Each MRS document also has multiple interpretations. Using constraints that are included as part of the MRS, a set of trees (called well-formed trees ) can be built from the flat list of predications in a given MRS. These well-formed trees define all the alternative meanings of that particular MRS.
I know the focus on scope-resolved representations has come up before and I suppose we haven’t come to a conclusion on it. I suspect the use of the term “tree” to refer to these is one of the concerns @arademaker has. In linguistics, while the tree data structure comes up in several fields and areas, it is very associated with syntax trees, which the ERG produces. In delph-in land, usually we refer to trees as derivations (though I’m not sure why). So it is a bit confusing to say an utterance gets a reading which is a pairing of 1. a tree/derivation and 2. an MRS and then additionally say that an MRS can be expanded into trees.
A DELPH-IN parser like ACE will usually generate more than one MRS document representing the various high-level interpretations of a phrase. Each one contains a list of predicate-logic-like predications and not a tree like you’ll see in many natural language systems. That’s because it is underspecified . Even though the parser has already done one level of interpretation on the phrase, there are still (usually) multiple ways to interpret that .
Technically, the predications are stored as a bag, not a list. Also, I don’t think the reason the predications are stored as a bag is because of underspecification, but rather that there isn’t information that is stored in the ordering of predications and/or arcs between predications.
While I’m not particularly opposed to this interpretation of “underspecified,” (though others might be), I think that usually an entire MRS isn’t referred to as underspecified. Instead, various components are underspecified. But, probably not a big deal if clarified in a footnote or introductory note or something.
- Whether it was actually seen in the text (starts with
_
) or added abstractly by the system (no initial _
)
Probably better to say “by the grammar,” but that also doesn’t really capture what grammatical predicates are for, I think.
If you pick variable values such that the MRS is true for a given world, then you have understood the meaning of the MRS in that world.
I think this is a misstatement of how truth-conditional semantics works. I think traditionally, the sentence “means” the set of truth conditions that are true, as opposed to a single truth condition that is true. For instance, if Bob says “cats walk” and then I see a cat walking, it’s not the case that I understand what Bob meant.
LBL:
It’s unclear why just for LBL
you’re including the colon, is this a typo?
Looks like PT means “prontype” and is for distinguishing different kinds of pronouns like reflexives, etc. See its definition.
This indicates that the verb go is the “main point of the phrase”. This is called the “syntactic head” in linguistics.
I don’t think “syntactic head” is accurate here. Usually the ARG0
of the verb or other main predicate is the INDEX
, but 1. this isn’t the syntactic head (which, especially in delph-in and HPSG, typically refers to the head of a phrase, not an utterance) and 2. I believe there are cases when the INDEX
is not the ARG0
of the main verb/etc. (in a different way than the copula example you provide).