Closed goodmami closed 5 years ago
Mike, I found the bug at the source of this misbehavior: when the attribute ARG1 is introduced in ERG's fundamentals.tdl, its value is wrongly left as top, so if nothing ever constrains it further, that's how it will emerge in the parse's feature structure, and the VPM statements also do not force it to be anything else. All of the other role attributes are rightly constrained to be of maximal type semarg', and ARG1 should be too, both in 1214 and in trunk. I remember why the value was made *top* once upon a time: we were experimenting with making the ARG1 of degree specifiers of quantifiers (as in "nearly every") be a string provided by the quantifier. We repented of this idea, but apparently never went back to constrain ARG1's maximal value to be
semarg'. I also went through the treebanks for the trunk ERG, and did not find any other instances of top in MRSs besides the ARG1 ones. As a patch, one can modify the fundamentals.tdl file in the definition of `basic_arg01_relation' to constrain the value of ARG1 to be semarg.
It seems unlikely that we will change the 1214 code base, which has now long been frozen, but I have made the correction in the trunk version of the ERG.
Thanks, Dan, for investigating and fixing. No worries about changing 1214; I'm already using a modified version of 1214 (with SEM-I additions for JaEn), so I can modify fundamentals.tdl
locally and put a note in the appendix of my thesis.
There are now no more top values in MRSs for the gold profiles for the 2018 version, so let's hope that now all semantic arguments are at least constrained to "u".
When an unknown is predicted to be an adjective, the adjective's ARG1 is given the value
*top*
instead of, say, au
ori
variable.This appears to be the case with ACE and not with the LKB, so it might be an ACE bug, or perhaps this is another situation where the LKB is making up for a deficiency in the grammar.
I found at least 3 sentences in the English side of the Tanaka corpus that caused this problem: