Multimodal Grammar Implementation

This paper reports on an implementation of a multimodal grammar of speech and co-speech gesture within the LKB/PET grammar engineering environment. The implementation extends the English Resource Grammar (ERG, Flickinger (2000)) with HPSG types and rules that capture the form of the linguistic signal, the form of the gestural signal and their relative timing to constrain the meaning of the multimodal action. The grammar yields a single parse tree that integrates the spoken and gestural modality thereby drawing on standard semantic composition techniques to derive the multimodal meaning representation. Using the current machinery, the main challenge for the grammar engineer is the nonlinear input: the modalities can overlap temporally. We capture this by identical speech and gesture token edges. Further, the semantic contribution of gestures is encoded by lexical rules transforming a speech phrase into a multimodal entity of conjoined spoken and gestural semantics.

Inheritance and complementation : a case study of easy adjectives and related nouns

Mechanisms for representing lexically the bulk of syntactic and semantic information for a language have been under active development, as is evident in the recent studies contained in this volume. Our study serves to highlight some of the most useful tools available for structured lexical representation, in particular, (multiple) inheritance, default specification, and lexical rules. It then illustrates the value of these mechanisms in illuminating one corner of the lexicon involving an unusual kind of complementation among a group of adjectives exemplified by easy. The virtures of the structured lexicon are its succinctness and its tendency to highlight significant clusters of linguistic properties. From its succinctness follow two practical advantages, namely its ease of maintenance and modifiability. In order to suggest how important these may be practically, we extend the analysis of adjectival complementation in several directions. These further illustrate how the use of inheritance in lexical representation permits exact and explicit characterizations of phenomena in the language under study. We demonstrate how the use of the mechanisms employed in the analysis of easy enable us to give a unified account of related phenomena featuring nouns like pleasure, and even the adverbs (adjectival specifiers) too and enough. Along the way we motivate some elaborations of the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) framework in which we couch our analysis, and offer several avenues for further study of this part of the English lexicon

Parallel Distributed Grammar Engineering for Practical Applications

Based on a detailed case study of parallel grammar development distributed across two sites, we review some of the requirements for regression testing in grammar engineering, summarize our approach to systematic competence and performance profiling, and discuss our experience with grammar development for a commercial application. If possible, the workshop presentation will be organized around a software demonstration

The Grammar Matrix: An Open-Source Starter-Kit for the Rapid Development of Cross-Linguistically Consistent Broad-Coverage Precision Grammars

The grammar matrix is an open-source starter-kit for the development of broadcoverage HPSGs. By using a type hierarchy to represent cross-linguistic generalizations and providing compatibility with other open-source tools for grammar engineering, evaluation, parsing and generation, it facilitates not only quick start-up but also rapid growth towards the wide coverage necessary for robust natural language processing and the precision parses and semantic representations necessary for natural language understanding

On Different Approaches to Syntactic Analysis Into Bi-Lexical Dependencies. An Empirical Comparison of Direct, PCFG-Based, and HPSG-Based Parsers

We compare three different approaches to parsing into syntactic, bi-lexical dependencies for English: a ‘direct’ data-driven dependency parser, a statistical phrase structure parser, and a hybrid, ‘deep’ grammar-driven parser. The analyses from the latter two are post-converted to bilexical dependencies. Through this ‘reduction’ of all three approaches to syntactic dependency parsers, we determine empirically what performance can be obtained for a common set of dependency types for English, across a broad variety of domains. In doing so, we observe what trade-offs apply along three dimensions, accuracy, efficiency, and resilience to domain variation. Our results suggest that the hand-built grammar in one of our parsers helps in both accuracy and cross-domain performance. Proceedings of The 13th International Conference on Parsing Technologies IWPT-2013

Open-Source Machine Translation with DELPH-IN

The Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELH-IN) provides the infrastructure needed to produce open-source semantic transfer-based machine translation systems. We have made available a prototype Japanese-English machine translation system built from existing resources include parsers, generators, bidirectional grammars and a transfer engine

Aligning Speech and Co-speech Gesture in a Constraint-based Grammar

This paper concerns the form-meaning mapping of communicative actions consisting of speech and improvised co-speech gestures. Based on the findings of previous cognitive and computational approaches, we advance a new theory in which this form-meaning mapping is analysed in a constraint-based grammar. Motivated by observations in naturally occurring examples, we propose several construction rules, which use linguistic form, gesture form and their relative timing to constrain the derivation of a single speech-gesture syntax tree, from which a meaning representation can be composed via standard methods for semantic composition. The paper further reports on implementing these speech-gesture construction rules within the English Resource Grammar (Copestake and Flickinger 2000). Since gestural form often underspecifies its meaning, the logical formulae that are composed via syntax are underspecified so that current models of the semantics/pragmatics interface support the range of possible interpretations of the speech-gesture act in its context of use

Lessons from the English auxiliary system

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.status: accepte

'Tough'-constructions and their derivation

This article addresses the syntax of the notorious 'tough' (-movement) construction (TC) in English. TCs exhibit a range of apparently contradictory empirical properties suggesting that their derivation involves the application of both A-movement and A'-movement operations. Given that within previous Principles and Parameters models TCs have remained “unexplained and in principle unexplainable” (Holmberg 2000: 839) due to incompatibility with constraints on theta-assignment, locality, and Case, this article argues that the phase-based implementation of the Minimalist program (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2004) permits a reanalysis of null wh-operators capable of circumventing the previous theoretical difficulties. Essentially, 'tough'-movement consists of A-moving a constituent out of a “complex” null operator which has already undergone A'-movement, a “smuggling” construction in the terms of Collins (2005a,b

Reporter Proteins in Whole-Cell Optical Bioreporter Detection Systems, Biosensor Integrations, and Biosensing Applications

Whole-cell, genetically modified bioreporters are designed to emit detectable signals in response to a target analyte or related group of analytes. When integrated with a transducer capable of measuring those signals, a biosensor results that acts as a self-contained analytical system useful in basic and applied environmental, medical, pharmacological, and agricultural sciences. Historically, these devices have focused on signaling proteins such as green fluorescent protein, aequorin, firefly luciferase, and/or bacterial luciferase. The biochemistry and genetic development of these sensor systems as well as the advantages, challenges, and common applications of each one will be discussed