[developers] What does it mean in ACE for a predicate to be 'covered' in generation?

[Woodley Packard]

Hi Mike,

An EP is covered if a grammar entity (lexeme or rule) can be found that supplies that EP while not introducing any other EPs that can't be reconciled to the input semantics.  So possibly what you are observing is that while place_n and time_n exist in the grammar (and SEM-I), if memory serves, every way to introduce them also introduces some other EP, e.g "when" is which_q time_n I think.  In this situation, if which_q were not in the input then "when" would not be activated, so time_n would risk being not covered (although there are other combinations that can cover it too).

Might this be consistent with your experience?

Woodley



> On Dec 12, 2017, at 7:21 PM, Michael Wayne Goodman <goodmami at uw.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Developers,
> 
> I'm trying to generate with the ERG and ACE from semantics transfered from Jacy via JaEn. I'm finding that the JaEn grammar has gone stale in parts compared to the predicates used in the current Jacy and ERG (e.g., coord vs coord_c in Jacy, and _good_a_at-for_rel vs _good_a_at-for-of_rel in the ERG). I'm updating those that are simple (like the above). Some predicates, however, appear to be valid already, but ACE still gives me messages like this:
> 
>     WARNING: EP 'time_n' is not covered
>     NOTE: EP 'time_n' is unknown in the semantic index
> 
> time_n does in fact exist in the SEM-I (in etc/abstract.smi), although it is also on the "block" list of etc/patches.lisp. Another example is place_n, which occurs in etc/abstract.smi and is not blocked, but I get a similar message from ACE.
> 
> How does ACE determine if a predicate is covered or not?
> 
> -- 
> Michael Wayne Goodman
> Ph.D. Candidate, UW Linguistics