Abstract
THE recent article concerning computer simulation1 is refuted by its first sentence. As the first condition for an acceptable simulation of the way in which human beings recognize syntactic structure, the authors say “an analyser must not be dependent on looking up every word of an input sentence in a dictionary”. To meet this condition a dictionary is used which contains information “only about those words with fixed syntactic functions and about suffixes”. “With this dictionary alone, infinitely many English sentences can be analysed.” Unfortunately, there are also “infinitely many” sentences which cannot be analysed in this way. The first sentence of the article is one such sentence.
Similar content being viewed by others
Article PDF
References
Bratley, P., Dewar, H., and Thorne, J. P., Nature, 216, 969 (1967).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
BROSS, I. Recognition of Syntactic Structure by Computer. Nature 217, 1078 (1968). https://doi.org/10.1038/2171078a0
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/2171078a0
This article is cited by
-
Recognition of Syntactic Structure by Computer
Nature (1968)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.