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From: marshall@marshall.cs.unc.edu (Jonathan Marshall)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.prose.d,comp.ai
Subject: Ambiguous parsing
Summary: seek sentence
Keywords: great ships, gray chips
Message-ID: <3064@borg.cs.unc.edu>
Date: 9 Apr 91 21:31:05 GMT
Expires: 30 Apr 91 04:00:00 GMT
Sender: news@cs.unc.edu
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 31

I'm writing a paper on parsing of ambiguous patterns, such as certain
ones arising in ordinary language.  As an example, the utterances
"Gray chips" and "Great ships" can sound identical [Grossberg], but of
course they are parsed differently depending on context.

We might consider this to be a grouping problem.  The three sounds
"GRAY," "T," and "SHIPS" can be grouped syntactically as
(GRAY+T)(SHIPS) or as (GRAY)(T+SHIPS).

I am looking for a longer version of this same idea.  That is, can
someone come up with an English sentence or phrase that has 2 or more
possible word-level parsings?  These might obey either the pattern
(A)(B+C)(D+E)(F) or the pattern (A+B)(C+D)(E+F), for example.  The
exact length or the particular grouping patterns are not of great
importance to me.

Please e-mail to me.  If there is enough interest, I'll summarize to
the net.  The authors whose examples I use will be properly
acknowledged in my paper.

Thanks!

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=   Jonathan A. Marshall			  marshall@cs.unc.edu   =
=   Department of Computer Science					=
=   CB 3175, Sitterson Hall						=
=   University of North Carolina		  Office 919-962-1887	=
=   Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175, U.S.A.		     Fax 919-962-1799	=
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