Hawking Hyphens in Compound Modifiers

The first principle of legal writing is surely its clarity — visible actors (unless the action matters more), uncluttered syntax, and, of course, logical structure. But the little things can matter to clarity, too — such as deliberate punctuation that signifies. In the language of law, in which compound nouns are rife, the reader can feel adrift as to where modifiers end and the noun begins. (Consider government-subsidized health flexible-spending arrangement without those hyphens.) Hyphens help. Whether an author cares to hyphenate the noun is his call; but hyphenating compound modifiers (also called phrasal adjectives, though they may include adverbs — more-abundant paperclips) follows a logic that is worth learning. This essay describes that logic. But its pitch is that legal writing, of all writing disciplines, should practice a deliberate, consistent use of such hyphens, rather than the more-relaxed practice readers see in less-formal writing (whose effects, of course, are usually also less consequential)

Regular Boardgames

We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) language called Regular Boardgames (RBG), which is based on the theory of regular languages. The objective of RBG is to join key properties as expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness of the description in one GGP formalism, compensating certain drawbacks of the existing languages. This often makes RBG more suitable for various research and practical developments in GGP. While dedicated mostly for describing board games, RBG is universal for the class of all finite deterministic turn-based games with perfect information. We establish foundations of RBG, and analyze it theoretically and experimentally, focusing on the efficiency of reasoning. Regular Boardgames is the first GGP language that allows efficient encoding and playing games with complex rules and with large branching factor (e.g.\ amazons, arimaa, large chess variants, go, international checkers, paper soccer).Comment: AAAI 201

A Type-coherent, Expressive Representation as an Initial Step to Language Understanding

A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL), which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019

Indeterminacy by underspecification

We examine the formal encoding of feature indeterminacy, focussing on case indeterminacy as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Forms that are indeterminately specified for the value of a feature can simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements on that feature and thus are a challenge to constraint-based formalisms which model the compatibility of information carried by linguistic items by combining or integrating that information. Much previous work in constraint-based formalisms has sought to provide an analysis of feature indeterminacy by departing in some way from ‘vanilla’ assumptions either about feature representations or about how compatibility is checked by integrating information from various sources. In the present contribution we argue instead that a solution to the range of issues posed by feature indeterminacy can be provided in a ‘vanilla’ feature-based approach which is formally simple, does not postulate special structures or objects in the representation of case or other indeterminate features, and requires no special provision for the analysis of coordination. We view the value of an indeterminate feature such as case as a complex and possibly underspecified feature structure. Our approach correctly allows for incremental and monotonic refinement of case requirements in particular contexts. It uses only atomic boolean-valued features and requires no special mechanisms or additional assumptions in the treatment of coordination or other phenomena to handle indeterminacy. Our account covers the behaviour of both indeterminate arguments and indeterminate predicates, that is, predicates placing indeterminate requirements on their arguments.</jats:p

Towards a constructional approach to discourse-level phenomena : the case of the Spanish interpersonal epistemic stance construction

This study contributes to a better understanding of how constructional models can be applied to discourse-level phenomena, and constitute a valuable complementation to previous grammaticalization accounts of pragmatic markers. The case study that is presented concerns the recent development of the interpersonal epistemic stance construction in Spanish. The central argument is that the expanding use of sabes as a pragmatic marker can best be fully understood by taking into account the composite network of related expressions which Spanish speakers have at their disposal when performing a particular speech act. The diachronic analysis is documented with spoken corpus examples collected in recent decades, and is mainly informed by frequency data measuring the productivity, as well as formal properties of the construction and its instances

The placement of the head that minimizes online memory: a complex systems approach

It is well known that the length of a syntactic dependency determines its online memory cost. Thus, the problem of the placement of a head and its dependents (complements or modifiers) that minimizes online memory is equivalent to the problem of the minimum linear arrangement of a star tree. However, how that length is translated into cognitive cost is not known. This study shows that the online memory cost is minimized when the head is placed at the center, regardless of the function that transforms length into cost, provided only that this function is strictly monotonically increasing. Online memory defines a quasi-convex adaptive landscape with a single central minimum if the number of elements is odd and two central minima if that number is even. We discuss various aspects of the dynamics of word order of subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) from a complex systems perspective and suggest that word orders tend to evolve by swapping adjacent constituents from an initial or early SOV configuration that is attracted towards a central word order by online memory minimization. We also suggest that the stability of SVO is due to at least two factors, the quasi-convex shape of the adaptive landscape in the online memory dimension and online memory adaptations that avoid regression to SOV. Although OVS is also optimal for placing the verb at the center, its low frequency is explained by its long distance to the seminal SOV in the permutation space.Comment: Minor changes (language improved; typos in Eqs. 5, 6 and 13 corrected

Concurrent Lexicalized Dependency Parsing: A Behavioral View on ParseTalk Events

The behavioral specification of an object-oriented grammar model is considered. The model is based on full lexicalization, head-orientation via valency constraints and dependency relations, inheritance as a means for non-redundant lexicon specification, and concurrency of computation. The computation model relies upon the actor paradigm, with concurrency entering through asynchronous message passing between actors. In particular, we here elaborate on principles of how the global behavior of a lexically distributed grammar and its corresponding parser can be specified in terms of event type networks and event networks, resp.Comment: 68kB, 5pages Postscrip

Regularization and Model Selection with Categorial Effect Modifiers

The case of continuous effect modifiers in varying-coefficient models has been well investigated. Categorial effect modifiers, however, have been largely neglected. In this paper a regularization technique is proposed that allows for selection of covariates and fusion of categories of categorial effect modifiers in a linear model. It is distinguished between nominal and ordinal variables, since for the latter more economic parametrizations are warranted. The proposed methods are illustrated and investigated in simulation studies and real world data evaluations. Moreover, some asymptotic properties are derived

Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on universal dependencies

The present paper discusses the benefits and challenges of token-based typology, which takes into account the frequencies of words and constructions in language use. This approach makes it possible to introduce new criteria for language classification, which would be difficult or impossible to achieve with the traditional, type-based approach. This point is illustrated by several quantitative studies of word order variation, which can be measured as entropy at different levels of granularity. I argue that this variation can be explained by general functional mechanisms and pressures, which manifest themselves in language use, such as optimization of processing (including avoidance of ambiguity) and grammaticalization of predictable units occurring in chunks. The case studies are based on multilingual corpora, which have been parsed using the Universal Dependencies annotation scheme