Actually I have no idea what you mean here. What are “aligned sentences”?
A sentence in one language, together with its translation in another .
Can you start with an example of a whole decomposition of a specific task, but instead of showing the entire tree, just a path from the root to a leaf? [...] The top-level task could be (source text --> meaning) for this sentence, which I’m picking for its subtle ambiguity, or let me know if this is not a good example to start with: “Some of the undisciplined children in his class couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time.”
Here is a quick version that hopefully gives the idea:
Given the question: “What is the meaning of the sentence with list of words {X}.”
I loop over ways of dividing into the section into two. For each division a, b I ask:
1. What are the most plausible meanings of the phrase with list of words {a}, and how plausible are they?
2. What are the most plausible meanings of the phrase with list of words {b}, and how plausible are they?
(L is the resulting list of pairs, each pair with one meaning from a and one from b)
3. For all pairs of possible meanings in the list of pairs {L}, what are the possible meanings of the concatenation of two phrases with those meanings, and how plausible is that concatenation?
One of the pairs is a=”Some of the undisciplined children in his class” and b=”couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time.”
For that pair we get a list of pairs of meanings. I’m not going to write any of them out in full, unless you think that would be particularly useful. An example is is roughly ({a noun phrase whose use implies {x} and that refers to {y}} , {a verb phrase whose implies {z} and which implies that implies the noun $1 it modifies satisfies {w}}). The most plausible combinations of those meanings is {{a phrase whose use implies {{z} and {x} and {the referent of {y} satisfies {w}}}}. We can then ask about plausibility of that meaning (which involves e.g. evaluating its consequences and how plausible they are, or what alternative expressions would have had the same meaning, and prior probabilities that someone would want to express this idea, or etc.) compared to the other meanings we are considering. For deeper trees you’d also do more subtle things like analyzing large databases to see how common certain constructions are.
You’d have to go a lot deeper in order to get the other meaning you were considering, that the undiscplined children tended to not be able to sit still. I’m not sure you could do it without having done a very large database search and found this alternative idiomatic usage, or by performing an explicit search over plausible nearby meanings that might have been unintentionally confused with that one (which would be at a plausibility disadvantage but might be promoted up by pragmatics or priors). But there might be an alternative grammatical reading I haven’t seen (since I haven’t done the extensive work of parsing it—doing the whole tree is exponentially slow) or there might be some other way to get to that meaning.
A sentence in one language, together with its translation in another .
Here is a quick version that hopefully gives the idea:
Given the question: “What is the meaning of the sentence with list of words {X}.”
I loop over ways of dividing into the section into two. For each division a, b I ask:
1. What are the most plausible meanings of the phrase with list of words {a}, and how plausible are they?
2. What are the most plausible meanings of the phrase with list of words {b}, and how plausible are they?
(L is the resulting list of pairs, each pair with one meaning from a and one from b)
3. For all pairs of possible meanings in the list of pairs {L}, what are the possible meanings of the concatenation of two phrases with those meanings, and how plausible is that concatenation?
One of the pairs is a=”Some of the undisciplined children in his class” and b=”couldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time.”
For that pair we get a list of pairs of meanings. I’m not going to write any of them out in full, unless you think that would be particularly useful. An example is is roughly ({a noun phrase whose use implies {x} and that refers to {y}} , {a verb phrase whose implies {z} and which implies that implies the noun $1 it modifies satisfies {w}}). The most plausible combinations of those meanings is {{a phrase whose use implies {{z} and {x} and {the referent of {y} satisfies {w}}}}. We can then ask about plausibility of that meaning (which involves e.g. evaluating its consequences and how plausible they are, or what alternative expressions would have had the same meaning, and prior probabilities that someone would want to express this idea, or etc.) compared to the other meanings we are considering. For deeper trees you’d also do more subtle things like analyzing large databases to see how common certain constructions are.
You’d have to go a lot deeper in order to get the other meaning you were considering, that the undiscplined children tended to not be able to sit still. I’m not sure you could do it without having done a very large database search and found this alternative idiomatic usage, or by performing an explicit search over plausible nearby meanings that might have been unintentionally confused with that one (which would be at a plausibility disadvantage but might be promoted up by pragmatics or priors). But there might be an alternative grammatical reading I haven’t seen (since I haven’t done the extensive work of parsing it—doing the whole tree is exponentially slow) or there might be some other way to get to that meaning.