Something to consider…

As we rewrite these current commands to specify semantic roles instead of specific modifiers, it is important to distinguish between synonymous prepositions in English which actually map to different semantic roles. Here are two examples:

• with: English “with” can refer to one of two relations: “together-with” as in “share this with Jono” and “using-with” as in “share this with delicious” or “eat this with a fork.”
• in: “in”, similarly, can refer to two different relations: “location-in” as in “find mexican food in Tokyo” and “format-in” as in “search Moscow in Russian” or “save this page in PDF.”

A quick test for such cases is “would these markers translate to the same markers in a different language?” It’s easy to find a language where the two different “with”s and the two different “in”s are expressed using different words. With semantic roles in Parser TNG, it’s okay for multiple semantic roles to share the same delimiters/markers.

A proposed set of semantic roles

Here is a set of semantic roles which I would like to propose. Keep in mind that these roles should map to morphological features in languages, not necessarily to the type of content in the argument (which is why we also will keep the noun types).

• object: direct object (the default or unmarked argument)
• goal: the goal or end point of (metaphorical) movement or transition
  • example: in English, arguments marked by “to”, “into”, “toward”, etc.
• source: the source or starting point of (metaphorical) movement or transition¹
  • example: in English, arguments marked by “from”, “by”, etc.
• position: refers to a (metaphorical) location which defines the scope of an action, in contrast to goal and source.
  • example: in English, arguments marked by “in”, “at”, “near”, etc.
• instrument: a tool or intermediary to be used
  • example: in English, arguments marked by “using” or “with”, as in “bookmark this with delicious.”
• format: describes the intended or expected form of the result
  • example: in English, arguments marked by “in” as in “in PDF form” or “in German”
• alias: a name or reference to
  • example: in English, arguments marked by “as” as in “tag this as new” or “login to mail as aza.”

Note that all three locational roles, goal, source, and location may be used for both times and places as the morphological marking of temporal and spacial expressions are often conflated in language. The appropriate type of referent (time or space) can then be specified with the noun type.

As a quick sanity check of this proposal, here are all the standard feeds built into Ubiquity which have multiple arguments together with what semantic role is appropriate for each argument:

The only problematic standard command, then, is the share-on-delicious command which can take both tags and a title, both of which would most naturally correspond to the alias role. If you have a suggestion for how best to deal with this type of case, I’d love to hear your suggestions!

We’d love to get your feedback to this proposed set of semantic roles. How do you feel about the proposed set of semantic roles laid out here? In particular, if you have a command or can envision a command which would like to use a semantic role which does not fit any of these roles or would take multiple arguments of the same role, please let us know! ^^

Related posts:

1. Writing commands with semantic roles
2. Ubiquity Commands by The Numbers
3. Three ways to argue over arguments

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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

Clicking on the environment info will give you some information on the specific verbs, noun types, and roles implemented. You can also scroll through the current parse section to see the step by step derivation of how the suggested parses were constructed.

I’ll be flying about 15 hours in the next hour as I make my way back to Japan… hopefully I’ll make some more progress on the plane! I’ll look forward to your comments! For those of you interested in checking out the code yourself, you can find it on BitBucket.

Related posts:

1. Writing commands with semantic roles
2. Ubiquity in Firefox: Focus on Japanese
3. User-Aided Disambiguation: a demo

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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.

In a perfect world the last issue could be solved (at least for languages which mark semantic roles with adpositions) by a mapping of English prepositions to the target language adpositions. Indeed, for some adpositions in some languages this may be possible:

However, some English prepositions do not cleanly map to a particular adpositions. Take, for example, English “with.” This “with” may map to different markings in Chinese and Japanese depending on the sentence:

Note, however, that which set of markings “with” maps to is predictable, as there is a salient semantic difference. The first “with” could be referred to as together-with while the second is a using-with. With this distinction, we can easily predict which paradigm the “with” in “search with Google” should use, because these two “with” arguments represent two different semantic roles.

A proposal: identifying arguments by semantic role¹

Suppose commands could specify their arguments by referring to these semantic roles in lieu of adpositions as they currently do. This way, we would be able to automatically map commands into different languages. For example, you could write a new command called move with the following argument structure:

move:

• role_object (noun_arb_text)
• role_goal (noun_type_geolocation)
• role_source (noun_type_geolocation)

The English mapping of ” => role_object, ‘to’ => role_goal, ‘from’ => role_source could be used to parse the command

move truck from Tokyo to Paris

In addition, with the Japanese mapping of ‘が’ => role_object, ‘に’ => role_goal, ‘から’ => role_source, you could immediately use the command in Japanese as well:

東京からパリにトラックをmoveして

In essence, this proposal would let command authors get their commands localized for free, as long as they stick to a predefined set of semantic roles. For more complex commands and legacy commands, of course, commands could optionally specify particular English modifiers, but then Ubiquity would simply not attempt to localize those commands.

In addition, each language specific parser would determine how to identify its arguments. This would allow languages with case marking or no role marking on arguments at all to handle their own mapping of arguments to semantic roles and still use shared commands. Even parsers such as English would benefit by letting the parser deal with synonymous prepositions and possibly even argument structure alternations (such as English ditransitive alternations).

As a starting point, we could use argument types based on the list of semantic roles given in Fillmore (1971):

• Object: the entity that moves or changes or whose position or existence is in consideration
• Result: the entity that comes into existence as a result of the action
• Instrument: the stimulus or immediate physical cause of an event
• Source: the place from which something moves
• Goal: the place to which something moves
• Experiencer: the entity which receives or accepts or experiences or undergoes the effect of an action …

Comments welcome!

As command authors and Ubiquity users, how do you feel about this proposal? How might this affect, simplify, or complicate the localization of Ubiquity into your language? Thank you in advance! ^^

Related posts:

1. Three ways to argue over arguments
2. Contribute: how your language identifies its arguments
3. Ubiquity in Firefox: Focus on Japanese

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