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  • From: James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>
  • To: Eric Inman <eric-inman AT comcast.net>
  • Cc: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew
  • Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:10:18 +0300

This is about the most intelligent and informed response I've had yet. You
are spot on in every respect.

Yes! Unfortunately, attempts to define generative grammars computationally
are predominantly binary operations i.e. accepted or rejected. Recent
psycholinguistic experiments which I have heard of but cannot provide
references for at this moment view grammar not as a binary operation but as
a ranking operation. Let's look at an example:

1) I am James
2) I is James
3) I are James

The common meaning behind each of these three sentences is easily extracted
by a native speaker. A binary operation defined by standard English grammar
would only accept sentence 1 but reject 2 and 3. In spite of this the data
of spoken English would show that, while considered incorrect, forms 2 and 3
are attested in the corpus. Probability scores would assign 1 as the most
likely in certain genres. In the genre of gang A member speaking to rival
gang B member in the back streets of Detroit maybe form 2 is the most
likely.

One thing I would disagree with is the assumption that a generative grammar
must define sentences. This is, as you observe, the de facto but there is no
reason why couldn't first start with smaller chunks and work our way up to a
definition of paragraph grammar and even eventually to an entire discourse.
Certain sentences, however grammatical they may seem in isolation, are not
likely to be accepted when they follow an irrelevant context.

I would suggest we start with smaller and most frequent units. I suspect
that the category of PP's can be better defined if we split this over
generic category into more useful functional units like phrases of location
of action, phrases of direction of motion etc. This is my theory. Only
experimentation with the data would show if my theory is worth anything. I'm
not here to push theories. I would like to start experimenting so that we
can see together what the data says for itself.

Back to the subject of grammatical ranking. I have no doubt that there are
many utterances in the b-hebrew corpus that some speakers of b-hebrew would
have ranked low in psycholinguistic experiments of ranking for grammatical
correctness. It would be interesting if we could spot patterns in the data
indicative of this but with no informants I really don't see how we could be
sure of any interpretation of the data we offer. I suggest we start by
attempting to define a grammar which can produce what is in the corpus. This
in itself is already far more complicated and interesting a task than it
would at first seem

James Christian


On 17 June 2010 04:08, Eric Inman <eric-inman AT comcast.net> wrote:

> I have a question.
>
> My understanding is that such a grammar is for defining the set of
> sentences
> that can be considered to be valid Hebrew sentences. This would imply that
> any sentence is in one of two states: either a valid Hebrew sentence or
> not.
> My concern is that typically there are sentences which are technically
> valid
> but which would never or rarely be used in practice. In some cases this
> would be because the sentence makes no sense semantically. In other cases
> it
> would be because for whatever reason a different sentence would normally be
> preferred for expressing the given content. In other words, the question of
> whether or not a sentence is a valid Hebrew sentence sometimes is neither
> yes or no but rather more of a probability or set of probabilities of how
> likely the sentence is to be used in practice and/or considered valid.
>
> Therefore I'm not sure how useful this kind of grammar is as a model of the
> language. It also seems that trying to build one would get bogged down in
> discussions of these gray areas. I think it would be better to use a model
> that had a way of taking into account these gray areas.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Eric Inman
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of James Christian
> Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 2:56 PM
> To: Pere Porta
> Cc: b-hebrew
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew
>
> Hi all,
>
> further to Pere's question I'll explain with an example of why I believe
> joint participation from list members on an experiment of this kind could
> make for good linguistic discussion on this list.
>
> Let's assume that in defining our grammar we want to start with high
> frequency phenomenon to increase our chances of developing a wide coverage
> grammar. Doing a simple word count on words that occur in the Tanakh we see
> that with the exception of Yhwh the most common words (as in most
> languages)
> are prepositions. This would suggest that prepositional phrases are high
> frequency linguistic chunks and a good place to start developing a wide
> coverage grammar.
>
> Following a theory of constituency it is pretty much standard to create
> high
> level definitions of prepositional phrases (PP) with DCG rules like the
> following (for English):
>
> PP --> P NP
>
> NP --> (Det) N
>
> Obviously, in practice such an over generic rule set is bound to over
> generate because of the lack of fine grained control on the rule set. In
> certain contexts certain pseudo-legal PP's are ungrammatical at some level
> of grammar that goes beyond simple constituent structure. This is perhaps a
> partial motivation of formalisms like LFG (lexical functional grammar)
> which
> add a functional structure to the generation grammar.
>
> In any case, the general idea is to get list members involved in an
> experiment of developing a generational grammar so that we can discover the
> finer nuances of b-hebrew together by experimenting with rule sets on real
> data. I predict that such a practical experience will be eye-opening to the
> intricacies of b-hebrew grammar and will stimulate many a linguistically
> based discussion (something we keep aiming at on b-hebrew but always seem
> to
> end up straying away from).
>
> The reason I suggested we do something like this using Prolog is simple.
> Prolog (IMO) is a shoddy programming language which is inefficient and I
> would never dream of using for a serious linguistic technology. However, it
> has inbuilt DCG support and so no programming skills required. If you can
> understand what PP --> P NP means then you can start working straight away
> with Prolog to build a generation grammar. It really is that simple.
> Totally
> linguist friendly.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_clause_grammar
>
> In any case, I've already had some positive responses off list and I would
> welcome some more and would like as many to get involved as possible.
> Please
> keep writing to express interest if you haven't already done so. I've
> already decided the positive response was large enough to attempt to get
> something going. I'll go ahead and make a simple toy grammar to play with,
> experiment with, build on etc. Those who are interested in participating
> the
> best thing to do while waiting for me to post further information is to
> download and install Prolog and perhaps play around with it.
>
> If you're running Unix or Linux then you may already have it installed. If
> not there are plenty of distributions available. GNU Prolog is probably the
> most common standard.
>
> www.gprolog.org
>
> Obviously, GNU Prolog can be run in Windows using an emulator like Cygwin.
> I've been told there are other good Prolog distributions that run on
> windows
> but can't recommend any as I've never used them. If you can get Prolog
> running on your system and your installation can interpret DCG's then your
> ready to make a start.
>
> I'll let you all know when I've got a toy grammar ready to start playing
> with. It shouldn't take too long and I should be able to fit it in around
> other things going on. If no-one has any objections to discussing b-hebrew
> grammar via experimentation with a generational grammar on the b-hebrew
> list
> then I'll continue to communicate via the list. If not, then we can always
> take it off list amongst those who have expressed an interest.
>
> Again, thanks for your responses. Keep them coming.
>
> James Christian
>
> On 15 June 2010 12:01, Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > (As a replying to James Christian's mail about his project on
> > generation grammar, which I mistakenly sent only to him and not to the
> > list)
> >
> > In this case, James, start, please.
> > Now, I do not know whether this can be done within b-hebrew list or
> > rather privately...
> > Dear b-hebrew Moderators, what is your mind and/or advice? Could
> > James's project or proposal be interesting for b-hebrew list members
> > in a general way?
> >
> >
> > Pere Porta
> > (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)
> >
> > On 10 June 2010 09:55, James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I don't how familiar everybody is with theories of generation
> >> grammar. In a nutshell theories of generation grammar can be
> >> summarised as follows.
> >> There
> >> is a set of words and rules which describe any given natural language.
> >> Given
> >> a correctly defined set of words and rules the generation grammar
> >> will accept all grammatically correct utterances of that language and
> >> reject ill formed utterances.
> >>
> >> Attempts to form a generation grammar for any given language
> >> generally suffer from problems of over generation and under
> >> generation. Over generation is when the grammar is poorly defined
> >> and, as such, accepts ill formed utterances as well formed
> >> utterances. Under generation is when the grammar rejects utterances
> which
> are known to be well formed.
> >>
> >> Testing of generation grammars consists of having two different test
> sets.
> >> One test set of well formed utterances and the other of ill formed
> >> utterances. The goal is that the grammar we define will accept the
> >> utterances known to be well formed and reject the utterances known to
> >> be poorly formed.
> >>
> >> If we were to extend this method to b-hebrew we already have a corpus
> >> of utterances we can consider to be well formed. Defining a corpus of
> >> ill formed phrases is a little more difficult as informants are lacking.
> >>
> >> I was toying with the idea of encouraging fans of b-hebrew to put
> >> their theoretical knowledge into practice by playing with building a
> >> generation grammar of b-hebrew using a simple linguist friendly
> >> Prolog driven interface. I just wanted to get a quick idea of numbers
> >> of who may be interested in participating in such an experiment.
> >> Please let your students etc. know about the prospect and get them to
> >> write to me either on or off list so that I can get an idea of
> >> whether it would be worth putting this together.
> >>
> >> James Christian
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> b-hebrew mailing list
> >> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> >> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
> >>
> >
> >
> >
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