Natural Language Computing: An English Generative Grammar in Prolog

The book offers a hands-on approach to anyone who wishes to gain a perspective on natural language processing – the computational analysis of human language data. All of the examples are illustrated using computer programs. The optimal way for a person to get started is to run these existing programs to gain an understanding of how they work. After gaining familiarity, readers can begin to modify the programs, and eventually write their own.

The first six chapters take a reader who has never heard of non-procedural, backtracking, declarative languages like Prolog and, using 29 full page diagrams and 75 programs, detail how to represent a lexicon of English on a computer. A bibliography is programmed into a Prolog database to show how linguists can manipulate the symbols used in formal representations, including braces and brackets. The next three chapters use 74 full page diagrams and 38 programs to show how data structures (subcategorization, selection, phrase marker) and processes (top-down, bottom-up, parsing, recursion) crucial in Chomsky's theory can be explicitly formulated into a constraint-based grammar and implemented in Prolog. The Prolog interpreters provided with the book are basically identical to the high priced Prologs, but they lack the speed and memory capacities. They are ideal since anything learned about these Prologs carries over unmodified to C-Prolog and Quintas on the mainframes. Anyone who studies the prolog implementations of the lexicons and syntactic principles of combination should be able to use Prolog to represent their own linguistic data on the most complex Prolog computer available, whether their data derive from syntactic theory, semantics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language acquisition, language learning, or some related area in which the grammatical patterns of words and phrases are more crucial than concepts of quantity.