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

[Dan Flickinger]

Hi Mike,


In looking at the github list of ERG predicates not covered, almost all of them look like instances of what Woodley described, where there is a lexical entry that introduces  multiple EPs (such as `here' or `now'), and where the Ja-En transfer rules apparently are not getting that nontrivial collection of EPs described exactly right in order to satisfy the generator's lexical lookup.  One element in particular that might have changed in recent memory is that the ERG pays a little more attention now to the variable properties of the ARG0 for the locative EP introduced by `here' and `now', so the generator trigger rules can (for efficiency) only introduce the semantically empty copula `be' when these guys are to be used predicatively, as in "people are here".  The Ja-En transfer rules might not be getting that ARG0 quite right, maybe.


 Dan

________________________________
From: developers-bounces at emmtee.net <developers-bounces at emmtee.net> on behalf of Michael Wayne Goodman <goodmami at uw.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2017 11:04 PM
To: Woodley Packard
Cc: developers
Subject: Re: [developers] What does it mean in ACE for a predicate to be 'covered' in generation?

Thanks Woodley,

On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 9:43 PM, Woodley Packard <sweaglesw at sweaglesw.org<mailto:sweaglesw at sweaglesw.org>> wrote:
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?

Yes, that makes sense, and mostly fits what I'm seeing. Some other predicates that ACE says aren't covered (I have a partial list of things that are "not covered" here: https://github.com/delph-in/JaEn/issues/3) are the ones that go along with, e.g., time_n or place_n, such as _soon_p and _here_a_1, so I'll have to figure out why (i'm assuming) my automatically extracted transfer rules are not putting them together in a way that ACE+ERG can make sense of.

Woodley



> On Dec 12, 2017, at 7:21 PM, Michael Wayne Goodman <goodmami at uw.edu<mailto: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



--
Michael Wayne Goodman
Ph.D. Candidate, UW Linguistics
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