Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!pardo
From: pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Syntactical defininition of English
Message-ID: <6198@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 88 16:39:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: june.6198
References: <726@wsccs.UUCP> <44600003@hcx2>
Reply-To: pardo@cs.washington.edu (David Keppel)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 34

> somebody writes;
>>[ english grammar? ]

In article <44600003@hcx2> dougs@hcx2.SSD.HARRIS.COM writes:
> [...] But to use syntactical productions to recognize things such as
> various data types in expressions, or even worse, checking that the
> number of parameters agrees between a caller and a callee is either
> too exhaustive to be useful or just simply beyond a CFL.

Attribute grammars are a current research topic.  It is possible
(although "too exhaustive") to write an attribute grammar that
recognizes (semantically) Ada.  It runs to some thousand pages (whew!).

Here's another "goodie":  somebody fed the statement "Time flies like
an arrow" into a computer and the computer said:

* This is an analogy; time is a thing that moves in a way (flying)
  that is similar to the way that an arrow moves.
* Definition: "time files" are some species that have characteristics
  much like those of an arrow.
* Command: [go get a stopwatch and] time flies the same way that you
  would time an arrow.

If you think that's fun, the Lojban people enumerate something like
20 different ways to understand the phrase "pretty little girl's
school".  Lobjan is a synthetic language related to Loglan that is
designed to be unambiguous and machine-parseable; there *are* parsers
for Lojban, so quick, everybody run out and learn Lojban so we can
have "synthetic-language query systems" :-)

	;-D on  ( Eh?  I don't grok, Mike )  Pardo
-- 
		    pardo@cs.washington.edu
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