On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:39:51 -0500, Peter Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Christopher Subich wrote: >> Using English, because that's the only language I'm fluent in, consider >> the sentence: >> >> "The horse raced past the barn fell." >> >> It's just one of many "garden path sentences," where something that >> occurs late in the sentence needs to trigger a reparse of the entire >> sentence. > >I can't parse that at all. Are you sure it's correct? Aren't "raced" >and "fell" both trying to be verbs on the same subject? English surely >doesn't allow that forbids that sort of thing. (<wink>) > The computer at CMU is pretty good at parsing. You can try it at http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html Here's what it did with "The horse raced past the barn fell." : ++++Time 0.00 seconds (81.38 total) Found 2 linkages (2 with no P.P. violations) Linkage 1, cost vector = (UNUSED=0 DIS=0 AND=0 LEN=13) +------------------------Xp------------------------+ | +----------------Ss---------------+ | +-----Wd-----+ +----Js----+ | | | +--Ds-+---Mv--+--MVp--+ +--Ds-+ | | | | | | | | | | | LEFT-WALL the horse.n raced.v past.p the barn.n fell.v . Constituent tree: (S (NP (NP The horse) (VP raced (PP past (NP the barn)))) (VP fell) .) IIUC, that's the way I parse it too ;-) (I.e., "The horse [being] raced past the barn fell.") BTW, the online response has some clickable elements in the diagram to get to definitions of the terms. Regards, Bengt Richter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list