Experimental Features in ACE

This page describes some features that have been added to ACE over the course of minor revisions that are not well-tested enough to be considered robust, but may be of interest to some users.

  • Ubertagging – as of 0.9.21, ACE can perform ubertagging to prune unlikely lexemes / tokenizations. Adding the following block to ace/config.tdl for (e.g. May 13th 2015 preview of) ERG 1214 enables usage of the –ubertagging=0.001 commandline option:
;; übertagging settings
übertag-emission-path := "../ut/nanc_wsj_redwoods_noaffix.ex.gz".
übertag-transition-path := "../ut/nanc_wsj_redwoods_noaffix.tx.gz".
übertag-generic-map-path := "../ut/generics.cfg".

Note that the PET implementation of UT has a lot more bells and whistles than the ACE implementation, at least for now (various tag types, whitelists…).

  • The LogonTransfer system – as of version 0.9.11, ACE has relatively complete support for this (see AceTransfer for implementation details). To translate from Japanese to English, for example:
$ ace -G jacy.dat -g logon/dfki/jacy/ace/config.tdl
[various output...]
$ ace -G erg.dat -g erg-1214/ace/config.tdl
[various output...]
$ ace -G jaen.dat -g logon/uio/tm/jaen/ace/config.tdl
[various output...]
$ echo "犬 が 猫 を 食べる" | ace -g jacy.dat -1Tf 2>/dev/null | ace -g jaen.dat 2>/dev/null | ace -g erg.dat -e1 2>/dev/null
The dog eats the cat.
$

Note that JaCY does not work properly out-of-the-box with ACE; you will need an SVN update at least as recent as late January 2013 of JaCY, and you will additionally need need to comment out the line including “lex/generics.tdl” in the file japanese.tdl. Also, to compile the ERG from a working directory other than the ACE directory (as shown above), you will need ace-0.9.13, and unknown word handling will not work.

  • Detailed time profiling. When run with the -i option, ACE produces a report of how much time was spent in various system components. For parsing, chart mapping, and transfer, the amount of time spent in each rule is included. Most of the other measurements are somewhat coarser, such as “semantic lookup” and “idiom checking”.
  • Pre-generation transfer phase: input MRSes can undergo a set of transfer rules in a .mtr file defined by the ‘generation-fixup-rules’ configuration setting. This is fairly robust.
  • Post-unpacking transfer phase: output MRSes can undergo a set of transfer rules in a .mtr file defined by the ‘cleanup-rules’ configuration setting.
  • Post-generation token mapping phase: output surface strings can undergo a set of token mapping rules, defined by TDL status “post-generation-mapping-rule”. This can be used, for example, to conjoin tokens like the possessive ‘s in English and to adjust uppercase/lowercase.
  • Token mapping flow control: token mapping rules can have a +JUMP property that enables nonlinear processing through a set of rules (e.g. skipping a section if a condition is met, or looping).
  • ICONS – “individual constraints”: this is an additional top-level property on MRS structures, analogous to the existing HCONS list. ACE is agnostic as to the types of the constraints, but structurally they look like < x17 some-constraint x4 >. Possible uses include recording information structure and binding constraints that the syntax makes available but MRS did not previously provide a convenient place to store. You will need to configure enable-icons := yes. in all relevant grammars (i.e. source and target language, and transfer grammar in an MT setup). In generation, ICONS adds an additional layer to the semantic compatibility test: every ICONS in the input MRS must be realized by the output, possibly with a more specific type. Extra ICONS elements on the generator output do not cause the test to fail.

Disclaimer

There may not be enough information on this page to successfully try out some of these features. Contact WoodleyPackard if you want to deploy something and need help.

Last update: 2015-08-25 by DanFlickinger [edit]