AceCsaw

This page describes how to use and train models for csaw in combination with ACE. csaw was written and is maintained by WoodleyPackard.

There is more information at the upstream page. You can download the software from here.

The basic idea is to extract a PCFG from an HPSG-parsed corpus, use ordinary PCFG techniques to derive approximate HPSG derivations for unseen sentences, and then use robust unification to derive MRS structures from those approximate derivations. It builds on earlier work by Yi Zhong, Stephan Oepen, and others.

Using the PCFG (with ACE)

You can use this in a stand alone csaw, or together with ace.

export CSAW_USE_ACE_TAGGER=true 
echo "My sentence." | ./csaw path/to/my/grammar.dat treebank.pcfg

echo "My sentence." | .ace -g path/to/my/grammar.dat --pcfg=treebank.pcfg

The CSAW_USE_ACE_TAGGER setting is only relevant when using CSAW separately from ACE. CSAW's default is to invoke TNT with the WSJ model, from the presumed-to-be-installed LOGON tree. If you don't want that (e.g. using a non-English language, or prefer the ACE tagger), use CSAW_USE_ACE_TAGGER=true.

Training the PCFG

Start a master

./exmaster treebank.pcfg

In a different terminal, start a worker for each treebanked profile. The arguments are grammar, profile, server host, level of grandparenting (default is 2).

./exworker ../path/to/grammar.dat ../path/to/profile/ localhost 0

When all the workers have finished their profiles, go back to the master and kill it with ^C. It will then write out the pcfg.

Note, you can train on parsed, but non-treebanked profiles, in this case parse and store only the top one.

References

Zhang, Yi, and Hans-Ulrich Krieger. "Large-scale corpus-driven PCFG approximation of an HPSG." Proceedings of the 12th international conference on parsing technologies. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011.

Yi Zhang, Stephan Oepen, Rebecca Dridan, Dan Flickinger, and Hans-Ulrich Krieger. In prep. Robust parsing, meaning composition, and evaluation: Integrating grammar approximation, default unification, and elementary semantic dependencies. Accessed Feb-01-2017 from: http://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/people/aca/oe/robustness.pdf