From: Claus Spitzer <docboobenstein@...>
Date: 2005-01-21T04:14:55+09:00
Subject: Ruby link grammar parses

Greetings!
I've stumbled upon a little dilemma: I'm working on an analogy-based
lexico-semantic disambiguator. I'll spare you the gist of it, but if
you're really interested, it's related to this:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=992694&dl=GUIDE&coll=Portal&CFID=36359232&CFTOKEN=49186190

I'm basically attempting to reproduce that work. Now to the real
problem: I am in need of a parser to extract verb-subject/object pairs
from texts. One of the professors here directed me to Link Grammar (
http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/ ), which does what I would need...
except that it is written in C. I've meddled with the API a bit, but
to my dismay I discovered that (mostly) all my knowledge of C
programming has waned, to the point of not even being able to get
their examples to work (in my defense, I'm _really_ good with Ruby and
Smalltalk now :-D ). Still, I am in need of a parser. Now, the forum
for Link Grammar indicates (
http://hartford.lti.cs.cmu.edu/linkparser/phorum/read.php?1,7 ) that
there is a Perl interface available for it so I said to myself "Hey,
why not see if there is something similar available in Ruby"? I looked
at RAA, but could not find anything related (perhaps I overlooked some
category?). So the question at hand is: Is there any English text
parser available in Ruby that would (somewhat) match my needs? I
_could_ write my programs in Perl, but I'd much rather use the one
language I've come to love: Ruby.
Cheers...
  C.W.S.