Adding more fields
Acceptor
The program on the previous page only had one field, text. It's not very useful with just one field!
But it's still somewhat useful! If you had a lot more forms, you could make a spellchecker from it. The client program could go through every word in a document and ask, "Is this word in my database?", and if yes, it leaves it alone, and if no it underlines it with a red squiggle.
In "finite-state automata" terms we'd call a program like this an "acceptor". It doesn't turn something into something else (that would be a "transducer"); it can only say, "Yes, that's one of the words I cover," or "Nope, not one of mine."
(Side note: You'll probably often hear us call fields "tapes". This is using the metaphor of a Turing Machine, picturing computer programs as reading and writing to long strips of tape. In the finite-state machine world, we often use this metaphor, speaking of our programs as "reading a symbol from the input tape" or "writing a symbol to the output tape". An acceptor is a "one-tape automaton", it can only read from one tape; a transducer is a "two-tape automaton" reading from one tape and writing to another.)
So let's add another field and turn this into a transducer.
From acceptor to transducer
Let's take the previous program and add another field, gloss. (By the way, if you don't know this word, "gloss" is what linguists call a labeled breakdown of the parts of a word, like 1-past-pend.)
We have to decide what our gloss is going to look like, so let's say jumps comes out as jump-3SG.PRES, jumped comes out as jump-PAST, etc. (But there's nothing special about these labels. I chose linguist-y labels, but you could use any labels you want. Gramble doesn't understand what text or gloss or jump or 3SG.PRES mean.)
(If you're following along in the interface, this is the second example, 2: text<->gloss, in the Gramble->Tutorial sheets menu.)
| Root = | text | gloss |
|---|---|---|
| call | call | |
| jump | jump | |
| Suffix = | text | gloss |
| s | -3SG.PRES | |
| ed | -PAST | |
| ing | -PRES.PROG | |
| Verb = | embed | embed |
| Root | Suffix |
We added the gloss field to each of the Root and Suffix tables above, associating each piece of text with the appropriate piece of gloss. So, for example, in the Root table, call in the text field is associated with call in the gloss field ({text:call, gloss:call}), and in the Suffix table, ing in the text field is associated with -PRES.PROG in the gloss field ({text:ing, gloss:-PRES.PROG}); the Verb table contentenates entries from the Root and Suffix tables, so one of its results would be calling in the text field, and call-PRES.PROG in the gloss field ({text:calling, gloss:call-PRES.PROG}).
(There's nothing special about that hyphen either, by the way. It's a character like any other, and I'm just putting it there to split up the gloss because we decided that was how glosses are going to be split up.)
Also, there's a shorthand we can use when a table like Root has two fields that are exactly the same, we can join them with a forward slash like so:
| Root = | text/gloss |
|---|---|
| call | |
| jump |
That means we don't have to write the same thing twice. (Writing things twice can be bad because the two versions can sometimes get out-of-sync with each other. This makes sure they're always the same.) After all, not-writing-things-a-bunch-of-times is the whole reason we're writing a program!
Trying out a transduction
Let's put that into your sheet. After doing so, remember to first click any cell other than the last cell you edited. Then click Sync & Validate in the sidebar, which makes the sidebar interface update to use your latest changes.
<YourSheetName>.Verb should still be selected in the dropdown menu, but if not, select it again. Now if you sample by clicking Sample here, you'll see there are two fields in the results. Check that you're generating all six forms, and that the correct gloss is matching up with the correct text!
Now let's look at another part of that interface that we haven't used yet. Below <YourSheetName>.Verb but before the buttons, you can see coloured text input areas labeled with the field names of Verb: gloss and text. Anything you type into these restricts the generation/sampling -- or put another way, it lets you make a database query.
So type called into the coloured input area labelled text. Now if you sample or generate, the only possible result is {text:called, gloss:call-PAST}. We've done a transduction!