Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

6.863J/9.611J Natural Language Processing, Spring, 2004

 

Laboratory 3, Component III: 

Context-free parsing, Writing Grammar Rules

 

 

 

Handed Out: March 17                                                                      Due: April 12

 

1. Introduction: Goals of the Laboratory & Background Reading

 

The main aim of this laboratory is to give you a brief exposure to building “real” grammars, along with an understanding of how syntactic phenomena interact with context-free parsing algorithms., along with an “initiation'' into the particular way of handling the syntactic phenomena we describe.  In addition, you will learn how to use features to simplify grammar construction. For all of this, you will use the python Earley parser as described in Laboratory 3a.  Finally, we will want you to understand the trade-off between the simplicity of the grammar and its precision in terms of covering more and more detailed grammatical phenomena:

 

·          Given a simple context-free ``starter'' grammar that we provide, you will extend this grammar to handle a slightly wider variety of syntactic phenomena with different kinds o of verb arguments and embedded sentences.

 

·          You'll then add rules to handle a very small number of subject-verb agreement examples.

 

·          In the third part, you will add rules to handle questions such as “Which detectives solved the case?”

 

·          Then, using features, you'll write an augmented context-free grammar to cover the same examples as in parts 2 and 3, and compare its size to your grammar that does not use features.

 

·          Finally, we shall see how to interface the parser to Kimmo. [deferred in this lab!]

 

Similar to previous labs, your completed laboratory report should be written as a web page, sent to havasi@mit.edu, and contain these items for each of the four parts above:

A description of how your system operates.  How does your system handle each of the syntactic phenomena described below?  Include a description of the rules that were used to encode the relevant changes to the grammars and how these were implemented (e.g. “I added the rule VP®,”... “In order to implement this rule, we had to …”).  If appropriate, mention any problems that arose in the design of your grammar.

 

·          Your modifications to any initial grammar rule files that we supply to you.

 

·           A record of a parser run on supplied the test sentences – you can use the command line options  of the Earley parser in terminal mode to record runs to an output file, and print both postscript and latex formatted trees – use the command earley –h to get a list, e.g.:

 

options:

  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

  -t, --text            run in text mode (faster)

  -bFILE, --batch=FILE  Batch test: parse all the lines in a file

 

  Text/batch mode options:

    -v, --verbose       output all edges that are generated [default]

    -q, --quiet         output only the generated parses [default in batch mode]

    -l, --latex         output parses as LaTeX trees (using qtree.sty)

    -d, --drawtrees     show parse trees in a GUI window (NONBATCH only)

    -oFILE, --output=FILE send output to a file

 

·          Your feature-based context-free grammar for the same sentences, as well as a size comparison to your feature-free context-free grammar for these sentences.  We shall also ask you to generalize your result, if possible (see below).

General Background reading for this Laboratory

Running the Earley parser

(The following paragraph is review from the previous laboratory.) You invoke the Earley parser this way:

               athena% cd /mit/6.863/python-earley

      athena% earley

This will pull up the following window, in which you can load your own or a demo grammar and lexicon, or just type one in.  Grammar files have the extension .grm. (These files are otherwise just plain text files, so you can edit them any way you want – the Earley window has a fairly complete editor so you can find/search & replace; and so forth to edit a grammar file right there – but you should save the result in your own dir.)

For this laboratory, we want you to load a very simple ‘starter’ grammar in the python-earley directory. The file is lab3b.grm. (Do not load the grammar for lab 3a!) To load grammar 3b, simply go to the “File” menu, click “Open”, which will pull up the list of .grm files in the directory, and select lab3b.grm. Please do that now.  Your window should now look like the one below – if it doesn’t, something is awry and you should ask us! The grammar file format shown below is what you should follow for this Lab: separate lines for each rule; a separator between rules and lexicon. Note that a word can have more than one part of speech.  Also note that the way we write the lexicon is a bit different from the chart parser – just the word followed by one or more part of speech categories.

Important: Your grammar file should always include at least one rule that is in the following form: Start ® … ; for instance, Start ® S.  The order of rules in the Rules section does not matter.  The order of lexical items in the Lexicon section does not matter. Once you have loaded a rule file, you can parse a sentence by typing in the sentence in the panel below the grammar, and then pressing “Parse”. This will pull up a window similar to the chart windows for the previous examples, but again different in a few details.  You can proceed to parse a sentence by hitting the “Run parser” button on this new window.  Again as before, this will trace out the creation of each edge as it is placed into the chart. The “Step” checkbox works as before – you can trace through parse execution, edge by edge.  There are no strategy control buttons, because the whole point of the Earley algorithm is to fix a particular strategy for edge construction.

If the parse is successful, a window will pop up with a tree display for the parse.  You can print this to postscript. If there is more than one parse, you can scroll through them using the “Next” and “Prev” buttons on the window, inspecting or printing each one as you want. The parse tree output for the sentence “Poirot solved the case” should look like the following:

 

Pressing the “Show Log” button will display the actual edges as they are created, their label, and their extent, as discussed in section 2.3. This is most helpful in diagnosing exactly where a parse goes awry.

2.1 Grammar 1: Rules for declarative sentences

The grammar that you already have can parse these sentences (and a bit more), which we call “simple declarative sentences” (note that you do not have to provide an end of sentence marker like a period):

1.      Poirot solved the case

2.      The detectives lost the guns

3.      Poirot thought

4.      Poirot sent the police

5.      Poirot sent the solutions to the police

 

You've already seen the structure the parser produces for the first sentence in the list above.  For the second, third, and fourth sentences below are corresponding pictures of the resulting parse trees. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we ask you below to “extend the parser to produce correct parses,” we mean that your revised grammars should produce parse trees exactly like these and no others. Your revised grammar should not produce ‘extraneous’ parses.  This is important – your grammar should not ‘overgenerate’ in the sense of being able to parse “ungrammatical” sentences o assign parses (structures) that are incorrect to otherwise correct sentences. After all, if overgeneration were allowed, then one could simply write very, very general rules like  S® w*, that is, a sentence is any string of words at all.  This grammar could indeed  “parse” any string of words, but the results would not be very informative. (On the other hand, you might rightly question whether our grammar should or should not be able to parse ‘ill-formed’ sentences – one thought is that it should try to get through as much as it can, to understand such a sentence.  That’s a legitimate point – we return to it in later lectures.  But for now, take the structures we give as a ‘gold standard.’)

For this reason, your grammar should not allow examples such as the following, where we have (artificially) marked the ill-formed examples your grammar should not be able to parse with an asterisk in front.  Just as in the Kimmo lab, the asterisk is not part of the input! It simply indicates that the sentence is to be rejected as yielding no parses with respect to your grammar, or as in case number 4 below, it should block a particular parse structure.   These are all violations of the subcategorization (argument requirements) for their respective verbs.

1.      * Poirot solved (invalid because solve requires an object as an argument)

2.      * Poirot thought the gun  (invalid because think requires either no argument or else an argument that is a certain kind of object, namely, a full proposition or sentence)

3.      * Poirot sent to the police  (invalid because send requires two objects)

4.      *Poirot sent [the solutions to the police] (invalid because we do not want to get the parse where ‘to the police’ modifies ‘the solutions’) – that is, we want to block the parse as shown below:

 




Your assignment in this section. More generally, at it stands the lab3b grammar for the parser does not correctly distinguish between verbs that take zero, one, or two arguments (with some arguments perhaps optional). It also does not block the improper attachment of  “to the police” to “the solutions” in the fourth case above.  Please augment the lab3b grammar by adding new verb subcategories so that sentences 1-4 immediately above, such as Poirot solved, will be rejected by the parser (no output), while Poirot thought will still be OK.  We want the new grammar to be able to parse all the sentences it could before, of course. You will also have to add/modify the dictionary entries.  You can edit your grammar file in the editing input window to do this, but be sure to save it somewhere later!

 

Note: A list of all the example sentences you will have to handle in lab3b, listed section by section, along with the starred (ill-formed) sentences your parser must reject, is given in the file lab3b-sentences.txt in the python-earley directory.

 

Important note: Probably the most common error is to forget to include a word with its part of speech, or to mistype a word.  If this is so, the parser will never construct a 1-token edge for that word – you should see that right away when you try to parse the sentence.

Hand in for your lab report: Your modified grammar rules and dictionary, and output from the parser illustrating that it has parsed these new sentences correctly, while rejecting the first three starred sentences above.  In the fourth case, please show via the output panel that the single, correct parse is produced for “Poirot sent the solutions to the police”.

In this section, as in all the remaining sections below,  when we say to illustrate that your grammar works as advertised you should include snapshots of the final chart matrix and/or edges, which will show either the correct derivation or how the parse was blocked in the case of ‘starred’ sentences.

 

 

 

2.2 Grammar 2: Verbs that take full sentences as arguments

Still other verbs demand full propositions – sentences – as arguments:

 

1.      Poirot believed the detectives were incompetent

2.      Poirot believed that the detectives were incompetent


Here, the verb believe takes as an argument a full Sentence or Proposition: the detectives were incompetent.  As the second example immediately above shows, that may or may not be present before such ‘embedded sentences’ in English (though not, for instance, in Spanish).  This will require further elaboration of the subcategories of verbs, as you may appreciate. 

We shall require a special structure for such sentences, as described below and as shown in the figure that comes next.  In order to accommodate the possibility of that, and for other linguistic reasons, the Sentence phrase itself is written so that the actual combination of  that-S forms a phrase called S-bar.  The item before the S is called its complementizer, abbreviated
COMP, and is filled by words such as that, who, which, etc. in English. You may think of this Comp position as the place filled by a kind of semantic ‘operator’, sometimes phonologically empty (as in a main sentence, like #1 above).  The idea here is to make full sentences fit into the uniform framework of Verb Phrases, Prepositional Phrases, Adjective Phrases, and Noun Phrases – the first item in English phrases is a ‘functor’ like a Verb, Preposition, Adjective or a Determiner, and what follows is the ‘argument’ to the functor.  So, for a sentence, the Comp position holds the functor, and the Sentence is the argument.   You don’t have to worry about the semantics of this now – but simply adopt this form for the parses here.

 
Here are the parse structures corresponding to the two believe sentences.  We would like you to modify your grammar to produce these parse trees as output. As you can appreciate, one could immediately see what the corresponding context-free rules ought to be, just by looking at these tree structures.  So, in the figure below we have given almost the correct parse trees – we have deliberately wiped out some information about the verb subcategories.  It will be your job to figure out the correct verb subcategories and to write the grammars to produce the parse trees as shown (adding the detail needed for the verbs).

 

Poirot believed that the detectives were incompetent





Poirot believed the detectives were incompetent

 

Hand in for your lab report: Your modified grammar rules and dictionary, and output from the parser illustrating that it has parsed these two new sentences correctly, while still working properly on the sentences from section 2.1.

 

 2.3 Grammar 3: Unbounded Dependencies and Questions

As our next example of grammar augmentation, you will now try to add rules to handle certain kinds of English questions. This will involve implementing the augmented nonterminal (“slashed category”) notation discussed in class –the augmentation of a context-free grammar with new `` nonterminals and rule expansions.

Listed below are examples from each of the construction types your new grammar should handle, as well as examples that it should reject. The sentences that should be rejected parses are marked with asterisks in front.  Of course, as usual these asterisks are not part of the actual input sentence! For these sentences your parser should return no parses.  Note also that there are no question marks at the end of these sentences – this isn’t needed!  Such sentences are called ‘wh question’ sentences, because there’s a wh-phrase like ‘which…’ or ‘what…’  at the beginning of the sentence.

 

2.3.1 Question Formation

 

1.      Which case did Poirot solve

2.      Who solved the case

3.      Which solution did Poirot send to the police

4.      Which detectives solved the case

5.      Which solution did Poirot believe that the detectives sent to the police

6.      *Which solution did Poirot send the gun to the police

7.      *Who solved


In these examples, we will again explain the structures we want you to output with your parser.  This will assist you in adding context-free grammar rules to be able to parse them. Your job will be to write those rules.

 

2.3.2 Step 1.

You should first note that your new grammar will have to handle verbs like solved, send, as well as verb sequences that include that peculiar English verb do, as in ‘did solve’, ‘did send’, and ‘did believe’.  To do this, you should first add ordinary (non-augmented) nonterminal rules to parse the corresponding examples without ‘which case’, etc:

 

1.      Poirot did solve the case

2.      Poirot did send the solution to the police

3.      Poirot did believe that the detectives sent the solution to the police

 

What is the structure you should adopt to accommodate did? Note that do actually has absorbed the ‘tense’ marker that is usually part of the verb: in the sentence John kissed, ‘kissed’ has a tense marker (i.e., past), but in John did kiss, it is do that has changed to did, and the verb following did is always without tense – i.e., solve, send, believe.  How to do this?  There are several possibilities, but one that was adopted by the creators of the ‘augmented context-free grammar’ approach was simply to include a new phrase called “DOP” (for a “do phrase) that is part of an auxiliary verb form:

 

 

2.3.3 Step 2.

Now you have to expand your grammar to handle the ‘inverted’ form seen in questions, where the auxiliary verb is switched with the subject noun phrase:

 

1.      Poirot did solve the case ® Did Poirot solve the case

2.      Poirot did send the solutions  ® Did Poirot send the solutions

3.      Poirot did believe ® Did Poirot believe

 

The following parse tree suggests the rules that you will have to add to capture these possibilities.

 

 

 

2.3.4 Step 3.

You will next note that the wh-phrases such as which case, which solutions, and which detectives themselves are Noun Phrases (NPs), but of a special sort: the determiner that is at the front of the noun is a wh-word such as which, what, etc. – and it is these sorts of NPs that are displaced. So, you would have to write new NP rules that form what are called ‘wh’ NPs: let us label these as whNP and provide this parse tree to suggest the rules needed to describe them. Note that this sentence does not show the wh-phrase in the correct question positions. (You might be getting winded at this point – for good reason.  Shouldn’t there be some way to do this automatically?)   Such rules would also have to parse the ‘echo questions’ Did Poirot solve which case? as shown after this snapshot.

 

 

 

2.3.5 Step 4.

We are finally ready to tackle the wh-question sentences themselves. In sentences like these, we find the wh-Noun Phrases displaced from their canonical position of interpretation, usually the object of the main verb.  Instead, we find a ‘gap’ – a phonetic null – in this position, e.g, after solve below, with the wh-phrase itself being fronted to the beginning of the sentence:

 

            Which case did Poirot solve ___

 

In the literature this is often written by labeling the position after solve a ‘gap’ (G) and which case a ‘filler’ (the item that fills the gap), F. This is of course notation that does not ‘show up’ in the way the sentence looks as input:

 

            Which case-Filler  did Poirot solve  Gap

 

It is more convenient to think of the Filler which case as being ‘displaced’ or ‘moved’ from its canonical position, the Gap, as we shall see. We already know that which case forms a Wh-NP (a Noun phrase with a ‘wh’ property, because of the determiner which).  Where should it go in the output parse tree?   We don’t seem to have a position for it.  At this point, it is useful to recall our form for embedded sentences – we said they were phrases of type S-bar, made up out of two parts: Comp and S.  If we apply that idea uniformly, then we may imagine that which case was ‘launched’ from its canonical position after solve, and the position underneath Comp provides a ‘landing site’ for the phrase, as shown in the final output parse tree below. 

NOTE that this tree is not its correct, final form because we have left which case in its ‘starting position’ as well.  So, in the next step we’ll have to get rid of that second which case – you might think of it being ‘not pronounced’, following some rule of ‘economy of effort’ to ‘not say something you’ve already said’ (obviously not followed in my case, but there you go).

 

How do we ‘erase’ the second occurrence of which case?  We simply must introduce a rule to ‘erase’ whNPs generally, that is, having nothing at all on the right-hand side of a rule (e.g., WhNP® ).  Adding this to our grammar will give us the following output parse:

 

 

You might be beginning to wonder what you have to do to build the grammar to handle questions – haven’t we given you all the rules?  No.   Somehow we must output the example above while blocking an example such as which case did Poirot solve the case, or which case did Poirot solve the police or Which solution did Poirot send the gun to the police.  This is because the ‘argument’ to the verb solve is the displaced which case, so the position after solve is already filled and cannot be occupied by another argument such as the police.  Further, we do not want to allow an empty argument if there is no whNP out front, i.e., we don’t want the parser to accept Did Poirot solve.  

 

To do this, you’ll have to add new grammar rules and new nonterminal names to ‘remember’ whether or not a WhNP has been encountered.  This ‘augmented’ context-free grammar approach, known as Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, does this by means of special nonterminal names.  Alongside rules such as S®NP VP, we add rules such as these:

 

            Start® Comp S-WhNP

            Comp® WhNP

            S-WhNP ® NP VP-WhNP

            VP-WhNP® V WhNP

            WhNP®

 

 

Note that here nonterminal names such as S-WhNP are indivisible and atomic – they are single names, just like ‘VP’.  You should be able to see that their purpose is to allow the generation of an example such as which case… with a phonetically empty WhNP after the verb.  These rules are not complete – it is your job to finish them off properly to handle the example sentences 1-4 at the start of this section.  In addition, you will have to make a design decision about a sentence such as ‘Who solved the case’.  Is the ‘who’ in the position of a subject NP as usual, or is it too ‘displaced’ to the position in Comp?  Note that this is difficult to tell from the surface since the displacement is invisible to the eye (or ear).  We shall leave the choice to you, but urge you to attempt a uniform solution first – i.e., one where the WhNP is displaced to the Comp position.  In addition, you should reflect on why this is a choice at all – why would it be better to adopt one solution rather than another?

 

Finally, as before, you must make sure that your grammar does not overgenerate, and parse, incorrectly, the sentences:

 

1.      * Who solved

2.      * Which solution did Poirot send the gun to the police

3.      * Which solution did Poirot solve which solution

4.      *Which case did Poirot believe the police

 

Hand in for your lab report: Your modified grammar, along with appropriate parsing documentation (e.g., snapshots of the chart) and parse tree output demonstrating that your grammar will produce the correct output parses for sentences 5-9 below, as well as rejecting the ‘starred’ sentences 1-4 immediately above. (Note that as a side effect your parser should also be able to parse do-questions such as Did Poirot solve the case, etc.,  but you needn’t document these.)

 

5.      Which case did Poirot solve

6.      Who solved the case

7.      Which solution did Poirot send to the police

8.      Which detectives solved the case

9.      Which solution did Poirot believe that the detectives sent to the police

 

 

2.4 Grammar 4: Agreement, features, and grammar size

In English, there is agreement in person, number, and gender between the subject noun phrase and the verb phrase.  Thus we have:

1.      The solution solves the case (singular noun and singular verb – an s as the suffix of solve)

2.      *The solution solve the case (singular noun, plural verb – no s on the end of solve)

3.      The solution that Poirot sent to the police solves the case


English is fairly impoverished with respect to agreement phenomena.  As you saw in Laboratory 1b, many other languages are far richer. 

 

How should one encode such ‘feature agreement’ into a context-free grammar?  We shall try two approaches.  In this section, we want you to simply revise the system you currently have, using just atomic nonterminal names, so that it will correctly parse the following sentences, while rejecting as unparseable the starred sentences, as usual:

1.      The solution solves the case

2.      * The solution solve the case

3.      The solutions solve the case

4.      * The solutions solves the case

5.      The solutions that Poirot sent to the police solve the case

6.      *The solutions that Poirot sent to the police solves the case


Hand in for your lab report: (1) Your modified, atomic nonterminal grammar rules and dictionary that will correctly parse all the unstarred sentences, while rejecting the starred sentences, along with output demonstrating that your new grammar works as advertised. 

(2) Grammar Size. Please calculate the grammar size, |G|, in terms of the total number of nonterminals in your grammar (that is, the total number of symbols in your ‘Rules’ section – you don’t have to count the arrow!), and compare its size to the that of your final grammars from sections 2.2 and 2.3 above – please tell us what the percentage  size increase is from your version 2.2 and 2.3 grammars to the grammar that handles  agreement in this section.  Save your results for the comparison in the next section.

 

2.5 Grammar 5: Using features

2.5.1 Features and grammars As you can see, our grammars keep getting larger and larger.  There is something inherently ‘wrong’ with this approach: the rules for singular and plural subject and verb agreement are stated separately, when clearly they are the result of a single ‘agreement’ phenomenon.  There should be one rule, but we have written two.   Following the principle of modularity, it would be more accurate and perspicuous to state the rules that a sentence is a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase separately from the agreement rules that are superimposed ‘on top of’ this basic one. This also follows the idea of a ‘right’ representation: if we change, say, the fact that there is no agreement, then we need only negate one statement, and it is impossible to retain agreement just for ‘singular’ without also retaining agreement for ‘plural’ features.  In short, then there would be one phrase structure rule and one rule for the feature agreement.

 

Note where agreement is checked.  As suggested earlier, we want to reduce all syntactic predicates to operate on the basic ‘units’ of representation in syntax – either dominance, or adjacency. In the case of agreement, we check features based on adjacency.   For example, the subject NP is adjacent to the VP.  That must mean that the VP too has features: these are inherited ‘from below’ by its verb.  This makes sense according to our notion that a VP is merely the ‘scaffolding’ that supports a verb – if a verb is 3rd person or 1st person (e.g., she solves vs. we solve), then that property is somehow projected from the verb entry to the VP (we show below how this is implemented in our Earley parser).

 

The notion of agreement is essentially that of compatibility or consistent variable value assignment – features that the language says should agree must not conflict.  For instance, in other languages, and residually in English for instance, a determiner and its noun must agree in number: we have this book (singular) but these books (plural). If a feature conflicts in its value, the sentence seems odd:  this books. Note that this means that if a feature happens not to be present, then there is no effect since there is no conflicting feature value to cause trouble: since the does not retain a number feature, we have either the books or the book.   English also has a case feature, a historical remnant of Latin: we have, I saw her (her is the object of the verb, or ‘objective’ case); vs. She saw Mary (she is the subject of the verb, or ‘nominative’ case).   

 

We can conceptualize all this as follows.  A feature is a [feature-name  feature-value] pair.  For example, [Person 1] is a possible feature, denoting first-person.  We place feature name and feature value pairs in square brackets.  A feature set is an (unordered) collection of feature names and feature values, separated by commas.  For example, this feature set consists of two features, Pers and Plural.  The Pers value is 3 (‘third’ person, as in ‘She solves’ rather than ‘You solve’); and the Plural value is –, arbitrarily denoting not plural, or singular:

            [Pers 3, Plural -]

Some features may be designated agreement features, and required to match, more precisely be consistent with other features, as described below. 

 

For instance, Poirot in Poirot is hungry could be written as having the feature set [[Pers 3], [Plural -]], since Poirot is not plural and is third person (as opposed to I, which is ‘first person’.)  Similarly, the singular verb sleeps could be labeled with the features [[Pers 3], [Plural -]].   Since the features person, number, and (sometimes) gender appear so frequently together in English, we shall admit the abbreviation Agr to stand for all three.  Thus for Poirot we may attach the feature [Agr [Pers 3, Plural -]].  In this case, we have a feature name Agr whose value is itself a list, namely, Pers 3, Plural -]. Feature names are, of course, arbitrary, but hopefully mnemonic.  The feature values, in contrast, are determined by the way the language works – in English, an item can be either Plural (marked [Plural +]) or not (marked [Plural -]).

 

The following parse tree for Poirot solves the case illustrates how the Earley parser output will change after we have added feature agreement for NPs and VPs.  Note that the feature values from the lexicon are ‘percolated up’ to be checked at adjacent nodes in the tree:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feature implementation in the Earley parser

 

To implement feature agreement in the Earley parser we add variables and feature structures to context-free rules and to lexical entries.    We let the grammar writer specify which features on the lefthand side of a rule must agree with those on the righthand side by using variables, in the  following form:

 

                        [feature-name ?x]

 

where the feature-name is separated by one or more spaces from a variable specifying a feature value.

(We precede variables with a question mark – otherwise, the names are arbitrary.)

For example, to assert that the Plural feature of the subject NP and VP must agree with the Plural feature on the S(entence) we can write a modified rule this way:

 

            Original rule:     S -> NP VP

            New rule:         S[Plural ?x] -> NP[Plural ?x] VP[Plural ?x]

 

It is the consistency of variable bindings that is used to check agreement. This is a simplified (nonrecursive) version of unification that you may have seen in 6.001 or 6.034.   The value for ?x on the right-hand side of the new rule will be filled in from below for either NP or VP or both in the parse tree (see our parse tree output example) and bound  to the value + or – (for plural or singular).  The binding for ?x must be consistent across the entire rule, so the effect of this statement is twofold:  ensure that the value for the Plural feature matches in the NP and VP; and coerce a value for the Plural feature for the S.   Ultimately, the feature values will come from lexical items at the leaves of the tree, either specified in the grammar rule lexicon or passed through by a morphological analyzer like Kimmo.  For example, the Plural features for the NP could be passed up from either the Determiner or the Noun.  Thus we could provide the following entry for a Noun such as Poirot. Note that we simply add to the usual part of speech entry in the parser lexicon. Since feature-value pairs comprise sets, the order of feature-values within a bracket is immaterial:

 

            Poirot N[plural -]

 

Similarly, for a verb such as solves we could write this in our grammar lexicon:

 

            solves V[plural -]

 

We may also label a finite set of feature values with a separate feature name label, for abbreviatory purposes, whose value is itself a list of features in square brackets. For example, the features person, number, and gender can be grouped as a single ‘agreement’ feature, Agr.  Note, importantly, that as always there must be a space between the feature name Agr and its list of values (in this case also in square brackets):

 

            S[Agr ?x] -> NP[Agr ?x] VP[Agr ?x]

     Poirot N[Agr [pers 1, plural -]]

     Solves V[Agr [pers 1, plural -]]

 

 

In this case, the value of  ?x will become bound to the value of the Agr feature for Poirot, i.e., [pers 1, plural -]. Note that this variable assignment is consistent with the feature value for solves. If the lexical item were solve then the entry would be, e.g., V[Agr [pers 1, plural +]] and this would not match with the value previously assigned to ?x, namely,  . Thus the consistency check would return failure, as desired. 

Importantly for our purposes, we do not allow feature structures to be nested beyond this, nor do we allow nested variables.   For example, the following structure is not admissible:

 

            solves  V[[Some-Verb-feature [Agr [pers 1, plural -]]]

 

A lexical entry can also specify a feature value that will not be checked for consistency because the corresponding context-free rules do not mention it.  For example, suppose we expanded the verb entry for solves to include a binary value as to whether the verb is inflected for tense or not.  Thus in Poirot wants to solve the case ‘solve’ is in its infinitive form; in Poirot solves the case ‘solves’ is in its ‘finite’ form.  We call this feature finite, abbreviated ‘fin’, so we label solves with the feature value pair [fin +], and (to) solve with the feature value [fin -]. Now our lexical  entry would look like this:

           

            solves V[fin +, Agr [pers 3, plural -]]

 

To check this feature we must mention it in a context-free rule, using another variable name for the new feature to distinguish it from the agreement feature, for instance:

 

            VP[fin ?y, Agr ?x] -> V[fin ?y, Agr ?x]

 

Now the lexical entry for solves can be something like this:

            solves V[fin +, Agr [pers 1, plural -]]

 

When this entry is looked up  in the course of Earley parsing, it has the effect of binding ?x to + and ?x to  [pers 1, plural -]. Thus, the feature structure now associated with V would now be:

 

            [fin +, Agr [pers 1, plural -]]

 

as desired.  Since the augmented context-free rule requires that the variable binding be consistent on both sides of the derivation arrow, this coerces the VP to have the same feature structure, also as desired. But if we omitted  all mention the [fin ?y] specification in a rule, only the Agr feature (more precisely, its components) would be checked and passed up the tree. 

 

Alternatively, these features could be specified via morphological analysis, using Kimmo.  Here we shall assume that features are given in the context-free grammar dictionary, and follow along with our example.

 

More generally, features are written just as they are defined, as (unordered) sets in the form of feature name and feature value pairs, each pair separated by commas.

 

            [feature1 value1, feature2 value 2, … , feature n value n]

 

To repeat: additionally, a feature name may itself be an abbreviation for a (finite) bundle of features, e.g.,  the arbitrary name Agr can abbreviate the list for person, number and gender:

 

            [person value, plural value, gender value]

can be also written as:

            [Agr [person value, plural value, gender value]]


The value of this abbreviation is that it lets us compactly write rules such as the one for subject-verb agreement above, without having to always explicitly mention the three agreement features by name. (Reminder: Note also that while Agr may be thought of as a feature name that itself has a set of feature-values as its value, in general ‘nested’ feature-value combinations are not admissible – that is to say, the value of a feature cannot itself be another feature, recursing arbitrarily. Feature-value structures can be nested to a depth of exactly 1  - as in the example for Agr above.   An arbitrary depth for feature-value structures is permitted in some feature agreement computational systems for language processing, but is arguably not required for natural languages.  It also boosts computational complexity, as we remark briefly below and in lectures to come.)

 

Note also that not all features need be checked on each component of the righthand side of a rule. For example, suppose we had an S expansion rule of this kind, with an Auxiliary verb (Aux) (e.g., for Poirot will solve the case):

 

            S -> NP Aux VP

 

We could enforce agreement between the NP and the VP, but not the Auxiliary verb, simply by writing this rule, with no features at all associated with the Aux:

 

            S[Agr ?x] -> NP[Agr ?x] Aux VP[Agr ?x]

 

 

An example.

Let’s walk through an example to see how feature checking works: Poirot solves the case.

The first snapshot below shows the first stage of agreement checking after the word Poirot has been processed by scanning past the N.  Note that in virtue of the context-free rule with features NP[Agr ?x] ® N[Agr ?x],  the parser will look for a matching lexical entry, and, in this case, find one.  So, all the features of Poirot from its lexical entry have been percolated to the Noun, with ?x now bound to [Pers 3, Plural -]:

 

Continuing with the rule NP[Agr ?x] ® N[Agr  ?x],  this binding for ?x also fixes the value for the variable ?x in the NP, since this variable must also have these same value.  The features on the NP are thus automatically coerced to this value, as shown when the N completes the NP in the Earley parse. Accordingly, the parser shows the ‘dot’ being moved over the NP in the expansion rule for S. Importantly, note that at this time, since ?x has now been set, the parser can also assign this  variable value as the feature values associated with S:

 

 

Continuing, the parser will next predict the VP portion of the S rule.  Since the VP starts out with a verb, also with features, as with the N, these features are eventually percolated up by feature agreement from the V’s lexical entry to the VP (we might also arguably set the VP values via the value now set at the S node, but we put to one side this possibility):

 

.

 

 

 

With the VP complete, the full S rule is now checked for consistency of the ?x variable assignment.  In this case, both the subject NP and the VP have consistent feature values, so the assignment is consistent.  The parser can therefore assign this value, [Pers 3, Plural -], to be the value also associated with the S, as shown in the figure below.  This is the final output of the parser.

 

To implement the feature extension in the Earley parser, note that the edges in the chart must now be annotated with feature-value labels.  Clearly, two edges are now distinct if they have different feature value labels. Once a feature value is set, we can advance the ‘dot’ if we actually find an edge (phrase) with the ascribed feature values in the input.  So, the essential part that changes is when the dot can be advanced in a rule (when the Fundamental Rule can apply), and how we distinguish different edges in the chart (they must have consistent feature values in addition to consistent phrase names).  You might want to think a bit about how far these new distinctions would expand the chart size beyond its usual quadratic size (in the length of the input).   You might also want to think about what would happen if feature structures were themselves arbitrarily recursive, rather than just finite lists. 

 

2.5.2        Your assignment for this section.

Now that we have seen how features are implemented in our Earley parser, please reconsider your grammar from the previous section that implemented subject-verb agreement.  We’d like you to reimplement that grammar using the feature machinery described above.  Here are the sentences you were to handle. Your feature grammar should correctly parse (and correctly reject) the sentences as shown:

 

1.      The solution solves the case

2.      * The solution solve the case

3.      The solutions solve the case

4.      * The solutions solves the case

5.      The solutions that Poirot sent to the police solve the case

6.      *The solutions that Poirot sent to the police solves the case

Now we shall calculate the size of your feature grammar to an equivalent context-free grammar.

First you should calculate the grammar size of your feature grammar – the total number of symbols it takes to write the grammar down.  You should figure out a reasonable method to calculate feature ‘sizes’.  Then, compare this value to that for your equivalent context-free grammar and record the percentage size difference – which is larger?

 

This small example might not reveal very much, so let’s extend the result a bit. Assume there the size of the feature grammar you are analyzing would be |G| without features taken into account.   Suppose there are m agreement phenomena in a language, and each feature is binary-valued.  In terms of |G| and m, what would be the maximum size of the nonterminal-expanded context-free grammar |G| that would be needed to encode m agreement phenomena?   What about the size of the equivalent feature grammar?  Call this value GF. What is the value of GF/G? What is the value of this as m®¥?

 

Hand in for your lab report: (1) Your feature grammar that reproduces the agreement results from the previous section, along with output supporting your results; (2) Your calculation of comparative grammar sizes for this simple example, along with an explanation of the measure you adopted for calculating feature grammar sizes; and (3) the results of your grammar size comparisons for the general case of m features, including the comparisons between ordinary and feature agreement context-free grammars.

 

[You may skip the next section and go on to 2.6 if you so desire]

 

2.5.3 Agreement grammars – a formal account. More formally, let us define this kind of system as an agreement grammar, by the extending the usual notion of a context-free grammar and the notion of a derivation in a context-free grammar as follows.  Then we shall see how to write rules in this kind of grammatical system in a modified Earley parser.  Your job will then be to re-do the grammar from the previous section using agreement features.

 

Let’s define the set of nonterminals and the notion of derivation in a context-free grammar to get agreement grammars in the following way.  The set of nonterminals in an agreement grammar is characterized by a specification triple <F, a, p> where:

·          F is a finite set of feature names;

·          A is a finite set of permissible feature values;

·          p is a function from feature names to permissible feature values.  That is,
p: F
® 2A  (the power set of A)

 

We say that this triple specifies a finite set Vn of nonterminals, where a nonterminal may be also thought of as a partial function from feature names to feature values:

 

            Vn = {C Î A(F) : " f Î domain(C)[C(f) Î p(f)] }


where Y
X is the set of all partial functions from X to Y. Domain(C) is the domain of C, the set {x: $y[<x, y>Î C]}. 

 

Example.  Informally, in English we have agreement in number (singular or plural), and ‘person’ (first, second third).  Let’s formalize this.  Suppose we have the feature names {PLURAL, PERSON}.  Then we have the following function p defined as follows, which just says there is a PLURAL feature with values +, - (i.e., plural and singular) and a PERSON feature, with values 1, 2, or 3.


            p(PLURAL) = {+, -}

            p(PERSON)= {1, 2, 3}

Now we must alter the ‘derives’ relation in an ordinary context-free grammar to handle the ‘matching’ part of feature agreement.

 

We say that a category C' extends a category C (written CÊ C) iff for all f in Domain(C), [C(f)= C(f)], that is , C' is a superset of C. For example, the category {[PERSON 1], [NUMBER 1]} extends the category {[PERSON 1]}.

Now we can define our system. An agreement grammar is a 5-tuple,


                        G = <<F, A, p>, V
T, FA, P, S>


whose first element specifies a set V
N of syntactic categories with features (nonterminals) and VT is a finite terminal alphabet (parts of speech or actual words).  FA is the set of agreement feature names, FAÍ F.  S is the distinguished starting symbol, SÎ VN . P is a finite set of the usual context-free rule productions, each member taking one of the following two forms:

 

1.      C ® a, where CÎ VN  and a Î VT

2.      C0 ® C1 Cn where each Ci Î VN

 

To complete the definition, we modify the derives relation to incorporate agreement. We say that a production C0 ® C1 Cn  extends a production C0 ® C1 Cn iff  each category Ci extends Ci, for every i,  and a left-hand side nonterminal’s (mother’s) agreement features appear on every daughter (right-hand side nonterminal):


        a. 
"i, 0 £ i £ n, C'i  extends Ci ; and
        b. [the agreement convention]

"f Î (DOMAIN(C'0) ÇFA), "i, 1£i  £n, [(f Î ( DOMAIN (C'i )) & (C'i (f) = C'0 (f)]

The second condition ensures that all agreement features on the left-hand side of a production rule are also found on all the right-hand side daughters. 


We may now define the language generated by an agreement grammar.  If P contains a production A
®g with an extension A' ®g ', then for any a,b Î(Vn ÈVT)*, we write aA'b Þ aA'b.  Let Þ* be the reflexive, transitive closure of Þ in the given grammar. (That is, zero or more applications of Þ.) The language L(G) generated by G contains all the terminal strings that can be derived from any extension of the start category:

            L(G)= {x: x
ÎVT * and $S', [S'ÊS & S' Þ* x]}

 

 

2.6           Grammar 6: Filler-gap dependencies and features

 

We can use features to encode the atomic nonterminal names like S-WhNP used to track the relationship between ‘wh’ fillers and gaps.  In this section, your assignment is to build a feature grammar that can do this.  Here is what you must do.

 

2.6.1 Features. Consider a pair of rules, one with ‘ordinary’ nonterminals and one with corresponding augmented counterparts, as stated previously in section 2.3:

 

            S ® NP VP

     S-WhNP ® NP VP-WhNP

 

Instead of creating new nonterminal names, S-WhNP, V-WhNP, etc., we could also approach the problem in another way.  Let’s think of the S as having the feature WhNP or not – values + and –. In the first rule above, the S does not have the WhNP feature, e.g., the feature-value combination associated with the S is [WhNP +]. In the second rule, both S and VP have the feature-value [WhNP +].  Ultimately, as usual, this feature value is ‘passed up’ from the lexical entry for which when followed by words that form an NP, so that the NP is itself labeled [WhNP +]. You can see that now the rule with S-WhNP and VP-WhNP can be replaced by simply adding a new feature-value consistency check, in this case, one for WhNP.  As before, we will also need to add an new NP expansion rule to account for the possibility of an ‘empty’ NP, so we need an NP rule that will expand to the empty string, if the WhNP feature value is +.  (Note that we have not described all the rules that will need WhNP features – you should go back and see how your previous grammar was implemented.)

Given this new outlook on life, please rewrite your grammar from section 2.3 so that it uses feature-value pairs as described, instead of new nonterminal names, to parse the same wh question examples (and reject the wrong ones), from section 2.3:

           

1.      Which case did Poirot solve

2.      Who solved the case

3.      Which solution did Poirot send to the police

4.      Which detectives solved the case

5.      Which solution did Poirot believe that the detectives sent to the police

6.      *Which solution did Poirot send the gun to the police

7.      *Who solved

 

Please save your grammar and the output showing that you can successfully parse (and reject) these sentences, using features, to turn in for the end of this section.

 

2.6.2 Other sentence types with ‘wh’ features

We are far from having exhausted the sentence types that display ‘displaced’ phrases, even if we limit ourselves to sentences that are ‘wh’ questions.  Let’s consider just one more:

 

To whom did Poirot send the solutions

 

This is a lot like the sentences in the previous section, except the displaced ‘filler’ is a Prepositional Phrase, to whom.  Otherwise, it’s the same: there is a ‘gap’ after solutions where the PP argument to the verb usually goes.  Your job is to add new rules, using features, to parse this example. This can be done in an elegant way by seeing what the displaced wh-NPs and PPs have in common.  Hint: you might want to consider a feature [wh +/-], denoting whether any word, phrase, etc. has the feature  +/- wh, i.e., is a phrase that is marked as containing a ‘wh’ word like which, what, etc. somewhere below.

 

 

2.6.3 The ‘slash’ feature

But wait, there’s more!  We can generalize (and should generalize) this account of fillers-and gaps. Recall that in addition to wh-phrases, one can also ‘displace’  almost any kind of phrase – e.g., Prepositional Phrases, as in To the police Poirot sent the solutions  (not very pretty, but OK).  As before, there is a ‘gap’ after solutions – the object of the sentence, the PP to the police, has been displaced to the front to serve as a topic for semantic focus.  So once again we have a filler-gap structure, but it’s not a WhNP.    We could use our new feature machinery to handle this too – we could add a [PP +] feature to indicate that there’s a displaced PP somewhere underneath a particular node, just as S[WhNP  +] means that this is a sentence from which we’ve displaced a WhNP.   Analogously, [PP -] denotes an ‘ordinary’ phrase – one where there is no such displaced PP.  So for example, some of the rules to derive a sentence such as To the police Poirot sent the solutions could be as follows:

 

            S[PP +] ®  NP VP[PP +]

     PP[PP +] ® P  NP[PP +]

 

Of course, we’d need more rules – at least, a rule to expand NP to an empty string in the proper feature context, as before, plus others. (You should think about the other rules we would need – but you don’t have to write them down.)

 

This is quite inelegant – we again wind up duplicating all the features for all the different kinds of phrases.  We can displace Adjective Phrases (AP), Verb Phrases, Sentences, etc:

 

            Happier than the police, Poirot will never be___  (the ___ indicates the ‘gap’)

           

Instead of doing this for each phrase category, we can introduce a special feature name, called SLASH, but written, amazingly, as a slash: / .  The idea is that the  / feature can take as values all the possible kinds of displaced phrases – NP, WhNP, PP, VP, etc.  If the feature is not present, then it’s just an ordinary phrase.  We can then write the PP and WhNP displacement rules as follows:

 

            S[/ WhNP] ® NP VP[/ WhNP]

            S[/ PP] ® NP VP[/ PP] or to show how other features are written with the slash:
           
S[fin +, / WhNP] ® NP VP[fin +, / WhNP]

 

We won’t ask you to rewrite your grammar using slash rules like this.  (Whew.)  But we do want you to briefly describe the strengths and weaknesses of using this slash feature implementation as opposed to the explicit listing of individually displaced phrases, like PP, NP, S, etc.  For instance, it looks like we won’t save anything in terms of number of rules, or so it seems, since we still have individual rules to expand out displaced WhNP, PP, etc.  Is this so?  Please explain why or why not. 

 

Hand in for your lab report: (1) Your feature grammar that parses (or rejects) the whNP sentences 1-7 above; a feature grammar that can do all this, plus parse the sentence To whom did Poirot send the solutions, using a feature system that systematically unifies WhNPs and PPs;  and (3) your discussion of the slash feature machinery.

 

 

Thus endeth Laboratory 3, Component III