Neural Semantic Parsing by Character-based Translation: Experiments with Abstract Meaning Representations

We evaluate the character-level translation method for neural semantic parsing on a large corpus of sentences annotated with Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs). Using a sequence-to-sequence model, and some trivial preprocessing and postprocessing of AMRs, we obtain a baseline accuracy of 53.1 (F-score on AMR-triples). We examine five different approaches to improve this baseline result: (i) reordering AMR branches to match the word order of the input sentence increases performance to 58.3; (ii) adding part-of-speech tags (automatically produced) to the input shows improvement as well (57.2); (iii) So does the introduction of super characters (conflating frequent sequences of characters to a single character), reaching 57.4; (iv) optimizing the training process by using pre-training and averaging a set of models increases performance to 58.7; (v) adding silver-standard training data obtained by an off-the-shelf parser yields the biggest improvement, resulting in an F-score of 64.0. Combining all five techniques leads to an F-score of 71.0 on holdout data, which is state-of-the-art in AMR parsing. This is remarkable because of the relative simplicity of the approach.Comment: Camera ready for CLIN 2017 journa

VP-Ellipsis is not licensed by VP-Topicalization

Starting from the observation that the constraints on VP-ellipsis (VPE) closely match those on VP-topicalization (VPT), Johnson (2001) proposes a movement account for VPE: in order for a VP to be deleted, it must first undergo topicalization. We show that although this proposal is attractive, making VPE dependent on VPT is problematic because VPE and VPT are not distributionally equivalent. While VPT targets the left periphery and consequently is subject to constraints on movement, VPE is not so restricted. We outline some alternatives for capturing the observed parallelism in the licensing of VPT and VPE

Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking

Computer-based argument mapping greatly enhances student critical thinking, more than tripling absolute gains made by other methods. I describe the method and my experience as an outsider. Argument mapping often showed precisely how students were erring (for example: confusing helping premises for separate reasons), making it much easier for them to fix their errors

Apportioning Development Effort in a Probabilistic LR Parsing System through Evaluation

We describe an implemented system for robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of English, using a unification-based grammar of part-of-speech and punctuation labels coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We present evaluations of the system's performance along several different dimensions; these enable us to assess the contribution that each individual part is making to the success of the system as a whole, and thus prioritise the effort to be devoted to its further enhancement. Currently, the system is able to parse around 80% of sentences in a substantial corpus of general text containing a number of distinct genres. On a random sample of 250 such sentences the system has a mean crossing bracket rate of 0.71 and recall and precision of 83% and 84% respectively when evaluated against manually-disambiguated analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 1 Postscript figure. To Appear in Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, University of Pennsylvania, May 199

On the Origins of Some English Idioms and the Adequacy of Their Definitions in the Georgian Dictionaries (II Part)

The aim of this article is to fill the informative gap and to overcome those difficulties which arise in case of not having the adequate interpetation or exact definition of the English idioms in the Georgian dictionaries.This paper investigates some idiomatic expressions and observes how often they are used in the modern English publicist texts from “The Guardian”, “Fortune”, “The Scotsman”, “The Independent” etc. whether they have preserved their original meanings or obtained some other new senses and coloring. More than this, the goal is to research if there is an adequate translation or interpretation of those English idioms in the Georgian language bilingual dictionaries. If there is not any, then the objective is how to make their adequate Georgian equivalents and, as a result to compose a new mini-dictionary of idioms. The urgent need for etymological study of idioms is also stimulated by the fact that the phraseology condensates the complex interaction of the culture and psychology of people, national self-being and their unique metaphoric mentality The reaserch value is dectated by its outcome, namely, it will be the research not only of those idioms which have the adequate definitions in the Georgian dictionaries, but find out some cases of not having the right definition and in result to compile the mini be-lingual dictionary of idioms. It can be assumed, that it will make a siginificant contribution to the development of lexicography in Georgia

Translating English non-human subjects in agentive contexts : a closer look at Dutch

While subjects of transitive action verbs in English and Dutch are typically realized as human agents (see Comrie 1989), both languages also feature instances of nonhuman agents in subject position. However, Vandepitte and Hartsuiker (2011) have shown that there are fewer options in Dutch and that translation issues present themselves in cases where both languages do not overlap. This paper wants to document overlap and differences in terms of non-prototypical subject realization by focussing on the strategies that are used in Dutch translations of six actions verbs (give, demonstrate, show, suggest, offer and tell) in combination with non-human subjects. Results reveal that a fair share of non-human subjects are also translated as such in the target language. Other strategies include occasional humanization of the non-human source text subjects, reduction of valency patterns with reduced agentivity vis-a-vis the English source-text sentences and shifts in the mapping of semantic roles onto syntactic functions

On Right Node Raising in Catalan and Spanish

This research has been funded by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) (UFI11/14), the Basque Government (grants GIC07/144-IT-210-07, and HM-2009-1-1), and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant FFI-29218/FILO). I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer and the audience at LingLunch Paris 7 for their comments and suggestions. Francesc Roca deserves my deepest gratitude for both his judgements on Spanish and Catalan data and for his valuable comments and suggestions. Of course, all remaining errors are mine.La derivació de les construccions d'elevació del nus dret (END) ha estat objecte de força debat en la bibliografia generativista, però l'anàlisi d'aquest tipus de construccions no ha rebut, fins ara, gaire atenció en els treballs dedicats al català i a l'espanyol. En aquest article analitzo les propietats de l'END en aquestes dues llengües i proposo que també hi ha la distinció introduïda a Valmala (2012) per a les construccions equivalents de l'anglès: defenso que en català i en espanyol hi ha dos tipus d'END que contenen propietats sintàctiques, prosòdiques i d'estructuració de la informació diferents. A les END amb pivot focalitzat, el sintagma que fa de pivot és focus i va precedit per una ruptura en l'entonació, i hi ha trasllat de cap a cap en els dos constituents coordinats (és a dir, el pivot és ex situ). Contràriament, a les END amb pivot no focalitzat aquest element no és focus, no va precedit per cap ruptura entonacional i ocupa la seva posició canònica (és a dir, és in situ). Aquest tipus d'END és conseqüència d'un procés d'elisió del primer conjunt de la coordinació o d'una relació de multidominança del pivot.The derivation of Right Node Raising (RNR) has been the object of much debate in the generative literature, but the analysis of this construction has not received much attention so far in the literature on Catalan and Spanish. Here I analyze the properties of RNR in these languages and propose that the distinction introduced in Valmala (2012) for English RNR also applies: Catalan and Spanish are argued to have two types of RNR with different information-structural, prosodic, and syntactic properties. In Focal-Pivot RNR (FP-RNR), the pivot is focal, is preceded by a prosodic break, and undergoes ATB-movement from both conjuncts of the coordination, i.e. it is ex-situ. In Non-Focal-Pivot RNR (NFP-RNR), on the contrary, the pivot is not focal, is not preceded by a prosodic break, and occupies its canonical position, i.e it is in-situ. NFP-RNR is the result either of ellipsis in the first conjunct or of multidominance of the pivot

On Lexicalized Valency and the Valency of (New) Complex Verbal Formations in Slovenian

The paper considers the matter of so-called lexicalized valency within the framework of new complex verbal formations in Slovenian, and in consequence, the increasingly dominant accusative valency in the language, which can also indicate that the extension of semantic verbal independence simplifies the syntax

Addiction and the New Psychology

A look at the 'New Psychology' (Embodied, Discursive, Situated, and Distributed Cognition) to see what relevance it has to the 'addiction debate'