Jono and I have recently been working to incorporate the Parser The Next Generation into Ubiquity proper, and this of course involves the process of retooling the standard commands with semantic roles. The first step, however, is to come up with a list of universal semantic roles which the verbs will be rewritten to use and individual languages’ parsers will be built to identify. Today I have just such a proposal.
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.)
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!
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:
noun_arb_text)to (noun_type_contact)translate:
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.