[matrix] Pronoun Relations

[Scott Drellishak]

I'm involved in an effort to take the various grammars produced by students
in Emily Bender's grammar engineering class and hook them together into a
 small but functional N-way machine translation system.  One of the issues
 that has arisen has to do with pronoun relations.  Generally in the
 grammars, when a pronoun occurs overtly it contributes a relation called
 something like "pronoun_n_rel" whose associated individual is constrained
 to a particular person and number value.  When the person and number is
 simply marked on the verb with no overt pronoun, there is no pronoun
 relation, but the individual associated with the subject is still
 constrained for person and number.

I think, in most cases, this is a distinction without a difference -- it
 might be true that there's a difference in emphasis between "ego te
 absolvo" and "te absolvo", but it's not the sort of difference we capture
 in the MRS representations of sentence meanings.  What's more, having
 pronoun relations in the MRSs of only some languages is troublesome for our
 MT system, requiring rather elaborate transfer rules.

 I propose, therefore, doing away with pronoun relations altogether when the
 person and number values are already marked on the verb.  I'm interested in 
feedback from this list about cases in which this strategy wouldn't scale to 
larger grammars.

 - Scott Drellishak