On 7/7/11 3:50 AM, Aleksandar Dimitrov wrote:

It's actually a shame we're discussing this on -cafe and not on -nlp. Then again, maybe it's going to prompt somebody to join -nlp, and I'm gonna CC it there, because some folks over there might be interested, but not read -cafe.

When you mentioned Arabic for producing sentences that go on for ages — you don't really need to go that far. I have had the doubtful pleasure of reading Kant and Hegel in their original versions. In German, it is sometimes still considered good style to write huge sentences. I once made it a

Quite :) point,

just to stick it to a Kant-loving-person, to produce a sentence that spanned 2 whole pages (A4.) It wasn't even difficult.

The Romans were big fans of that too (though there's only a small group of folks interested in doing NLP on Latin these days). I've only read Hegel et al. in translation, but the Latin I've read falls nicely into the notion of "span". It doesn't, however, always fall nicely into a clause-based approach like Japanese does. Then again, that could be due to the poetic/rhetorical nature of the texts in question. I wonder if there's been any computational attempt to make the notion of span or discourse atoms rigorous enough for pragmatic use...

I'm very much a "works for me" person in these matters. Mostly because I'm tired of linguists fighting each other over trivial matters. Give me something I can work with already!

I can't help but be a (meta)theorist. But then, I'm of the firm opinion that theory must be grounded in actual practice, else it belongs more to the realm of theology than science. -- Live well, ~wren