[antlr-interest] Natural language parsing

[Andy Tripp]

Terence Parr wrote:
>
> ANTLR could only handle a limited deterministic subset rather than 
> full NLP and couldn't help in that area.  I'm just saying that 
> grammatical structure is key to NLP.  Word freq don't cut it.  I'm 
> paraphrasing Steven Pinker, a human language expert from some 
> fancy-pants school back east. :)
My understanding is that the grammatical structure and word frequencies 
are all intertwined, too. So when you look for the verb in "Woods Eyes 
Masters", you might see that "eyes" is used as a verb less often than 
"masters" is, yet that's offset by the fact that sentences almost never 
end with a verb. And even then, if "Woods" doesn't turn out to be a noun 
which can perform the "eyes" action (as determined by word frequency), 
then we might backtrack and decide that "masters" is the verb after all.

All in all, NLP seems like a total crapshoot compared to parsing 
programming languages. Heck, even C++ and COBOL have SOME rules that 
come close :)

Andy