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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Softare for simple noun (&verb) extraction
In-Reply-To: Ian's message of Wed, 26 Apr 1995 04:44:01 GMT
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Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 19:03:03 GMT
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In article <D7ML5E.5oM@demon.co.uk> Ian <enmh@demon.co.uk> writes:

>Does anybody know of any s/ware that can effectively highlight nouns from a
>text file. It would also be nice to get at verbs as well - but this might be a
>much taller order.

It's a much taller order than you may think.  For example, here are two
sentences of English:

	1) My arrival came as a surprise to her.

	2) Did my early arrival surprise him as well?

There are probably programs that can distinguish between the noun "surprise" in
sentence 1 and the verb "surprise" in sentence 2, but they will be expensive
commercial applications, not simple public domain freebies.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
