[erg] Logon missing MRS for

Dan Flickinger danf at stanford.edu
Tue Mar 31 23:56:48 CEST 2015


Those unexpressed argument "i" variables will show up a lot in MRSs, wherever a predication has an optional argument position that does not correspond to an overt expression in a sentence.  I make them of type "i" rather than "x" so we can preserve the expectation that all x's are bound by a quantifier, while avoiding the need for gratuitous quantifiers whenever an argument slot does not get filled.  

You might well argue that in many instances it would be plausible to infer the existence of an entity to fill such an argument position, such that an existential quantifier would seem well-motivated, but we don't want to make the grammar uniformly supply such an existential quantifier for every uninstantiated argument variable: for a relational noun like "solution" we would get a strange MRS for "That isn't a solution" in a setting where we mean "That isn't a solution to any problem" or equivalently "That is a solution to no problem".  The grammar can't add any information about an unexpressed argument, so we leave it underspecified in the MRS.  You might of course for a given application be able to supply additional constraints on some such arguments, in which case you could enrich the parser's output MRS to add a quantifier for that argument variable as a postprocessing operation on the MRS.

 Dan


----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Haley" <paul at haleyai.com>
To: "Dan Flickinger" <danf at stanford.edu>
Cc: "erg" <erg at delph-in.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 12:23:49 PM
Subject: Re: [erg] Logon missing MRS for

Ooops, thank you very much (and regrets).

I went on-line to see why there were no quantifiers in the MRS I was 
getting, but I see now that the only x has one.  But note the 
co-occurrence of i7 without quantification, which was the interesting 
case (at least it broke my code).  I was expecting an implicit 2nd 
person pronoun and its quantification.

Thank you,
Paul



On 3/31/2015 3:18 PM, Dan Flickinger wrote:
> Paul, your screen shot shows that you did not click the box asking for MRS output.  If you click that MRS box and resubmit the input, you should see the MRSs for each of the three analyses.
>
>   Dan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Haley" <paul at haleyai.com>
> To: "erg" <erg at delph-in.net>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 31, 2015 12:11:44 PM
> Subject: [erg] Logon missing MRS for
>
> Parsing the following sentence produces a VP parse without any MRS. Is
> that expected?
>
> Generate and compare multiple solutions!
>
> Thanks,
> Paul
>
>





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