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>
> While doing some AI studies of parsing engines I ran across some
> interesting sentences:
>
> The major generals loved baked lasagna
> a) The generals loved a major, and that major baked lasagna
> b) A particular category of generals, namely major generals loved
> lasagna when the lasagna was baked.
>
> The grammatically correct classic:
> The horse run past the barn fell.
>
> It parses to:
> "George ran the black horse past the barn"
> "He also ran the brown horse past the house"
> "One horse fell down"
>
If you accept the antiquated meaning of "fell" as evil, it could parse as
a phrase in answer to a question:
"Where did this take place?"
"The horse run past the barn fell."
That is, there's a barn which is fell, and the incident took place beyond
there, at the run used to exercise horses.
Or, if you allow for one word of dialect (ungrammatical, it is true) in
addition to the antiquated word:
"The horse he run past the barn which is fell." (A haunted barn -- built
over a graveyard perhaps. I'd probably run past it too.)
It's all a question of context, of course -- which is why natural
language parsers won't handle this kind of thing until they incorporate as
much contextual knowledge as the average human.
Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
Chris
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