Re: Corpora: Ergo's Patent Publishes

vannoord@let.rug.nl
Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:53:59 +0100 (MET)

>
> On Mon, 15 Mar 1999, Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. wrote:
>
> > The patent for the tools that create Ergo Linguistic Technologiess=92
> > software has just been published by the U.S. Patent Office. Copies
>
> ***Incredibly long snip***
>
> This is my first post to this group. I hope this isn't out of line, but I
> was too tempted by the claims of this post to resist checking the online
> demo. I tested it with three different problems:
>

...lots of simple examples for which `Ergo' fails...

> I am a neophyte in NLP so I chose pretty simple parsing challenges. =20
> These are the problems which I drew from an undergraduate level class on
> the topic. I was fortunate enough to sit in on a demo from IBM on work
> they're doing with probabilistic phrase grammars which could handle many
> of these types of examples. My unprofessional opinion is that this
> grammar has the same problems that every other basic grammar has.
>
> I'm curious if others think the challenges I posed were reasonable.
> Perhaps someone else can find a class of sentences that this system does
> parse well.=20
>

I tested the demo a few years ago. Short description can still be found
on e.g. dejanews. My experiences were similar to yours. Almost every example
I tried something went terribly wrong. I think it is time to ignore
mr. Brahlich's nonsense.

Gertjan