Augury

A Brief History of Grammar – Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Pollard and Sag, in 1985, took the Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar model and pared it down, reducing the formalism to a more minimal set of tools in many ways reminiscent of the contemporaneous work in Government and Binding. Where GPSG had just arbitrary rules for production/constraints on local subtrees with arbitrary constraint equations, HPSG has a very small set of rules that license local subtrees with very specific constraints equations, and all variation comes not from having separate rules but from having different properties on the items in the subtree. HPSG was also very lexicalized, in that the general combinatory rules combine and manipulate features that come from the lexical items; nothing is contributed by the tree except the combination of these sets of features into new sets of features. And rather than employing normal constraint equations, HPSG looks more like LFG, in that it employs feature structures represented by AVMs.

more »

MQL, Prolog, and the future of Semantic Web databases

Metaweb has this Semantic Web database, Freebase, employing an incredibly cool query language called MQL (Metaweb Query Language). The core idea of the database is that you represent knowledge as a massive object graph — objects represent things that you want to store information on, corresponding roughly to the things you would have Wikipedia articles about, and the relationships between objects (and between objects and primitive values like test or numbers) encode the knowledge you want to store about those objects. The programming language Prolog has similar knowledge-representation capabilities, but with subtle differences. Both of these provide extraordinarily interesting takes on interfacing with complex databases, but both also have their limitations.

more »

A Brief History of Grammar – Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar

Finally! The GPSG post!

In the early 80’s, a number of syntacticians who desired a form of syntax without all the transformations of Chomsky’s kind of syntax, invented a model called Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG). GPSG bares a striking resemblance to LFG, in a great many ways, and as such the description here will be quite short, drawing much on analogies to LFG.

more »

Fake Countries

According to a fellow grad student, a fake country is a country you’re not from. She’s a native speaker of Argentinian Spanish.

My Current Absence

I’m not posting right now because I’ve just moved to Maryland and don’t have real internet yet, just my iPhone. I’ll be online, hopefully, in a few days.

A Brief History of Grammar – Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG)

In the 70’s, Joan Bresnan, a student of Chomsky’s, came out with a new model of grammar called Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). At the time it was perhaps one of the only real alternatives to the then-contemporary versions of generative grammar espoused by Chomskyans. Bresnan’s model was different in that instead of treating the whole of linguistic phenomena in terms of purely syntactic categories and phrase structure rules, and so forth, she added a second layer to the nature of linguistic representation, a “functional” layer, which would represent more traditional notions of grammatical functions like subject, object, and so forth. The phenomena traditionally handled via transformational processes applied to underlying syntactic structures were instead taken to be constraint relationships that apply between syntactic rules and objects, and their corresponding functional structures.

more »

A Brief History of Grammar – Tree-adjoining Grammar (TAG)

The grammars described so far can be thought of as collections of rules that build trees. The primitive structuralist grammars being the most obvious sort, and the later transformational and combinatory approaches similarly tree-construction oriented, to one degree or another. Tree-adjoining Grammars (TAGs), on the other hand, take trees to be the fundamental objects under consideration. Rather than building trees, the rules of TAGs govern how trees can be put together. TAGs are as a whole mildly context-sensitive, in that they allow some amount of context-sensitive behavior, but not all, but are still a superset of the context-free grammars. Tree-adjoining Grammars are very similar to Categorial Grammar, and lexicalized TAGs are computationally equivalent to Combinatory Categorial Grammar in expressive power.

more »

Borrowed Words for Borrowed Words

“Calque” is a loanword. “Loanword” is a calque.

I wonder if there’s a name for this sort of silliness.

The Logic of Science

I’ve gotten into a number of discussions recently about the nature of science and its relation to inductive reasoning. It seems to be relatively common for people to assume that science utilizes inductive reasoning, and that therefore science has all of the same problems that inductive reasoning has. What I aim to explain here is that science is not based on inductive reasoning, and is infact the exact opposite of inductive reasoning in a number of ways. Inductive reasoning certainly has its flaws, in most cases, but it’s distinct from science and the kind of reasoning used there, and so critiques of inductive reasoning are non sequitur.

more »

Machine Diaries

20:41 of literature , poetry was injured by a poet , all the vicissitudes of the night and day , is the mirror of the soul , liquor thought , contradicting the mind and the soul . And what is known about the literature that he knows and God, a equation impossible and final solution. Based to play at did not stand in front of the era of or a dilemma, but is the dilemma that stands where spirit, and secrets of nature, and thinking, insomnia, which run out, and the language from time to time. Explaining and psychological poet who undulates Between the ebb and flow. The poet living unusual installation to meet in his person, many characters It is capable of asking programmed in each (C), and vice versa, and can make the green, and the Bustan checkpoint into the fire burned feet of. That is located at all times, but he does not see us, but by its provisions embraced our dreams and tempered our wounds. The poet is very sensitive toward human things until Aljmadat felt we do not feel, He predicted everything he writes and simultaneously . Broadcast frequencies creativity across continents to keep a single around hundreds or even thousands of people. If he continues to receive the prestigious status in society that we do not see them since the ignorant era are obsessed with the poet in the as it is by the tribe and today is the lips of its work to the world that reached the degree of universality .