[developers] Issues appending diff-lists

[Guy Emerson]

I think there might be a quicker solution in this case (without replacing
all diff-lists with "emerson-lists").

1-plus-list misleadingly named, because it actually insists on at least two
elements in the list (1 plus something nonempty). If you use "QUE.LIST
cons", that will insist on at least one element -- as long as the end of
the list is closed.  It looks like you're already closing the list (by
using "LIST 0-1-list" or "LIST 1-list").  Closing a diff-list is dangerous
because you'll never be able to append to it later, but as long as you're
doing that at the top of the tree where you're not expecting any more QUE
elements, that should be okay.

So at the top of the tree, you could have "QUE [ LIST cons, LAST null ]".
Then you know you have at least one thing on the list (but will not be able
to add anything more).


2018-06-20 10:28 GMT+02:00 Francis Bond <bond at ieee.org>:

> 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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