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How about this rule? Order the modifiers to maximize the product of their successive restrictive effects. For example, we would prefer "great green dragon" to "
by tmoertel 14y ago
How about this rule? Order the modifiers to maximize the product of their successive restrictive effects. For example, we would prefer "great green dragon" to "green great dragon" because
([_] - [great _]) * ([great _] - [great green _])
is greater than
([_] - [green _]) * ([green _] - [green great _]),
where the notation [x _] denotes the expected number of substitutions admitted by the hole (_) in the context x.
Note that this ordering rule seems to do the right thing for the obvious corner cases. For example, we would prefer "modern brick house" to "brick modern house" because, in the second ordering, [brick modern _] is about the same as [brick _], making the second term in
([_] - [brick _]) * ([brick _] - [brick modern _])
tend toward zero, making the preference score for "brick modern house" also tend toward zero.
EDITED TO ADD: Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that this is the rule we actually use when we're putting words together. I'm claiming that this is the "true" rule, to the extent that anything can be said to be true in human communications. What we do in our heads works out to be an approximation: We (1) choose the modifiers that we think we need and (2) order them so that none seems wasted. For example, when describing a modern brick house, we know that "modern" and "brick" have to go somewhere, but putting "modern" after "brick" makes it impotent, so we put it before. By avoiding these "zeroes," which ring hollow to our inner ear, we make every word earn its place and indirectly seek the product-maximizing ordering.
- smackfu 14y agoWouldn't that imply that substituting in a different adjective of the same type (color / size) could change the order? But in practice, that doesn't seem to be the case.
- B-Con 14y agoPersonally, I've always mentally preferred an ordering with the noun first followed by increasing levels of restrictiveness. In my head, that's how I think. I then have to translate that into proper English grammar. It makes sense to me because I'm providing as much detail as necessary, but giving as much detail up front as possible. For example, when saying "the [adjective_detailed], [adjective_general] [noun]", what if the last word were lost? Then you'd have no idea what the phrase was about. And for the listener, you start with the most useless of detail and have to remember it, applying it to more useful of information as it comes in, and you have no idea what's being spoken about until you've heard the end. So then you have to backup and apply the adjectives once you've actually heard the noun. It makes (IMO) bad structure for parsing. Conversely, with the most general detail first, you drill down to the necessary level of detail as you speak, and continuously describe something the listener already heard.
- sk5t 14y agoThe order you describe reminds me of inventory or shipping labels, particularly military-ese: "QTY 5, pistol, M1911, A2". However, in my experience, Western spoken languages are not at all optimized for dropping the last bits (so often that's where the predicate / object lives).
- sev 14y agoHow about in the case of: 1. "A Chinese vegetarian lawyer" 2. "A Vegetarian Chinese lawyer" According to the referenced paper[1], #1 is considered awkward, but #1 follows your ordering logic, assuming that there are more Chinese than Vegetarians. [1] http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/25/paper1473.pdf http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/25/paper1473.pdf
- mtinkerhess 14y agoThose examples are hard for me to reason about. In my limited experience with lawyers, my prior for vegetarian is probably higher than for Chinese, but my sample size is too low to be statistically significant. I also find either ordering awkward for categorizing a professional by their county of origin and their dietary restrictions :)
- almost 14y ago#1 Would suggest to me a lawyer who is Chinese and specialises in vegetarians someone while #2 would suggest a layer who is Chinese (or who deals in Chinese laws) and is a vegetarian. Maybe just me?
- buss 14y agoYes, that is also how I interpreted the two phrases.
- proofofconcept 14y agoThere needs to be a comma in between 'Vegetarian' and 'Chinese' in both phrases to clarify that whichever is the former modifies 'lawyer' as opposed to the latter.
- mtinkerhess 14y agoI really like this. I can't imagine that the cognitive process humans use to order adjectives in everyday speech involves categorizing each adjective and memorizing an arbitrary ordering on those categories. On the other hand, the category-ordering approach does have the advantage that it's an O(log n) operation, whereas solving the restrictive effect maximization problem is harder: a heuristic greedy search in the solution space might be O(n), and a true solution might be O(n!).
- lukesed 14y agoSome humans categorize every noun by gender and every verb by conjugation behavior... and even memorize multiple definitions and connotations for thousands of words.
- kbenson 14y agoAm I supposed to know how to parse those? I'm not sure how, but I really want to. Is that a standard representation I'm just not familiar with (or even one I am familiar with but having trouble recognizing)?
- tmoertel 14y agoI'm just making this stuff up based on what seems sensible. For all I know, my hypothesis has been made countless times before and refuted by practicing linguists. But, from what I can see so far in this conversation, the hypothesis seems plausible.
- dfc 14y agoSo what is all the extra markup supposed to indicate? ([_] - [great _]) * ([great _] - [great green _]) What is the first [_] ? Why do you alternate between *s and -s? What is the point of "[x _] denotes the expected number of substitutions admitted by the hole (_) in the context x." if everything seems to have the same number of substitutions? When I first saw the markup without examining it closely I was excited that I might learn a new markup/sentence diagramming format. Upon closer inspection it seems its just a bunch of characters that when interrogated closely add very little value. I think smackfu was correct: substituting different adjectives of the same type should not change the order of the adjectives. How are people supposed to discuss things they are not familiar with? What should I do if I do not know what portion of houses are brick? What proportion are colonial versus modern? Or what proportion of craftsman style houses are brick? It is beyond me why this is the lead thread under a pretty interesting and out of the ordinary link on HN.
- tmoertel 14y agoI defined [x _] to denote the size of the hole _ in the context x. By "size" I mean some measure of the width of the distribution of things that can sensibly fill the hole. One reasonable measure would be entropy. So, for example, we could say that [_] means the entropy of the distribution of things that could sensibly fill a hole in the empty context, which is to say start a new phrase. Similarly, [great _] denotes the entropy of the phrases that could sensibly follow "great". Does the notation make sense now? Update: The * and - symbols are just the usual arithmetic operators applied to the sizes.
- kafkaesque 14y agoOrder the modifiers to maximize the product of their successive restrictive effects. Can you explain this? A lot of the discussion here seems to be based on the fact that the problem is with interpreting the importance of an adjective in relation to others written out in succession (attached to a noun). Then comes the way it flows in speech. The general 'rule' (for a lack of a better term), as far as I can tell, is interpreting the importance/value of each adjective, and, thus, recommends a placement order. This importance is based on customary usage. If you mean to say that we should place superlatives ahead of all adjectives, what if the modifiers include more than one superlative? E.g., the greatest, darkest horse. To give another example: the most beautiful, darkest horse. More than one permutation seem to work. Doesn't this undermine any inherent value one order may have over another? Also, what does 'impotent' mean? Effective? Isn't this begging the question? If it does mean 'effective', then aren't you essentially saying the order recommended is the most effective because it is the most effective? So, that begs the question: why is it more effective than any other order? And what is effective in terms of adjective order? Fluidity (in terms of pronunciation)? Or physicality/nature of the attributes (black vs. white, etc.)? Or something different altogether? The way I see it, there is very little rhyme and reason in the order of adjectives. There is no intrinsic value in brick modern house or modern brick house. The rules were created based on arbitrary custom/tradition. But now we are getting into semantics, which really complicates everything. My apologies if I'm way off here.
- tmoertel 14y agoSure, let me try to explain. My model is built as follows: 1. People speak and write not by following rules but their ears. 2. Since the ear hears words in sequence, the interpretation of those words also occurs in sequence. 3. Thus the phrase “great green dragon” is interpreted first as “great _”, then as “great green _”, and then finally as “great green dragon”, with the hole “_” representing the expectation of something concrete to come, something that the mind’s eye can eventually see. 4. This expectation is satisfied only when each new word reduces the possibilities for what will fill the hole. With each new word, the hole must shrink toward a single point, and rapidly. 5. Therefore, the most-pleasing ordering of N modifiers will tend to be the one that most rapidly and evenly converges to a point. 6. Therefore, we can find the most-pleasing ordering by maximizing the geometric mean of the shrinkages for all steps in the sequence. 6. For fixed N, the geometric mean and the product are interchangeable for optimization purposes, so we can just maximize the product of the shinkages. And that’s pretty much it. Now to your questions: By “impotent” I mean without effect. Any word that you put after a word that has already reduced the hole to a near-point is going to seem worthless and spoil the whole sequence. Re. begging the question, a sequence isn’t effective because it’s effective; it’s effective because, given our mental probability models for word sequences, it rapidly and evenly converges upon a concrete interpretation. To take your “darkest/greatest” as an example, here’s the rapid-and-even-convergence scores for the two possible orderings: $ { echo darkest greatest; echo greatest darkest; } | ./modorder.py 170047264509 darkest greatest 3409987166088 greatest darkest So, without any knowledge that “horse” will follow, we can predict that “greatest darkest” will be the best ordering of the modifiers. (This is from a crude approximation of the model that I just whipped up. It uses a small database of 2-gram and 3-gram frequencies.)
- dfc 14y agoFor example, we would prefer "modern brick house" to "brick modern house" because, in the second ordering, [brick modern _] is about the same as [brick _], making the second term in This bit makes no sense to me. Are you assuming that most brick houses are modern? Or that most modern houses are made of brick? How do you describe a brick house in the colonial style? Craftsman? Greek Revival? I dont even want to think about Brick Gothic...
- tmoertel 14y agoI'm saying that "brick _" is more restrictive on the phrases that can plausibly follow it than is "modern _". By choosing to place brick first, you narrow the possibilities so much that the following word has little work to do and seems out of place.
- Terretta 14y ago> Order the modifiers to maximize the product of their successive restrictive effects. Compare: "The great grey-green greasy Limpopo river, all set about with fever trees." So we'd have to decide on the fly which is more restrictive of great rivers, grey-green or greasy. Perhaps sometimes it's just about how the sounds sound.
- jngreenlee 14y agoYou made me think of two similar (pet peeves) of mine: Address and US Dates In the latter, obviously Mar 15, 2013 is expressed as 3/15/2013. I prefer to encode as 2013 03 15 (insert whatever syntax you like). There are enough techie people here I doubt I need to say much more on that. But the former, addresses, really bother me. Why do we start with the smallest modifier first? It probably relates to the way postal routes were first created, maybe for ease of use for the delivery person, would would already be in a restricted area. Seems that addresses should be ordered: Country, City, ZIP/subregion, Street, Number, Person
- yew 14y agoIf you assume that most post travels between points that are close to one another, putting the most specific modifier first makes sense. Most of the time you only have to think about a small part of the address to route correctly. That breaks down if the assumption is incorrect, and also to some extent if you have many different places with the same name that all receive lots of mail from you. So you're essentially right: It's an artifact of how the postal system used to work. Though both assumptions still apply more often than you might think.
- scoot 14y agoGood point - likewise email addresses and domain names.
- jcampbell1 14y agoIn Chinese, everything is "big to small". It is very logical. dates are 2013-03-15, addresses are USA, New York, Manhattan, names are Last Name, First Name, etc.