Hello everyone,

Just a brief remark from me (I am travelling): Lori has very good points. I would find it particularly interesting if we could develop the basis for promoting our approach to treebanking vis à vis UD. (I liked the stone soup comparison. In Norway it is ’nail soup’ (’spikersuppe’) – the sort of nails you hammer.) Of course, it remains to be seen what is practically possible. For one thing, there can hardly be a concomitant development of XLE, as in the original ParGram project.

Best,

Helge

29. jul. 2021 kl. 17:54 skrev Lori Levin <levin@andrew.cmu.edu>:

Hi Joan, 

I hope it is appropriate for me to chime in, since my day job as a funded project monkey prevented me from attending all but one ParGram meeting in the past. 

I'm now trying to get back to doing more linguistics, but with the perspective of the needs of the field of language technologies. 

Here is how I see the importance of ParGram:

1. Cross-lingual studies of grammatical relations, information structure, constructions in a very broad sense, argument realization, grammaticalization, etc. leading to theoretical insight into the nature of these things. 

2. Treebanks and parsers that can be used for corpus-based studies in linguistics, and perhaps in some hybrid third-wave neuro-symbolic systems in language technologies, especially in low-resource languages. 

3. A challenge to UD (universal dependency) and UMR (uniform meaning representation):  I think we can learn from UD and UMR how to do things on a larger scale.  But at the same time, we can save them from their fate as stone soup in the following sense:  they thought they could do something easy (make soup using only "stones" and water, which consisted of three pages of definitions of grammatical relations), but as they progressed, they needed to keep adding "carrots", "onions", "bones" (serious linguistic decisions).  But unlike the story, where the soup turned out good, UD has turned out messy and too big to fail.  Sometimes they talk about possibly not going on to Version 3 because Version 2 is too big to change.  We can show how to do a UD-like project on a firm foundation. 

--Lori

On Thu, Jul 29, 2021 at 12:45 AM Joan Bresnan <bresnan@stanford.edu> wrote:

I would like to hear some discussion of what the goals would be.

—Joan (my spelling checker keeps rewriting my name as Jian, which is what we call the straight sword in my taiji group— but this is really unintentional)

Sent on the fly

> On Jul 28, 2021, at 5:00 AM, Agnieszka Patejuk via LFG-list <lfg-list@mailman.uni-konstanz.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am sending this message to all potentially relevant lists (ParGram,
> XLE, LFG, ParSem) so as to maximise the chance that it will reach
> people who are interested in this topic. If you know someone who might
> be interested but is not subscribed to these lists, please consider
> letting them know.
>
> The question is: who would be interested in restarting ParGram meetings?
>
> I am not sure what would be the best way to organise this discussion,
> so I am suggesting the following:
> • if you think your answer might be of interest to many people (for
> instance, it might spark a discussion), please consider replying to
> the list(s)
> • if not, please reply only to me – I will later go through the
> responses and post a summary to the relevant lists.
>
> I hope that later we can discuss this topic in more detail with people
> who have expressed interest.
>
> All best,
> Agnieszka