On 11/29/06, Philip Goetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Either that, or I wouldn't do a purely syntactic parse. It doesn't work very well to try to handle syntax first, then semantics.
Bother. I've made some contradictory statements. I started out by saying that you could parse English into predicates, without resolving the semantics, and feed those predicates into whatever process you like to "understand" the sentence. What I actually do, as opposed to what I say, is to attack syntax and semantics at the same time. The more you commit to a particular semantic interpretation, the more elaborate you can make your parse, and the more predications you can extract. Understanding is a large part of parsing. This is complicated by the fact that the ambiguities that are easy to think of (e.g., does "bank" mean a river bank or a place to put money) are also easy to resolve, whereas subtler ambiguities that are very difficult to resolve (say, what qualities is the speaker focusing on, and what qualities are they ignoring, when they say someone is "admirable") generally have little impact on the syntax. I can at least say that, supposing you can figure out what the sentence means, predicates can be a good way of representing that meaning. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
