[Attempto] Parsing questions and affirmations

[Kaarel Kaljurand]

Hi Norbert,

I didn't try to analyze the intended meaning of the sentences. What
I'm saying is that

- "Is the project Alpha late?" is an ACE sentence and is correctly
parsed by APE.
- "The project Alpha is late." is not an ACE sentence and APE
generates a correct error messages (although, as with any error
messages, more feedback could be offered).

By "is (not) an ACE sentence" a certain user lexicon is assumed, e.g.
if "late" was listed in the lexicon (only) as e.g. a ditransitive verb
then "Is the project Alpha late?" would not be correct.

@Marco, my recommendation is to disable APE's built-in lexicon and
only include your domain lexicon. E.g. if you remove all adverbs
(because they are maybe not needed in your modelling) then you would
avoid certain unexpected parsing results, e.g. APE+Clex does not
successfully parse "Is the project Alpha beautiful?" because
"beautiful" is not an adverb in Clex.

Best,
Kaarel

On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 6:43 PM Norbert E. Fuchs <fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch> wrote:
>
> Kaarel
>
> I believe that you are mistaken. From the second sentence "The project Alpha is late." you can see that Marco wants the project to be named Alpha, and does not want to express that the project is "Alpha late" – whatever that means.
>
>    --- nef
>
> > On 14 Dec 2019, at 18:00 , Kaarel Kaljurand <kaljurand at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I think the parser is correct (i.e. consistent with the ACE spec)
> > here, but the of course the DRS might not represent what the normal
> > English meaning of the input sentence is. Notice that "late" is an
> > adverb that modifies the copula verb "is". Consider e.g.:
> >
> > Every project is Alpha initially. There is a project. Is it Alpha late?
> >
> > [A]
> >   [B]
> >   object(B,project,countable,na,eq,1)-1/2
> >   =>
> >   [C]
> >   predicate(C,be,B,named(Alpha))-1/3
> >   modifier_adv(C,initially,pos)-1/5
> > object(A,project,countable,na,eq,1)-2/4
> >   QUESTION
> >   [D]
> >   predicate(D,be,A,named(Alpha))-3/1
> >   modifier_adv(D,late,pos)-3/4
> >
> > Best,
> > Kaarel
> >
> > On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 1:49 PM Norbert E. Fuchs <fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On 14 Dec 2019, at 12:48 , Marco Zanchi <mzanchi at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi there,
> >>>
> >>> I have been playing with the parser recently and noticed a strange behaviour, not sure if it is down to the language definition or not. I can ask a question:
> >>>
> >>> Is the project Alpha late?
> >>>
> >>> And this parses well:
> >>>
> >>> <DRS domain="">
> >>>  <Question>
> >>>    <DRS domain="A B">
> >>>      <object
> >>> ref="B"
> >>> noun="project"
> >>> struct="countable"
> >>> unit="na"
> >>> numrel="eq"
> >>> num="1"
> >>> sentid="1"
> >>> tokid="3"/>
> >>>      <predicate
> >>> ref="A"
> >>> verb="be"
> >>> subj="B"
> >>> obj="named('Alpha')"
> >>> sentid="1"
> >>> tokid="1"/>
> >>>      <modifier_adv ref="A" adverb="late" degree="pos" sentid="1" tokid="5"/>
> >>>    </DRS>
> >>>  </Question>
> >>> </DRS>
> >>>
> >>> But if I try the equivalent affirmation:
> >>>
> >>> The project Alpha is late.
> >>>
> >>> then I get a parsing error.
> >>> ERROR: [sentence] at 1-4: 'The project Alpha <> is late.'. This is the first sentence that was not ACE. The sign <> indicates the position where parsing failed.
> >>>
> >>> Has anyone encountered anything of the sort?
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> attempto mailing list
> >>> attempto at lists.ifi.uzh.ch
> >>> https://lists.ifi.uzh.ch/listinfo/attempto
> >>
> >>
> >> Marco
> >>
> >> There is a grammar error occurring in both of your examples. Namely
> >>
> >>        Variables can be introduced as noun phrase apposition, and can then be used as noun phrases.
> >>        Variable names consist of a single upper case letter, optionally followed by an integer.
> >>
> >> Thus your noun phrase "project Alpha" violates this construction rule since "Alpha" is not a correct variable.
> >>
> >> However, your first example "Is the project Alpha late?" points to a bug of the parser APE since - though being translated – it is translated wrongly as the DRS
> >>
> >> []
> >>   QUESTION
> >>   [A,B]
> >>   object(B,project,countable,na,eq,1)-1/3
> >>   predicate(A,be,B,named(Alpha))-1/1
> >>   modifier_adv(A,late,pos)-1/5
> >>
> >> that does nor reflect the question correctly. Again, the variable "Alpha" should trigger an error message.
> >>
> >> Best regards.
> >>
> >> Norbert E. Fuchs
> >> Institute of Computational Linguistics
> >> University of Zurich
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> attempto mailing list
> >> attempto at lists.ifi.uzh.ch
> >> https://lists.ifi.uzh.ch/listinfo/attempto
>