Projects: language

[nibot]

This afternoon I went to UB:2 and pulled out a stack of books on language, linguistics, and computational linguistics. After reading through them for an hour or two I left with three (An Introduction to Language, Svensk Grammatik, and A Prolog Primer). I want to teach the computer Swedish and play with machine translation. I think that being a bit of a novice in the language (Swedish) is actually a benefit in such endeavors, as I actually think about the syntactic constructions rather than simply having the language come completely `naturally.' This afternoon I wrote a simple Lisp program that conjugates verbs (trivial, really, but it's a start). I think it would be really neat to create a parser for the language. Of course, that's a huge and non-trivial task, and I'd be completely happy with a limited subset of the language. The parser would start with a basic definition of the grammar (ie some kind of BNF) from which it would start parsing a sentence. The program should be able to try to figure out unknown words by looking at where they fall in the sentence structure and by looking at the word ending, etc. A more immediate goal is to write a program that, given subject-verb-object and a tense, will make the adjectives and verbs agree with one another in the appropriate way. (Of course, I'll probably never actually get around to doing it.)