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Article 3879 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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e!santas
>From: santas@inf.ethz.ch (Philip Santas)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Look-up tables
Message-ID: <1992Feb19.195909.26025@neptune.inf.ethz.ch>
Date: 19 Feb 92 19:59:09 GMT
References: <299C3CC6.15601@orion.oac.uci.edu> <1992Feb15.114130.8837@husc3.harvard.edu>
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In article <1992Feb15.114130.8837@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
>schoi@teri.bio.uci.edu (Sam "Lord Byron" Choi) writes:
>>
>>Although it is true that the totality of any human being's conversations
>>throughout a lifetime is necessarily finite in retrospect, this says nothing
>>about the possible avenues of conversation at any particular point in
>>an ongoing conversation.
>>
>>For instance:  Looking back at past conversation, I might have asked at one
>>point the question, "Is four evenly divisible by two?"  After I have asked this
>>question, it only goes down as one of the many questions I have asked in
>>my lifetime.  At the instant before I asked the question though, any number
>>of variations could have been possible.  (e.g. "is five evenlydivisible by
>>two," "is six evenly divisible by two," "is seven evenly divisible by two" etc).
>>
>>This possibility clearly defeats any attempt to construct a straight-forward
>>look-up table.
>
>I don't see why.  If an English lexicon were fixed in advance, we could
>search through it word by word, deciding whether a given entry makes sense
>as a meaningful successor of the previously recorded terms in a given
>discourse fragment.  Two caveats are in order: the decision procedure may
>have to ve non-effective (we use a human agent), and sufficiently liberal
     ^^^^^^^^^^
>meaningfulness criteria may have to be used in order to accomodate
>cataphoric devices (unfulfilled would-be cataphora may be eliminated on the
>second pass).


It is possible to enumerate and code even misspellings like the one above.
Such a lexicon schould contain all possible errors as well. Notice that
one (non linguistic) criterion for possible interpretations is the fact 
that 'v' and 'b' are neighbours on a keyboard...

Philip Santas

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