catball

Meowdy Pawdner

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catball
@catball

one of my classes goes over interesting stuff that I think I'd enjoy like 1,000x more if the information were presented differently. the textbook is 20 years old and written kinda badly, and the course is 100% based on the textbook

if I had unlimited time I wish I could study and learn this better with the intent of revising how the material is presented. I think a lot of people could vibe with this weird theory of syntax if it had any accessible educational materials!


catball
@catball

edit: i was complaining, but i removed it, but also didnt wanna clobber comments


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in reply to @catball's post:

"Syntactic Theory, A Formal Introduction" 2e by Sag, Wasow, Bender ( https://git.computer.garden/catball/UW_LING_566/media/branch/main/Textbooks/Sag_Wasow_Bender_Syntactic_Theory_2003_2e.pdf )

I'm behind on archiving stuff into there, but the course materials and lecture recordings are at https://git.computer.garden/catball/UW_LING_566

It focuses only on HPSG. the textbook is built around each chapter, proposing some grammar rules, then next chapter ostensibly builds on those (although sometimes just throws out the past rules or dramatically changes them). By the end of the book, it settles on a grammar that's close to how HPSG was actually used (or at least, a specific flavor of hpsg)

It's a little difficult to keep the entire state of the grammar at whatever given chapter inside your head for doing the homeworks. The homework is writing very large fiddly attribute-value matrices very accurately; the grading rubrics are a little thunderdome in that if you mess up an outer structure, you'll lose points on all its inner structures.

The value of this kind of syntax though is how it avoids overfitting of minimalist theory, and is designed (mostly) for computing. It's kinda neat (although it has fallen out of favor of modern language modeling long ago). But the homeworks feel more like an exercise in combing through the jumbled jargon the authors present over the past several chapters.

There's a class (ling 567) where you can actually model a low-resource language using some academic HPSG libraries that everyone seems to enjoy (although consensus among students that this class 566 is the hardest weedout class and by far the most time-consuming in the program)

partly I think it's a little weird choice as a required course for their Comp Ling MS program (which the professor is the director of) since it seems like the Syntax I course LING 507 is already used for the linguistics PhD program and goes over a sampling of theories of syntax in context of how they're currently used

I think it could be really cool if homeworks were like, implement this bit of of the grammar library given these existing bits, or like, analyze this annotated language data and partially model some bit of it with the hpsg python libraries. Or even just like, homework questions that ask conceptual questions about the material, rather than "fully specify this enormous thing accurately in latex, good luck"

if it's useful context, Bender is the professor, and she was a student of Sag and Wasow. They were in turn students (and later dissidents) of Chomsky. She helped write the book alongside them sometime while she was in grad school.

I did see the pdf 1e instructor copy on annas-archive when I searched the textbook! I should compare it to the 2e textbook; iirc they diverge on the homeworks a lot, but I should check it out again especially for my current assignment. Thank you for the tip~~