Simultaneous Amalgamation - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 161

The owner proplets are ordered alphabetically, while the member proplets in a
token line are ordered according to their frq (frequency) values. The example
shows that decide occurred 65 times with the word case as object and that
case occurred 65 time with the functor decide in the BNC corpus.
In contradistinction to the Episodic Word Bank 4.1.1, the Corpus Word Bank
8.5.3 is static. The content is changed only after more corpus work has revealed
additional argument values for a given verb, additional functor values for a
given noun, and so on, as well as different frequency numbers, such that the
elements and their order in a token line have to be adjusted.
Querying a Corpus Word Bank is based on pattern proplets. The query pat-
tern is matched with elements of a corresponding token line from right to left
until a successful match is found (Sect. 4.2). For example, the question How
often does decide occur with the nominal object case in the BNC corpus?
may be formalized as the following query:

8.5.4 F ORMAL QUERY AND ANSWER 1

query result

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verb: decide
arg: X case
frq: ?

verb: decide
arg: X case
frq: 65

In the result, the “?” of the query is replaced by the frq value searched for.
Similarly, the question How often does case occur as a nominal argument
of decide in the BNC corpus? may be formalized as the following query:

8.5.5 F ORMAL QUERY AND ANSWER 2

query result

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noun: case
fnc: decide
frq: ?

noun: case
fnc: decide
frq: 65

If case occurred also as the subject of decide ,asin This case decided the
issue , the query would return two answer proplets, one for case as subject,
the other for it as object, each with its respective frq value.
Finally consider Which intrapropositional relations in the BNC use decide ?

8.5.6 F ORMAL QUERY AND ANSWER 3

query result

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verb: decide
arg: ?
frq: ?

noun: issue
fnc: decide
frq: 74

noun: case
fnc: decide
frq: 65

noun: fate
fnc: decide
frq: 57

noun: dispute
fnc: decide
frq: 7

noun: game
fnc: decide
frq: 4