Lab 4 (due 2/2 11:59pm)

Overview

The goal of this lab is once again to continue development of your test suite on the one hand, and to refine your starter grammar on the other. Again, the test suite will include phenomena not covered by the customization system (but on the agenda for the rest of the quarter). The grammar work will include adding some new phenomena as well as whatever clean-up is required to get to a good starting point.

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Test Suite

The first task is to create positive and negative example sentences illustrating the following phenomena, to the extent that they are relevant for your language:

• Possessives
• Delcarative clausal complements
• Matrix yes-no questions
• Yes-no questions as clausal complements (testsuite only, unless this is entirely trivial)
• Clausal modifiers
• One of:
  • Evidentials
  • Valence-changing lexical rules
  • Argument Optionality ** For many grammars, this one is most urgent. **

Before you start, read the general instructions for testsuites and the formatting instructions.

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Starter grammar

This week we'll do another round of grammar improvement through the questionnaire. This time, you'll need to address these sections:

• Matrix Yes-No Questions
• Adnominal possession
• Clausal complements
• Clausal modifiers
• Nominalization (if applicable)
• One of:
  • Evidentials
  • Valence changing lexical rules (actually in Morphology)
  • Argument optionality
• Other changes to Lexicon and Morphology (as appropriate)

An additional goal for the starter grammars for this week is to get to the best possible starting point. I will try to get feedback to you from Lab 3 quickly, and my feedback will contain suggestions of what to clean up.

In addition, you should do the following:

• Review your grammar's performance over the test suite (using [incr tsdb()]) to determine whether there are any examples that you think should parse which currently don't.
• Use interactive unification to determine the source of the parse failure, and post to Canvas to get ideas about how to fix it.
• Likewise, if you are overgenerating, post to Canvas for ideas on how to fix it. In some cases, the advice might well be "we'll fix this later".
• For the examples that do parse, examine the semantic representations (Simple MRS) to check whether the dependencies look correct. That is, are the nouns showing up as the arguments of the verbs, and in the way you would expect? Do you see correct values for tense, aspect, person, number and (where relevant) gender on the event and individual variables?
• If you have any incorrect semantic representations, post to Canvas for advice on how to fix them.

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Make sure you can parse individual sentences

Once you have created your starter grammar (or each time you create one, as you should iterate through grammar creation and testing a few times as you refine your choices), try it out on a couple of sentences interactively to see if it works:

1. Load the grammar into the LKB.
2. Using the parse dialog box (or 'C-c p' in emacs to get the parse command inserted at your prompt), enter a sentence to parse.
3. Examine the results. If it does parse, check out the semantics (pop-up menu on the little trees). If it doesn't look at the parse chart to see why not.
4. Problems with lexical rules and lexical entries often become apparent here, too: If the LKB can't find an analysis for one of your words, it will say so, and (obviously) fail to parse the sentence.

Note that the questionnaire has a section for test sentences. If you use this, then the parse dialog will be pre-filled with your test sentences.

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[incr tsdb()] profile

The final step for this lab is to use the [incr tsdb()] grammar profiling system to test the performance of your starter grammar over your test suite, and then examine the results. (You may find in doing so that you want to refine certain aspects of your starter grammar. You can do this by uploading the file "choices" which comes with your grammar into the customization system and then tweaking from there.)

We expect to see an overall drop in coverage this week (since you'll be adding sentences that we don't expect to parse yet), but at the same time, some improvement over the subset of your test suite that represents the last two weeks.

Create a test suite skeleton

• From previous weeks, you should already have a tsdb directory with subdirectories skeletons and home.
• The skeletons subdirectory should have files Relations and Index.lisp.
• Use make_item to create a new item file from your current testsuite.
• You can replace skeletons/lab2/item (or skeletons/lab3/item) with this new file, or create a new subdirectory in skeletons called lab4. In that case, you'll need to copy skeletons/Relations to skeletons/lab4/relations, put your new item in skeletons/lab4/, and edit Index.lisp to add a line for the lab4 skeleton.

Create and run an initial test suite instance

1. Start the lkb
2. Load your starter grammar. (The script file is in matrix/lkb/script.)
3. Start [incr tsdb()] (within emacs, that's (tsdb:tsdb :podium))
4. In the [incr tsdb()] podium, select Options > Database Root and input the path to tsdb/home.
5. In the [incr tsdb()] podium, select Options > Skeleton Root and input the path to tsdb/skeletons.
6. Optional: For future use, you can set these variables ahead of time in a file called .tsdbrc in your home directory. It should contain these lines, with path names edited appropriately:

   (in-package :tsdb)
   (setf *tsdb-home* "path-to-tsdb/home")
   (setf *tsdb-skeleton-directory* "path-to-tsdb/skeletons")
   

7. In the [incr tsdb()] podium, select File > Create. You should see your test suite in the menu there. Select it, and get a test suite instance. Post to Canvas if this doesn't work.
8. Make sure your grammr is loaded into the LKB.
9. Once you have a test suite instance, select it (by clicking on it), then do Process > All Items.
10. Explore the results, with functions such as Browse > Results and Analyze > Competence.
11. Be sure to save (i.e., not overwrite or delete) this test suite instance, as you'll be asked to turn it in.

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Write up

NB: While the test suite and choices file creation is joint work, the write up should be done by one partner (the one who didn't do it last week). The writing partner should have the non-writing partner review the write up and make suggestions.

Your write up should include the following:

1. Documentation of the phenomena you have added to your testsuite, illustrated with examples from the testsuite.
2. Documentation of the new or revised choices you made in the customization system, illustrated with examples from your test suite. (Diff your lab3 and lab4 choices files to make sure you've caught all the changes.)
   • This can be interleaved with the documentation of the phenomena (so you describe each phenomenon and then the choices you used to add an analysis of it to the grammar), but the documentation of the phenomenon and choices should be logically separate. Here's an example of what this should look like.
3. Descriptions of any properties of your language illustrated in your test suite but not covered by your starter grammar and/or the customization system. This will be most of the additions to your test suite this week. Here, too, please include IGT from your testsuite, and give explanations along the lines of the example above (though without the information about the customization system).
4. Documentation of the coverage of your grammar over the testsuite. If there are examples that thare parsed incorrectly (unanalyzed grammatical examples, analyzed ungrammatical examples, or grammatical examples assigned surprising parses), reflect on why that might be.
5. Documentation of any changes you made to your grammar to improve its performance (coverage and accuracy). Include the exmaples that motivated the change and explain what changes you made to the choices file or tdl.

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Submit your assignment

• Be sure your write up and the text-file version of your test suite are included in your grammar directory.
• Likewise, make sure to include your most current tsdb profile in the grammar directory (ideally inside tsdb/home/).
• Create a tarball:

        tar czf iso-lab4.tgz iso-lab4
      

• Upload the tarball to Canvas under the name of the partner who did the write up.

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