Re: Is the Gnu diction Package is bison and flex Candidate=

[Hans Aberg]

On 2 Aug 2007, at 21:33, Hans (Req man) wrote:

> This spelling out all possibilities brought to my mind the usage of  
> flex and bison in one of my projects in the early nineties:
>
> Generalization example 1:
> 1. <form of 'to be'>'able to'                          /* I am able  
> to ... */
> 2. <form of 'to be'><some text>'able to                /* were yo  
> able to ... */
>
> Generalization of example 2:
> 1. 'along'(<the> | <these>)(line | lines)(of | NIL)    /* along the  
> line of */
>
> Currently the three languages together check about 1,000 phrases.  
> Only one language can be active at any time. If the language is  
> unknown then only language independent checks can be executed (like  
> the counting of sentences and words).
>
> Now my question: How much work is it to specify this type of  
> 'complex' phrases in flex and bison?

I am not sure exactly what you are out for (i,e,, how these programs  
you mention work), but it is difficult to use Flex and Bison in  
natural language processing, in view of that natural languages are  
grammatically ambiguous even on the lexical level. For example, take  
the sentence:
  Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Here, there are a number of ways of resolving the grammatical  
components, leading to different meanings. So Flex would need to  
return a set of possibilities, instead of just one lexeme.

There is one constructed language Lojban <http://lojban.org/>, which  
has been made so that it is Yaccable (LALR(1)-parsable).

  Hans Aberg