[antlr-interest] Grammar natural language

[Stephen Winnall]

Hi Dagi

Grammars for natural languages are very difficult, and ANTLR is not suited for the general case. Natural languages are a complex structure involving the interaction of phonemics, morphology, syntax and semantics (not to mention general knowledge). Classic illustrations of the sort of problems that can arise are sentences like "flying planes can be dangerous" or "general flies back to front".

However, if you can restrict your corpus to a relatively small, well-defined domain (runways?), you may still be able to create an adequate grammar. But the chances that anyone has already written a grammar for that domain are correspondingly small. And your users are going to have to learn to restrict their language to what the grammar can handle, so you might really be better off writing a simple DSL instead.

Steve

On 15 Oct 2010, at 10:29, <Dagi.Troegner at dlr.de> wrote:

> Hi Armin,
> 
> I would like to cover just basic sentences in the English language with the purpose to let a user formulate simple constraints for a modelling environment. For the beginning sentences like
> 
> "The length of a runway is not greater than 5000 metres"
> Or 
> "If the runway is dependent then the distance is smaller than 1000 metres"
> 
> Thanks for any advice,
> 
> Dagi
> 
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Armin.Wegner at bka.bund.de [mailto:Armin.Wegner at bka.bund.de] 
> Gesendet: Freitag, 15. Oktober 2010 07:47
> An: Trögner, Dagi
> Betreff: AW: [antlr-interest] Grammar natural language
> 
> Hi Dagi,
> 
> for which one? Most likely you will have a separate grammar for each natural language.
> 
> Armin 
> 
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org [mailto:antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org] Im Auftrag von Dagi.Troegner at dlr.de
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 14. Oktober 2010 14:39
> An: antlr-interest at antlr.org
> Betreff: [antlr-interest] Grammar natural language
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am looking for a simple grammar for natural language. In a first version just short simple sentences would be satisfying.
> Has anyone tried to formulated such a grammar already?
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> 
> Dagi
> 
> 
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> Dagi Troegner
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