Abstract
In this paper, we shall address resolution of gender and person in French coordination and suggest that a list-based encoding of feature values provides for a very simple and intuitive resolution mechanism in coordinate structures by means of simple list concatenation, while it leaves the treatment of agreement in head-compositional structures entirely unaffected. We shall discuss the implementation of this approach in the context of an emerging computational HPSG of French based on the LinGO Grammar Matrix (Bender et al. 2002), and argue that the problem at hand calls for concatenation by recursive copying (Emerson 2017), as opposed to difference lists (Clocksin and Mellish 1981). Finally, we conclude that the list-based encoding of person and gender values can act as a drop-in replacement for the standard sort-based encoding, since it is not only more flexible in the treatment of feature resolution, but also bears the further potential of representing more elaborate person systems, like the inclusive/exclusive distinction.
The research reported on this paper has been partially carried out within the excellency cluster (LabEx) “Empirical Foundations in Linguistics”, supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Nevertheless, distribution of features in LFG will need to differentiate according to feature values, making the statement of resolution quite clumsy. E.g. feminine gender values will be distributive, whereas masculine values on the coordinate structure will only require membership on one of the f-structure sets contributed by the conjunct-daughters. One can imagine that such a regime will become even more unwieldy, once we move to a tri-fold resolution scheme, as observed with person.
- 2.
This last restriction avoids spurious ambiguities with all masculine coordinations, using three rules for the four logical combinations.
- 3.
These observations are only true, in a strict sense, for pure unification formalisms. In systems like Trale (Penn 2004) the disjunctions between rules could be relegated to attached relational constraints or even better, implicational constraints, as pointed out to us by an anonymous reviewer. However, once a general solution has been found for formalisms without these more elaborate constraints, it certainly helps towards closing the gap in expressiveness between the two competing approaches to HPSG implementation.
- 4.
The LinGO Grammar Matrix (Bender et al. 2002) is a starter kit for the development of implemented HPSG-style grammars, which has been distilled, originally, from the implemented grammars of English (Copestake and Flickinger 2000) and Japanese (Siegel and Bender 2002). On the syntactic side, the Matrix provides type definitions for grammars developed in the spirit of Ginzburg and Sag (2000). With respect to semantics, the Matrix provides compositional principles for semantics construction in Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake et al. 2005), ensuring both reversibility and cross-linguistic interoperability.
- 5.
The list type 0-1-list denotes a list with length of at most 1. It is straightforwardly defined in TDL as follows:
- 6.
The LKB, unlike Trale, does not allow inference from features to the types that introduce or constrain them.
- 7.
TDL (=Type Description Language; Krieger 1996.) was the original description language of the PAGE system (Uszkoreit et al. 1994) and currently is the standard description language for typed feature structure grammar development and runtime platforms within the DELPH-IN collaboration, such as the LKB (Copestake 2002), Pet (Callmeier 2000), and Ace (Crysmann and Packard 2012). Grammars specified in TDL include the English Resource Grammar (Copestake and Flickinger 2000) among several others, as well as the LinGO Grammar Matrix (Bender et al. 2002).
- 8.
Note that checking for cyclic feature structures – a check which the LKB indeed performs—will not provide a solution: once we need to underspecify the length of the list, reentrancy between the rest and last cannot be stated.
References
An, A., Abeillé, A.: Agreement and interpretation of binominals in French. In: Stefan, M. (ed.) Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, University of Kentucky, Lexington, pp. 26–43. CSLI Publications, Stanford (2017). http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/2017/hpsg2017-an-abeille.pdf
Anderson, S.R.: A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1992)
Bender, E.M., Flickinger, D., Oepen, S.: The grammar matrix: an open-source starter-kit for the rapid development of cross-linguistically consistent broad-coverage precision grammar. In: John, C., Nelleke, O., Richard, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on Grammar Engineering and Evaluation at the 19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 8–14 (2002)
Callmeier, U.: PET—a platform for experimentation with efficient HPSG processing techniques. J. Nat. Lang. Eng. 6(1), 99–108 (2000)
Clocksin, W.F., Mellish, C.S.: Programming in Prolog. Springer, Heidelberg (1981)
Copestake, A.: Implementing Typed Feature Structure Grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford (2002)
Copestake, A., Flickinger, D.: An open-source grammar development environment and broad-coverage English grammar using HPSG. In: Proceedings of the Second conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2000), Athens (2000)
Copestake, A., Flickinger, D., Pollard, C., Sag, I.: Minimal recursion semantics: an introduction. Res. Lang. Comput. 3(4), 281–332 (2005)
Copestake, A., Lascarides, A., Flickinger, D.: An algebra for semantic construction in constraint-based grammars. In: Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toulouse, France (2001)
Corbett, G.G.: Gender. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1991)
Crysmann, B., Packard, W.: Towards efficient HPSG generation for German, a non-configurational language. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2012), Mumbai, India, pp. 695–710 (2012)
Dalrymple, M., Kaplan, R.: Feature indeterminacy and feature resolution. Language 76(4), 759–798 (2000)
Drellishak, S., Bender, E.M.: A coordination module for a crosslinguistic grammar resource. In: Stefan, M. (ed.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon, pp. 108–128 (2005). http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/HPSG/2005/drellishak-bender.pdf
Emerson, G.: (Diff-)list appends in TDL. In: 13th DELPH-IN Summit Oslo (2017)
Ginzburg, J., Sag, I.A.: Interrogative Investigations. The Form, Meaning, and Use of English Interrogatives. CSLI Publications, Stanford (2000)
Ingria, R.J.P.: The limits of unification. In: Proceedings of the Twentyeigth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 194–204 (1990)
King, T.H., Dalrymple, M.: Determiner agreement and noun conjunction. J. Linguist. 40, 69–104 (2004)
Krieger, H.-U.: TDL—a type description language for constraint-based grammars. Saarbrücken Dissertations in Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, vol. 2. DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken (1996)
Penn, G.: Balancing clarity and efficiency in typed feature logic through delaying. In: Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2004), Barcelona, Spain, pp. 239–246 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3115/1218955.1218986. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P04-1031
Sag, I.A.: Coordination and underspecification. In: Kim, J.-B., Wechsler, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, 5–7 August 2002, pp. 267–291. CSLI Publications, Stanford (2003)
Siegel, M., Bender, E.M.: Efficient deep processing of Japanese. In: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Asian Language Resources and International Standardization, Coling 2002 Post-conference Workshop, Taipei (2002)
Uszkoreit, H., Backofen, R., Busemann, S., Diagne, A.K., Hinkelman, E., Kasper, W., Kiefer, B., Krieger, H.-Ul., Netter, K., Neumann, G., Oepen, S., Spackman, S.P.: DISCO - an HPSG-based NLP system and its application for appointment scheduling. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 1994), Kyoto, Japan, 5–9 August, vol. 1, pp. 436–440 (1994)
Zwicky, A.: Hierarchies of person. In: Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 13, pp. 714–733 (1977)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature
About this paper
Cite this paper
Aguila-Multner, G., Crysmann, B. (2018). Feature Resolution by Lists: The Case of French Coordination. In: Foret, A., Kobele, G., Pogodalla, S. (eds) Formal Grammar 2018. FG 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10950. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57784-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57784-4_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-57783-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-57784-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)
