I've never been to a Pargram meeting, so I don't know if this is appropriate, because it is not about XLE:

I'd like to have a group discussion about formulating a Pargram reply to the Google universal part of speech tag set and the Google universal dependency label set. They are gaining momentum and most people in the ACL crowd accept it without questioning. Linguists can ignore Google, but it's a little scary for the field of language technologies. If we wait too long, there will be too many resources in the Google format and it will be too late to change it. (Although maybe it's not so bad because Google based their dependency labels on Stanford dependency, which is based on LFG.)

In fact, there are a few projects on Treebank interoperability (HAMLETD from Prague, something from Reut Tsarfaty, Google universal dependency set, and a relatively new project by me, Owen Rambow, and Archna Bhatia). Pargram has been working on interoperability for 20 years, so I would like to hear the Pargram position.

Some sample questions:

1. HAMLETD did a survey of how coordinate structures were handled in 29 dependency treebanks. They found that there were four or five different ways, and then they picked one and converted all the treebanks to that format. Sorry for skipping the first 19 Pargram meetings and not knowing this, but in Pargram is there a one-size-fits-all treatment of coordinate structures, or is there some variation across languages?

2. I'm worried that Google is not allowing enough cross-linguistic variation on IOBJ and OBJ2. They might be forcing languages to have grammatical relations that they don't have.

--Lori

On 2/10/2014 5:57 PM, Kaplan, Ronald wrote:

If you haven't already told us, please let us know whether you will be coming to the meeting, and whether you would like to have a presentation slot on the agenda or whether there is a particular topic you would like to see discussed.

It's now about 2 weeks away, so we need to get down to more specific plans.

Thanks---

Ron

Begin forwarded message:

...

*From: *Ron Kaplan <ronald.kaplan@nuance.com mailto:ronald.kaplan@nuance.com> *Subject: * *February Pargram meeting* *Date: *January 27, 2014 at 6:25:08 PM PST *To: *pargram <pargram@mailman.uni-konstanz.de mailto:pargram@mailman.uni-konstanz.de> *Reply-To: * Ron Kaplan <ron.kaplan@nuance.com mailto:ron.kaplan@nuance.com>, Annie Zaenen <azaenen@earthlink.net mailto:azaenen@earthlink.net>

Hi everyone,

As indicated earlier, we will be hosting the meeting at Nuance in Sunnyvale, February 24-28. If you want to look up the location on a map, the address is 1198 E. Arques Avenue, at the intersection of Lawrence Expressway and Central Expressway. The nearest train station is the Lawrence station, about a 10 minute walk.

It is now time to develop the schedule. Following tradition, our tentative proposal is to allocate blocks of time roughly as follows:

Monday: Feature committee and parse comparison (Jani has sent out the sentences)

Tuesday morning: Grammar reports Tuesday afternoon: General session (proposal: a tutorial/discussion on grammar debugging in XLE)

Wednesday morning: Papers/discussion Wednesday afternoon: Symposium at CSLI/Stanford celebrating Pargram's 20th anniversary

Thursday: Papers/discussion

Friday morning: Planning and wish list, especially about the new arrangements for XLE distribution and maintenance.

Please let us know whether you plan to come (for local logistics), and also let us know whether you would like to present a paper, suggestion a topic for discussion, or organize a more focused workshop session.

Best,

Annie and Ron

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