From pycyn@aol.com Thu Aug 03 10:14:40 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16924 invoked from network); 3 Aug 2000 17:14:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 3 Aug 2000 17:14:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r10.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.10) by mta1 with SMTP; 3 Aug 2000 17:14:29 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r10.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.12.) id a.6e.1c6001b (6397) for ; Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:14:13 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <6e.1c6001b.26bb0264@aol.com> Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:14:12 EDT Subject: Re: [lojban] Some ambiguous sentences To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 3815 In a message dated 00-08-03 11:37:38 EDT, cowan writes: << From: jcowan@reutershealth.com (John Cowan) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com To: lojban@egroups.com (lojban@onelist.com) Here are a few pairs of sentences: individually not ambiguous to human beings, but having the same formal English parses. Source: http://www.cyc.com/products2.html Fred saw the plane flying over Zurich. Fred saw the mountains flying over Zurich. The police arrested the demonstrators because they committed violence. The police arrested the demonstrators because they feared violence. Mary saw the dog in the store window and wanted it. Mary saw the dog in the store window and pressed her nose up against it. >> In what parsing system? Even Miss Gradgrind back in fifth grade would have done each of these differently and no modern system would disagree. Is this some hopeless LR1 English "parser"? Further, these are even very sophisticated cases, involving only pronoun reference ambiguity or "misplaced modifiers."