Data
Reduced Relative Clauses
Category
Data
Abstraction level
Primitive
Operation level
DataInference
Use cases
Psycholinguistic studies of syntactic processingTesting model robustness to garden-path sentencesDiagnosing parsing of hard constructions
How it works
A parser or model must recognize that a phrase initially looking like the main predicate is in fact a reduced relative clause modifying a noun, and revise the initial interpretation upon encountering the true main verb.
Problem solved
How to correctly parse a sentence where omitting the relative pronoun and auxiliary creates temporary ambiguity (a garden-path effect)?
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
✓A sensitive probe of syntactic understanding
✓Reveals differences between humans and models
Limitations
✗A source of interpretation errors
✗Language- and context-dependent
✗Rare in typical text, but diagnostically valuable