[Haskell-cafe] NLP libraries and tools?

[wren ng thornton]

On 7/7/11 3:50 AM, Aleksandar Dimitrov wrote:
> It's actually a shame we're discussing this on -cafe and not on -nlp. Then
> again, maybe it's going to prompt somebody to join -nlp, and I'm gonna
CC it
> there, because some folks over there might be interested, but not read
-cafe.

Quite :)

> When you mentioned Arabic for producing sentences that go on for ages —
> you don't really need to go that far. I have had the doubtful pleasure of
> reading Kant and Hegel in their original versions. In German, it is
sometimes
> still considered good style to write huge sentences. I once made it a
point,
> just to stick it to a Kant-loving-person, to produce a sentence that
spanned 2
> whole pages (A4.) It wasn't even difficult.

The Romans were big fans of that too (though there's only a small group of
folks interested in doing NLP on Latin these days). I've only read Hegel
et al. in translation, but the Latin I've read falls nicely into the
notion of "span". It doesn't, however, always fall nicely into a
clause-based approach like Japanese does. Then again, that could be due to
the poetic/rhetorical nature of the texts in question.

I wonder if there's been any computational attempt to make the notion of
span or discourse atoms rigorous enough for pragmatic use...


> I'm very much a "works for me" person in these matters. Mostly because
I'm tired
> of linguists fighting each other over trivial matters. Give me something
I can
> work with already!

I can't help but be a (meta)theorist. But then, I'm of the firm opinion
that theory must be grounded in actual practice, else it belongs more to
the realm of theology than science.

-- 
Live well,
~wren