p.s. I think there is no doubt at all that Tamil can and should have dative experiencer subjects in UD — and we even got in an example of a dative experiencer subject into the new UD paper in Section 4.4 — but, as noted, there are certainly issues with various UD treebanks, whether coming from traditional grammar notions, trying to wrongly generalize from English, a lack of linguistic expertise, or whatever. I think they can be worked through, though sometimes it takes some careful interpersonal work, and some treebanks have been actively improved and made more consistent with others and the UD specification. It would be great to see Tamil improved using some of the discussions that have taken place. I wish Sarves luck (and could help in a limited way).
Chris.
On Jul 30, 2021, at 9:35 PM, Miriam Butt miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de wrote:
Hi,
interesting discussion.
I think we should definitely restart ParGram meetings — they were a good forum for discussion and exchange and we could do some of that on-line these days — part of why we stopped having them was a lack of travel funds.. But the world is different now and we can put appropriate infrastructure in place along with meeting in person as needed or wanted.
@Koenraad — we’ll look into moving the Bergen site into to Konstanz.
I am working with a Tamil PhD student (Sarves) and he has been trying to use the Tamil UD bank. He’s got an LFG Tamil ParGram grammar and can map to UD, but the problem is that the Tamil UD bank that exists actually has chosen wrong categories or does not have some (at some point it did not have dative subjects and this abstract I reviewed was trying to introduce them to UD but several UD reviewers pushed back with the argument that this category simply did not and should not exist in UD). So he is a bit stuck, he wants to be able map to UD and it’s technically possible, but it’s not possible in terms of content mapping. One would have to fix the existing Tamil UD and all of the Tamil people involved in the Tamil UD agree that this needs to be done, but since most of them are more CS than linguistics and Tamil is under-researched, the way forward as to the fixes is not immediately clear. They need ParGram type help, as Lori points out.
Having said that, I have realized over the years of training students that very few people can actually grasp all of the linguistics and engineering and formal underpinnings of everything we did and do in ParGram. Which is why it is difficult to make it a broad based community effort — one just has to know too many things (and be good at them).
The genius of UD was to distill things down to a simple scheme that the “crowd” could understand and apply, so it could become a broad-based community effort. But then, it turns out that that scheme is too unspecified to deal with the variety of crosslinguistic patterns that are out there. And us ParGram and LFG people do indeed understand the crosslinguistic patterns fairly well and could advise, while not losing sight of the practicalities and compromises needed for CL work. But then there are not many of us….
And it also takes time to get to know a language like Tamil, which has a long but confusing literature and very few formal linguists who work on it. So I have been helping, but it took me a while to understand just their complementizer system, for example. In CL you can’t wait around for some linguist to take a year or even just a few months to figure out just the complementizers…
I can sort them out when they come and tell me they have 48 auxiliaries or some such nonsense because I know all about verbs, but the bottom line is that good linguistics is hard and takes time and needs many more experts on a language than what we can currently field. One solution would be for the big tech companies to fund 10 linguists for each of the world’s languages. That would already help a lot. And be a tiny fraction of their overall budget.
That’s my two cents!
Miriam
On 30. Jul 2021, at 19:32, Lori Levin levin@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
Hi Chris,
The CL article is wonderful! I recommend it to everyone on this list.
While having great respect for UD, I stand by my "stone soup" analogy (which I stole from Yorick Wilks's characterization of statistical MT).
For ParGram people, I know this is off the topic of ParGram, so feel free to ignore.
First, my great respect for UD:
- By making UD a community-sourced project, a very large resource was created that has enabled research on joint, cross-lingual, and multilingual models of parsing. This research could not have been done without UD.
2.UD has enabled the development of parsers for low-resource languages, both with supervised training on a UD treebank and with transfer from higher-resourced languages.
- Community-sourcing and stone-souping allowed all of this to happen quickly, years faster than it could have been done without community-sourcing.
Second, some points about community-sourcing:
(I just now remembered that just before the pandemic, I told Joakim that I would help write better documentation to improve the quality of community-sourced UD treebanks as a way of remediating the points below.)
Starting from UD's stated goal of having a collection of treebanks in a uniform, comparable format, to facilitate cross-lingual machine learning:
Some UD treebanks are written by linguists and are excellent. Others show misunderstandings of the definitions of dependency labels and head-dependent relationships. Thus they do not fulfill the goal of having a uniform, comparable format. The validation scripts for UD are a great resource, but they cannot detect when a treebanker makes a decision that is not quite what a linguist would do given the same documentation. The documentation needs to include procedures for how to tell if recipients in your language are core-arguments or obliques, etc.
I believe that the UD documentation is intentionally brief so that people will not be intimidated, say, in comparison to the 300-page manual of the Penn Treebank or the 1500-page manual to the Prague Dependency Treebanks. UD documentation includes a number of constructions (as in your CL paper), but it doesn't have a decision process for deciding whether the thing that translates into a secondary predicate in English really is a secondary predicate in your language, which I think leads to copying English grammar instead of analyzing the grammar of your own language. Again, I think this could be fixed by tutorials on linguistic tests for various things along with typology lessons. e.g., "There are n things that typologists know about coordinate structures, apply these diagnostics to see which type you are dealing with. Now that you know which of the n types you are dealing with, here are specific treebanking guidelines for that type".
I'm noticing more and more in my teaching that students from other countries equate grammar with English grammar, causing them to miss-analyze their own language by assuming that it is like English. For example, students who speak languages with locative possession constructions (a book is at me) will say that possession in their language is just like English. The UD documentation does not help people with this. There needs to be some pre-treebanking awareness. ParGram people would be great at writing the needed documentation, tutorials, and instructions.
- Further copying of English grammar results from over-interpretation of the goal of having a uniform, comparable format for all treebanks. (I don't mean to pick on Japan. I have discussed this politely with Graham Neubig.) Some groups in Japan (Unidict?) took this to an extreme, which to my mind, totally defeated the purpose of UD. In your CL article, "ta" is not segmented separately from the word "katta", but some Japanese segmenters treat "ta" as a separate word. In some Japanese UD's "ta" is an AUX. Why did they think this was a good idea? Because tenses are carried on auxiliary verbs in European languages, so this makes Japanese more like European languages and should be consistent with UD's goal of uniform, comparable trees across languages. They also treated "koto" as an AUX because it seems like an aux when it nominalizes a sentence, but they also treated it as an aux in "noun no koto". One of my students was experimenting with cross-lingual parser training, and had to remove Japanese from the training pool or at least delete all instances of "koto" before training with Japanese.
The UD goals could be easily mis-understood by non-linguists to mean "make everything like English". However, multi-lingual neural net parsers work by learning what is languagey about language. If you are not a linguist and you do something naive, without experimenting first, because you think it is compatible with UD goals, you are likely to mess up what is languagey about your language. I think this is what happened with over-segmentation in Japanese. Again, ParGram people could help people understand what it means to make your f-structures compatible without copying the grammar of another language.
Finally, content words as heads and other policies that were made without anticipating all of the consequences
Here is where the stone soup comes in most: it would have been good to anticipate the consequences before becoming too big to change.
UD has decided to define itself as dependency relations among content words. I can't complain about this: around 2003-2004 I was in a group called Interlingual Annotation of Multilingual Text Corpora (IAMTC), which was short-lived, but included people like Ed Hovy, Owen Rambow, Bonnie Dorr, and Nizar Habash. IAMTC also advocated content words as heads. We were a little too early for community sourcing and very large-scale annotation, and not nearly as charismatic as the UD people, so we faded away.
Any policy has consquences. Here are some of the consequences of "content words as heads":
The head of "Women in the house and in the senate" is "house" because "is", "in", and "and" can't be heads. A better solution would be a constructional approach, identifying this as an instance of a type of predicative construction.
The UD discussion board has long discussions of sentences like "The answer is nobody knows". "Is" can't be the head, so "knows" is the head. But that leads to a violation of the "one subject" policy. "nobody" is the subject of "knows" but "answer" is also the subject of "knows". This is the kind of thing that linguists anticipate before they try to start the soup using only stones.
And now, I see in the UD discussion boards that it may not be possible to move on to version 3 because there has been too much effort and volume in version 2.
--Lori
On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 10:08 AM Christopher D. Manning manning@stanford.edu wrote: Of course, I’d describe UD — and its relation to LFG — slightly differently. 😉
At any rate, we do have — and have always had — more than 3 pages; and just now we’ve got an article out in Computational Linguistics:
https://direct.mit.edu/coli/article/47/2/255/98516/Universal-Dependencies
Chris
On Jul 29, 2021, at 8:34 PM, Lori Levin levin@andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
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:
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.
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.
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
Miriam Butt Department of Linguistics University of Konstanz Fach 184 Tel: +49 7531 88 5109 78457 Konstanz Fax: +49 7531 88 4865 Germany +49 7531 88 5115
miriam.butt@uni-konstanz.de https://www.ling.uni-konstanz.de/butt/
“One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the HIndustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain."
William Dalrymple, p. xxiii, "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company"