> On 2016-02-17, at 10:50 AM, Sven M. Hallberg <pe...@khjk.org> wrote: > > Derick Winkworth <ccie15...@gmail.com> writes: >> In this case, they went through the process of defining a grammar for an >> existing protocol. This process might actually have another application in >> the realm of machine learning and language processing.
> Interesting, could you elaborate? I would believe natural language > processing includes a lot of grammar construction; Meredith should be > able to tell. For some approaches to natural language processing (and much else in Linguistics) trying to work out an explicit grammar from just having instances of what is (and if you are lucky, what isn’t) in a language is the fun part. Now when linguists do this, they typically have the ability to check whether something is or isn’t in the language. For example, I can check whether (1) is English by consulting my intuitions. (1) *language the in isn’t or is something whether check to But when you don’t have the opportunity to interrogate a parser that knowns the language, you are struck with working from (mostly) positive examples of what is in the language. Note that to a substantial extent children learning their native language are confronted with the same problem. So when presented with a bunch of grammatical sentences made up from a set, w, of words in a language, the simplest grammar would be w* This of course, is not what people should do. We have exceptions of what a natural language grammar should look like and the kinds of things that the target language actually does. Anyway, there is a whole bunch of research on what sorts of assumptions about the nature of the grammar need to be in place to be able to “learn” the grammar from positive instances of it. One thing to keep in mind is that natural language grammars allow for ambiguity. (2) She saw the boy with the binoculars. There are clearly two distinct parse trees available for this. She [saw [the boy] [with [the binoculars]]] She [saw [the boy with the binoculars]] And see how many you can get for (3) We saw her duck Anyway, trying to figure out what a grammar is from instances of the language and various expectation about what the language is supposed to do is loads of fun. But the languages that Linguists look at are enormously more complex than the tiny languages of these protocols, so I don’t really think that many of the specific techniques are useful. Now as no to Linguists ever agree things, I await for Meredith to explain what I am wrong about. Cheers, -j _______________________________________________ langsec-discuss mailing list langsec-discuss@mail.langsec.org https://mail.langsec.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/langsec-discuss
