<div dir="ltr"><div>(This discussion was started on the "predicate naming in MRS" thread.)</div><div><br></div><div>On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 11:39 AM Ann Copestake <<a href="mailto:aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk">aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk</a>> wrote:</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">quantifiers are treated specially in the MRS Lisp code and that actually predates the tripartite structure. But e.g., my scoping code does not rely on the _q_rel but uses the presence of a feature which is specifiable by the grammar writer and defaults to BODY. Or a grammar writer can define a list of quantifiers. Incidentally, you can check stuff like this by looking at the mrsglobals.lisp file, which has some documentation.<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Checking for POS=="q" did seem fragile to me, especially because of the gpreds-don't-officially-have-pos issue. But I'm not certain that these solutions are much better, from my point of view; namely, pyDelphin needs to be able to detect the quantifiers in a *MRS without knowing anything about the grammar. Anyway, let's iterate some ways to detect quantifiers:</div><div><br></div><div>1. Check for a POS of "q"</div><div><br></div><div>This is merely conventional and not a formal part of *MRS, but seems to be a well-respected convention.</div><div><br></div><div>2. Look for a scope feature (e.g. BODY)</div><div><br></div><div>Treating BODY as the conventional scope feature is about the same as (1), but to be accurate more generally it requires per-grammar configuration (e.g., parsing grammar files like mrsglobals.lisp). Also, DMRS doesn't use BODY, but instead RSTR, to indicate quantifier relationships (is RSTR thus a better choice for the scope feature?).<br></div><div><br></div><div>3. Check a list of quantifiers (e.g. in a SEM-I file)</div><div><br></div><div>This isn't so bad, but then there's a burden on the grammar developers to keep their SEM-I files up-to-date. Also, those files would ideally be distributed with, e.g., a deepbank, separate from the grammar.<br></div><div><br></div><div>4. Look at the structure: in MRS, a quantifier has an HCONS relation that selects a label shared by EPs where the ARG0 of one EP from that set is the bound variable of the quantifier. In DMRS, a quantifier has a RSTR/H link to the quantifiee.</div><div><br></div><div>This seems the most reliable in the absence of per-grammar configurations, but is relatively expensive to compute.<br></div><div><br></div><div>In general, I see the requirement for per-grammar configurations in order to analyze the semantic output as a barrier-to-entry for non-DELPH-INites (or for anyone, really, if they just want to do stuff with the semantics). For this reason I somewhat disprefer (2) and (3), even if they are better solutions.</div><div><br></div><div>I guess my question is this: would checking for the RSTR feature be a more reliable heuristic for detecting quantifiers? If grammars consistently use it always and only for quantifiers, then it seems a better choice than BODY.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div>