I'm loving all these emails but I find it hard to keep track of the different topics. Someone find me a Wiki!
So, your question, Adam: "What do you think about conjugation and declension functions?"
In general, I'm against them. (Well, I'm English. What would you expect?)
That said, I would expect correct inflections of natural language output (and valid inferences from natural language input). I just wonder whether we need specific functions for this and, if we do, whether they need to be generic across languages. My view at the moment is that we need neither.
Instead, I see inflections as special cases of vocabulary and structure selection. To refer to your example, Bobby and the ball can be related in many ways, depending on the context. If we assume "Association Football" (soccer), we might default to kicking. But if it's a foul, we should assume he handled the ball. Otherwise, we can only assume (lawful) contact. Staying on topic: "assume" is uninflected, so we might infer the present tense; "kicking" might be a present participle but I think it's a gerund; "it's" implies the present tense but "handled" implies the past (if it's not passive). So, if I need to inflect the concept Bobby-kicking-the-ball, I'm expecting to end up with "Bobby kicked the ball"... But maybe he "didn't kick the ball". Maybe he "used to kick the ball" but now he's a goalkeeper he "can handle the ball" without its being a foul.
So, if you like, we have some extra dimensions of inflection, to do with negatives and interrogatives and modes and word function (should it be "Bobby's handling the ball is lawful" or "Bobby handling the ball is lawful" or "Bobby's handling OF the ball WAS lawful" or "handling the ball was lawful for Bobby"). Considering only results, maybe these are just minor tweaks of the near-final result. That's my "lazy evaluation" perspective.
Perhaps it's worth re-visiting forms of a word. Let's say English has a handful of forms ("kick", "kicks", "kick's", "kicks'", "kicking", "kickings", "kicking's", "kickings'", "kicked"... and you might just treat "kicked" as a noun) but empirically there are just three (what?!): "kick", "kicking" and "kicked" (each of which has more than one use). Then there are rules about adding an s (with or without an apostrophe) that are more or less universal (and, of course, ambiguous). So my lazy English rules would be: decide which of the three is best; add an s (or not); (if written) use an apostrophe (or not). Okay, so that's not quite right, but I think it's nearer to the truth than is generally supposed. The point is, if we start with forms that actually occur (and here I would extend forms to include auxiliary words) and then consider what rules different forms in and out (when we need to), we won't necessarily end up with traditional patterns. We might end up with something more interesting and more useful (or of greater interest and more use, to "inflect" differently).
Best regards,
Alan [has general form "Al."]
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Today's Topics:
1. Conjugation and Declension Functions (Adam Sobieski)
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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 07:01:08 +0000
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
To: "General public mailing list for the discussion of Abstract
Wikipedia (aka Wikilambda)" <abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Abstract-wikipedia] Conjugation and Declension Functions
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Louis indicated that we should consider modeling and approaches encompassing the features of all languages [1].
Factors that affect verb conjugation are numerous and we can envision a verb conjugation function which gathers these factors together from across languages, a function resembling:
conjugate(language, stem, person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, formality, clusivity, transitivity, valency, evidentiality)
The following example utilizes a Context parameter as we haven’t yet discussed global variables. The following example uses a “::” syntax for enums. The following example shows that, with multilingual conjugation and declension functions, we could encapsulate multilingual conjugation and declension in language-specific convenience functions, perhaps resembling:
kick<T>(Context context, Noun agent, Noun patient)
{
join(" ", [
agent,
context.conjugate("en-US", "kick", person::second, agent.number, agent.gender, T, aspect::perfective, mood::indicative, voice::active, context.formality, clusivity::no, transitivity::transitive, valency::transitive, context.evidentiality),
"the",
patient
])
}
and, as expected:
kick<tense::past>(context, Bobby, ball) would produce: “Bobby kicked the ball”.
It appears that there are a multitude of ways to approach implementing NLG-related Wikilambda functions. Conjugation and declension functions could be components of some approaches.
What do you think about conjugation and declension functions?
Best regards,
Adam
[1] https://wals.info/
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