Center embedding of the week
« previous post | next post »
Today's Tank McNamara:
The crucial panel:
The comic starts with the issue of whether Pickleball rules are within the purview of the Guardian of Tennis Rules.
But when the recursive GGSRR Guardian intervenes, The Guardian of Golf Rules and the Guardian of Tennis Rules find it impossible to parse his title, as appropriate for human beings. And GGSRR admits himself that he also can't figure out who he is.
Automatic parsers are also baffled — though rather than failing, the symptom is that that they come up with incorrect and uninterpretable structures, like this one from the Berkeley Neural Parser:
I think the correct structure should be something like this, modulo the node names that I don't have the time or energy to correct just now:
Q. Pheevr said,
December 17, 2023 @ 5:06 pm
I think I’d attach DT2 to NP2 rather than NP3.
Philip Taylor said,
December 17, 2023 @ 5:09 pm
Although I know nothing of the internals of the Berkeley Neural Parser, I was nonetheless surprised to learn that it failed to parse the GGSRR’s utterance correctly. The human parsing of the utterance, as provided by Mark Liberman, reflects my own intuitive parsing.
Mark Liberman said,
December 17, 2023 @ 5:11 pm
@Q. Pheevr: "I think I’d attach DT2 to NP2 rather than NP3."
I think you're right — I'll fix it at some future time…
Seth said,
December 17, 2023 @ 10:09 pm
He's (the Guardian) of ((the Guardians) of (Sports Rules)) (Rules)
It's confusing since there is a shift in the type of Guardian.
All three are rules-Guardians in general.
The left and middle are Guardians for the category of rules about sports, in specific respectively golf and tennis.
The right is not a Guardian for rules about sports, but for the
category of rules about (rules-Guardians), in specific (rules-Guardians) of Sports.
Being a (specific) rules-Guardians of (other) rules-Guardians isn't a paradox given the specificity – someone can be a watcher of *other* watchmen, or an investigator of *other* investigators.
Mike Grubb said,
December 18, 2023 @ 10:58 am
If rewritten without the embedding, it would be "the guardian of the rules of/for the guardians of sports rules," correct? Which would make the "second" "the guardians of sports rules" genitive case, yes? Mightn't this suggest that, when embedded, there is a missing apostrophe to signal possession: "The guardian of the guardians of sports rules' rules"(?)
David Marjanović said,
December 18, 2023 @ 2:28 pm
The guardian of the guardians-of-sports-rules rules.
The guardian of the rules that govern guardians of sports rules.
Hyphens to the rescue!
Gregory Kusnick said,
December 18, 2023 @ 3:16 pm
Berkeley Neural Parser's take on it is arguably not completely incoherent. If there are rules governing how sports rules are formulated and/or adopted, then the Guardians of these Sports Metarules are presumably important personages who merit a personal bodyguard.