NP coreferent to a clause: appos? #762
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There is relevant discussion in #751. Basically I think the |
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This is a case that in Latin IT-TB and LLCT we might treat by means of The But actually, here a simple |
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Nice example! This reminds me a little of discourse deixis in coreference, where you refer back to something that doesn't actually have an NP antecedent. I agree that avoiding appos here seems appropriate. I would have chosen |
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I agree it is coreference-like. As I understand it CGEL argues that Supplements are anaphoric. Another observation: "which is" can be inserted before the NP, making it resemble a nonrestrictive relative clause. Perhaps "who/which is" insertion should be a test for determining the deprel. TBH I don't love |
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@amir-zeldes Do you know what PTB would do here? Is there a function tag for NP supplements? |
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^ I found it quickly on pp. 12-13 of http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PennTreebank1995.pdf: Makes me wonder if UD should call this |
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In English-GUM, it seems that supplements such as "which is a problem" have been analyzed as |
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My preference for I think there is somehow some stigma about asyndetic co-ordination, but it seems to me a very widespread phenomenon, also in languages sich as English or Latin which prefer an explicit conjunction. It's not really the same as syndetic one, so the insertion of a conjunction might not fully do justice to it, but I think it helps focusing it. The Wild suggestion: would it be thinkable to extend |
@sylvainkahane I don't think this is the same construction - here we have an explicit relative clause which attaches to a verb, complete with a subordinate clause predicate and in this case a relative pronoun. I agree in the 4th example the tree isn't right, since the clause should come out of the verb, not the noun teachers. The canonical analysis in GUM is indeed:
And I think in this case both |
Once again, we run into issues with deprels mixing POS/phrase type and grammatical relation. I think it's fair to say this is indeed a relative clause, but it's an adverbial rather than adnominal relative clause. So should it be While some of the supplements arguably modify a nominal indirectly, and thus |
While I agree that this is different from the canonical use of the term "parataxis",
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I probably have a different intuition because in the similar construction (peut-être ils ont de mauvais profs, ce qui est un problème), the supplement is not exactly a relative clause. It is an NP with the pronoun "ce" 'that' modified by a relative clause. This construction in equivalent to free relatives in English (What you do is bad = Ce que tu fais est mal). I suspect the supplement _which is a problem_to be also a free relative. |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_clause defines a free relative clause as a relative clause lacking an overt external antecedent, as in "I like what I see". For "maybe they had bad teachers, which is a problem", I would interpret "they had bad teachers" as the antecedent of "which", so a regular RC but not headed by a nominal. |
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If I understand the French correctly it is not a free relative clause because it requires an overt pronoun head to serve as antecedent, like "That which you do is bad" or "He who finishes first wins". |
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You're right, literally -ce que tu fais is equivalent to that which you do. But ce que and ce qui are very grammaticalized in French and have replaced pronouns in free relatives, as well in indirect interrogatives:
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@nschneid I would love to be able to find all of these cases using special labels, but realistically they are so rare that introducing them, or In general I think we need to avoid suggesting new deprels (including subtypes) for phenomena that are very rare. Cases like "VP which..." are easy enough to find by searching for verbs modified by |
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So does that mean we need to relax the definition of |
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In essence I am asking whether deprel definitional criteria like "modifies a nominal" are strict, or whether deprels should be viewed as prototypes and rare special cases mapped to the most similar prototype. |
I am not fully understanding, because The ratio of They bought meat, cooked a lot yesterday, great party I do not see a I went to the university yesterday - do you know Ann? I see a Ruling out
I would be oriented towards a strict formal lecture, which I think is the intended one, if none else to guarantee annotational coherence between treebanks. |
That is an excellent question - personally I've always understood categorical annotation to be about finding 'the best class from all the options'. If we adhere to acl as stricly limited to nouns and follow the guidelines to the letter, then I suppose we will be forced to choose The advantage of our discussions is that we can think about what we want, and personally I find |
I would call this
The result would have to be an unlike-coordination (PTB's label More generally though, my understanding of the difference between parataxis and conj at the clausal level is the absence of an explicit |
Is there a clear reason that |
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I think that would be surprising to most users - or at least to me :) My point above was that users who want to find all relative clauses are likely to search for PS - Please please don't take this to mean that I think it should be |
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For noun-headed RCs an advantage of calling it
So I'm wondering if there are NON-relative, clausal supplements anchored by verbs. How about:
What would be a good deprel for (1)? Not |
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Interesting how this discussion connects with one example in Portuguese that I mentioned some time ago in ufal/udpipe#128. The sentence is
We have discusses two interpretations. In the appos interpretation, we have a NP to NP dependency, right? Something like |
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@arademaker Yes I think that's like the example at the beginning of the thread. An NP supplement, hard to know how to attach it to the clause and whether it's |
This construction used to carry the special label I contrast that with things like oblique argument clauses (I'm relying [on you to come]), where every year I teach students to tag this as advcl I get some very cringey expressions and protests, since in general linguistics I think no one would call this an adverbial clause (despite being oblique and attaching to a verb). I think for the relative clauses attached to a verb, again normal linguists would be very surprised to consider them adverbial clauses, even if they attach to a verb. |
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For UDv3 how about we merge |
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Why? I think the current expressivity of the |
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What do they actually distinguish besides the POS of the head? Is it useful mainly for copular predicates since a modifier clause could be attaching to the clause vs. the adjective or noun? If we merged them we wouldn't have this adverbial relative clause problem, for one. |
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Well, first of all I think there can be adverbial clauses attached to a noun just like regular adverbs can attach to nouns, especially if that noun is deverbal:
But more generally, I firmly believe we should avoid messing with the deprel list if we can at all help it. Every major change we make to the main relations (as opposed to localized decisions of which existing relation to use for a construction we don't have good guidelines for) is going to have lots of consequences:
In my opinion stable standards are really important and these are just some of the reasons why. |
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Yes I know your opinion on stable standards and I'm not sure there is a serious appetite for a UDv3. So it was only a half-serious suggestion. But I think your example shows why the current deprels as defined in the guidelines are problematic. BTW this is related to the asterisk on |
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I don't think that POS of the head should be an overriding consideration, so I guess I would be in favor of amending the definition. For me, a clause that fulfills the function of an adverb (substitutable/pronominalizable/interrogable by an adverb) is an If the only important thing is the POS of the head, then should we be calling "then" in the example above |
No, by the definition of
I think this is a huge tension in UD: it is lexicocentric and thus views syntactic functions as defined by POS classes. But this leads to problematic corner cases such as relative clauses which modify verbs, and are thus not really adjectival relative clauses, or adverbial-looking clauses which modify deverbal nouns. English, at least, seems to distinguish phrase types from grammatical functions, and when UD tries to convey both in a limited set of deprels, things get messy. I have a hunch that UD could, in theory, be revamped to make less-POS-sensitive deprel distinctions (is this what Bill Croft has suggested?). But I'm not holding my breath for this to actually happen. :) |
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The morphological classes that tell us that the thing being modified is a noun/verb are already distinguished in the POS tags, so shouldn't we want deprels to mainly reflect function? I'm actually in favor of modifying the universal definitions to reflect functional motivation for some of these labels, at least as an option, but as far as what we decide to do for unusual constructions like relative clause dependent of verbs in English, I think this is still a language-specific guideline decision and doesn't necessarily mean we have to change all of UD as a result. |
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I guess technically it's not whether the head is verb vs. noun, it's predicate vs. (non-predicate) nominal. https://universaldependencies.org/u/dep/index.html Still, I'm not sure there is a sharp distinction between non-core modifiers of predicates vs. modifiers of non-predicate nominals when the modifier is a clause. At least not in English, when we consider that relative clauses can modify verbs and that deverbal non-predicate nominals can have adverbial-ish clause modifiers. |
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Two remarks Second, I don't think that supplements are modifiers. For instance, they cannot be moved in front of the sentence, while in most langauges, sentence/verb modifiers can. They are almost new sentences, but they are less autonomous than true sentences. They can be NPs (initial example of this thread) as well as subordinated clauses (relative or participial clauses as in the example given by @amir-zeldes). Maybe we need a new relation for supplements, which will complete our set of relations for detached elements (I mean dislocatd, discourse and parataxis). In the French tradition, we distinguish what is called microsyntax for arguments and modifiers and macrosyntax for looser elements, which escape to the verbal construction. Clearly, supplements fall in the second category and are macrosyntactic elements. The best existing relation, for the time being, would be parataxis, but parataxis is already a relation covering many different thing (unmarked coordination, parentheses, inserts, clausal discourse markers, clausal dislocation) and the supplement is not always a clause. That's why I think that a new relation is required. |
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@sylvainkahane at least for the current English guidelines, the POS of the parent and child alone are not enough to reconstruct the relation: verbs can be |
This is a difference between English and French, right? In English, non-RC supplements can be at the beginning of the sentence ("A die-hard conservative, her father refused." in #751). But yes, I could see an argument that supplements are at a looser level of attachment than ordinary modifiers. |
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@amir-zeldes First, to annotate stunning as a VERB and an |
In EWT, annotation of gerunds are not consistent. Some are VERB, other ADJ. I reported it elsewhere. |
Well adjective modifiers in English are usually prenominal, whereas clausal modifiers are postnominal. So there is a phrase order justification to distinguish between If |
Would expanding |
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Mm.. I see what you're saying, and with obl/nmod it seems more reasonable to me, since those are indeed primarily distinguished by the parent POS (SD didn't even distinguish them at all, calling both But looking up, I see we've veered off topic here :) if there's more need for discussion feel free to open an issue - otherwise in my mind there's no need to change anything about these cases in corpora like EWT or GUM, so no issue is needed from my end. |
Hi,
Extending #523 discussion, I would like to know how we should annotate nominal phrases that are dependent of verbs, such as:
Here, the behavior in focus is that of "browsing", so we would interpret the NP as the apposition of a clause, but appos is a relation that should only be dependent of NP, not verbs.
Thanks in advance
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