PLOGHELP PARSEDEMO                               Chris Mellish July 1983
                                 Revised by Kathryn Seifert  August 1986

Library demonstration program of a simple natural language parser

Keywords: parsing, natural language, grammar, graphics display


The library program PARSEDEMO is a small demonstration program involving
a simple natural language parser written with Prolog grammar rules.  The
program accepts a sentence as input, parses the sentence, and produces a
'picture' of the resulting parse tree using LIB * SHOWTREE (see
PLOGHELP * PLOGSHOWTREE and HELP * SHOWTREE). The code of the PARSEDEMO
program itself also demonstrates the use of POPLOG processes to produce
"generators" of solutions to Prolog goals (see SHOWLIB * PARSEDEMO).

To load the program, type:

    ?- library(parsedemo).

The program is started by typing:

    ?- go.

You will receive the following prompt:

** [please type your sentence]
?

At this point you should type in the sentence to be parsed (without
punctuation) after the '?'.  If the sentence can be parsed, then the
parse tree will be displayed on your screen.  The program will then ask
for another input sentence.

If you have no more sentences to parse, type <control> C  (i.e.
<interrupt>) to end the program.

The parser is very restricted in scope. It understands simple sentences
involving the following vocabulary:

Determiners:  the, a, an
Adjectives:   big, red, fat, tall, thin, hairy, blue, green, small
Common Nouns: man, block, woman, girl, boy, tree, cat, dog
Proper Nouns: john, mary
Verbs:        ate, saw, sang, smiled, walked, ran, sat, jumped, chased
Prepositions: on, with, in, at, by, up, under, to
Relative pronouns:  who


-- RELATED DOCUMENTATION ----------------------------------------------

PLOGHELP * GRAMMARS
 Overview of HELP files dealing with grammars and natural language

PLOGHELP * PLOGSHOWTREE
 Library package for drawing out a tree representing a list

HELP * SHOWTREE
 POP-11 HELP file giving details on LIB SHOWTREE