- Cognitive Science Department
Informatics Institute ODTU 06800 Ankara
Cem Bozsahin
Middle East Technical University, Cognitive Science, Faculty Member
TheBench is a tool to study monadic structures in natural language. It is for writing monadic grammars to explore analyses, compare diverse languages through their categories, and to train models of grammar from form-meaning pairs where... more
TheBench is a tool to study monadic structures in natural language. It is for writing monadic grammars to explore analyses, compare diverse languages through their categories, and to train models of grammar from form-meaning pairs where syntax is latent variable.
Monadic structures are binary combinations of elements that employ semantics of composition only. TheBench is essentially old-school categorial grammar to syntacticize the idea, with the implication that although syntax is autonomous (recall \emph{colorless green ideas sleep furiously}), the treasure is in the baggage it carries at every step, viz. semantics, more narrowly, predicate-argument structures indicating choice of categorial reference and its consequent placeholders for decision in such structures.
There is some new thought in old school.
Unlike traditional categorial grammars, application is turned into composition in monadic analysis. Moreover,
every correspondence requires specifying two command relations, one on syntactic command and the other on semantic command. A monadic grammar of TheBench contains only synthetic elements (called `objects' in category theory of mathematics) that are shaped by this analytic invariant, viz. composition. Both ingredients (command relations) of any analytic step must therefore be functions (`arrows' in category theory). TheBench is one implementation of the idea for iterative development of such
functions along with grammar of synthetic elements.
Monadic structures are binary combinations of elements that employ semantics of composition only. TheBench is essentially old-school categorial grammar to syntacticize the idea, with the implication that although syntax is autonomous (recall \emph{colorless green ideas sleep furiously}), the treasure is in the baggage it carries at every step, viz. semantics, more narrowly, predicate-argument structures indicating choice of categorial reference and its consequent placeholders for decision in such structures.
There is some new thought in old school.
Unlike traditional categorial grammars, application is turned into composition in monadic analysis. Moreover,
every correspondence requires specifying two command relations, one on syntactic command and the other on semantic command. A monadic grammar of TheBench contains only synthetic elements (called `objects' in category theory of mathematics) that are shaped by this analytic invariant, viz. composition. Both ingredients (command relations) of any analytic step must therefore be functions (`arrows' in category theory). TheBench is one implementation of the idea for iterative development of such
functions along with grammar of synthetic elements.
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The article is an attempt to contribute to explorations of a common origin for language and planned-collaborative action. It gives ‘semantics of change’ the central stage in the synthesis, from its history and recordkeeping to its... more
The article is an attempt to contribute to explorations of a common origin for language and planned-collaborative action. It gives ‘semantics of change’ the central stage in the synthesis, from its history and recordkeeping to its development, its syntax, delivery and reception, including substratal aspects.
It is suggested that to arrive at a common core, linguistic semantics must be understood as studying through syntax mobile agent’s representing, tracking and coping with change and no change. Semantics of actions can be conceived the same way, but through plans instead of syntax. The key point is the following: Sequencing itself, of words and action sequences, brings in more structural interpretation to the sequence than which is immediately evident from the sequents themselves. Mobile sequencers can be understood as subjects structuring reporting, understanding and keeping track of change and no change. The idea invites rethinking of the notion of category, both in language and in planning.
Linguist’s search for explaining the gaps in possible structures, and offlineness of lan- guage, and computer scientist’s search for possible plan landscape, and onlineness of action, are leveraged by the synthesis for open exploration. It leaves very little room for analogies and instrumental thinking, such as language being an infinite gift, or computer being the ultimate human tool. Nothing is infinite if modern physics is right, not even the computer’s name- recursive representations, which is commonly—and misleadingly—compared with human’s value-recursive representations. This has implications for the synthesis.
Understanding understanding change by mobile agents is suggested to be about human extended practice, not extended-human practice. That’s why linguistics is as important as computer science in the synthesis. It must rely on representational history of acts, thoughts and expressions, personal and public, crosscutting overtness and covertness of these phenom- ena. It has implication for anthropology in the extended practice, which is covered briefly.
It is suggested that to arrive at a common core, linguistic semantics must be understood as studying through syntax mobile agent’s representing, tracking and coping with change and no change. Semantics of actions can be conceived the same way, but through plans instead of syntax. The key point is the following: Sequencing itself, of words and action sequences, brings in more structural interpretation to the sequence than which is immediately evident from the sequents themselves. Mobile sequencers can be understood as subjects structuring reporting, understanding and keeping track of change and no change. The idea invites rethinking of the notion of category, both in language and in planning.
Linguist’s search for explaining the gaps in possible structures, and offlineness of lan- guage, and computer scientist’s search for possible plan landscape, and onlineness of action, are leveraged by the synthesis for open exploration. It leaves very little room for analogies and instrumental thinking, such as language being an infinite gift, or computer being the ultimate human tool. Nothing is infinite if modern physics is right, not even the computer’s name- recursive representations, which is commonly—and misleadingly—compared with human’s value-recursive representations. This has implications for the synthesis.
Understanding understanding change by mobile agents is suggested to be about human extended practice, not extended-human practice. That’s why linguistics is as important as computer science in the synthesis. It must rely on representational history of acts, thoughts and expressions, personal and public, crosscutting overtness and covertness of these phenom- ena. It has implication for anthropology in the extended practice, which is covered briefly.
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Bu yazinin amaci, Ulamsal Dilbilgisi (Categorial Grammar) alaninda son yillarda yapilan calismalari ozetlemek, ve bu kuramin Turkce'ye uygulanmasinda kullanilan yeni yontemleri tanitmaktir.
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UDK 36 Kayseri Erciyes özeti
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Two positions of Bolinger, about synonymy and meaningfulness of words, point to significance of controlling the referentiality of word forms, from representing them in grammar to their projection onto surface structure, i.e.... more
Two positions of Bolinger, about synonymy and meaningfulness of words, point to significance of controlling the referentiality of word forms, from representing them in grammar to their projection onto surface structure, i.e. configurationality. In particular, it becomes critical to control the range of surface substitution for surface syntactic categories of words to maintain referential properties of idiosyncrasy. Categorial grammars as reference systems suggest ways to keep the two aspects in grammar. The first dividend of adopting a categorial perspective is systematically distinguishing metaphorical sense extensions from idioms. The second dividend is procedural. Some tokens can be seen to be types themselves, with distinct referential import. Furthermore, some idiomatic meanings which require a unique phonological word for specific reference to events and participants can be types too. Together they can be thought of as the idiotype. The idiotype as idiosyncrasy’s foot through the door of grammar reveals controllable range of possibilities for referentiality and configurationality of idiosyncrasy. Phrasal and idiomatic meanings can then be treated compositionally, given the proposed added role of paracompositionality arising from event versus predicate distinction at the level of predicate-argument structure, in multiword expression cum idiom and phrasal verb treatment, which we show for English, Mandarin Chinese and Turkish.
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We propose an integrated deep learning model for morphological segmentation, morpheme tagging, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing onto dependencies, using cross-level contextual information flow for every word, from... more
We propose an integrated deep learning model for morphological segmentation, morpheme tagging, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing onto dependencies, using cross-level contextual information flow for every word, from segments to dependencies, with an attention mechanism at horizontal flow. Our model extends the work of Nguyen and Verspoor ((2018). Proceedings of the CoNLL Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. The Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 81–91.) on joint POS tagging and dependency parsing to also include morphological segmentation and morphological tagging. We report our results on several languages. Primary focus is agglutination in morphology, in particular Turkish morphology, for which we demonstrate improved performance compared to models trained for individual tasks. Being one of the earlier efforts in joint modeling of syntax and morphology along with dependencies, we discuss prospective guidelines for ...
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Languages and Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and 15 moreComputational Linguistics, Syntax, Attention, Morphology, Parsing, Linguistics, Deep Learning, Segmentation, Recurrent Neural Networks, Dependency Parsing, Morphological Segmentation, Natural language engineering, Morphological Tagging, Dependency Grammar, and Morpheme
We report two tools to conduct psycholinguistic experiments on Turkish words. KelimetriK allows experimenters to choose words based on desired orthographic scores of word frequency, bigram and trigram frequency, ON, OLD20, ATL and... more
We report two tools to conduct psycholinguistic experiments on Turkish words. KelimetriK allows experimenters to choose words based on desired orthographic scores of word frequency, bigram and trigram frequency, ON, OLD20, ATL and subset/superset similarity. Turkish version of Wuggy generates pseudowords from one or more template words using an efficient method. The syllabified version of the words are used as the input, which are decomposed into their sub-syllabic components. The bigram frequency chains are constructed by the entire words’ onset, nucleus and coda patterns. Lexical statistics of stems and their syllabification are compiled by us from BOUN corpus of 490 million words. Use of these tools in some experiments is shown.
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Typed conception of surface-command and LF-command reveals a unique degree of freedom for specifying a verb in its combinatory capacity. It naturally brings in the question of word order in relation to its semantics. We exemplify from the... more
Typed conception of surface-command and LF-command reveals a unique degree of freedom for specifying a verb in its combinatory capacity. It naturally brings in the question of word order in relation to its semantics. We exemplify from the Turkish verb and verbs of three other languages with different word order behavior. The differences are explainable in syntax if we assume that surface-command and LF-command are free to vary in a lexical correspondence, and that being the head of a construction also means determining its semantics. Turkish verbs are not heads of any construction; word-order variation has semantics arising from metrical grid and autonomous phonological events. Welsh verbs are heads of relativization; as such their logical forms must be different than their plain semantics. European Portuguese treats referentially dependent and independent arguments of the verb differently, exploiting word order for them but not to the extent of requiring a different category for th...
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This study aims to model social dynamics of an idealized closed musical society to investigate whether a musical agreement in terms of shared musical expectations can be attained without external intervention or centralized control. Our... more
This study aims to model social dynamics of an idealized closed musical society to investigate whether a musical agreement in terms of shared musical expectations can be attained without external intervention or centralized control. Our model implements a multi-agent simulation, where identical agents, which have their own private two dimensional transition matrix that defines their expectations on all possible bi-gram note transitions, are involved in round-based pairwise interactions. Throughout an interaction two agents are randomly chosen from the population, one as the performer and the other as the listener. Performers compose a fixed length melodic line by successively appending their most expected note sequences recursively by using sounds from a finite inventory. Listeners assess this melody to determine the success of the interaction by evaluating how familiar they are to the bi-gram transitions that they hear. According to success the interacting parties perform updates o...
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The Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) is a resource of approximately 400,000 words in its current release in which explicit discourse connectives and phrasal expressions are annotated along with the textual spans they relate. The corpus has... more
The Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) is a resource of approximately 400,000 words in its current release in which explicit discourse connectives and phrasal expressions are annotated along with the textual spans they relate. The corpus has been annotated by annotators using a semiautomatic annotation tool. We expect that it will enable researchers to study aspects of language beyond the sentence level. The TDB follows the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) in adopting a connective-based annotation for discourse. The connectives are considered heads of annotated discourse relations. We have so far found only applicative structures in Turkish discourse, which, unlike syntactic heads, seem to have no need for composition. Interleaving in-text spans of arguments appears to be only apparently-crossing, and related to information structure.
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Wide-coverage parsing poses three demands: broad coverage over preferably free text, depth in semantic representation for purposes such as inference in question answering, and computational efficiency. We show for Turkish that these goals... more
Wide-coverage parsing poses three demands: broad coverage over preferably free text, depth in semantic representation for purposes such as inference in question answering, and computational efficiency. We show for Turkish that these goals are not inherently contradictory when we assign categories to sub-lexical elements in the lexicon. The presumed computational burden of processing such lexicons does not arise when we work with automata-constrained formalisms that are trainable on word-meaning correspondences at the level of predicate-argument structures for any string, which is characteristic of radically lexicalizable grammars. This is helpful in morphologically simpler languages too, where word-based parsing has been shown to benefit from sub-lexical training.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Theory Of Computation, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, and 11 morePhilosophy Of Language, Philosophy of Science, Syntax, Explanation, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Semantic Content, Computer, Correspondence Problem, Programming language, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Minds & Machines
The paper argues that a computational constraint is one that appeals to control of computational resources in a computationalist explanation. Such constraints may arise in a theory and in its models. Instrumental use of the same concept... more
The paper argues that a computational constraint is one that appeals to control of computational resources in a computationalist explanation. Such constraints may arise in a theory and in its models. Instrumental use of the same concept is trivial because the constraining behavior of any function eventually reduces to its computation. Computationalism is not instrumentalism. Born-again computationalism, which is an ardent form of pancomputationalism, may need some soul searching about whether a genuinely computational explanation is necessary or needed in every domain, because the resources in a computationalist explanation are limited. Computational resources are the potential targets of computational constraints. They are representability, time, space, and, possibly, randomness, assuming that ‘BPP = BQP?’ question remains open. The first three are epitomized by the Turing machine, and manifest themselves for example in complexity theories. Randomness may be a genuine resource in quantum computing. From this perspective, some purported computational constraints may be instrumental, and some supposedly noncomputational or cognitivist constraints may be computational. Examples for both cases are provided. If pancomputationalism has instrumentalism in mind, then it may be a truism, therefore not very interesting, but born-again computationalism cannot be computationalism as conceived here.
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This study is a preliminary investigation of verb classes in Turkish Sign Language (TiD), and how they can be captured in a lexicalized generative grammar. TiD manifests an array of verb classes, as in other sign languages: plain verbs,... more
This study is a preliminary investigation of verb classes in Turkish Sign Language (TiD), and how they can be captured in a lexicalized generative grammar. TiD manifests an array of verb classes, as in other sign languages: plain verbs, single/double agreement verbs, and spatial verbs. Syntactic categorisation of these verb classes is a challenge to any linguistic theory because it involves multi-modal features (manual and nonmanual signs), a relativistic pronominal reference scheme, an unorthodox morphology for signs and iconicity. We start our investigation with directionality (and grammatical relations) because they are considered to be basic for understanding syntactic asymmetries, as Ross (1967) and subsequent research has shown for coordination and extraction. Rather than confining ourselves to single clauses without embedding, we investigate syntactic constructions and try to determine word order and directionality. An important assumption in this approach is that directionality can be captured in the lexicon, in the lexical categories of verbs, as a systematic combinatory property of argument-taking entities such as verbs, under the guidance of an invariant Universal Grammar (Steedman 1996, 2000). The question then becomes testing the hypotheses on directionality of verbs by looking at syntactic constructions that depend on verbal categories coming from the lexicon.
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4.1 Lexical families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.2 Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.3 Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4.4... more
4.1 Lexical families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 4.2 Categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.3 Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4.4 Unification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 4.5 Set args . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 4.6 Dollar variables . . . . . . . . . ...
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Grammars that expect words from the lexicon may be at odds with the transparent projection of syntactic and semantic scope relations of smaller units. We propose a morphosyntactic framework based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar that... more
Grammars that expect words from the lexicon may be at odds with the transparent projection of syntactic and semantic scope relations of smaller units. We propose a morphosyntactic framework based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar that provides flexible constituency, flexible category consistency, and lexical projection of morphosyntactic properties and attachment to grammar in order to establish a morphemic grammar-lexicon. These mechanisms provide enough expressive power in the lexicon to formulate semantically transparent specifications without the necessity to confine structure forming to words and phrases. For instance, bound morphemes as lexical items can have phrasal scope or word scope, independent of their attachment characteristics but consistent with their semantics. The controls can be attuned in the lexicon to language-particular properties. The result is a transparent interface of inflectional morphology, syntax, and semantics. We present a computational system and show...
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Two positions of Bolinger, about synonymy and meaningfulness of words, point to significance of controlling the referentiality of word forms, from representing them in grammar to their projection onto surface structure, i.e.... more
Two positions of Bolinger, about synonymy and meaningfulness of words, point to significance of controlling the referentiality of word forms, from representing them in grammar to their projection onto surface structure, i.e. configurationality. In particular, it becomes critical to control the range of surface substitution for surface syntactic categories of words to maintain referential properties of idiosyncrasy. Categorial grammars as reference systems suggest ways to keep the two aspects in grammar. The first dividend of adopting a categorial perspective is systematically distinguishing metaphorical sense extensions from idioms. The second dividend is procedural. Some tokens can be seen to be types themselves, with distinct referential import. Furthermore, some idiomatic meanings which require a unique phonological word for specific reference to events and participants can be types too. Together they can be thought of as the idiotype. The idiotype as idiosyncrasy’s foot through the door of grammar reveals controllable range of possibilities for referentiality and configurationality of idiosyncrasy. Phrasal and idiomatic meanings can then be treated compositionally, given the proposed added role of paracompositionality arising from event versus predicate distinction at the level of predicate-argument structure, in multiword expression cum idiom and phrasal verb treatment, which we show for English, Mandarin Chinese and Turkish.
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In this paper, we describe an annotation environment developed for the marking of discourse structures in Turkish, and the kinds of discourse relation configurations that led to its design.
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This is a review by Umut Ozge.
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Bu makale köktendilbilgisi yaklaşımının (ing. radically lexicalised grammar), dil edinim sürecini, içinde barındırdığı belirsizliklerle ve anlamla birlikte, nasıl bilişsel açıdan çalışılabilir yaptığını özetlemektedir. [The online... more
Bu makale köktendilbilgisi yaklaşımının (ing. radically lexicalised grammar), dil edinim sürecini, içinde barındırdığı belirsizliklerle ve anlamla birlikte, nasıl bilişsel açıdan çalışılabilir yaptığını özetlemektedir.
[The online version fixes some of the font problems in print, which made formulas in the printed version somewhat unintelligible (thanks Word!)]
[The online version fixes some of the font problems in print, which made formulas in the printed version somewhat unintelligible (thanks Word!)]
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This is a revised reprint of 1994 report in 2014, by Oflazer, Gocmen and me.
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Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) We propose an integrated deep learning model for morphological segmentation, morpheme tagging, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing onto... more
Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
We propose an integrated deep learning model for morphological segmentation, morpheme tagging, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing onto dependencies, using cross-level contextual information flow for every word, from segments to dependencies, with an attention mechanism at horizontal flow. Our model extends the work of Nguyen and Verspoor ((2018). Proceedings of the CoNLL Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. The Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 81-91.) on joint POS tagging and dependency parsing to also include morphological segmentation and morphological tagging. We report our results on several languages. Primary focus is agglutination in morphology, in particular Turkish morphology, for which we demonstrate improved performance compared to models trained for individual tasks. Being one of the earlier efforts in joint modeling of syntax and morphology along with dependencies, we discuss prospective guidelines for future comparison.
We propose an integrated deep learning model for morphological segmentation, morpheme tagging, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing onto dependencies, using cross-level contextual information flow for every word, from segments to dependencies, with an attention mechanism at horizontal flow. Our model extends the work of Nguyen and Verspoor ((2018). Proceedings of the CoNLL Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. The Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 81-91.) on joint POS tagging and dependency parsing to also include morphological segmentation and morphological tagging. We report our results on several languages. Primary focus is agglutination in morphology, in particular Turkish morphology, for which we demonstrate improved performance compared to models trained for individual tasks. Being one of the earlier efforts in joint modeling of syntax and morphology along with dependencies, we discuss prospective guidelines for future comparison.
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The paper argues for two points in relation to Turkish NLP: (i) we are better off developing and using research methodologies and tools that are not language-specifi c, although the models built with these methods and tools must... more
The paper argues for two points in relation to Turkish NLP:
(i) we are better off developing and using research methodologies and tools that are not language-specifi c, although the models built with these methods and tools must certainly exploit language-specifi c thinking or technology. One way to do this is to collect distributional data at the level of morphemes. (ii) we need to incorporate semantics into the picture somehow, otherwise what we do is form recognition, or contextually deprived (or dissituated) form production.
The last point raises problems from the world's morphologies (and from Turkish morphology in particular) for the current state of art in NLP, where morphological processing is usually separated from syntactic processing for practical reasons. There is no semantic motivation to separate morphological processing of compositional meaning from syntactic processing of meaning. In fact, semantic aspects indicate that we should integrate them. I will mention some attempts at the problem and suggest some lines of research.
(i) we are better off developing and using research methodologies and tools that are not language-specifi c, although the models built with these methods and tools must certainly exploit language-specifi c thinking or technology. One way to do this is to collect distributional data at the level of morphemes. (ii) we need to incorporate semantics into the picture somehow, otherwise what we do is form recognition, or contextually deprived (or dissituated) form production.
The last point raises problems from the world's morphologies (and from Turkish morphology in particular) for the current state of art in NLP, where morphological processing is usually separated from syntactic processing for practical reasons. There is no semantic motivation to separate morphological processing of compositional meaning from syntactic processing of meaning. In fact, semantic aspects indicate that we should integrate them. I will mention some attempts at the problem and suggest some lines of research.
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Pre-final copy of paper to appear in Turkish Word Order book, Springer, 2018, Sumru Ozsoy ed.
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Published in Computing and Philosophy, Springer, 2014 (Vincent Muller, ed.)
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URL retrieves author's pdf copy, which is published in Minds & Machines, 28:543–567, 2018 This paper argues that the idea of a computer is unique. Calculators and analog computers are not different ideas about computers, and nature does... more
URL retrieves author's pdf copy, which is published in Minds & Machines, 28:543–567, 2018
This paper argues that the idea of a computer is unique. Calculators and analog computers are not different ideas about computers, and nature does not compute by itself. Computers, once clearly defined in all their terms and mechanisms, rather than enumerated by behavioral examples, can be more than instrumental tools in science, and more than source of analogies and taxonomies in philosophy. They can help us understand semantic content and its relation to form. This can be achieved because they have the potential to do more than calculators, which are computers that are designed not to learn. Today’s computers are not designed to learn; rather, they are designed to support learning; therefore, any theory of content tested by computers that currently exist must be of an empirical, rather than a formal nature. If they are designed someday to learn, we will see a change in roles, requiring an empiri-cal theory about the Turing architecture’s content, using the primitives of learning machines. This way of thinking, which I call the intensional view of computers, avoids the problems of analogies between minds and computers. It focuses on the constitutive properties of computers, such as showing clearly how they can help us avoid the infinite regress in interpretation, and how we can clarify the terms of the suggested mechanisms to facilitate a useful debate. Within the intensional view, syntax and content in the context of computers become two ends of physically realizing correspondence problems in various domains.
This paper argues that the idea of a computer is unique. Calculators and analog computers are not different ideas about computers, and nature does not compute by itself. Computers, once clearly defined in all their terms and mechanisms, rather than enumerated by behavioral examples, can be more than instrumental tools in science, and more than source of analogies and taxonomies in philosophy. They can help us understand semantic content and its relation to form. This can be achieved because they have the potential to do more than calculators, which are computers that are designed not to learn. Today’s computers are not designed to learn; rather, they are designed to support learning; therefore, any theory of content tested by computers that currently exist must be of an empirical, rather than a formal nature. If they are designed someday to learn, we will see a change in roles, requiring an empiri-cal theory about the Turing architecture’s content, using the primitives of learning machines. This way of thinking, which I call the intensional view of computers, avoids the problems of analogies between minds and computers. It focuses on the constitutive properties of computers, such as showing clearly how they can help us avoid the infinite regress in interpretation, and how we can clarify the terms of the suggested mechanisms to facilitate a useful debate. Within the intensional view, syntax and content in the context of computers become two ends of physically realizing correspondence problems in various domains.
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This study is a preliminary investigation of verb classes in Turkish Sign Language (TiD), and how they can be captured in a lexicalized generative grammar. TiD manifests an array of verb classes, as in other sign languages: plain verbs,... more
This study is a preliminary investigation of verb classes in Turkish Sign Language (TiD), and how they can be captured in a lexicalized generative grammar. TiD manifests an array of verb classes, as in other sign languages: plain verbs, single/double agreement verbs, and spatial verbs. Syntactic categorisation of these verb classes is a challenge to any linguistic theory because it involves multi-modal features (manual and nonmanual signs), a relativistic pronominal reference scheme, an unorthodox morphology for signs and iconicity.
We start our investigation with directionality (and grammatical relations) because they are considered to be basic for understanding syntactic asymmetries, as Ross (1967) and subsequent research has shown for coordination and extraction. Rather than confining ourselves to single clauses without embedding, we investigate syntactic constructions and try to determine word order and directionality. An important assumption in this approach is that directionality can be captured in the lexicon, in the lexical categories of verbs, as a systematic combinatory property of argument-taking entities such as verbs, under the guidance of an invariant Universal Grammar (Steedman 1996, 2000). The question then becomes testing the hypotheses on directionality of verbs by looking at syntactic constructions that depend on verbal categories coming from the lexicon.
We start our investigation with directionality (and grammatical relations) because they are considered to be basic for understanding syntactic asymmetries, as Ross (1967) and subsequent research has shown for coordination and extraction. Rather than confining ourselves to single clauses without embedding, we investigate syntactic constructions and try to determine word order and directionality. An important assumption in this approach is that directionality can be captured in the lexicon, in the lexical categories of verbs, as a systematic combinatory property of argument-taking entities such as verbs, under the guidance of an invariant Universal Grammar (Steedman 1996, 2000). The question then becomes testing the hypotheses on directionality of verbs by looking at syntactic constructions that depend on verbal categories coming from the lexicon.
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Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the... more
Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression.
Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as empirically realized categorial possibilities rather than lacuna in a theory of lexicalizable syntactic categories.
Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as empirically realized categorial possibilities rather than lacuna in a theory of lexicalizable syntactic categories.
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Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the... more
Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression. Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as...
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This is a chapter in Turkish NLP book. Here is the pointer to Springer:
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319901633
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319901633
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Demirşahin, I., Öztürel, A. Bozşahin, C., Zeyrek, D. (2013). Applicative Structures and Immediate Discourse in the Turkish Discourse Bank. In Proceedings of the ACL 2013. LAW VII&ID. The 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop &... more
Demirşahin, I., Öztürel, A. Bozşahin, C., Zeyrek, D. (2013). Applicative Structures and Immediate Discourse in the Turkish Discourse Bank. In Proceedings of the ACL 2013. LAW VII&ID. The 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop & Interoperability with Discourse.
Various discourse theories have argued for data structures ranging from the simplest trees to the most complex chain graphs. This paper investigates the structure represented by the explicit connectives annotated in the multiplegenre Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB). The dependencies that violate tree-constraints are analyzed. The effects of information structure in the surface form, which result in seemingly complex configurations with underlying simple dependencies, are introduced; and the structural implications are discussed. The results indicate that our current approach to local discourse structure needs to accommodate
properly contained arguments and relations, and partially overlapping as well as shared arguments; deviating further from simple trees, but not as drastically as a chain graph structure would imply, since no genuine cases of structural crossing dependencies are attested in TDB.
Various discourse theories have argued for data structures ranging from the simplest trees to the most complex chain graphs. This paper investigates the structure represented by the explicit connectives annotated in the multiplegenre Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB). The dependencies that violate tree-constraints are analyzed. The effects of information structure in the surface form, which result in seemingly complex configurations with underlying simple dependencies, are introduced; and the structural implications are discussed. The results indicate that our current approach to local discourse structure needs to accommodate
properly contained arguments and relations, and partially overlapping as well as shared arguments; deviating further from simple trees, but not as drastically as a chain graph structure would imply, since no genuine cases of structural crossing dependencies are attested in TDB.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Connectives, Syntax, Corpus Linguistics, and 12 moreLinguistics, Turkish Linguistics, Turkish Language, Annotation, Language Resources, Discourse Connectives, Corpus Annotation, Linguistic Annotation, Turkish Syntax, Turkish syntax, Turkish Discourse Structure, and Turkish Discourse Bank
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This was an early attempt to pin down Turkish word order by looking at gapping. It is now superseded by 'Serialization and the verb' paper of 2012.
It gets cited for its data so I include it here for convenience.
It gets cited for its data so I include it here for convenience.
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Syllables, Morphemes and Bayesian Computational Models of Acquiring a Word Grammar C ¸ a˘gri C ¸ o ¨ ltekin Cem Bozs¸ahin Cognitive Science Cognitive Science and Computer Engineering Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara 06531... more
Syllables, Morphemes and Bayesian Computational Models of Acquiring a Word Grammar C ¸ a˘gri C ¸ o ¨ ltekin Cem Bozs¸ahin Cognitive Science Cognitive Science and Computer Engineering Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara 06531 Turkey METU, Ankara 06531 Turkey cagri@xs4all.nl bozsahin@metu.edu.tr Abstract There are indeed phonological and prosodic cues for dis- cerning substrings smaller than words, namely syllables (rhythm), stress and pitch accents. In this work, we report a computational study which starts with the ability to iden- tify syllables, and learns the meaning and category of words and morphemes without the assumption that only words and morphemes have a meaning. The kind of meanings that the system starts with and learns more of is not lexical meanings, such as what it means to be a dog or to sleep (see Tenen- baum & Xu 2000 for a Bayesian way to tackle that prob- lem), but the combinatory meaning and its syntactic reflex in the form of a category, as a lexica...
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In this paper we claim that Turkish controls the syntactic subject, like English, Icelandic, Dyirbal and German, although not all languages control the syntactic subject, e.g. Basque, Inuit and Tagalog, which control the maximally... more
In this paper we claim that Turkish controls the syntactic subject, like English, Icelandic, Dyirbal and German, although not all languages control the syntactic subject, e.g. Basque, Inuit and Tagalog, which control the maximally LF-commanding argument (which we shall call the semantic subject, following Bozsahin and Steedman (in submission)). At least in some of these languages, the semantic subject and the syntactic subject are not the same argument. Hence control cross-cuts accusativity/ergativity. The claim for Turkish might seem obvious but we think it requires justification in the face of facts from other languages: Although it is common to assume that control requires a VP complement therefore what is “missing” from the controlled clause is the syntactic subject, what appears to be controlled in some ergative languages is the syntactic subject, but not all. Majority of ergative languages control the ergative argument, which can be shown in many of them not to be the syntacti...
2024 37. Ulusal Dilbilim Kurultayında davetli konuşma [invited talk at 37th Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of Türkiye]
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UDK 36 Kayseri Erciyes sunumu
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These are the slides of the talk I gave at Ankara DTCF Linguistics department, on October 4, 2022. [Turkish text with some Turkish, English, and Chinese examples]
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These are the slides (in Turkish) for the talk I gave to students of linguistics, 2021.
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These are the notes i shared in the 'sohbet' we had at Dilbilim Ogrenci Platformu
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These are the slides for the talk I gave at Bogazici Univ. CogSci colloquium, 2020.
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There are the slides for the talk I gave at Math Club in Turkish, ODTU, Feb 2019
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These are part of the summary slides for a philosophy of computer science course
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A One-leaf Summary of Ways to Link CS and Linguistics (requires a bit of CS and Linguistics)