🚀 go-pugleaf

oneil@husc10.harvard.edu (John O'Neil) writes:

>In article <hansg.728031611@risken> hansg@risken.vd.volvo.se (Hans Granqvist) writes:
>>This may be a strange question, but having read in the latest issue of
>>BYTE about Machine Translation, I thought, why not express the source
>>language in yacc to resolve all ambiguities like "the can can be filled"
>>where "can" is noun or verb?

>There are two immediate problems with such a scheme, which have noting
>to do with lexical ambiguity:

>(1) There are phenomena in natural language (including Swedish, I
>believe) which are provably not context free.  Since the syntax used
>in YACC is less than context-free (LALR(1), I believe), one of the
>difficulties would be to change the syntax people used with the
>translator.
I do not think this is really a problem. Most "proofs" I have seen
use arbitrarily deep nesting, or arbitrarily often repeated `respectively',
or some such. But I would hesitate to call a sentence acceptable
when it contains nesting of more than a hundred levels, or more
than 10000 words. And a program that could correctly translate
arbitrary pieces of text of not more than 50 words would be a
miraculous achievement.
[Try to translate from Russian to English and only get the choice
of articles (`a', `the' or none) right. A very detailed knowledge
of the subject matter is required.]