Re: THEORY: Parsing for meaning.

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 21:11:36 -0400, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:

> This reply might not be exactly what you were looking for, but I was
> wondering whether you've read the June 16th issue of the Economist, in
> which is an article about machine translation. What the article said
> was basically that scientists realised that the more efficient method
> of machine translation was not by keying in numerous grammar rules and
> vocabulary replacements, but through statistical analysis: let the
> computer parse a text unguided and it will figure out which word is of
> what function, and arrive at a set of rules and glosses itself,
> replete with exceptions. I don't know how it works, but it sure sounds
> fascinating.
I actually started thinking about this principle around a year or so ago.
I gave up when I couldn't figure out what the minimal atomic units of
linguistic knowledge should be[*], but I did also envisage extending the
system to allow it to attempt to determine cognates, and plausibly build a
tree of relatedness given semantically identical corpora in a set of
languages. They seem to be based on a generalization of the same problem.

[*]Heck, if I knew *that*, I could put Chmosky out of business... ;-)



Paul

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