ecn-ec:davy@pur-ee.UUCP (10/04/83)
#N:ecn-ec:17500001:000:937 ecn-ec!davy Oct 3 08:59:00 1983 Hello, I am looking for a SIMPLE set of grammar rules for English. To be specific, I'm looking for something of the form: SENT = NP + VP ... NP = DET + ADJ + N ... VP = ADV + V + DOBJ ... etc. I would prefer a short set of rules, something on the order of one or two hundred lines. I realize that this isn't enough to cover the whole English language, I don't want it to. I just want something which could handle "simple" sentences, such as "The cat chased the mouse", etc. I would like to have rules for questions included, so that something like "What does a hen weigh?" can be covered. I've scoured our libraries here, and have only found one book with a grammar for English in it, and it's much more complex than what I want. Any pointers to books/magazines or grammars themselves would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance (as the saying goes) --Dave Curry decvax!pur-ee!davy eevax.davy@purdue
asa@rayssd.UUCP (10/07/83)
date: 10/7/83 Yesterday i sent a suggestion that you look at Winograd's new book on syntax. Upon reflection, I realized that there are several aspects of syntax not clearly stated therein. In particular, there is one aspect which you might wish to think about, if you are interested in building models and using the 'expectations' approach. This aspect has to do with the synergism of syntax and semantics. The particular case which occured to me is an example of the specific ways that Latin grammar terminology is innapropriate for English. In English, there is no 'present' tense in the intuitive sense of that word. The stem of the verb (which Winograd calls the 'infinitive' form, in contrast to the traditional use of this term to signify the 'to+stem' form) actually encodes the semantic concept of 'indefinite habitual' Thus, to say only 'I eat.' sounds peculiar. When the stem is used alone, we expect a qualifier, as in 'I eat regularly', or 'I eat very little', or 'I eat every day'. In this framework, there is a connection with the present, in the sense that the process described is continuous, has existed in the past, and is expected to continue in the future. Thus, what we call the 'present' is really a 'modal' form, and might better be described as the 'present state of a continuing habitual process'. If we wish to describe something related to our actual state at this time, we use what I think of as the 'actual present', which is 'I am eating'. Winograd hints at this, especially in Appendix B, in discussing verb forms. However, he does not go into it in detail, so it might help you understand better what's happening iif you keep in mind the fact that there exist specific underlying semantic functions being implemented, which are in turn based on the ltype of information to be conveyed and the subtlety of the disinctions desired. Knowing this at the outset may help you decide the elements you wish to model in a simplified program. It will certainly help if you want to try the expectations technique. This is an ideal situation in which to try a 'blackboard' type of expert system, where the sensing, semantics, and parsing/generation engines operate in parallel. Good luck! A final note: if you would like to explore further a view of grammar which totally dispenses with the terms and concepts of Latin grammar, you might read "The Languages of Africa" (I think that's the title), by William Welmer. By the way! Does anyone out there know if Welmer ever published his fascinating work on the memory of colors as a function of time? Did it at least get stored in the archives at Berkeley? Asa Simmons rayssd!asa
shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (10/12/83)
(Oh no, here he goes again! and with his water-cooled keyboard too!) Yes, analysis of syntax alone cannot possibly work - as near as I can tell, syntax-based parsers need an enormous amount of semantic processing, which seems to be dismissed as "just pragmatics" or whatever. I'm not an "in" member of the NLP community, so I haven't been able to find out the facts, but I have a bad feeling that some of the well-known NLP systems are gigantic hacks, whose syntactic analyzer is just a bag hanging off the side, but about which all the papers are written. Mind you, this is just a suspicion, and I welcome any disproof... stan the l.h. utah-cs!shebs