Syntactic Theory

This is part of an open investigation on the representation and interpretation of the syntax of natural language.

In this article, we show a basic implementation of a DRT parser in JS using the nearley compiler compiler and rendered using the zdog tree renderer.

Here are some examples:

Jones likes Mary. Jones loves Brian. Jones and Brian like Mary. the man likes himself. the woman likes herself. Jones owns Ulysses. it fascinates him. Jones stinks. he does not like her. Jones likes a woman who loves Mary. Mary loves a book which Brian owns. Jones owns a porsche. she is happy. they are not happy. Jones likes a woman who is not happy. Jones owns a book which Brian loves. a man admires a woman. Jones does not own a porsche. Jones owns a book about Brazil. if Jones owns a book then he loves it. every man who owns a book stinks. every brazilian owns a book about Brazil. the man or the woman loves the book. the man loves the book and Mary. she loves him. she loves herself. they love Jones. Jones likes Brian's wife. Mary is Brian's wife. Jones is unhappy. the book is near the porsche. Jones likes a woman with a book. he loves a woman who does not like Brian. she is from Brazil. she likes a man from Brazil. every man is mortal. Socrates is a man. Brian and Jones love Mary and Brazil. every man who likes Brian loves Mary. they kissed Mary. Jones has kissed Mary. Jones will kiss Mary. Mary was behind Jones. all men are mortal. most men are mortal. many men are mortal. only men are mortal. the majority of men are mortal. the minority of men are mortal.

The sentence above gets parsed as:

You can also try your own:

The parser is still fairly fragile and is at best a toy. A few things missing here:

• error handling
• plurals
• generics
• an extensibility story (e.g. proper names, nouns and verbs)

More to come! WDYT?