Matt said: People do not learn grammar by being given grammatical rules, because we still don't know what they are. Grammar rules seem to have a Zipf distribution, like vocabulary. About 200 words account for half of the tokens in text, and then it gets complicated. Likewise, a small number of rules cover a lot of the cases, like (S ::= NP VP, NP := det adj noun, etc). But after this point, you run into huge number (nobody know exactly how many) of idioms and special cases like "what/why/how in the world?" that makes language immensely complex. By the time you are old enough to learn the concept of grammar, you have already learned more of the rules than anyone has ever been able to write down. I hope that my incremental Fluid Construction Grammar parser, as recently illustrated in this blog post, copes with the complexity that you describe. Because FCG has as its organizing principle that grammar is the pairing between form and meaning, it theoretically accommodates the idioms and special cases present in natural languages such as English - e.g. by allowing a rule for each separate idiom. I expect at least one FCG rule per English word sense, so that's 200 000 rules alone, plus at least one rule per word inflected form - another 100 000 plus rules. I suppose that another 100 000 rules will cover the complex constructions of English. In Texai, I expect these to be taught to the system by volunteer mentors. Perhaps as it gets smarter, Texai's construction rule acquisition will become more like human children, who can induce generally applicable constructions given some examples of the parings of form and meaning.
-Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
