SUO: RE: Link Grammar and Parser - RRGs
John Velman wrote:
> What's CHUG? I guess the UG part is 'universal grammar', but
> somehow I'm
> missing the CH. :-)
Chomskyian Universal Grammar (CHUG) is an acronym I made up.
Sorry if this caused more confusion than recognition.
> Arguments against (or for) grammatical relations aren't
> necessarily the
> same as arguments against (or for) universal grammar. From what I can
> tell, it is certainly the case that many linguists don't believe in
> universal grammar. Van Valin apparently does, and the RRG
> book (Van Valin
> and LaPolla, Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and Function)
> devotes a chapter to
> Grammatical Relations GR. This includes a section on a theory of
> grammatical relations. I gather that some folks think that
> grammatical
> relations such as subject, object, indirect object are
> somehow 'primitives'
> of grammar, while others think that they are somehow derived.
>
> An overview of GR can be found at
>
> http://ai.ato.ms/MITECS/Entry/woolford.html
>
> Haven't finished reading it yet, but it seems to cover the subject
> reasonably well.
Thanks for the reference; I'll take a look.
> I raised the RRG subject --- I hasten to add that I said 'its not for
> everyone'--- so I feel like I should say something more about it.
>
> 1) The fact that RRG doesn't use traditional phrase structure or
> traditional grammatical relations doesn't detract from its
> usefulness as a
> theory of English. The universal aspects, if true, apply to
> English and
> from what I've seen so far are every bit as simple as the traditional
> analysis of English. Whether better or not, I'm not yet
> ready to argue.
> One would also have to ask, 'better for what purpose.'
>
> However,
>
> 2) The fact that the analysis of English that results from RRG is
> non-traditional does mitigate against it's being ready for
> prime time. For
> a non-traditional theory to take hold, it is necessary that there be a
> pretty clear case for it being better (for some purpose) than the
> traditional theory. One also recalls that relative to
> paradigm shifts in
> physics someone (wish I had the reference handy) said words
> to the effect:
> new paradigms aren't accepted by old physicists -- they are
> accepted only
> when the old physicists die off.
>
> 3) Another mitigation against RRG being ready for prime time
> is the lack
> of any (publicly available?) significant lexicon based on RRG.
>
> 4) I might add to the latter: the 'formal' language VV&LP
> use to formalize
> their recommendations for the lexicon is never (as far as I
> can tell) given
> a formal statement. It is pretty clear that they are using
> a structured
> approach to the Logical Structure (their caps) to be used in
> the lexicon,
> but they never say what it is explicitly. Moreover, it uses
> different type
> styles for different 'sorts', including bold face lower case
> roman, plain
> roman, SMALL CAPS, slanted SMALL CAPS, and very small caps
> with the same
> baseline as the rest of the representation. And, between the
> lexicon an
> the logical structure of an utterance that includes the
> operators, there
> are paired parentheses, square brackets, angle brackets, (not
> sure about
> curly brackets), each used for a different purpose. Its a
> significant job
> just to translate this into a language that uses plain ASCII.
>
> These problems being noted, I've learned a lot from VV&LP so
> far, much of
> it relevant to choosing an ontology adequate for mapping
> English into CGs
> or some symbolic logic. Perhaps this is partly due to my
> general ignorance
> of linguistics to begin with.
>
> I note that my 3) and 4) by themselves would be reason enough
> for someone
> interested in generating a real application in the near future (or in
> his/her lifetime?) to stick to some more well developed
> approach -- even if
> the theory isn't as elegant :-).
There certainly is a lot of work to do before Kurzweil's
Spritual Machines are let out of the box. I've been looking
at verbal behavior papers, bevarior-mod papers, speech act
papers, and so on. So far, I've found no depth of material
that could be a behavioral kernel for a language understanding
system I can feel will actually be implemented any time soon.
But I also think its just a matter of time before all the
right models and databases are ready to integrate.
> I think the lattice versus acyclic graph question is interesting.
> Certainly, there is a lot of work going on in linguistics relative to
> typology (as they say). Placing languages in a lattice
> structure looks
> like a good thing for someone to do, but I haven't seen it anywhere.
Too many divergent opinions. And is there really ANY liguist
who knows enough about enough languages to build a believable
typology. Maybe a committee of linguists could do it, but
who would fund such a large effort?
> Best,
>
> John Velman
Thanks for your thoughts John.
Rich Cooper
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 10:59:24AM -0800, Richard Cooper wrote:
> > Regarding RRGs and CHUG, I found the following reference:
> >
> > Bhat, Darbhe Narayana Shankara. 1991. Gramatical Relations:
> > The Evidence Against Their Necessity and Universality.
> > London: Routledge.
> >
> > This paper isn't available to me, but the title indicates
> > that at least some linguists aren't convinced that a CHUG
> > really exists.
> >
> > Could languages be organized into a lattice, instead of
> > a directed acyclic graph? If we believe ontologies are
> > organized in lattice form, perhaps there is something in
> > the human mind that makes lattices, rather than DAGs,
> > the most convenient way to compartmentalize mental life.
> >
> > And if there is no single CHUG, then why should RRGs
> > be extended beyond the target language (English in my case)?
> >
> > Does anyone have any other references related to this topic?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Rich
> >
>