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From: randyg@iscuva.ISCS.COM (Randy Gordon)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: English grammar (was Re: In layman's terms.)
Message-ID: <529@iscuva.ISCS.COM>
Date: Wed, 27-May-87 11:34:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: iscuva.529
Posted: Wed May 27 11:34:53 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 29-May-87 06:17:10 EDT
References: <13263@watmath.UUCP> <1116@houdi.UUCP>
Reply-To: randyg@iscuva.UUCP (Randy Gordon)
Distribution: na
Organization: ISC Systems Corporation, Spokane, WA
Lines: 27
Keywords: English, Backus-Naur Form, syntax.
Summary: Alternatives


There are two major "camps" of natural language techniques. 

The "Old School" is the syntactic/transformational grammer types, which 
comprise the majority of folks actually producing natural language parsers.
Harris's Intellect, for example. Some translation work is done by them,
Tomita's has a nice book on English/Oriental translation, and McCord's LMT
on English/German translation, for example. Personally, I find thier efforts
brilliant, but as futile as the dying stages of the "ether" theory.

The "Young Turks" are the descendents of Schank's Conceptual Dependency
theory, Sowa, Schank, etc. These generally treat semantics as secondary 
to syntactics. Shanks company, Cognitive Systems, several years ago, produced
a system for a Belgian Bank that could translate six languages well enough
to act as an interface to an EFT system. The nice thing about concept based
parsing is that you don't have to fully map the sentence to understand it.
This is very useful in unrestricted input systems.

There is a small group that believes you ought to pick the input words off
of menus. It works, and with modifications, better than ANY of the other
methods, but frankly, I don't consider it natural language processing.

A lot of the concept based parsing techniques have fascinating consequences
in expert systems, database representation type work, and may very well
represent the next "hot button" in AI.

Randy Gordon     "Tao ku tse fun pee"