rda@epistemi.UUCP (Robert Dale) (12/03/86)
Don't laugh, but .... does anyone know of any research that has been done
into possibilities for structure editors for *natural language*? Yes, I
know that this is just not feasible given our limited understanding of the
syntax of natural language (I'm supposed to be a computational linguist);
however, I'm wondering if anyone has attempted to use ideas found in
structured editors for programming languages in the context of well
understood fragments of natural languages. So, for example, given a grammar
for a fragment of natural language, it would be possible to manipulate noun
phrases as explicitly represented entities: the command
"delete-noun-phrase" might be an operation provided by the editor.
A related question I have is on the determination of word and sentence
boundaries in a stream of characters -- does anyone know of anything in the
literature that approaches these issues? I'm aware of the algorithms used
by standard text processing facilities, of course, but I'm wondering if
there are any treatments out there that owe more to formal linguistic
theory. So, for example, we might have sentences viewed as consisting of
entities of type Word separated by entities of type Punct, with
well-formedness constraints on the combination of Words and Puncts.
Any pointers would be appreciated. Of course, if it looks like there is
sufficient interest, I'll report back to the net with what I find.
--
Robert Dale University of Edinburgh, Centre for Cognitive Science,
2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, Scotland.
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