[developers] Issues appending diff-lists

[Francis Bond]

It appears the emerson-lists (see Berthold's talk at this summit and one of
Guy's talk at the last one) would allow us to do this.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 2:51 AM, Zhen Zhen Fan <zhenzhen.fan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear developers,
>
> We'd like to seek your help for this problem of dealing with diff-lists.
>
> Chinese interrogatives have in-situ wh-questions, which have wh-words
> appearing at positions of arguments, specifiers, and modifiers. While
> implementing the analysis for these interrogatives, we
>
> 1. Define all wh-words to have its QUE containing an index (<! #index !>),
> and all other words to have QUE as 0-dlist.
>
> 2. Redefine SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE to be a diff-list instead of 0-1-dlist
> (to allow more than one wh-word to appear in a question), and make binary
> rules to append QUE values of their daughters, as shown below:
>
> basic-binary-phrase :+
>   [ SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE [ LIST #first,
>                LAST #last ],
>     ARGS < sign & [ SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE [ LIST #first,
>                            LAST #middle ] ],
>        sign & [ SYNSEM.NON-LOCAL.QUE [ LIST #middle,
>                            LAST #last ] ] > ].
>
> 3. Define the rule to identify clauses with at least one wh-word and set
> SF to "ques". The problem is how to define the constraint for a diff-list
> with at least one item inside.
> We tried to use "QUE.LIST 1-plus-list", which works great to exclude
> sentences with 0 wh-word, and to parse sentences with 2 or more wh-words.
> For sentences with exactly 1 wh-word, some can be parsed and some can not.
> It turns out that it works correctly if the wh-word is the first ARG in the
> binary rule, and it won't parse if the wh-word is the second ARG in the
> binary rule.
> So it seems that appending gives us different results for the two
> scenarios:
> a) when wh-word is the 1st ARG, mother's QUE can unify with the constraint.
> -- 1st ARG's QUE: diff-list
>                  [ LIST < 6 > + 16LIST,
>                    LAST 16 ]
> -- 2nd ARG's QUE: diff-list
>                   [ LIST 19 0-1-list,
>                     LAST 19 ]
> -- mother's QUE: diff-list
>                  [ LIST <4> + 18 0-1-list,
>                    LAST 18 ]
> b) when wh-word is the 2nd ARG, mother's QUE can't unify with the
> constraint, complaining the conflict between 1-list and 1-plus-list.
> -- 1st ARG's QUE: diff-list
>                   [ LIST 28 0-1-list,
>                     LAST 28 ]
> -- 2nd ARG's QUE: diff-list
>                  [ LIST < 6 > + 16LIST,
>                    LAST 16 ]
> -- mother's QUE: diff-list
>                  [ LIST 1-list <4> + 11,
>                    LAST 11 ]
>
> How can this be resolved so that we get consistent results regardless of
> the position of wh-word in a binary rule?
>
> We also notice that two daughters with QUE as 0-dlist lead to the mother's
> QUE as diff-list (not 0-dlist) with identical LIST and LAST.
>
> We have also tried defining 1-list to inherit from 1-plus-list too. Then
> the above problems will disappear, but it will fail to exclude sentences
> containing no wh-word.
>
> Many thanks!
> Zhenzhen
>



-- 
Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/>
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Nanyang Technological University
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