Subject: ? on Chinese grammar

From: "(Guo Jin)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 13:14:31 SST

Hi, Jianhua,

Yesterday, I sent to you through the inner mailbox parts of HAN Di's
Ph.D dissertation, "computer speech recognition and expert system methods
for entering Chinese characters to computers".  It includes about 30
pages dictionary codes and ATN graphs.

The main problem he encountered is:  the resolution of homonyms in
pinyin to hanzi transcription.  Two accompanied ambiguouses are:  less
of tonal and word boundary information.  The main idea (not new, even in
Chinese) is to use lexical, syntactic and semantic constraints as
filters.  I don't think his work a breakthrough.  It is, however,
representative.

There are two kinds of NLP systems:  constructive and destructive.  The
ultimate goal of a constructive system is to build an inner (deep)
representation (logic form or whatsoever).  The destructive system is
simply to rule out any "impossible" hypotheses.  The former is always
try to say "it is ..." while the later is always to say "it is not ...".
But I never understand the real difference between them.

Theoretically, the logic for constructive system is:  if you can not say
it is impossible, it is possible.  On the other hand, the logic for
destructive system is:  if not possible, it is impossible!

I think the logic is very important in grammar rule formation.

Each Chinese NLP system has its own linguistic rules.  It is not hard to
collect them.  But how to use them?  Each system has its own assumptions
and emphases.  It is hard, if not impossible, to merge them together.

You see, how many ambiguous in my mind!  Any info. about grammar and any
of your progress in this area, pls share with me.  Talk to you later.

[email-masked]