LINGUIST List 10.412

Thu Mar 18 1999

FYI: Corpora, Grammatical Framework, Syntax

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • Jean Carletta, Summary of spoken dialogue corpus annotations
  • Aarne Ranta, GF - Grammatical Framework
  • Lotfi, Minimalist Program Revisited

    Message 1: Summary of spoken dialogue corpus annotations

     Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 11:08:03 +0000
    From: Jean Carletta <jeancmail.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
    Subject: Summary of spoken dialogue corpus annotations


    The MATE project (Telematics LE4-8370) aims to facilitate re-use of language resources by addressing the problems of creating, acquiring, and maintaining spoken dialogue corpora. As part of the project, we have put together a summary of coding schemes, concentrating on prosody, (morpho-) syntax, co-reference, dialogue acts, and communicative difficulties. I have been requested to advertise this summary more widely because some of the community has found the summary quite useful (especially regarding dialogue acts). The summary can be found at

    http://mate.mip.ou.dk/about/deliverables.html

    as deliverable 1.1. We invite comments about either the deliverable or the project, of course.

    Jean Carletta

    Human Communication Research Centre University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland Phone: +44 (0)131 650-4438 Fax: +44 (0)131 650-4587 Email: J.Carlettaedinburgh.ac.uk URL: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~jeanc

    Message 2: GF - Grammatical Framework

     Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 12:24:15 +0100
    From: Aarne Ranta <Aarne.Rantaxrce.xerox.com>
    Subject: GF - Grammatical Framework


    FYI: GF - Grammatical Framework

    GF is a framework for writing grammars. Its intended use is to define fragments of natural languages for specific technical domains, with a semantic control of content. Moreover, GF supports multilinguality: grammars may differ a lot intheir concrete syntax, and still share an abstract GF structure. GF is also suitable for the description of formal languages, so that GF helps in interfacing formal notations with natural language.

    GF is a synthesis of two traditions, logical and linguistic. From the linguistic point of view, GF is a grammar formalism: it permits a declarative definition of grammars, for which it provides generic parsing and generation algorithms. From the logical point of view, GF is a logical framework (hence its name): it permits type-checking algorithm and an interactive type-driven syntax editor.

    GF has had experimental applications at Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE) and at NTC/HUT (Nokia Telecommunications and Helsinki University of Technology). At XRCE, GF is being applied in the prototyping of multilingual documentation systems. Small GF grammars have been written for several languages: English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Swedish. At NTC/HUT, GF is used in the design of a persistent industrial functional programming language, for which it provides a concrete syntax and a type-checker at the same time.

    Developers: Aarne Ranta (XRCE), with a typechecker by Petri Menp (NTC) Contact: Aarne.Rantaxrce.xerox.com

    Freely distributed Haskell source and Unix binaries (Solaris and Linux), as well as documentation, are available at the GF home page

    http://www.xrce.xerox.com/research/mltt/gf/gf-index/index.html Related publications:

    Aarne Ranta: Type-Theoretical Grammar (Oxford University Press, 1994) (on the semantic theory underlying GF)

    http://www.cs.chalmers.se/ComputingScience/Research/Logic/TypesWG/index.html (general information on logical frameworks)

    Message 3: Minimalist Program Revisited

     Date: 14 Mar 1999 22:11:56 EDT
    From: Lotfi <Lotfiwww.dci.co.ir>
    Subject: Minimalist Program Revisited


    Hello every body,

    Recently I've been conducting a research on formal features and how they may affect the structure of sentences. Despite fundamental agreement with Chomsky's MP framework, I find his thesis of movement rather faulty in several respects. Please find below the abstract of my paper "Minimalist Program Revisited: Chomsky's Strength to Trigger Movement." Those who are interested can send an email to my address and ask for the ascii version of the whole paper.

    A. R. Lotfi English Department Azad University MailTo: lotfiwww.dci.co.ir

    A B S T R A C T

    The checking theory in its present form is not explanatorily adequate as it does not shed light on such questions as why certain formal features, i.e. [-interpretable] ones, are present after all in the collection of formal features FF(LI) of a lexical item LI if they are doomed to be finally deleted and typically erased due to uninterpretability at LF, why certain features (and not others) happen to be strong in some languages, and how strength can be defined without restating the problem in PF convergence terms. Even if we hypothesize that (strong) un/interpretable are simply there in order to trigger overt movement, we will end up in some kind of circularity because we need now to resort to the predestined existence of such features in order to answer the question of why some elements should move at all.

    The Pooled Features Hypothesis is based on the assumption that the computational system CHL for human language is economical in its selection of formal features from the lexicon in the sense that if two LIs (to be introduced in the same derivation) happen to have some identical formal features, such features are selected only once but shared by the syntactic objects in the derivation. It follows that the objects in question must be as local in their relations as possible. The locality of relations as such, which is due to economy considerations, results in some kind of (bare) phrase structure with pooled features located in the tree as nodes dominating the syntactic objects. Pooled features, in a sense, are structurally interpreted. Other features, i.e. those not pooled, have to wait until interpreted at LF.