Monthly Archives: March 2011

Arabic

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Colin Batchelor

A better-resourced language that is VSO is Arabic, and I noticed today that Chris Brew’s group have a paper on converting the Penn Arabic Treebank into CCG. I didn’t know that Arabic had resumptive pronouns. Gaelic doesn’t, but they might … Continue reading →

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To be and to be (2)

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Colin Batchelor

And there is another verb “to be”, like this: Positive: Is mise Calum. (I am Calum.) Interrogative: An tusa Ealasaid? (Are you Elizabeth?) Negative: Cha mise Calum. (I amn’t Calum.) Negative interrogative: Chan esan Uilleam? (Aren’t you William?) However, is … Continue reading →

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What is the simplest parser that could possibly work?

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Colin Batchelor

Behind this blog is a happy half hour or so I spent on Friday evening writing a bit of code to do forward composition in a really simple-minded way. Forward composition, in categorial grammar, is applying the following rule: X/Y … Continue reading →

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To be and to be (1)

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Colin Batchelor

First up, “to be”. Bi has three forms in the present tense, according to whether it’s positive, interrogative, negative or negative interrogative, all thanks to particles which I don’t know whether they’re a VMOD or a P or a what. … Continue reading →

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The slashes

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Colin Batchelor

In most frameworks you quickly get familiar with notation like PP (prepositional phrase), NP (noun phrase), VT (transitive verb), ADJ (adjective) and so forth. Categorial grammar however, bristles with things like (S\NP)\((S\NP)/(S[adj]\NP)). What’s going on here? Aside: hopefully these are … Continue reading →

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Categorial Grammar of Gaelic

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Colin Batchelor

Categorial grammar is a promising framework for doing things like really fast parsing of English and handling coordination (words like “and”, “or”) in a principled way. And I’ve recently realized that I’m not going to understand how it works unless … Continue reading →

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