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proper names with spaces

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Robert
2007-03-16
2013-04-08
  • Robert

    Robert - 2007-03-16

    Hello all,
       First off, thank you for your excellent work on this project.  I am still just learning both CCG and openCCG, but I am finding it to be very exciting stuff.  My question is about how to represent sets of words that are separated by spaces but that all actually make up a single given "thing" in the sentence.

       For example, if you want to represent something like a sports team name such as "New York Mets."  It is made up of three words, but it is all one "thing" for the sentence.

       Lets say you have a grammar such as the one in Steedman's very short introduction to CCG. ( I apologize for the horrid ASCII here):

    Mary    likes      musicals
    ---- -----------  ----------
    NP   (S\NP)/NP      NP
          -------------------->
                  S\NP
    ----------------<
           S

    Is there an easy way to have the NP that is made up of the word "Mary" above be represented by an arbitrary number of nouns?  So that a sentence like "New York mets love chicken" would validly parse without requiring something like underscores in a proper name to make it all "one word?"

    Expressing something like this in BNF form would be like:
    S  -> NP VP
    NP -> N NP | N
    VP -> V NP

    I apologize if this is already explained somewhere that I havent come across yet, but I sincerely thank you all for your time and effort. :)

     
    • Michael White

      Michael White - 2007-03-18

      For named entities, it's probably easiest to handle these outside of OpenCCG, and then just group them with underscores.  Otherwise, you can use N/N categories and unary rules, eg N => NP, as in the CCGbank.  I believe the treatment of such NPs is discussed in the CCGbank manual (see below).

      -Mike

      from http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccg/publications.html:

      Julia Hockenmaier and Mark Steedman (2005). CCGbank: User's Manual. Technical Report MS-CIS-05-09, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania.
      http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~juliahr/Papers/CCGbank/CCGbankManual.pdf

       

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