TomarNames

Dan’s intro

This session I proposed for the agenda again for a fairly selfish reason: In working through the DeepBank treebanking, and hearing quite reasonable complaints about inconsistent annotation… there’s a large class of cases where our formalism or our current use of it doesn’t quite guide us in the right direction of uniform annotation as regards to proper names. A single word, capitalized, not so hard. Two together — not much ambiguity. Three tokens (Jonas Klemper Schmidt) — start to need to know about which names tend to be middle names or last names to decide on bracketing.

A set of cases to illustrate how the situation is a little messy:

• Three or more token names from other cultures.
• Words which are also non-name words of English capitalized in non-initial position. Non-nouns used in noun spots, not so hard. I believe that Grumpy is one of the dwarves that slept in late. Current machinery can posit a proper noun entry for Grumpy. If the word is a count noun, can still find it because otherwise there would be no parse. As long as there’s not much ambiguity, fairly robust.
• Bracketing conventions: sequences of proper names without high confidence, just go for left bracketing. Creates tension when there’s a sense that you might want a different structure: International Business Machines. In order to avoid the inconsistency that would result from trying to make all those decisions, name-name-name compounds treated as left bracketing, unless you have reason to do something different. Leads to annoyances with New York Stock Exchange — almost no instances of New York Stock without Exchange, so the left bracketing looks weird.
• Can put in a declaration in a file establishing domain-specific bracketing for particular frequent terms in a domain being treebanked. Supports consistency without insisting on left-bracketing everywhere.

The proposal on the table today is going to affect some of these earlier decisions.

Case I’m worried about now are nouns that could perfectly well fit where they are, and yet they’re capitalized: The Department of Defense which used to be called the Department of War. Orwellian capitalized words that may or may not mean what they appear to. The annotator’s decision is between named entity analysis and transparent analysis. For a while I was saying that the capital letter specifically flags opaque proper names. But that leads to a radically different semantics in our representation. Especially annoying in The Departments of Defense, Justice and state with lower case s — get weirdly different representation of the departments. Always named_rel for the named entities, with interesting stuff in CARG. Ordinary common nouns (known or unknown/generic), have _[lemma]_n_rel — content is in the name of the predicate, not in CARG. Especially annoying in e.g. titles where every word is capitalized by convention and it doesn’t mean that the author is using the words in a funny way. Does author of Dept. of Justice Shrinks. mean Justice or justice?

In Bellingham, tried to figure out how to minimize the difference between named entities and non-named entities. The proposal I’m interested in exploring is having the predicate name in all nouns be _[lemma]_n_rel for State or state, while recording the capitalization somewhere in the EP, probably on the ARG0. We could fiddle with things like putting it in the subsense field or something, but again we’d have two different semantic predicates which is what I’m trying to avoid, for the purposes of easily ignoring it when it makes sense to do so. Trouble is how to annotate that info that we’re not too embarrassed about—smuggling punctuation info right into the semantics, so we can make a maximally common specification.

In the case of adjectives, there doesn’t seem to be a practical way to do exactly the same word with only the caps info—Grumpy as _grumpy_n_rel + caps, grumpy as _grumpy_a_rel. Maybe problematic because you’d need some way to know that _grumpy_n_rel can only be there with caps. Still some vexation with the count nouns, like my friend in San Francisco named Tree: I think Tree is coming to the party tonight. Tree will be _tree_n_rel +caps, and can’t interpret it correctly without knowing that it’s a proper name, since count nouns can’t appear there without an article. If I said The Tree is falling referring to a distinguished tree named Tree, don’t really know if the caps are indicating something important or not, would need to look at contextual info. The decision about conflating the representations of named and non-named things will address a large class of difficulties I encountered.

Proposed grammar behavior: In common noun case, only a single lexical entry with an annotation from the preprocessor, then a non-branching rule sensitive to the property. Trying to avoid having two lexical entries Justice and justice in the chart, so annotators don’t have to decide.

Discussion

Ann: Why aren’t you going for an account where you underspecify and the specify further in the case where you know for sure (e.g. Grumpy and I think Tree went to the party.).

Dan: I think Tree went to the party no choice.

Ann: Not in the chart, but in the MRS. What’s showing the specification there.

Dan: I’m still going to introduce a proper_q_rel in that case. Not proposing to change the inventory of quantifiers.

oe: As I understand it, Dan is looking for a different semantics to give to names that would allow underspecifiation where there is uncertainty/ambiguity between common noun and proper noun. Gist of the proposal is to eliminate CARG and have the predicate carry the lemma info with PN variable property on the ARG0. PN means proper name, not proper name, or don’t know. Would closely correspond to capitalization, but distinct.

Ann: I thought the property was about caps or non-caps.

oe: That often sets it.

Ann: Dan said that property is capitalized or not.

oe: Tree is not coming to the party. caps force [ PN + ].

Ann: I would like the proper_q_rel to go along with the [ PN + ].

Dan: Could be cases where [ PN + ] is underspecified.

Ann: And there’s a proper_q_rel?

Dan: Yes.

Ann: Why?

Dan: The only guys that the word Mr. can attach to are proper names. mr. jones came in. The only way to accept that is by making him a proper name. Risky: ambiguates lots of nouns where case is not indicate.

oe: I would think that jones can be [ PN + ]. In addition to caps, can be other signals that force [ PN + ].

Ann: _proper_q_rel has access to the ARG0 and can enforce [ PN + ].

Dan: I want that value stamped in by the preprocessing to tell me it’s upper case. But that can be done in other places than proper nouns. If you mean PN is has a cap letter, then this isn’t going to work well.

Ann: I want PN and the caps.

Dan: But PNness is given by _proper_q_rel. Why need it redundantly?

Emily: If _proper_q_rel is there with proper and not common, then you’re not underspecifying, just bring the complex ones closer to common nouns. And what about the Department of Justice?

Dan: Right – don’t want _proper_q_rel to be the only sign of a named entity.

Woodley: Does Justice ever get _proper_q_rel?

Dan: No.

Ann: In I think Justice won’t come to the party. it should.

Dan: Don’t want to agonize over Justice will be here, but not State and Transportation.

Ann: In I think Tree isn’t coming to the party. get _proper_q_rel.

Dan: There I know it has to be a proper name.

Ann: So proper names that happen to be mass nouns and those that happen to be common nouns, we see a difference.

Dan: Feature, not a bug: With mass noun proper nouns, get underspecification.

Ann: So many mass nouns that can be proper nouns, won’t get _proper_q_rel for lots of names. Many nouns in the ERG are marked as count or mass. Can we potentially think of a better proposal that doesn’t shift the problem to another type of annotation? Would depend on a system knowing whether you had a mass-or-count sense for this particular entity. A back-end system would be confronted with something that _proper_q_rel would be meaningful, but not the one that goes with mass noun quantifiers. Can we find a version that doesn’t have that property where you can still do underspecification, but only in a way where it really bites you.

Francis: In this world where the ERG in a principled manner pushes off the decision, where do you anticipate the decision being made? Or the output of our system is never going to tell us whether this thing is a name or not?

Dan: We do it where we can, but decline to do it where it would require real world knowledge to do so. That seems to me in keeping with our general strategy. Could go back to asking annotators to make that decision in treebanking, but the annotators would be stuck with consistency problems. I think Justice is really important. — is that someone talking about the person or department [Francis/Emily: both names] or the concept?

Ann: Would be happy with the mass term quantifier being underspecified — preserve the info when we know we have a real mass term, but don’t use that quantifier when it’s underspecified between mass and proper.

Dan: Pumping rule says _udef+or+proper_q_rel in the capitalized mass noun case.

Ann: Want to keep all info there is, plus ability to annotate it when we have it, so you can build an appropriate probabilistic model.

Dan: We have to be careful then to construct a representation that is really underspecified that can be specialized to the precise interpretation we want. Might imagine supplying another piece of machinery (probabilistically driven) that resolves e.g. New York to named entity. Might also be true for Kim in HPSG…

Francis: Sandy

Dan: Might even hardwire the fact that we’re going to swallow the .0001% of cases where it’s wrong and coerce these to named entities, but not in the parser, in a later component.

Francis: What sort of proportion of things are cases where the info is there in treebanking, vs. not? How much effort is really required currently for tree bankers?

Dan: It’s like 50/50. Half the time I could not exactly tell you what I wanted to do with that. Partially because of frequency of Stock Exchange, Department, Ministry that are sometimes capitalized, sometimes not. Get Stock exchange, stock exchange as well. The Chicago Mercantile exchange, the Merc, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Names of indices/composite stocks, sometimes caps, sometimes not. There’s just no way to be consistent about such frequently occurring sometimes capitalized in a domain. Will be a new set in another domain.

Francis: Isn’t some annotator sometime going to have to make this decision?

Dan: About the mercantile exchange? If it’s a domain-driven decision, and there’s statistical info available…

Francis: Where do we get the #s about that decision.

Dan: It’s not an annotator problem, it’s a processing problem. Could pay annotators enough to do it, but don’t want the grammar doing it.

Bec: I’ve certainly seen it in tagging and could work the numbers for you—train a trigger on this and it’s showing randomness, and it’s taking the 55% one, and wrong about 45% of the time.

Dan: In the whole proposal saying let’s take a step back in our ambitions, and I know you hate that. I think the amount of info in the signal is insufficient to sustain the level of differentiation we’d like to have.

Ann: It is for some domains: didn’t come up in VerbMobil, not sure about LOGON, but probably not. When you see a single word by itself with a capital letter, as an annotator can tell. Can see that it’s a problem in this domain, but we shouldn’t end up with a solution where we can’t annotate it when it is possible.

Woodley: So you’re saying it’s speaker meaning and not sentence meaning?

Dan: To the extent that I understand and believe in that distinction, yes. But I also take Ann’s point. In SemCor and other data, it’s not a problem. It’s when we move to a technical domain—I did see it to some extent in the chemistry domain, but there we already had a NE analyzer go before we went in.

Ann: I think Chemistry is a good example where it’s not speaker meaning or sentence meaning but really genuinely unspecified.

oe: I suspect the problem was there well before you got so irritated by it. We didn’t have the general mechanism for introducing names where there is caps until after LOGON. I do remember much debate about choosing between the analyses available in LOGON.

Dan: The Jutenheimen [m|M]ountains

Ann: Not saying you should be able to do all of this in the ERG. Just like with compound_rel could specialize further with other machinery. In cases where the annotator can decide reasonably, should be given the option to leave underspecified.

Emily: I think that entails a different annotation set up, since we can right now just decide among trees. Would need to be able to either say underspecification over these trees, or to specify an additional bit of information.

Dan: I’d be nervous about having individual annotators do that, but rather use the machinery to create a list of things to be treated as named entities–hardwiring choices on a per-domain basis. Maybe even look at frequent up to 5-grams ahead of time as things to consider putting into that list.

Emily: That doesn’t answer my objection though—still choosing between trees in that set up.

Dan: Right — talking about the 99/1 problem. Would need additional machinery to do what you’re talking about. Maybe could even do some repair afterwards of the MRSs without changing the syntactic structures. Not proposing to do that now, just talking about a way to do it that would be relatively modular.

Francis: The thing that potentially worries me there is if we have Wall Street Journal that we list as something to always treat as a NE, if other journals come up and they get the underspecified representation (e.g. Gold Street Journal, occurring only once). Won’t that weirdly affect the statistical model if some things are specified and some are left underspecified?

Dan: If our statistical model was sensitive to… would we have a different looking derivation tree? If there’s a non-branching rule which either leaves the thing underspecified or fixes it to proper or not, but I’m hoping to get away from that. Right now we have two different ones for proper names and mass noun. The proposal comes to making that just one each time that gives _udef-or-proper …

Francis: But if it’s Wall Street Journal and listed in the gazetteer…

Dan: It’ll be different from what I’m doing now. Might be a different mechanism so I can encode that derivation (possibly with something like PN feature), possibly in the projection out of the MRS, and still have just one rule rather than forcing a choice between two rules. Hand wave hand wave.

Francis: Compound followed by journal name, would like the statistical machinery to have a reasonable chance to come up with proper noun and not just underspecified.

Bec:

Dan: Could still have a specialized statistically-driven engine that affects the semantic representation before we ship it out the door, perhaps sensitive to the CAPS feature. One trainable on some external set of data.

Francis/Dan: So trying to do it not just in a sentence by sentence context with the main engine.

Ann: For some domains you definitely need a named-entity resolver preprocessor. In some domains it’ll be very accurate. Don’t want to lose that in the output MRS. It’s a similar sort of situation to when the annotator knows.

Dan: If we build more sophisticated pipelines with either good preprocessors or post-processing of the MRSs. What I’m aiming here to do is to take out our pretense of being able to make that decision sentence-internally with high reliability.

Woodley: With the kind of annotators we have.

Dan: Right.

Francis: The solution of better guidelines have been tried and rejected?

Dan: Not interested in trying to train the annotators better, because we can’t ever get enough training data to get the machine to do it for us. And if we can do that, why

Ann: Different object: if you do it with a whole load of annotation guidelines, whatever you’re doing is not annotation, it’s a fake.

Woodley: What about proper names like CoNLL?

Dan: Johan van Benthem, Ponce de Leon, … the only way to put these together is proper name,

Woodley: Mixed case within a word.

Dan: iPhone

Woodley: Are you losing the info about what about the word was capitalized with a binary CAPS feature.

Dan: Oh, CARG had the info before.

oe: We have an elaborate hierarchy of cap patterns.

Bec: Won’t catch all patterns.

oe: Designed to capture all relevant patterns.

Woodley: All patterns are relevant.

Ann: What about the attribute SURFACE capturing the surface string.

Francis: CFROM/CTO point to SURFACE string of the whole sentence.

Ann: In some versions, it’s on the individual EPs as well…

Woodley: Still not going to work for generation from an MRS. How to generate iPhone or CoNLL form our scheme.

Dan: Where you do think it should come from?

Woodley: Currently, comes from CARG.

Francis: It’s part of the lexical information for iPhone that it looks like this.

oe: No, it’s part of the semantic information on this analysis. From this it would follow that nouns with surprising caps pattern have to be in the generation lexicon.

Dan: Let’s imagine the person supplying the input has a very strong opinion about the capitalization of LaTeX. How do they specify that?

oe: Use a version of the generator that takes semantic info + another channel as input.

Woodley: You’re making fun of this, but it’s a real problem that real people care about that we solve currently.

Ann: I suggest we take what’s in CARG and put it in SURFACE.

oe: Formal status is as parameter to the EP or an additional annotation?

Mike: pyDELPHIN allows SURFACE for the whole MRS.

Emily: In generation, don’t have the whole SURFACE. Want to allow generator input to specify spelling of specific tokens.

Ann: Some versions had EP-level SURFACE.

oe: That would be a way to allow that channel.

Woodley: What about inflection?

Dan: Would have to treat that SURFACE as the stem.

Ann: Right, like iPhones.

Mike: Isn’t that the BASE attribute?

Dan: I think it’s still the case that we’re going to need CARG for numbers. I don’t want _1578_n_rel for cardinal numbers. Still want card_rel with CARG. Could we leave it where it is for nouns, but not instantiate it for normal nouns? If the CARG is different from the relation name in anything but capitalization? Intended use is for LaTeX or CoNLL?

oe: Don’t we want to be a little more deliberate about what we consider part of the semantics and what we consider annotation? CARG I take to be a constant, a parameter. The SURFACE I wasn’t aware of, but it looks to me like it’s not part of the semantics.

Dan: Neither is the capitalization feature.

oe: I had interpreted PN as a way of presenting that as semantics.

[…]

oe: Let’s not overload CARG and maintain the distinction between CARG and BASE/SURFACE.

Ann: There is a canonical spelling of iPhone — it’s a spelling error if you don’t follow. Currenlty we keep this in CARG and under the proposal we’d lose that because the pred name wouldn’t keep that capitalization? Why?

oe: We’d have to undo the declaration that pred names aren’t case sensitive.

Ann: The strong claim was that caps could only be relevant for English where there was CARG or other observable semantic properties … and we wouldn’t be treating iPhones as a proper name as in There were three iPhones lying on the table.

Francis/Emily: Not a proper name.

Emily: I broke my iPhone — how is that a proper name?

Dan: I bought a Ford yesterday. Surely Ford is a proper name?

Emily: Why?

Dan: You’ll note that this will be avoided by the solution proposed here. I bought a new GlumP yesterday — the caps show that it’s out of the name of normalcy.

Francis: But there you get the _a_q_rel, correctly, I think.

Francis/Emily: So not a proper name.

Dan: My Jimmy is 10 feet tall — still a proper name, but the language lets you do that. No proper_q_rel.

Francis: Other places where different spellings give the same PRED, like Thursday and Thurs — same lemma in PRED, but different BASE/SURFACE.

Dan: Does the broad direction seem plausible?

Emily: Not sure yet what the hallmark of a proper name is. proper_q_rel isn’t always there. And PN/CAPS isn’t yet really semantics.

Dan: It’s just recording for you everything I can see in the syntax, but no more.

Emily: Not sure about the relationship between proper name and named entity.

Dan: A terminology question?

Emily: I think you’ve been using proper name in this discussion where I’d use named entity. The things that the formal semanticists have worried about Kim and Sandy and even the Alps, but not iPhone.

Ann: Note the difference between I drove my Ford. and I went through my ford. — would have a caps difference. I don’t either of those are proper names. I think it’s a common noun convenitally always spelled with a capital letter. There are common nouns where it’s always a capital letter and it does sense disambiguation.

Last update: 2014-07-18 by EmilyBender [edit]