On Nov 29, 2005, at 10:32 PM, David Balmain wrote:

> On 11/29/05, James Edward Gray II <james / grayproductions.net> wrote:
>> On Nov 29, 2005, at 8:15 AM, David Balmain wrote:
>>
>>> On 11/29/05, James Edward Gray II <james / grayproductions.net> wrote:
>>>> On Nov 29, 2005, at 1:12 AM, Leslie Viljoen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The real challenge will be the parser - in fact, that might be a
>>>>> good quiz too.
>>>>
>>>> I've been considering this for a quiz.  I'm currently in the  
>>>> process
>>>> of solving it myself, to prove it's not too much work.  My free  
>>>> time
>>>> is scarce currently though, so if you beat me to a solution mail it
>>>> to me, along with a count of how many hours it took to build...
>>>>
>>>> James Edward Gray II
>>>
>>> Parsing English is what I wrote my thesis on at university. I wonder
>>> if a general purpose English tokenizing and parsing library would be
>>> of any use to anyone. I'm thinking of taking it up again.
>>
>> I would LOVE to see a pure Ruby library for something like this.  I
>> can't imagine it wouldn't get used.
>
> Unfortunately I think I'd have to do it in C. My linguistic skills
> aren't good enough to take a purely grammatical approach. I'd need to
> take a learning approach. The  parser I wrote at university took 72
> hours to process the input corpus which it learned all the rules from.
> I'd hate to think how long this would take in pure ruby. Writing this
> as a ruby extension would be the way to go. For me at least anyway.

It still sounds very interesting.

James Edward Gray II