<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 1:43 PM, Ann Copestake <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aac10@cam.ac.uk" target="_blank">aac10@cam.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> Thanks!<span class=""><br> <br> <div>On 05/02/2016 21:30, Emily M. Bender wrote:<br> </div> <blockquote type="cite"> <div dir="ltr">Not sure if this answers the question, but a couple of comments: <div><br> </div> <div>(a) I do think that written English is largely underspecified for information structure.</div> <div>It's part of what makes good writing good that the information structure is made apparent</div> <div>somehow.</div> <div><br> </div> </div> </blockquote> <br></span> OK. should I understand you as saying that composition (as in, what we do in the grammars) leaves it mostly underspecified, but that discourse level factors make it apparent? or that it really is underspecified?<span class=""><br> <br></span></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The former --- that is, in running text, there is a fact of the matter about topic,</div><div>focus, contrast, etc. but that English syntax does very little about it. There are</div><div>also tendencies (e.g., for subjects to be topics and vice versa) but there aren't</div><div>hard constraints. English has a few constructions for syntactically marking</div><div>information structure relations (clefts, English focus movement [fronting], ...)</div><div>but those underdetermine the actual information structure. Other languages do</div><div>more in the morphosyntax.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><span class=""> <blockquote type="cite"> <div dir="ltr"> <div>(b) I think the "I want only the unmarked form back" case might be handled by either</div> <div>a setting which says "no ICONS beyond what as in the input" (i.e. your ICONS { }) or</div> <div>a pre-processing/generation fix-up rule that takes ICONS { ... } and outputs something</div> <div>that would be incompatible with anything but the unmarked form. Or maybe the</div> <div>subsumption check goes the wrong way for this one?</div> <div><br> </div> </div> </blockquote></span> Yes, I think the ICONS {} might be a possible way of thinking about it. I should make it clear - I don't think there's a problem with constructing an implementation that produces the `right' behaviour but I would much prefer that the behaviour is specifiable cleanly in the formalism rather than as another parameter to the generator or whatever.<div><div class="h5"><br> <br> <blockquote type="cite"> <div dir="ltr"> <div>I hope Sanghoun has something to add here!</div> <div><br> </div> <div>Emily</div> </div> <div class="gmail_extra"><br> <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 1:01 PM, Stephan Oepen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:oe@ifi.uio.no" target="_blank">oe@ifi.uio.no</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">colleagues, <div><br> </div> <div>my ideal would be a set-up where the provider of generator inputs has three options: (a) request topicalization (or similar), (b) disallow it, or (c) underspecify and get both variants. <div><br> </div> <div>we used to have that level of control (and flexibility) in the LOGON days where there were still messages: in the message EPs, there were two optional ‘pseudo’ roles (TPC and PSV) <span></span>to control topicalization or passivization of a specific instance variable. effectively, when present, these established a binary relation between the clause and one of its nominal constituents. if i recall correctly, blocking topicalization was accomplished by putting an otherwise unbound ‘anti’-variable into the TPC or PSV roles.</div> <div><br> </div> <div>could one imagine something similar in the ICONS realm, and if so, which form would it have to take?</div> <div><br> </div> <div>best wishes, oe</div> <div> <div> <div><br> <br> On Friday, February 5, 2016, Woodley Packard <<a></a><a href="mailto:sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org" target="_blank">sweaglesw@sweaglesw.org</a>> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I can confirm that under ACE, behavior is what you indicate, i.e. generating from parsing the topicalized feline-canine-playtime I get just the topicalized variant out, but when generating from parsing the ordinary word order I get all 5 variants out.<br> <br> I believe this was designed to imitate the long-standing condition that the MRS of generation results must be subsumed by the input MRS. The observed behavior seems to me to be the correct interpretation of the subsumption relation with ICONS involved. Note that an MRS with an extra intersective modifier would also be subsumed, for example, but such MRS are never actually generated since those modifier lexical entries never make it into the chart.<br> <br> It’s certainly reasonable to ask whether (this notion of) subsumption is really the right test. I’ve met lots of folks who prefer to turn that subsumption test off entirely. I guess it’s also possible that the subsumption test is right for the RELS portion of the MRS but not for the ICONS, though that seems a bit odd to consider. However, given that we don’t have many ideas about truth-conditional implications of ICONS, maybe not so odd.<br> <br> I don’t really have much to offer in terms of opinions about what the right behavior should be. I (believe I) just implemented what others asked for a couple years ago :-)<br> <br> -Woodley<br> <br> > On Feb 5, 2016, at 8:03 AM, Ann Copestake <<a>aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk</a>> wrote:<br> ><br> > I'm part way through getting ICONS support working in Lisp, testing on the version of the ERG available as trunk. I have a question about generation. If I implemented the behaviour described in <a href="http://moin.delph-in.net/IconsSpecs" target="_blank">http://moin.delph-in.net/IconsSpecs</a> there doesn't seem to be a way of specifying that I want a `normal' ordering for English.<br> ><br> > e.g., if I take the MRS resulting from<br> ><br> > that dog, the cat chased.<br> ><br> > without ICONS check, there are 5 realizations, including the `null ICONS' case `The cat chased that dog.' With an exact ICONS check, I can select realizations with the same ICONS (modulo order of ICONS elements, of course, in the case where there's more than one element). But with the <a href="http://moin.delph-in.net/IconsSpecs" target="_blank">http://moin.delph-in.net/IconsSpecs</a> behaviour, there's no way of specifying I want a `normal' order - if I don't give an ICONS, I will always get the 5 realisations. In fact, as I understand it, I can always end up with more icons in the realisation than in the input, as long as I can match the ones in the input.<br> ><br> > So:<br> > - is the IConsSpec behaviour what is desired for the ERG (e.g., because one can rely on the realisation ranking to prefer the most `normal' order)?<br> > - or does the ERG behave differently from Emily and Sanghoun's grammars, such that different generator behaviour is desirable? and if so, could we change things so we don't need different behaviours<br> ><br> > Ann<br> ><br> ><br> ><br> <br> <br> </blockquote> </div> </div> </div> </div> </blockquote> </div> <br> <br clear="all"> <div><br> </div> -- <br> <div> <div dir="ltr">Emily M. Bender<br> Professor, Department of Linguistics<br> Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a><br> </div> </div> </div> </blockquote> <br> </div></div></div> </blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Emily M. Bender<br>Professor, Department of Linguistics<br>Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a><br></div></div> </div></div>