Delph-in Developers Meeting
This page contains some information about the Delph-in developers meeting to be held in Jerez 2006-02.
Date
February 20–24, 2006
Place
Hotel los Jandalos Jerez
Cost
There will be a 100 EUR fee to cover workshop expenses.
Participants
FrancisBond, Ann Copestake,
DanFlickinger, ChikaraHashimoto,
BerndKiefer, EricNichols,
StephanOepen, UlrichSchaefer,
TakaakiTanaka, BenWaldron
Contents
Proposed Timetable
| Morning | Afternoon | |
| Monday | Agenda Setting | Automated Testing/Delivery |
| Tuesday | API/Standoff/Preprocessors | PET bug squashing |
| Wednesday | Parse Ranking | API/Stand Off/Post processors |
| Thursday | MT/Large Lexicons | Free hacking |
| Friday | Free hacking | Sharing Results |
Topics
MT
Goal
make J-E functional again; provide internal access to LOGON set-up.
People
Stephan, Ann, Francis
What’s new
BRIEF (10-20 minute) intros of new stuff (maybe these should be part of the other sessions)
- Eric - RMRS2sql, ontology, packaging
- FCB - parse ranking, Itsdb perl modules, Cabocha RMRS
- TT - Chasen PIC
- Ben - MAF
- Ulrich - latest HoG
- Stephan Parse/Ranking
API/StandOff/Preprocessors
Goal
one usable, general preprocessor, supported in LKB, PET, iTSDB
People
- Ben, Ann, Stephan, Ulrich
PET bug squashing/LKB harmonization
Goal
squash bugs, merge branches if possible, 64 bit if possible
People
Bernd, Eric, Stephan
Bugs:
- flop slowness fixed — check accuracy
- merge done
- MMAP — document on wiki
- 2.6 kernels
- punctuation — documented
- gcc 4.0
- 64bit (ECL > 0.9h) todo: bernd
- mrs.system synchronization
- selective unpacking todo: eric
- :+, comment string todo: oe,bernd
Should also get Eric CVS access
Parse Ranking
Goal
allow cheap to use the new models
Large Lexicons
Goal
allow efficient use of large lexicons
Enhancements
Goal
discuss and set priorities
(Automated) Testing
- See also LisbonTestingDiscussion
- Using Apache Ant for Testing DELPH-IN Tools and Resources: see TestingWithAnt
Still More
- Encoding
- Automatic Documentation
-
ITSDB robustness/flexibility done: oe
- - continue treebanking even if parses fail to unify (just warn and lose that parse) - restart cheap if it dies - handling different parsers (e.g. Cabocha2RMRS)
Detailed Ideas
-> Preprocessors
- - syntax for orthographemic rules: the recent LKB changes resulted
in
- cleaning up the syntax for %letter-set, %suffix, et al. annotations on lexical rules. only #\!, #\?, #\*, and #\) need escaping in the new universe, and #\\ is the escape character. i believe only the ERG makes use of funny characters in orthographemics currently, but still i think we should update PET to reflect the above. i all but promised dan to do this, hence will hopefully look into it soon.
-> Preprocessors
- - chart dependencies: re-working the processing of lexical rules in
- the LKB resulted in a change to the chart dependencies mechanism, where in the old set-up chart dependencies were checked after all lexical rules had been applied, and in the current universe they are tested among lexical entries only (i.e. prior to application of lexical rules). PET (main), on the other hand, i believe has moved to a set-up where parsing is divided into two phases, viz. one with lexical rules only, the second with non-lexical rules only. there is an underlying difference between the systems here, where the LKB notion of `lexical’ rules only entails that a rule can be annotated with an orthographemic effect; otherwise, the LKB will happily feed the output of a non-lexical rule into a lexical rule. grammarians tend to not be aware of this, as they maintain the word vs. phrase distinction in the type system already (in my view, the LKB use of the term `lexical’ rule is potentially mis-leading; but documented).
-> Preprocessors
- i (still) have yet to re-read the earlier discussion on this on the `developers’ list, but currently at least berthold seems affected by the two systems not doing the same (and the LKB no longer doing what it used to). so, it seems as if a written specification for the mechanism was needed, and then hopefully we can aim at getting all processors to implement it alike.
-> Preprocessors
- - lexical rule processing: at some point, interleaving lexical
rules
-
without orthographemic effect prior to orthographemic rules (e.g. dative shift prior to passivization) had broken in the PET `main’ branch; i remember fixing it in the `oe’ branch, but are not quite sure about the state of play in recent `main’ versions (i believe the patch propagated). generally, it would seem tempting to have a
few testing grammars (e.g. the toy’ and polymorphan’ grammars in the LKB source tree), so as to mechanically (and regularly) confirm all systems output the sameresults on these.
-
-> PET bug squashing/LKB harmonization
- - TDL syntax extensions: ann (i believe) added a comment facility
on
- types some time ago, and emily last year added a `:+’ operator
for `overlay’ type definitions, i.e. monotonic extensions to an
earlier defined type. the latter is already in use in the
Matrix, i think, and the former we were thinking to use for
adding documentation to grammars, specifically to annotate types
that should be part of the SEM-I for a grammar (i.e. exported).
for all i know, PET does not yet have support for either
operator, but probably should. conversely, bernd (i believe)
extended PET at some point to allow a variant rule notation,
viz.
- [ ] –> [ ], …, [ ].
which should be equivalent to embedding the RHS of the definition as a list below some designated path (e.g. `ARGS’) in the LHS; to make this compatible with the (mostly unused) LKB option of having a separate feature embedding the LHS (which, in a sense, would be cleaner in terms of which parts of the FS corresponds to what), it could become necessary to also allow this in PET, but while no-one is using this option that seems hardly a priority. the arrow, on the other hand, i quite like and would love to get into the LKB.
- types some time ago, and emily last year added a `:+’ operator
for `overlay’ type definitions, i.e. monotonic extensions to an
earlier defined type. the latter is already in use in the
Matrix, i think, and the former we were thinking to use for
adding documentation to grammars, specifically to annotate types
that should be part of the SEM-I for a grammar (i.e. exported).
for all i know, PET does not yet have support for either
operator, but probably should. conversely, bernd (i believe)
extended PET at some point to allow a variant rule notation,
viz.
-> Preprocessors
- - input chart description: from what i gather we have at least
three
-
and a half ways of describing partly processed input for parsing,
viz. (a) the original YY mode (`PetInput’ on the wiki), (b) SPPP of the early Deep-Thought days (`LkbSppp’), (c) the XML input chart in PET (`PetInput)’, and (d) emerging MAF support. of these, (a) and (c) are available in PET ((c) only in the `main’ branch), while (b) and (d) are in the LKB. i personally believe in plurality, and at least (a) – (c) currently have active users, but if nothing else we should try to document the various options better (and work out what their strong and weak points are for candidate users).
-
-> Parse Ranking
-
- MaxEnt features: in recent work (jointly with erik velldal at UiO),
- we have extended the range of MaxEnt features in [incr tsdb()] and changed their textual representation in a non-backwards compatible way. the new code generates `[1 2 imper hcomp vc_prd_be_le “be”]’, where the second integer is new. the immediate effect is that PET will still read `.mem’ files created with the new code, but utterly mis-interpret features, i.e. effectively ignore the model. we hope to wrap up our re-redesign in the MaxEnt space fairly soon and then put out documentation on the feature templates. at that point, PET will need an update to minimally recognize the new format properly, and ideally make use of more of these new features (grandparenting, lexicalization, et al.).
-> Preprocessors
- - ERG and HoG: the current use of the ERG in HoG is, say,
sub-optimal
- in terms of interfaces and results. two core issues, i think, are (a) divergence in tokenization assumptions (e.g. |we haven’t slept| fails to parse due to the contracted auxiliary) and (b) the need to further fine-tune the interactions with pre-processing steps (e.g. |Kim arrived at 2:00am.|, email addresses, URLs, et al. all get not quite the analysis they could). these problems would get far worse with recent versions of the ERG, where most punctuation is treated as affixation now. dan, ulli schaefer, and i have talked about the issue in some depth and have concluded that a general solution will be somewhat challenging to build (though interesting): in principle it would have to allow for multiple views on tokenization (taggers have good reasons to consider punctuation separate tokens, the ERG has its reasons to consider punctuation marks as affixes), and then annotations contributed (to tokens) by one component might refer to only part of a token from the point of view of another component. when we last talked, ulli and i resolved to further investigate the general solution but also look for a more pragmatic solution to the current issues with using the ERG in the HoG. i believe the recent development in the ERG has actually simplified things, as we mostly now expect token boundaries at whitespace (plus for a small number of contracted forms, e.g. |’s|, |‘ve|, et al.). our proposal would be to make tokenization rules semi-explicit in the form of a token test suite, i.e. a collection of relevant examples plus associated tokenizer output). given that, ulli believes he should be able to re-organize the input to PET, so as to collapse token boundaries in several cases. we were hoping to look into this more when both dan and i are at DFKI in mid-november. differences in lexical rule processing might be another issue here, of course, as the ERG for the time being is developed against the `oe’ branch of PET (see above and below).
-> PET bug squashing/LKB harmonization
- - PET branches: dan and i still use what is effectively a version
of
- PET as of sometime in 2003 (with moderate patches here and there). the main reason for this, i believe, is the flop(1) slow-down from moving to using Boost (over LEDA). some remaining uncertainty of which of the various patches have migrated to the main branch, our overall conservative natures, and difficulties compiling the main branch last i tried add to our inertia. however, maintaining two distinct branches is not a good thing, and once flop(1) performance with Boost were resolved, some testing of the ERG on `main’ should fairly quickly allow merging of the two branches, i hope.
Last update: 2011-10-09 by anonymous [edit]