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A week or two ago while visiting California, Jono and I had a productive charrette, resulting in a new architecture proposal for the Ubiquity parser, as laid out in Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation. The new architecture is designed to support (1) the use of overlord verbs, (2) writing verbs by semantic roles, and (3) better suggestions for verb-final languages and other argument-first contexts. I’m happy to say that I’ve spent some time putting a proof-of-concept together.

I’ve implemented the basic algorithm of this parser for left-branching languages (like English) and also implemented some fake English verbs, noun types, and semantic roles. This demo should give you a basic sense of how this parser will attempt to identify different types of arguments and check their noun types even without clearly knowing the verb. This should make the suggestion ranking much smarter, particularly for verb-final contexts. (For a good example, try from Tokyo to San Francisco.)

➔ Check out the Ubiquity next-gen parser demo

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flod put up a nice blog post on thinking about Ubiquity in Italian. flod points out that what seems natural to him as a speaker is the use of the imperative form of the verbs, but that some verbs may not translate neatly, even following the overlord verbs proposal:

For example, the verb “make” is quite difficult to translate (too generic): “to make” could be “fare”, but “fare grassetto” (”make bold”) doesn’t make any sense, people would use more specific verbs:

• make bold -> trasforma in grassetto (sounds like “change to bold”)
• make page editable -> rendi pagina modificabile

This is a great point. Although the overlord verbs may naturally map into many languages, it may not be perfect for some commands in some languages. Where would English overlord verbs not translate well into your language?

I suggest on flod’s blog that a “synonym” system could be implemented to map single verbs to specific overlord’ed functionality, but these would definitely have to be done on a language-specific basis, unfortunately adding a little work to the localization process.