[antlr-interest] Any ANTLR based parser for the English language?

iank at bearcave.com iank at bearcave.com
Sun Mar 2 19:28:56 PST 2003


> Is there (or actually has anyone tried) writing a
> parser for the English Language (or for that matter
> any language - e.g. French, German, etc.) with ANTLR?

  I just purchased an excellent book "Foundations of Statistical
  Natural Language Processing" by Manning and Schutze (there is an
  umlaut over the u), MIT Press, 2000.  To be guilty of massive
  understatement, building a parse tree for a language like English is
  very different from building a parse tree for Java or any other
  programming language.  Programming languages are designed to be
  compiled (well, OK, there's C++ and Verilog).  The grammar rules for
  a natural language are much more complex and you would have to have
  a very sophisticated scanner (parser front end).

  The attraction of parser generators is that they save you time and
  make changes easier when building parsers for programming languages.
  I'm not sure that ANTLR would provide much savings in natural
  language processing, considering all of the support software you
  would need.

  Ian
  www.bearcave.com

 

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