Closed arademaker closed 3 years ago
I don't think it's a bug, but a missing lexical item or maybe just the wrong parse. In the sentence, "crop out" (or maybe just "crop" with "out" as a resultative or something) is the main verb, but the MRS uses _crop_n_1
instead of _crop_v_1
(a _crop_v_out
predicate is not defined by the ERG). Therefore the unknown
predicate serves as the main verb predicate. But as it is a null item it has no position and therefore has the span of the entire input.
Here's a simpler example, for the noun fragment "The sky". Note that it also has an unknown
predicate spanning the whole input.
[ LTOP: h0
INDEX: e2 [ e SF: prop-or-ques ]
RELS: <
[ unknown<0:7> LBL: h1 ARG0: e2 ARG: x4 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: sg ] ]
[ _the_q<0:3> LBL: h5 ARG0: x4 RSTR: h6 BODY: h7 ]
[ _sky_n_1<4:7> LBL: h8 ARG0: x4 ] >
HCONS: < h0 qeq h1 h6 qeq h8 > ICONS: < > ]
Mike is right - the lexicon did not yet contain an entry for the verb-particle crop out', only
crop up' and the transitive crop' as in |They cropped his hair|. Lacking that verb entry, the parser found an alternative analysis of the input as just an NP fragment, and the resulting MRS for such fragments includes that
unknown' predicate as a placeholder for the (presumably discourse-supplied) predicate of which the NP is an argument. I will add the missing entry to the lexicon to correct the behavior for this example, but you'll likely still see more fragment analyses than you might wish for as you parse interesting new text, with each such analysis introducing this `unknown' predicate.
See the first predicate
unknown<0:103> LBL: h1 ARG0: e2 ARG: x4 [ x PERS: 3 NUM: pl IND: + ] ]
, is it a bug ? The result came from ACE ace-0.9.30 (MacOS) with the following command line:$ ./ace -g erg-2018-osx-0.9.30.dat -n 1 -Tf