How much knowledge of English Grammar is needed to understand the dictionary?

[Calvin Irby]

Hi all,

I had a question while reading the "Parsing English with a Link Grammar" paper and wanted to know how much about English Grammar is  probably a requirement before understanding how all the linkages work?

It seems like in all the examples worked there is a huge gap of knowledge. So before tackling this paper and reading it all, would it make more sense for someone to have some background knowledge in English Grammar? Because right now I feel like while reading it the author assumes that the reader is already knowledgeable of grammar and how to parse sentences.

For example, would reading a book like this: Analyzing English Grammar 7th Edition help at all with the process? Or is there something else out there that is better. I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions and thoughts.

-Calvin

[Mike Dowd]

From my experience trying to understand the dictionary the past couple of months, this goes wayyyyy beyond anything you will have learned in school. And mostly likely way beyond anything you can learn in one book. Plus they are breaking new ground with a number of concepts, due to their fine-grained approach to grammar.

[Calvin Irby]

So what you are saying Mike: it's probably best to just go through the dictionary or recreate my own while reading the papers and linkages. Is that what you are saying is the best way to learn it? If so, what approach would you take in checking the Link-Grammar parser itself? Do you just intuitively know from experience or do you have any previous formal grammar training like my original question implies. 

[Mike Dowd]

You may already know this, but just making sure.

The website has lots of valuable documentation: https://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/

Go through every page. There is one on writing your own dictionary.

This page is particularly helpful, and all the pages it links to: https://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/dict/summarize-links.html

File 4.0.dict in the En directory is the heart of the English dictionary. All the comments there are super helpful.

As for me  personally, I would face changing the dictionary with a lot of trepidation. It appears to me from the rules and the documentation that you need a lot of context to understand the link types. Maybe something of an exaggeration, but it feels like you need to understand *all* the link types in order to know how to use any of them. I don't have any formal training. And I have found that, extensive as it is, the documentation isn't enough to answer questions I have. I keep link-parser running and try things out to see what happens.

Wiktionary is the best online dictionary I have found in terms of going in parts-of-speech. https://www.wiktionary.org

[Anton Kolonin @ Gmail]

Ideally, just start from https://github.com/opencog/link-grammar/blob/master/data/en/4.0.dict

I would love if there were some LG-explorer to navigate the grammar tree, like we were prototyping here:

http://langlearn.singularitynet.io/graph.html

JIC, If someone would like to proceed in this direction, I would be happy to be part of communication, we also have telegram chat do discuss such matters

https://t.me/internlp

-Anton

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[Calvin Irby]

Thanks everyone for the responses and the links! I was aware of most of them, but using Wiktionary was something I never thought of. And with that, back to the command line! Lol

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Calvin,

On Mon, Mar 7, 2022 at 10:11 PM Calvin Irby <calvin...@gmail.com> wrote:

So what you are saying Mike: it's probably best to just go through the dictionary or recreate my own while reading the papers and linkages. Is that what you are saying is the best way to learn it? If so, what approach would you take in checking the Link-Grammar parser itself? Do you just intuitively know from experience or do you have any previous formal grammar training like my original question implies. 

Some very quick remarks:

-- The English dict is the culmination of many man-years of work by professional lingusits. I really mean years of 40+ hours/week of work.

-- You can verify that it's correct by typing in sentences, and then checking that the linkages "make sense".  As an example, a grad student did this for his master's thesis, circa 2003 or 2005 or 2007, he checked 230 different sentences, and found that almost all of them were parsed correctly. You can find his thesis and all 230 sentences, in the list of papers published on the website. BTW, reading his thesis might be the easiest way to learn LG, maybe?

-- There are assorted short-cuts you can take for creating new languages. For example, the Russian dict (yes, yes, I've been doing nothing but reading news about ukraine 24x7 for the last 12 days...) Sergei Protaseiv took an earlier, large existing morphology dictionary from aot.ru, ran it through some complex scripts, and created the LG dict for Russian from it; he hand-authored maybe 50 or 100 additional rules to glue it all together. I am guessing it took him maybe a year? to do this? Maybe more maybe less?

-- The brand-new Thai dict followed a similar pattern I think. Much shorter times-scale, though.

-- It might be "easy" to do spanish or french this way, by starting with wikidictionary data.  I cannot say much about the quality of such results. It's easy to get started, its very hard to push the quality up high.

-- To successfully modify the existing English dict, yes, you have to more-or-less memorize all 100+ link types, or at least be prepared to read and re-read and re-re-read the documentation and think quite hard about things.

Linas.

On Monday, March 7, 2022 at 12:01:27 PM UTC-6 Mike Dowd wrote:

From my experience trying to understand the dictionary the past couple of months, this goes wayyyyy beyond anything you will have learned in school. And mostly likely way beyond anything you can learn in one book. Plus they are breaking new ground with a number of concepts, due to their fine-grained approach to grammar.

On Monday, March 7, 2022 at 8:03:26 AM UTC-8 calvin...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all,

I had a question while reading the "Parsing English with a Link Grammar" paper and wanted to know how much about English Grammar is  probably a requirement before understanding how all the linkages work?

It seems like in all the examples worked there is a huge gap of knowledge. So before tackling this paper and reading it all, would it make more sense for someone to have some background knowledge in English Grammar? Because right now I feel like while reading it the author assumes that the reader is already knowledgeable of grammar and how to parse sentences.

For example, would reading a book like this: Analyzing English Grammar 7th Edition help at all with the process? Or is there something else out there that is better. I'm interested in hearing other people's opinions and thoughts.

-Calvin

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[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Anton,

You may have noticed I've been gently trying to convince our Croatian friend Ivan Vodishek to implement generic graph visualization -- I've got datasets of tens of thousands of words with millions of edges between them burning holes in my pocket ... I think it would be fun to navigate those graphs. We'll see .... have you seen those emails? They're on the opencog mailing list.

I'm hoping for a minimalist API -- - given a word, return a ranked list of weighted edges, and then draw as many of these as reasonable, at some reasonable frame rate.  This would be purely graphical; anything beyond this API is bonus points.

--linas

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/link-grammar/d960870c-76cb-ce38-92eb-94e8b43b2e03%40gmail.com.

[Anton Kolonin @ Gmail]

Hi Linas, have not seen that thread, it would be fun, yeah.

Can continue this thread in the LG list here.

Another option is to use browser-side JS to handle the entire LG graph but it might be not efficient from performance standpoint - JS-based graph rendering toolkits stuck starting first thousands of nodes/edges.

Anyway, in the latter case I welcome to re-use my JS-graph framework (referenced below), if appears usable.  

Cheers,

-Anton

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/link-grammar/CAHrUA37xz1sFzp3%2BiF%3D94BZkN2Wp%2BCri5wu8KkrDBOa-7e%3D6Gw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Anton,

We've got an abundance of half-finished visualization tools that no one wants to maintain.  So I don't want to derail Ivan in any way.  I want to keep API's minimal and super-simple.

One of the older visualizers is is in javascript, and its very pretty, very nice graph. Problem was it came with a bunch of buttons that were attached to the atomspace in various crazy and unmaintainable ways. Ripping out the 50% that was just plain wrong would be the right place to start, and surely not hard for someone who knows javascript.  But since Ivan is already moving down his own path, I do not want to derail him ....

--linas