Today I’ll examine highlight some disparate typological data to help us understand these questions: where’s the verb? and what does the verb look like? There are broadly three different verb forms taken in commands in different languages:¹

1. the infinitive,
2. subjunctive mood, or
3. a special verb form such as imperative, participial, or conjunctive (such as Japanese て form)

Let’s give an example of each:

Infinitive (English):²

1

Hit me!

Subjunctive mood (Modern Greek): “Eat it all!”

2
3

Na   to fas olo!
SUBJ it eat all

Imperative form (French): “Eat it!”

4
5

Mange   -le!
eat.IMP it

It’s important to note that some languages have multiple forms available for the same command. For example:

Dutch: three ways to say “watch out!” with the same verb

1. Infinitive: Oppassen!
2. Imperative: Pas op!
3. Participial: Opgepast!

Similarly, I received a great comment by PhiliKON on German and associated data by Robert Kaiser on my blog post yesterday:

German: “search hello with google”

1. Infinitive: hello mit google suchen
2. Imperative: suche hello mit google

In addition, German and Dutch are interesting as they are verb second (V2) languages, so the verb may surface at the beginning or the end of the sentence, depending on the form.

The new parser design (which you can demo) assumes for simplicity that the verb should be found at the beginning or the end of the input, which is consistent with the data I’ve seen (modulo clitics). Multiple verb forms could be accounted for by supporting “synonyms” of the verbs.

What are the different ways verbs are expressed in commands in your language? Is the verb always found at the beginning or the end of the sentence? Is it ever somewhere in the middle?

Related posts:

1. Ubiquity i18n: questions to ask
2. Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation Demo
3. Contribute: how your language identifies its 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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