An Algebra for Semantic Construction in Constraint-based Grammars
What it is about
The paper offers a framework for semantic construction inside grammars written in typed feature structure logics, including HPSG. It is an alternative to the lambda calculus. Each sign has a hook, the value that fills a hole in another sign. Composition is limited to a small set of named operations on hooks, holes and lists of elementary predications. This keeps the grammar flexible but constrains what each rule may do. The constraints are checked as metalevel conditions on the grammar, not at run time. Applied to the English Resource Grammar, the work exposed many grammar bugs and made the grammar monotonic, which a chart generator needs. The paper gives no numbers.
Ideas
- I1.
en/src/expert.rs: declare for each rule its head, its dependents and its output slots, and let a checker reject rules that break the slot discipline. Count how many existing rules fail the check. - I2.
en/src/udreg.rs: a metalevel pass that flags any rule which overwrites a feature set set by an earlier rule (the non-monotonic case). Count the findings on EWT and on PUD. - I3. Slot audit: count the mismatches between the slots a rule declares and the heads it attaches on EWT dev, and list them for review.
For Mova
The code is en/src/expert.rs and en/src/udreg.rs; the chapter is 20. Syntax: the Universal Dependencies frame. The paper has no numbers, and it is written for HPSG, not for our rules. Test on EWT and PUD only.
Cite
@inproceedings{copestake2001algebra,
title = {{An Algebra for Semantic Construction in Constraint-based Grammars}},
author = {Copestake, Ann and Lascarides, Alex and Flickinger, Dan},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
year = {2001},
doi = {10.3115/1073012.1073031},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1073012.1073031}
}References
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