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Asymmetries in Extraction from Nominal Copular Sentences: a Challenging Case Study for NLP Tools
Asymmetries in Extraction From Nominal Copular Sentences: a Challenging Case Study for NLP Tools Paolo Lorusso, Matteo Greco, Cristiano Chesi, Andrea Moro NEtS at Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS. P.zza Vittoria 15, I-27100 Pavia (Italy) {paolo.lorusso, matteo.greco, andrea.moro, cristiano.chesi}@iusspavia.it revealed by some widely used Natural Language Abstract Processing (NLP) tools. This leads to poor performance in tasks like Machine Translation In this paper we discuss two types of (MT). nominal copular sentences (Canonical and This argument seems to us especially relevant Inverse, Moro 1997) and we demonstrate in those structural configurations in which a non- how the peculiarities of these two local dependency must be established: in parsing, configurations are hardly considered by for instance, interpreting correctly a wh- standard NLP tools that are currently dependency requires that the dependent (the wh- publicly available. Here we show that phrase) and the dependee (the head selecting the example-based MT tools (e.g. Google wh- phrase as its argument/modifier) are Translate) as well as other NLP tools identified, and the nature of the dependence (UDpipe, LinguA, Stanford Parser, and disambiguated (e.g. argument vs. modifier). In (1) Google Cloud AI API) fail in capturing the we exemplify the special case of a non-local critical distinctions between the two dependency between a wh- PP and a DP it structures in the end producing both wrong depends on (a co-indexed underscore signals the analyses and, possibly as a consequence of possible extraction sites, hence the dependent a non-coherent (or missing) structural constituent; the diacritic “*” prefixes, as usual, analysis, incorrect translations in the case illegal sites): of MT tools. -
Agreement in Specificational Sentences in Faroese
Agreement in specificational sentences in Faroese Caroline Heycock University of Edinburgh Abstract This paper examines the patterns of agreement found in Faroese in sentences where there are two noun phrases with which the verb could potentially agree, a situation that arises in “specificational” or “inverse” copular sentences of the type The problem is/are your parents. It is well known that in some languages (for example English) agreement is obligatorily with the first noun phrase, while in others (for example Italian) it is obligatorily with the second. Here I demonstrate that Faroese robustly exhibits both patterns, and that their distribution is strongly affected by other aspects of the syntax of the sentences in which they occur. 1. Introduction The question of what determines agreement on the finite verb has recently at- tracted renewed attention (see e.g. Bobaljik 2008). Within the Germanic lan- guages, interest is typically focussed on agreement in sentences in which one or more arguments are lexically specified for “quirky” case. There is however at least one other problematic construction as far as agreement is concerned: copular sen- tences with two noun phrases, in particular the class known as “specificational” or “inverse” copular clauses (see Higgins 1979, Williams 1983, Heggie 1988, Moro 1991, 1997, 2000, Büring 1998, Heycock and Kroch 1999a,b, 2002, Mikkelsen 2005, among others). Exactly how to characterise this class is a matter of some debate; at least as an initial approximation specificational copular sentences con- sist of the copula and two noun phrases (typically but not necessarily definite), of which the first is used “attributively” rather than referentially. -
ENJOY LINGUISTICS! Papers Offered to Luigi Rizzi on the Occasion of His 60Th Birthday
ENJOY LINGUISTICS! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday Edited by Valentina Bianchi & Cristiano Chesi CISCL Press Valentina Bianchi & Cristano Chesi (eds.) ENJOY LINGUISTICS! Papers offered to Luigi Rizzi on the occasion of his 60th birthday CISCL PRESS via Roma 56 – 53100 SIENA, Italy www.ciscl.unisi.it ISBN 978-88-9079-430-8 This Celebration collects contributions by some former students of Luigi, and a few of the visiting scholars who have interacted with him at the CISCL center in Siena. Alas, we were not able to reach all the people who might be willing to contribute to this celebration. Therefore, the following list is just a representative subset of a much wider community! Introduction: Adriana Belletti About CISCL 5 Contributions: Flavia Adani Some notes on the acquisition of relative clauses: New data and open questions 6 Giulia Bianchi A cartographic approach to the second language acquisition of German weak pronouns 14 Valentina Bianchi & Cristiano Chesi Subject islands and the Subject Criterion 25 Carlo Cecchetto & Caterina Donati “Perché” Rizzi is right 54 Cristiano Chesi & Andrea Moro Computational blindness in the brain 63 Carla Contemori & Maria Garraffa Subject relatives in typical and atypical language development 67 Silvio Cruschina Focus in Existential Sentences 77 Lena Dal Pozzo New information subjects in bilingual and monolingual child production 108 Elisa Di Domenico Focus and focus positions: The case of Perugino 117 Michelangelo Falco Specificity: the syntax/semantics mapping. A