[darcs-devel] darcs patch: Add some simple English morphology. (and 2 more)

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Tue Jan 29 19:01:14 UTC 2008


On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 04:37:35PM +0000, E.Y.Kow at brighton.ac.uk wrote:
> This might be overkill.  I just thought it would be amusing if
> darcs had a module just for the English language :-)
> 
> Tue Jan 29 16:36:13 GMT 2008  Eric Kow <E.Y.Kow at brighton.ac.uk>
>   * Add some simple English morphology.
> 
> Tue Jan 29 16:36:19 GMT 2008  Eric Kow <E.Y.Kow at brighton.ac.uk>
>   * Refactor SelectChanges English.
> 
> Tue Jan 29 16:36:33 GMT 2008  Eric Kow <E.Y.Kow at brighton.ac.uk>
>   * [issue558] Singular 'do you want to revert this change?'

Applied.  And I just have to say: Eric, you are awsome.  However, from a
computational linguist (even if you *did* get your PhD in France), I expect
more from you than this.  For instance, there is some present participle
code in Unrecord that could be refactored.  And really, NounLike is a bit
confusing, surely there must be a term for "pluralizable"? After all, I'd
like to be able to safely (with static guarantees of grammatical
correctness) define functions such as

makeDefinite :: NounLike n => n -> ???
makeDefinite n = ???

makeIndefinite :: NounLike n => n -> ???

-- show (singular $ makeIndefinite $ Noun "apple") == "an apple"
-- show (singular $ makeIndefinite $ Noun "plum") == "a plum"
-- show (plural $ makeIndefinite $ Noun "plum") == "some apples"

What's the good of having a haskell-programming computational linguist on
board if we can't get static compile-time guarantees of grammatical
correctness?
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University


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