Re: wordplay vs. an

[Steve Dunham <dunham@dunham.tcimet.net>]

Richard Jones <richard@a42.deep-thought.org> writes:

> P.S. anyone know much about language parsing and feel like writing a
> fast grammar checker for 'an'?  I tried using a yacc type parser
> (not perfect for parsing natural language), but it was woefully
> slow, and not that robust for some types of english structures (I
> don't speak any other languages), although it did add the
> interesting property of having 6 levels of different recursive
> functions nested within each other with none of them lending
> themselves too neatly to alternative iterative solutions).

I like Tomita's parsing algorithm.  It finds complete parse forests
for a large class of non-deterministic grammars.  It's a neat
algorithm, I have some source that I found on the net a few years ago,
you can get it from

   http://dunham.tcimet.net/~dunham/out/tomita.tgz

It includes a file with a short description of the algorithm. The
'tom.doc' file says the code is public domain, but the author doesn't
divulge his name...


Steve
dunham@cps.msu.edu