[Lexicog] Semantic parsing

[Patrick Hanks]

Mike Maxwell wrote:

> Depending on your proclivities, you may find such debates depressing
> ("There isn't any answer") or exciting ("I'm going to publish the
> answer") :-!

... or provocative ("I'm going to reformulate the question in terms that can
be answered").

Patrick


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Semantic parsing


> Patrick Hanks wrote:
> > I guess all this reinforces the point that semantic tagging is more
> > problematic than part-of-speeech tagging.
>
> Those of us who are old codgers will remember that Fillmore's "Case for
> Case", which came out in 1968, used basically the same sort of semantic
> tagging as is being discussed here--agent, patient, etc.  Over the next
> several years, any number of case systems were proposed, which offered
> more (usually) or fewer cases.  (SILers on this list may also remember
> that for a time, these semantic cases were an essential part of Tagmemic
> descriptions.  And even Chomsky referred to such things as Theta Roles,
> although it's hard to tell how seriously he took them.)
>
> One of the strongest criticisms of this enterprise, I believe, was that
> there was never any principled way of choosing a universal case system,
> or even a language-particular one (with the possible exception of
> languages like those of the Philippines, where you could argue that the
> set of language-particular case roles was the same as the actual case
> distinctions made in the morphosyntax).
>
> Another criticism of Fillmorean case grammars was that there were always
> borderline cases (pardon the pun), where you couldn't decide for a
> particular clause or verb which case to assign one of its NPs to.
>
> In the end, the linguistic community largely gave up on Fillmore-style
> case grammar, AFAIK.
>
> Of course, similar objections can be--and have been--raised about
> assigning parts of speech (= syntactic categories).  Linguists have
> argued, for example, about whether some languages (like the Tucanoan
> languages of Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil) have the category
> 'Adjective', and part of the reason for the argument is that it is
> unclear what a universal definition of that category would be.
>
> Also unclear is how different the morphosyntactic behavior of a word has
> to be before you assign it to a different category (including perhaps a
> unique category for that word or for that language).  Think of words
> like 'ago' and 'hence' in English, for instance, or the multiple
> subclasses of so-called "adverbs" in English.
>
> Depending on your proclivities, you may find such debates depressing
> ("There isn't any answer") or exciting ("I'm going to publish the
> answer") :-!
> -- 
>
>     Mike Maxwell
>     CASL/ University of Maryland
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>



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