Subject: Re: [lojban] Some ambiguous sentences

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2000 13:14:12 EDT

In a message dated 00-08-03 11:37:38 EDT, cowan writes:

<< From: [email-masked] (John Cowan)
Sender: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked] ([email-masked])

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."