Syntactic analysis of English by computer: a survey

Abstract

A statement in a spoken language may be regarded as a one-dimensional string of symbols used to communicate an idea from the speaker to a listener. The dimensionality of the statement is limited by the need for presenting words in a single time sequence. However, evidence indicates that most information and ideas are not stored by people in one-dimensional arrays isomorphic to these linear strings. This implies that a speaker must use certain complex information manipulating processes to transform the stored information to a linear output string, and that a listener, in order to "understand" the speaker, must use another set of processes to decode this linear string. In order for communication to take place, the information map of both the listener and the speaker must be approximately the same, at least for the universe of discourse. Most important, the decoding process of the listener must be an approximate inverse of the encoding process of the speaker.