 Natural Language Computing |
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The book's main goal is to show readers (who know little about modern Linguistics or languages like Prolog and Lisp) how to use the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky, called Universal Grammar, to represent English, French, and German on a computer using the Prolog computer Language. In so doing, it presents a follow-the-dots approach to natural language processing, linguistic theory, artificial intelligence, and expert systems. The basic idea is to introduce meaningful answers to significant problems involved in representing human language on a computer.
The book offers
a hands-on approach to anyone who wishes to gain a
perspective on natural language processing -- the computational analysis of
human language data using a parser. All of the
examples are illustrated using computer programs.
The optimal way for a person to get started is to run these existing programs to
gain an understanding of how they work. After gaining familiarity, readers can
begin to modify the programs, and eventually write their own.
The first six chapters take a reader who has never heard of non-procedural, backtracking, declarative languages like Prolog and, using 29 full page diagrams and 75 programs, detail how to present a lexicon of English on a computer, either a mainframe or a personal computer. A bibliography is programmed into a Prolog database to show how linguists can manipulate the symbols used in formal representations, including braces and brackets.
The next two
chapters use 74 full page diagrams and 38 programs to show how data structures
(subcategorization, selection, phrase marker,
ambiguity, perception,
left versus right branching) and processes (top-down,
bottom-up, parsing,
recursion) crucial in Chomsky's theory can be
explicitly formulated into a constraint-based grammar and implemented in Prolog.
Some examples of parallel processing are presented.
The programs in this book will assign structures like these
and like these.
The
Prolog interpreters provided with the book are basically identical to the high
priced Prologs, but they lack the speed and memory capacities. They all require
the learner to master the
edit-Prolog-edit loop. They are ideal since anything
learned about these Prologs carries over unmodified to C-Prolog and Quintus on
the mainframes. Anyone who studies the Prolog implementations of the lexicons
and syntactic principles of combination should be able to represent their own
linguistic data on the most complex Prolog computer available, whether their
data derive from syntactic theory, semantics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism,
language acquisition, language learning, or some related area (involving
game playing strategies and particularly
parallel processors) in which the grammatical
patterns of words and phrases are more crucial than concepts of quantity.
The
printed examples illustrate C-Prolog on an Ultrix VAX, a standard university
configuration. The disk included with the book contains shareware versions of
Prolog-2 (IBM PC) and Open-Prolog (Macintosh), plus versions of the programs
that run on C-Prolog, Quintus, Prolog-2, and Open-Prolog. Appendix II contains
information about how to use the Internet, Gopher, CompuServe, and the free More
BBS to download the latest copies of Prolog, programs, lexicons, and parsers.
All figures in the book are available scaled to make full size transparencies
for class lectures.
more than 100 full page diagrams, like this one, illustrate the basic concepts of natural language processing, Prolog, and Chomsky's linguistic theories;
more than 100 programs -- illustrated in at least one script file -- showing how to encode the representations and derivations of generative grammar into Prolog;
more than 100 sesion files guiding readers through their own hands-on sessions with the programs illustrating Chomsky's theory;
a
3.5 inch disk (IBM Format) containing: (a) all programs in versions to run in
C-Prolog or Quintus Prolog on an Ultrix VAX, and on an IBM PC and a Macintosh,
(b) a shareware version of Prolog-2 for IBM PC clones that runs all programs in
the book, (c) a shareware version of Open-Prolog that runs all programs in the
book;
numerous references enabling interested students to pursue questions at greater depth by consulting the items in the extensive bibliography
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