Semantically Analyzing an English Subset for the Clowns Microworld

What it is about

CLOWNS is a microworld in which English sentences about a clown, a pedestal, a boat and a dock are turned into pictures. Nouns are small drawing programs, prepositions and verbs define spatial relations and process models, and an ATN grammar parses the input. A sentence becomes a semantic network of objects linked by attach and support relations, and then a scene; a sentence takes under a second. Verbs of state get one diagram, while change-of-state verbs such as "sail" get a sequence of pictures from a process model. The authors argue that a subset of about a hundred words, a few dozen grammar rules and a dozen semantic functions is enough for a teaching system, and that the pictures are a measuring instrument for the parser's interpretation. The paper reports no evaluation figures. The scan is OCR-noisy; this card rests on the introduction, background and conclusion, and the grammar and semantics sections were read only in outline.

Ideas

• I1. Picture as a check: render a lesson's world as a table or diagram of objects and relations, so that the interpretation can be inspected by eye, as the paper uses its pictures. Output from world/src/story.rs.
• I2. A process model per change-of-state verb (fill, empty, open, sail): a sequence of world states in world/src/events.rs, to answer "what happened first" questions.
• I3. A microworld test set: take a vocabulary of about a hundred words from one lesson, and measure the exact-match tree rate of en parse-eval on sentences over that subset before widening the vocabulary.
• I4. The paper's own next example, "one of the first plants to appear", needs ordinals and "new". List such items as a failure set for en/src/morph.rs and en/src/dict.rs.

For Mova

Chapters: 21. The simple clause, 15. Adjectives and adverbs (size and angle words), 22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases. Code: en/src/parse.rs, world/src/story.rs, world/src/events.rs. Measure: exact-match tree rate on a closed-vocabulary subset, run twice.

Cite

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

@article{simmons1975semantically,
  title = {{Semantically Analyzing an English Subset for the Clowns Microworld}},
  author = {Simmons, Robert F. and Bennett-Novak, Gordon},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1975},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J75-2007/}
}

References

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

1. Gridhman, R . , Sager, Raze, C. and Bookchin, B., "The Linguistic S t r i n g P a r s e r . " AFIPS, Conference Proceedings Vol. 42; M I P S P r e s s , Muatvale, N . J . 1973, pp. 427-434. find
2. Harris, L a r r y R . , "A Model f o r d a p t i v e Problem Solving A p p l i e d to N a t u r a l Language A c q u i s i t i o n . " Thesis MSS, Department of Computer Science, dornell University Ithaca, N.Y. 1972. find
3. H e i d o r q George E. -"Natural Language I n p u t s t o a Simulatfon P r o g r a d n g System. " NPS-55W, H y a P l o s t Graduate Schoor, Monrerey, C a l i f . 1972. find
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6. Hendrix, C . G . , I I Hobbs, Jerry R. "A Model f o r N a t u r a l Language e m a n t i c s . " Department of Computer Science, Yale U n i v e r s i t y Research Report 8 3 6 , 1974. find
7. Matuszek, D., and Slocum, J . , "An Implementation of t h e Augmented T r a n s i t i o n Network System o f Woods." Department of Computer Sciences U n i v e r s i t y of Texas, A u s t i n NL-9 2972. ne Minslcy , Marvin, , "A Framework for Representing Knowled$e, " In The P s y c h o l o y of Computer Vis.ion, e d i t e d by P. winston, Winston, McGraw Hill 1975. find

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