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

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