Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Christian <jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com>]

Hi Eric,

as I explained to you off list this isn't my approach. It was intended as a
simple exercise to inspire list members to get their hands dirty with
turning theoretical knowledge into something practical. Prolog (a technology
I would never use for a serious system) is an ideal starting point because
of its built in DCG handling which means no programming skills needed to get
started playing with a toy grammar.

Now, as far as I know the leading approaches at the moment involve using
either the LFG or the HPSG formalisms and there are quite large projects in
both technologies which are attempting to define wide coverage grammars of
modern languages. For a system driven by LFG see:

http://decentius.aksis.uib.no/logon/xle.xml

<http://decentius.aksis.uib.no/logon/xle.xml>For information on systems
using HPSG see:

http://www.delph-in.net/

<http://www.delph-in.net/>Now, I'm not sure what you mean by using an
approach that has been adapted for languages with a high degree of freedom.
If you have any suggestions of a technology we could use which is friendly
to list members who may have no computational linguistics experience or
programming skills then I'm open to suggestions. The two technologies
mentioned above for HPSG and LFG imply a steep learning curve and XLE is not
freely available anyway.

James Christian

On 20 June 2010 14:38, Eric Inman <eric-inman AT comcast.net> wrote:

> Hi Jim,
>
> When referring to free word order languages, no one is using the term
> "free"
> in an absolute sense but rather in a relative sense. In addition, no one is
> using the word "free" to indicate that there are no rules or contraints
> governing the word order. From my review of your comments along with a
> quick, cursory review of what I could find by googling, my conclusion for
> the time being is that it would be a good idea to use a an approach that
> has
> been adapted for languages with a relatively high degree of freedom in word
> order.
>
> Your approach may very well prove productive if you carry it out, I just
> think there might be more efficient ways of proceeding. If you do proceed
> with this, I'll be interested in seeing what the results are.
>
> Eric
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:b-hebrew-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of James Christian
> Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 2:48 AM
> To: dwashbur AT nyx.net
> Cc: b-hebrew
> Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> in my honest opinion there is no such thing as a free word order language.
> Yes. It is true that when we compare English word order with that of Koine
> Greek then the Koine Greek does exhibit more 'freedom' in its word order.
> But just what exactly do we mean by 'freedom'. Were the composers of Koine
> Greek documents just randomly throwing out declined noun phrases? Hardly!
> There are clearly patterns which are more dominant and patterns which are
> less dominant and guided decisions were made when these documents were
> generated. We even see similar phenomenon in English, a language we
> consider
> to not have free word order. Consider the following:
>
> 1) Mary went to school
> 2) To school went Mary
> 3) To school did Mary go
> 4) To school Mary went
>
> Sentence 1 is clearly the variant we would most likely encounter and yet
> there are contexts were 2, 3 and 4 could be naturally produced. However,
> this is certainly not a random pattern. There are clear reasons described
> by
> patterns which dictate when form 4 would be preferred over form 1.
>
> In any case, I cannot emphasize to you enough. Don't worry about the number
> of rules. This is not necessarily a bad thing. What you should be worrying
> about is whether your rule set over or under generates. Once you've got a
> rule set which doesn't over or under generate *then* is the time to start
> worrying if you could achieve the same thing with a more compact
> representation. However, I promise you this. If you give this experiment a
> go you will soon see that being in such an ground breaking position is far
> greater a problem than it may seem.
>
> I would rather have 1 million well defined rules that neither over nor
> under
> generate than 1 all embracing rule that produces every conceivable
> permutation of words both acceptable and unacceptable.
>
> James Christian
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