Leslie Viljoen wrote:

> James Edward Gray II 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
>>
> For a quiz, perhaps you could provide a selection of say 10 or so 
> sentences that a parser would
> need to "understand" and convert to a range of method calls such as 
> get(obj), light(dobj, iobj),
> feed(dobj, iobj) etc.
>
> TO would need to be understood to get the 
> direct-object/indirect-object right:
> feed bird to lion vs. feed bird lion.
>
> I'll start on such a solution and let you know how it goes...


In my research I happened on a part-of-speech tagger by Mark Watson:
http://www.markwatson.com/opensource/

That would certainly make Mark a bit of an expert in this area! He posted
here in the forum about 10 days ago but I see his site says he is on 
holiday.
Anyway the tagger uses a 92000 line lexicon and some rules to transform
the results of the lexicon lookup. It's very interesting indeed.

I studied some linguistics at university but not enough to produce
something like this. It seems there may be a standard way to accomplish
such things if one does study the field further.

Les


PS: I got this using Mark's program:

feed:VBN  the:DT  lion:NN  to:TO  the:DT  bird:NN
feed:VBN  the:DT  lion:NN  the:DT  bird:NN
feed:VBN  the:DT  lion:NN  bird:NN
put:VB  the:DT  red:JJ  card:NN  in:IN  the:DT  card:NN  reader:NN