as ... as

[uhermjakob]

The pattern as ... as is quite productive in English, with a wide range of different meanings. And given the complexity, annotations have at times been inconsistent. Eliminating a few instances of :prep-as would be great too. So I have just added a new section to the AMR Dictionary with my annotation proposals:

• http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/amr/lib/amr-dict.html#as%20...%20as

Some of the material has been drawn from the old as section or has otherwise been discussed before, but I'd like to direct your attention to a few subsections that possibly offer a bit of novelty:

• :degree equal
• :degree most
• :concession
• :time
• as far as

The AMR for The girl is as tall as the boy. is closely patterned after the one for The girl is taller than the boy. (under http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/amr/lib/amr-dict.html#degree). And just as we decided to use more-than instead of exceed-01 to avoid overly convoluted AMRs, I propose to use equal instead of equal-01 for the same reasons.

Hopefully we'll have some time on Monday to review some of these cases as well.

[nschneid]

This looks great! Some quick reactions:

• He said he would support them as long as they didn't break any rules.
  • Currently: (support-01 :condition (as-long-as :op1 break-01))
  • I read "as long as" here as "provided that" or "on the condition that". So why not simply :condition break-01?
• She moved out as soon as she turned 18.
  • Currently: (move-01 :time (as-soon-as :op1 turn-02))
  • Can we give this the same AMR as "right (away)/immediately when she turned 18"?
• judgment of quantities and date entities: I can get different readings for those. To me, "You can register as early as January 1." doesn't just mean "You can register on January 1 (which is early)", but "You can register starting on January 1 (which is a long time before the deadline)."
• As far as North Korea is concerned, I'm not too worried.
  • Currently: (worry-02 :polarity - :ARG0 i :ARG2 North Korea :degree too)
  • What if it were: "As far as North Korea is concerned, I'm not too worried about a diplomatic fiasco at the summit"? "As far as X is concerned" is a discourse linker whose semantic relation to the main clause is pretty open-ended, so I'm, well, concerned that there won't always be a nice role for the X to fit into.
• What about hedged measurements?
  • North Korea will send as many as 10 delegates. [= North Korea will send up to 10 delegates; we're not sure exactly how many]
  • Countries sent as many as 10 delegates each. [= Countries sent various number of delegates; some sent 10 but none sent more than 10]

[uhermjakob]

Very helpful comments, Nathan! Thanks.

• He said he would support them as long as they didn't break any rules.
  • Currently: (support-01 :condition (as-long-as :op1 break-01))
  • Ulf: I think there is an aspectual difference between sentences such as
  • You may continue to live here as long as take care of my children.
  • You may continue to live here if you take care of my children.
• She moved out as soon as she turned 18.
  • Currently: (move-01 :time (as-soon-as :op1 turn-02))
  • Can we give this the same AMR as "right (away)/immediately when she turned 18"?
  • Ulf: I thought about that alternative too. In this case, as soon as indeed conveys a combination of time and immediacy. Let's discuss this on Monday!
• You can register as early as January 1.
  • Ulf: I agree the example sentence was not optimal. I already replaced it with The first snowfall came as early as November 10.
• As far as North Korea is concerned, I'm not too worried.
  • Ulf: Yes, I agree that there are cases where we will need to keep concern-02 or something similar. An additional example to show that would probably be helpful.
• What about hedged measurements?
  • North Korea will send as many as 10 delegates. [= North Korea will send up to 10 delegates; we're not sure exactly how many]
  • Countries sent as many as 10 delegates each. [= Countries sent various number of delegates; some sent 10 but none sent more than 10]
  • Ulf: Yes, that case should be documented as well. (Annotators have been annotating those cases correctly, in analogy to up to 10 delegates (delegate :quant (as-many-as :op1 10)).

[nschneid]

• He said he would support them as long as they didn't break any rules.
  • Currently: (support-01 :condition (as-long-as :op1 break-01))

Ulf: I think there is an aspectual difference between sentences such as

• You may continue to live here as long as take care of my children.
• You may continue to live here if you take care of my children.

For me, there is not necessarily any logical difference. The aspect—is the condition (taking care of children) required to persist as long as the consequent (permission to live here)?—is underspecified in both of the above:

• reading 1: You may continue to live here forever if/as long as you take care of my children tomorrow.
• reading 2: You may continue to live here if/while/(for) as long as you continue to take care of my children (and for no longer).

This aspectual difference seems awfully subtle for the purposes of AMR.

[uhermjakob]

Proposal adopted by AMR phone meeting at least for now, but we might revisit some of the :time and :concession+as-far-as constructions in the future. Will add examples of quantity hedging ("The wildfire might have left as many as 100 people homeless.") and "as far as ... is concerned" where we can't easily get rid of concern-02 or similar.

[uhermjakob]

@nschneid wrote: What if it were: "As far as North Korea is concerned, I'm not too worried about a diplomatic fiasco at the summit"? "As far as X is concerned" is a discourse linker whose semantic relation to the main clause is pretty open-ended, so I'm, well, concerned that there won't always be a nice role for the X to fit into.

I think that (fiasco :topic North Korea) looks feasible for this example. I've been trying to find a good example where as far as ... concerned doesn't easily go away, but I haven't been successful yet. Nathan?

[nschneid]

Some examples from the web. At the start of the sentence, it seems to mark a discourse shift to a new subtopic:

As far as the song selection is concerned, Karmarama were not always going to go with such a well-known song.

(selection = go with)

As far as the restaurant is concerned, the food is OK.

(from a hotel review: = the food at the restaurant)

It can also limit an aspect of something that is being considered:

In order to connect with this population, the BBC must look backward instead of forward, at least as far as technology is concerned.

(= look backward with respect to technology. Does :topic fit for this? Seems borderline.)

Do you dislike Obama, as far as being a leader is concerned?

(= dislike Obama's leadership)

Your Duke transcript should not have any negative consequences as far as admission to Medical Schools is concerned.

(= consequences for admission. I don't see consequence in PropBank. Would this be :topic? Or should "consequences" be mapped to cause-01? I see that has been done in maybe 2 of 41 release AMRs. Maybe the so-called "shell nouns" like topic, consequence, issue, problem deserve some attention.)