Reading a sentence (which humans do) is very different from parsing a
sentence (which computers do). Humans understand the semantics and
pragmatics of what they read. Computers don't. Many aspects of sentence
meaning may not be derived purely from the form of the sentence. Consider
Chomsky's classic example:
1. Time flies like an arrow.
2. Fruit flies like a banana.
Unless a parser knows about fruit flies, it can't know that "flies" in
example 2 is not a verb. What about this example:
3. Fruit flies like an arrow.
What does this mean? To a linguist, it obviously refers to the classic
examples 1 and 2, which are well known - but only to linguists. To the rest
of us, it is nonsense. But how is a computer to know that 1 and 2 are not
nonsense, but 3 is?
Jonathan
***************************************************************************
Jonathan Robie jwrobie@mindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~jwrobie
POET Software, 3207 Gibson Road, Durham, N.C., 27703 http://www.poet.com
***************************************************************************