[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The general XML processing problem
Patrick Durusau writes: > Yes, and the ambiguity solution inherited from SGML was to solve the > problem in syntax, not in the processing layer. Since the ambiguity > problem was solved by Earley in 1970 (Earley, J. (1970) An efficient > context-free parsing algorithm. Communications of the Association for > Computing Machinery, 13(2):94-102) as well as dealt with in NLP and > other disciplines by techniques such as active chart parsing and parse > forests, I fail to see any reason to continue to with a solution in > syntax. Since I'm not familiar with that algorithm, and I have little understanding of computerized natural language processing, could you explain this? The information I can find on it suggests an algorithm that's at least beyond my ability to implement - lookahead and probabilities are definitely not my specialty. I'm not sure that a "solution in syntax" is necessarily a bad thing, though I'll readily admit that it's not an optimal solution for many problems. > The "inline" vs. "out-of-line" distinction does not bear close > examination. All "out-of-line" markup does is move the tree syntax > problem one step away and allow you to have one more tree for that a > particular text. The NLP community can hardly advise speakers/writers > to move ambiguous text "out-of-line" and hence must parse it "inline" > where it occurs. For NLP, you may be correct. I suspect there is a class of problems for which out-of-line markup approaches and multiple overlapping trees is in fact a good idea, but I certainly won't claim that class includes your set of problems. > I see the "out-of-line" solution as more of a hint > as to the underlying cause of the problem than a solution. I think the distinction between inline and out-of-line raises a set of issues that can inform the practice of those of us who generally find the inline style of XML to be useful. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com
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