Tenets for an Interlingual Representation Definite NPs

What it is about

The paper asks what definiteness of a noun phrase should look like in an interlingua. It rejects the view that a definite NP always refers to something unique and familiar. Definiteness is one value of a determiner among several: distributional, collective, or a surface effect. The author gives a typology and shows how an analysis grammar can record it, using the determiner's subcategorisation and the semantic features of the noun. Generation is treated as the inverse of analysis. Rules map a definiteness configuration (definite or not, number, generic reading, focus) to a determiner in each language. The paper states, for example, that Romance languages use a definite article or a demonstrative where English uses none, as in "la libertad es esencial" for "freedom is essential", and that a generic singular is rendered by an indefinite. It gives rules and examples, and no counts.

Ideas

• I1. Add a definiteness feature to meta tokens, derived from the source article or determiner and from the tag. Measure article agreement on the Bible pairs (the, a, no article) and count how often the rule-based choice matches the target.
• I2. Treat generic noun phrases as a class: a plural or singular noun without a determiner in the source gets a target determiner from a rule table. Count how often each generic class occurs before writing any rule.
• I3. Keep the determiner rules as counted tables keyed by definiteness, number and generic reading (enums, in BTreeMap order), learned from the pairs under a count threshold, as profile.rs already learns chunks.
• I4. For the Hebrew side, check how the definite article (the prefixed "ha") reads into the definiteness feature, and whether the Hebrew reader keeps it.

For Mova

The English target is the case here, so the article generator in profile.rs is the place for I1 to I3, and the Hebrew reader (hebrew.rs) is the place for I4. This is open problem 4 (determiners and boundaries as features) in a form that can be counted. The paper's rules are hand-made, so Mova's versions would be learned and checked on held-out data.

Topics: Machine translation

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{meya1990tenets,
  title = {{Tenets for an Interlingual Representation Definite NPs}},
  author = {Meya, Montserrat},
  booktitle = {COLING 1990 Volume 2: Papers presented to the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1990},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/C90-2046/}
}

References

9 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Alonso,A . 1961 : Estilistica y gramatica del articulo en espa?ol,en Estudios LInguisticos. Madrid Barwise,J & R.Cooper: 1981. Generalised Quantifiers and Natural Language. Linguistics and Philosphy, 4. p.159-219 find
2. Benthem van ,J &A.ter Meulen Generalised Quantifiers. Dordrecht (eds) Bosch,R & B.Geurts 1989: Proccessing definite NPs. IBM. Lilog Project. find
3. Gardenfors, P (ed) 1987: Quantifiers. find
4. Reidel.Dordrecht Generalised Geurts, Bart 1985 : Generics, in .:Journal of Semantics. vol.4, p.247 find
5. Grimm, H.J 1987: Artikelgebrauch. Leipzig Lexikon zum Keenan,E. & J.Stasvi 1986: A semantic characterisation of Natural Language Determiners in: Linguistics and Philosophy, 4 p.159-219 find
6. Loebner Sebastian 1985 : Definites. In.Journal of Semantics. vol.4.p.279 find
7. MacCawley,J.D 1981 : Everything that linguistis have always wanted to know about logic. Univ. find
8. Chicago Press Peterson, Ph. 1979 : On the logic of few, many and most. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 20. p. 155o179 find
9. Weinl:ich, H. 1976 : Sprache in Texten. Klett. Stuttgart find

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