Chit-Fung Lam (Lawrence), Elaine Ui Dhonnchadha, and I are planning to revive the f-structure comparison sessions that were held in the regular meetings of the ParGram consortium (https://pargram.w.uib.no/). These meetings will be held on-line, and anyone who is developing a grammar using the XLE grammar development platform (https://ling.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/pages/xle/) is welcome to attend. We would also welcome participation by anyone using the Grammar Writer's Workbench (https://parc-public.pages-external.parc.com/xle/isl/groups/nltt/medley/). We anticipate that the meetings will be held every two months, but if there is interest in meeting more regularly, we can consider that in the first meeting.
In these meetings, we will discuss and compare f-structures for a parallel set of translationally equivalent sentences. We will use the Pargram treebank sentences as a starting point, and in the first meeting we will plan to discuss the first 5 sentences. (We may find that this is too ambitious -- we will discuss the f-structures in the order below, so even if you can produce only the f-structure for the first one or two sentences, please feel free to attend and participate in the discussion.) The Pargram treebank is available at the following link (scroll to the end of the page):
https://clarino.uib.no/iness/treebanks?collection=ParGram&reset-all=true
The first five sentences are:
The driver starts the tractor.
The tractor is red.
What did the farmer see?
Did the farmer sell his tractor?
Push the button.
All participants will translate these sentences into the language they are working on, and produce and print out the f-structures. You can do this by using the "Print" command to print the f-structures to PDF. It is helpful to circulate the analyses in advance of the meeting, so that people can look at the f-structures ahead of time. There is no need to circulate c-structures. It will probably be a good idea for us to have a repository where people can access the f-structures to prepare for the meeting-- we will look into this and let the participants know, so please let us know if you plan to participate, so we can add you to the repository.
The Pargram treebank contains analyses for these sentences, and it will probably be a good idea for grammar writers to try to model their f-structures on the analyses in the treebank to the extent possible. In the Pargram consortium, the idea is that differences in f-structures for translational equivalents should reflect syntactic differences between the languages -- there should be no arbitrary differences to do with spelling of feature names or other linguistically irrelevant details.
We propose to hold the first meeting on Tuesday 24 October at 8:00 AM UTC (this is 9:00 AM UK time). The Zoom link is below. If you have any questions, or if you would like to be added to the list of people with access to the f-structure repository, please send email to one of us. We are looking forward to discussing your f-structures!
- Mary, Lawrence and Elaine
PARGRAM Treebank
https://tcd-ie.zoom.us/j/93770084827?pwd=OEpZampzanZMS2VXMDNkcEJyTU9WZz09
Meeting ID: 937 7008 4827
Passcode: 111795
