Reading Group - Summer 2006: Tree Adjoining Grammars

Location: T-9406 (TASC-1) Where is TASC-1?
Time: 2-3:30pm Wednesday

Mailing List: tag-rg-06 _at_ sfu.ca (always prefix "tag-rg-06: " to all messages sent to this list)

This is a reading group on Tree-Adjoining Grammars with a focus on issues related to linguistics and computer-science. In the first few meetings we will start with a more tutorial style where we will get up to speed on the following topics:

Formal grammar aspects of TAG
Lexicalization in grammars and efficient parsing algorithms for TAG
Explanatory power of TAG for syntax of natural language like raising, crossing dependencies and long-distance dependencies/movement.
Variants of TAG like synchronous TAG, tree-local multi-component TAG, etc.

After these initial meetings, we will focus on:

How to use computationally efficient methods for compositional semantics. How to do semantics using synchronous TAG grammars. (we plan to compare and contrast with how semantics has been done in different ways in TAG and in other formalisms like HPSG)
Interesting linguistics issues in compositional semantics and how locality in TAG can be used to address various linguistic phenomena.
Formal aspects of synchronous TAG grammars and their close relation to tree automata/ tree transducers.
Applications of synchronous TAG to NLP applications like machine translation.

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Important Dates:

May 10: First meeting of the reading group

Weekly Readings

Papers listed as Additional Readings are additional references relevant to the topic at hand but you don't need to read them for the meeting.

May 10: Introduction to Tree-Adjoining Grammars (TAG)
- Formal Language, Natural Language and Tree Adjoining Grammars (tutorial slides). Anoop Sarkar.
- Abeillé, Anne and Rambow, Owen, 2000. Tree Adjoining Grammar: An Overview. In Abeillé, Anne; and Rambow, Owen, editors, Tree Adjoining Grammars: Formalisms, Linguistic Analyses and Processing. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.
May 17: TAG Formalism
- Introduction to TAG-based Linguistic Theory (tutorial slides). Chung-hye Han.
- Joshi, A.K. and Schabes, Y.; Tree-Adjoining Grammars, in Handbook of Formal Languages, G. Rozenberg and A. Salomaa (eds.), Vol. 3, Springer, Berlin, New York, 1997, 69 - 124.
May 24: TAG Formalism (cont'd) and TAG Variants
- We will finish up any remaining aspects of the introductory material concerning the TAG formalism from the papers of the last two weeks.
- We will informally cover variants of TAG such as TAG with feature structures, multi-component TAGs (MCTAG) and some linguistic analysis that depends on MCTAGs.
- Additional reading: Chapters 2 and 4 from Characterizing Mildly Context-Sensitive Grammar Formalisms. David J. Weir. Phd Dissertation. Department of Computer and Information Science. University of Pennsylvania. 1988.
May 31: Linguistic Relevance of TAG
- Tree-adjoining grammars: how much context-sensitivity is required to provide reasonable structural descriptions?. Aravind Joshi. In Natural Language Parsing, Eds. D. Dowty, L. Karttunen and A. Zwicky. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
- The Linguistic Relevance of TAG. Anthony S. Kroch and Aravind K. Joshi. University of Pennsylvania Technical Report, MS-CIS-85-16. 1985
Jun 7: Synchronous TAG (intro)
- Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammars. S. Shieber and Y. Schabes. In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: COLING-1990, pages 253-258, Helsinki, Finland, 1990.
Jun 14: Synchronous TAG
- Sections 1-4 of An Alternative Conception of Tree-adjoining Derivation. Yves Schabes and Stuart M. Shieber. Computational Linguistics, Volume 20, Number 1, March 1994.
- Restricting the weak-generative capacity of synchronous tree-adjoining grammars. Stuart M. Shieber. Computational Intelligence, 10(4):371-385, November 1994. Also available as cmp-lg/9404003.
- Generation and synchronous tree-adjoining grammars. Stuart M. Shieber and Yves Schabes. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation, pages 9-14, 1990.
- Additional Reading: Synchronous grammars as tree transducers. Stuart M. Shieber. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammar and Related Formalisms (TAG+ 7), Vancouver, Canada, May 20-22 2004.
- Additional Reading: Unifying synchronous tree-adjoining grammars and tree transducers via bimorphisms. Stuart M. Shieber. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-06), Trento, Italy, 3-7 April 2006.
- Additional reading: Induction of probabilistic synchronous tree-insertion grammars. Rebecca Nesson, Alexander Rush, and Stuart M. Shieber. Technical Report TR-20-05, Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2005.
Jun 21: Synchronous TAG
- LTAG Semantics with Semantic Unification. Laura Kallmeyer and Maribel Romero. Proceedings of TAG+7. Vancouver, May 2004, 155-162.
- Pied-Piping in Relative Clauses: Syntax and Compositional Semantics based on Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar. Chung-hye Han. Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+8). COLING-ACL 2006 workshop, Sydney, Australia.
- Simpler TAG Semantics through Synchronization. Rebecca Nesson and Stuart M. Shieber. In FG-2006: The 11th conference on Formal Grammar. Malaga, Spain, July 29-30, 2006. Warning: submission version only, not the final version, please do not distribute further.
Jun 26 (1pm, usual place): Corpora for NL semantics
- Learning to Map Sentences to Logical Form: Structured Classification with Probabilistic Categorial Grammars. Luke S. Zettlemoyer and Michael Collins. In Proceedings of the Twenty First Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-05), 2005.
- A Statistical Semantic Parser that Integrates Syntax and Semantics. Ge, R. and Mooney, R.J. Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 9--16, June 2005.
- Using Multiple Clause Constructors in Inductive Logic Programming for Semantic Parsing. Lappoon R. Tang and Raymond J. Mooney. Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML-2001), pp. 466-477, Freiburg, Germany, September 2001.
- The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles. Martha Palmer, Daniel Gildea, and Paul Kingsbury. Computational Linguistics, 31(1):71-106, 2005.

tag-rg-06 _at_ sfu.ca