[lojban] Re: Beta Release of PEG-based Lojban parser.

[Rob Speer <rspeer@MIT.EDU>]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 05:28:58PM -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> I am considering an extension to allow 'si' or 'sa' at the beginning of
> text (presumably to erase stuff from the proceeding utterance).  The
> morphology needs massive amounts of work, and ideally I'd like to get
> Nora and Pierre's full algorithm encoded.  I may also hack an extremely
> minimal pre-processor to do zoi.  At some point the parser needs to be
> taught to output something more useful than just the text it succeeded
> at parsing, but I'm really hoping someone with actual Java experience
> will look at that.

So I assume this means you can't currently get parse trees out of it.

But it's not something about PEGs that you can't get parse trees, right?
With the right code, the parse trees could be output?

The reason I ask is that this summer, I've got a research job in
semantic interpretation of natural languages. I've gotten permission
from my advisor to apply my research to Lojban.

This technique of semantic interpretation involves taking a CFG and
assigning a lambda expression to every rule. You then apply these lambda
expressions up a parse tree, and at the top you end up with an
expression encoding the meaning of the sentence.

So this should apply to Lojban very well. Now, I also think that the PEG
is very cool and is fixing some of the most blatant things wrong with
Lojban, and I'd like to be able to use it. So that requires being able
to retrieve parse trees.
-- 
mu'o mi'e rab.spir