As far as a lexicon is concerned, there is Wordnet, which appears to be
appropriately unencumbered:

http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

There are Lisp and Python interfaces as well as at least one parser (using
dBase!).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Ingalls [mailto:Dan.Ingalls at disney.com]
> Sent: July 16, 1999 10:50 AM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Cc: Ted Kaehler
> Subject: Simple Parser for Natural Language?
>
>
> Folks -
>
> Ted Kaehler and I want to write a Squeak program capable of
> superficially understanding natural language.  (Of course you are
> all invited to play, too ;-).
>
> By superficial understanding I mean, that it could successfully
> parse most sentences and could build up a body of valid knowledge
> structures based on the content.  Of course this does not
> constitute real understanding, since the relationships may be
> ambiguous, conflicting or lacking necessary context or metainformation.
>
> However, even at this superficial stage, it could be very useful
> and probably a lot of fun.  With backpointers to its source
> material, it could certainly facilitate inquiries about the
> content.  And with a bit more work, we might actually learn a
> thing or two about real understanding.
>
> So, here's the question:  Do any of you know of any simple
> parsers in Smalltalk (or even other languages) that are capable
> of parsing most english sentences correctly?  Presumably this
> also requires a lexicon, so it is important that the associated
> lexicon be in the public domain as well.
>
> Obviously, the next topic of interest is meta-information in the
> lexicon (like the relationship between infinitessimal, tiny,
> small, little, average, big, large, enormous, collossal), so if
> you have any leads onto (again, simple) work along these lines,
> that is also of interest to us.
>
> The idea is to then point it at a newspaper, the web, or the
> Squeak archives, and see if we can get it to make any interesting
> statements, even if they are wrong, and especially if they are
> funny.  Please don't mock us for simple thoughts about
> complicated topics.  After all, that's how we got Squeak.
>
> Thanks
> 	-Dan
>
>