Using Linguistic Rules
L. E. McMahon · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1968
The difficulties and partial successes of applying linguistic rules to natural languages will be discussed. Work in mechanical parsing of English has uncovered its pervasive syntactic ambiguity; and attempts to deal mechanically with the meaning of utterances have been only partially successful. Work in generative grammars has made regularities in language more evident to linguists, and the strict formality of generative rules has led some to believe that they are ideally suited for computer realization; the pitfalls and promises of this view will be pointed out. Finally, a brief discussion of what kinds of language computers can and do understand will suggest some possible routes towards better use of linguistic rules and facts in automatic language processing.