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Thank you to everyone who contributed data to how your language identifies its arguments! The data collection is ongoing so please contribute data points for languages you know!

How Ubiquity identifies its arguments

Currently when writing a command in Ubiquity you must specify two properties for each argument: a modifier (the appropriate adposition—the direct object excluded) and the noun type. Here are some quick examples from the standard commands:

email:

• direct object (noun_arb_text)
• to (noun_type_contact)

translate:

• direct object (noun_arb_text)
• to (noun_type_language)
• from (noun_type_language)

This way of specifying arguments has a few shortcomings. First of all, it requires you to identify each type of argument by unique adposition, which does not support languages with case marking nor languages with sets of synonymous adpositions (e.g. French {à la, au, aux}). Second, as we saw in how your language identifies its arguments some languages don’t mark semantic roles on the arguments at all and the current system of specifying arguments is completely incompatible with these languages. Third, the current specification requires command authors to make localized versions of their commands, specifying the language-appropriate modifiers.

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Earlier today I blogged on three different strategies languages use to mark the roles of different arguments: word order, marking on the arguments, and marking on the verbs.

I gathered some data from the fantastic World Atlas of Language Structures to put together a survey of many of the languages on the Internet. For each of the languages, I got the canonical word order and whether the language marks the role of its argument on the verb and/or the arguments themselves.

As you can see, there are a number of data points that are still missing. Please contribute information on the languages you speak! You can edit the spreadsheet on Google Docs. Thanks!

UPDATE: Contribute information on how your language identifies its arguments here.

When we execute a command in Ubiquity, in very simple terms, we’re hoping to do something (a verb) to some arguments (the nouns). Every sentence in every language uses some method to encode which arguments correspond to which roles of the verb. Here are a couple examples:

1
2

He sees Mary.
彼が Maryを 見る。 (Kare-ga Mary-o miru.)

As speakers of English, you can read sentence (1) above and know exactly who is doing the seeing and who is being seen and speakers of Japanese can get the same information from (2). How do different languages code for arguments in different roles? There are, broadly speaking, three different ways:

We’ll take a brief look today at these three different strategies, all of which a localizeable natural language interface will surely encounter.

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