Abstract:

The development of a successful, "intelligent" parser is essential to "intelligent" CALL programs. A modification of ATN makes possible the incorporation of case grammar analysis to judge meaningfully the use of prepositions, articles, tenses, and other parts of speech. This modified ATN makes possible the difficult task of constructing a parser which recognizes semantic and syntactic differences in an infinite number of possible sentences.

This parser works with an internally  generated copy of the text so as to not compromise the original text. The parser stores characters and compares them against internal dictionaries and other characters or words. These comparisons are made via several algorithms which make distinctions between such classes as Agent/Experiencer and Path/Location. The parser is able to skip around in a sentence through the use of pointers and stripping suffixes to find roots.

Author: Harold Hellwig