<div><div dir="auto">my apologies for the opaque inside joke, alexandre! some of us used to work at a start-up (called YY Technologies) a few years ago, developing the premier email auto response solution at the time. hence support for mbox files was relevant at least back then :-). and the ERG treebanks still include four profiles with e-commerce emails.</div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">regarding interpretation of the i-length field, i would maybe argue that the two use cases ultimately are the same meaning: the field quantifies the length of linguistic content; when there is nothing worse parsing in an item, its ‘linguistic length’ is zero (or maybe -1, not quite sure just now). but, yes, this results in a flag-like behavior for the processing commands: skipping over (what you might call ‘noise’) items which lack linguistic content.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">best, oe</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, 11 Apr 2019 at 19:31 Alexandre Rademaker <<a href="mailto:arademaker@gmail.com">arademaker@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi Stephan,<br>
<br>
> On 11 Apr 2019, at 13:52, Stephan Oepen <<a href="mailto:oe@ifi.uio.no" target="_blank">oe@ifi.uio.no</a>> wrote:<br>
> <br>
> hi emily and mike,<br>
> <br>
> the [incr tsdb()] import facilities support some mixed-content document formats, notably the un*x mbox format (you can guess when that was useful functionality).<br>
<br>
Sorry, I don’t! Do you mean that mbox files can be imported to profiles directly? So far, I always thought that a profile itens are all sentences or phrases subject to be analysed by a grammar.<br>
<br>
> to represent all data in the profile while not pretending that there is linguistic content (worth sending to the parser) in email headers, the corresponding items are marked as i-length = -1 (or maybe 0, not quite sure). this is the reason for the ‘Process | ...’ commands to require a non-zero, positive length ... in other words a reassurance that there actually is linguistic content in the item. in this regard, i-length (like i-id, i-input, and possibly i-wf as well) is a mandatory field in the item relation.<br>
<br>
So i-length has two meanings, it is at the same time the length of the input (in tokens) but also a flag. The -1 has special meaning, right? <br>
<br>
That is, what you are saying is that a profile can also accommodate noise data and we can explicit use the i-length to mark what itens are relevant for processing. Is that right?<br>
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Best,<br>
Alexandre<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div></div>