The book's main goal is to show readers how to usethe linguistictheory of Noam Chomsky, called Universal Grammar ,to represent English, French, and German on a computerusing the Prologcomputer Language. In so doing, it presents afollow-the-dots approachto natural language processing, linguistic theory,artificialintelligence, and expert systems. The basic idea is tointroducemeaningful answers to significant problems involved inrepresentinghuman language on a computer.
The book offers a hands-onapproach toanyone who wishes to gain a perspective on naturallanguage processing -- the computational analysis of human language datausing a parser. All of the examples are illustrated usingcomputer programs. The optimal way for a person to getstarted is to runthese existing programs to gain an understanding of howthey work. Aftergaining familiarity, readers can begin to modify theprograms, andeventually write their own.
The first six chapters take a reader who has neverheard ofnon-procedural, backtracking, declarativelanguages like Prolog and,using 29 full pagediagrams and 75 programs, detail how to present alexicon of English on acomputer, either amainframe or a personalcomputer. A bibliographyis programmedinto a Prolog database to show how linguists canmanipulate the symbolsused in formal representations, including braces andbrackets. The next two chapters use 74 full page diagrams and 38 programsto show how datastructures (subcategorization, selection, phrasemarker, ambiguity, perception, left versus right branching)and processes (top-down, bottom-up, parsing, recursion) crucial inChomsky's theory can beexplicitly formulated into a constraint-based grammarand implemented inProlog. Some examples of parallel processingare presented. The programs in this book will assignstructures like these and like these.
The Prolog interpreters provided with the book arebasicallyidentical to the high priced Prologs, but they lack thespeed and memorycapacities. They all require the learner to master theedit-Prolog-edit loop. They are ideal sinceanything learned aboutthese Prologs carries over unmodified to C-Prolog andQuintus on themainframes. Anyone who studies the Prologimplementations of thelexicons and syntactic principles of combination shouldbe able torepresent their own linguistic data on the most complexProlog computeravailable, whether their data derive from syntactictheory, semantics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language acquisition,language learning,or some related area (involving game playingstrategies and particularly parallelprocessors) in which the grammatical patterns ofwords and phrasesare more crucial than concepts of quantity.
The printed examples illustrate C-Prolog on anUltrix VAX, astandard university configuration. The disk includedwith the bookcontains shareware versions of Prolog-2 (IBM PC) andOpen-Prolog(Macintosh), plus versions of the programs that run onC-Prolog,Quintus, Prolog-2, and Open-Prolog. Appendix II contains informationabout how to use the Internet, Gopher, CompuServe, andthe free More BBSto download the latest copies of Prolog, programs,lexicons, andparsers. All figures in the book are available scaledto make full sizetransparencies for class lectures.
more than 100 full page diagrams, like this one, illustrate the basic concepts of naturallanguageprocessing, Prolog, and Chomsky's linguistictheories;
more than 100 programs -- illustrated in atleast one scriptfile -- showing how to encode the representations andderivations ofgenerative grammar into Prolog;
more than 100 sesion files guiding readersthrough their ownhands-on sessions with the programs illustrating Chomsky's theory;
a 3.5 inch disk (IBM Format) containing: (a) allprograms inversions to run in C-Prolog or Quintus Prolog on anUltrix VAX, and onan IBM PC and a Macintosh, (b) a shareware version ofProlog-2 for IBMPC clones that runs all programs in the book, (c) ashareware version ofOpen-Prolog that runs all programs in thebook;
numerous references enabling interested students to pursue questions at greater depth by consulting the items in the extensive bibliography