Leaving aside the compression of language via grammar rules, I am
continually in awe at the process that goes on in the lexicon. As a
computational lexicologist, I work with electronic dictionaries
(particularly with Oxford's latest) that are the distillation or
compression of rules about individual words. These distillations are
fraught with complexity, as witness the previous assertions about their
inutility for computational purposes. As Patrick Hanks has so
wonderfully articulated, any instantiation of a word's use represents an
activation of only selected components of a word's (fuzzy) meaning
(largely indicated by the context). But this only covers the analysis.
When I generate, I feel very much as if my use of a particular word
may change from one draft of a paper to the next, i.e., my whole
semantic network of associations changes from day to day. The rules for
generation seem so much more complex, but those who study such matters
have developed many. My parsing and analysis is, by comparison, so much
easier (but still only a tad successful).
-- Ken Litkowski TEL.: 301-482-0237 CL Research EMAIL: ken@clres.com 9208 Gue Road Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA Home Page: http://www.clres.com
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