[antlr-interest] Natural language parsing

[Terence Parr]

On Jan 8, 2008, at 7:44 AM, Andy Tripp wrote:

> Terence Parr wrote:
>> But an amazingly large subset can be had with a top-down parser.   
>> Successful NLP work always tries to apply grammatical structure  
>> (according to best fit rather than deterministic like top-down LL  
>> stuff) not just word frequencies.  Even backtracking is required  
>> by humans when reading sentences; antlr could handle that part  
>> too. :)
>>
> So how would ANTLR help in trying to figure out grammatical  
> structure if the approach is "best fit" rather than top-down LL?

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. :)

Ter