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From: sts@ssc-vax.UUCP (Stanley T Shebs)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Language Translation
Message-ID: <467@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Aug-83 16:12:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ssc-vax.467
Posted: Wed Aug 24 16:12:59 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Aug-83 04:17:01 EDT
References: <4452@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle
Lines: 23

You have heard of my parser.  It's a variant on Berkeley's PHRAN, but
has been improved to handle arbitrarily ambiguous sentences.  I submitted
a paper on it to AAAI-83, but it was rejected (well, I did write it in about
3 days - wasn't very good).  A paper will be appearing at the AIAA
Computers in Aerospace conference in October.  The parser is only a
*basic* solution - I suppose I should have made that clearer.  Since
it is knowledge-based, it needs **lots** of knowledge.  Right now
we're working on ways to acquire linguistic knowledge automatically
(Selfridge's work is very interesting).  The knowledge base is woefully
small, but we don't anticipate any problems expanding it (famous last words!).

The parser has just been released for use within Boeing ("just" meaning
two days ago), and it may be a while before it becomes available
elsewhere (sorry).  I can mail details on it though.

As for language analysis being NP-complete, yes you're right.  But
are you sure that humans don't brute-force the process, and that
computers won't have to do the same?

						stan the lep hacker
						ssc-vax!sts (soon utah-cs)

ps if IBM is using APL, that explains a lot (I'm a former MVS victim)