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Re: Tree-Adjoining Grammars and Cross-Serial Dependencies in Dutch Embedded Clauses (was: Re: Unsupervised learning of natural languages)

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 20, 2005, 1:06
Hi!

Thomas Hart Chappell <tomhchappell@...> writes:
>... > My library finally borrowed "Tree Adjoining Grammars: Formalisms, > Linguistic Analysis, and Processing", ...
Nice! I had a seminar on TAGs at uni and TAGs are quite interesting since they are parsable in O(n^6) (IIRC) instead of the O(e^n) for, e.g., HPSG. I found they are much more the way to go in analysing language than the more linguistically inspired grammars like HPSG. It tries to solve the parsability problem for a certain class of langs that cannot be handled with CFGs, while still being polynomial. Obviously, I'm a programmer so I want to approach the problem from the implementational point of view all the time. O(n^6) is awfully complex to me!
>... > In their overview, the editors mention the Dutch sentence fragment: > > "... omdat Wim Jan Marie de kinderen zag helpen leren zwemmen"
That's just like the sentence that I made up! :-) Only the proper names seem to make it parsable more easily. That one's quite easy!
>... > They show how it can be handled by just one rule of a T.A.G., (_with_ _no_ > _subsequent_ _transformations_, btw), and, like you, say it can't be > generated by context-free grammar. >...
Exactly. :-) Please tell us what you think when you've read the article. **Henrik