From: Axel Etzold Date: 2008-05-25T07:34:54+09:00 Subject: Re: #plural? or #singular? -------- Original-Nachricht -------- > Datum: Sun, 25 May 2008 03:14:18 +0900 > Von: "Todd Benson" > An: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org > Betreff: Re: #plural? or #singular? > On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 11:14 AM, Axel Etzold wrote: > > > > > > -------- Original-Nachricht -------- > >> Datum: Sun, 25 May 2008 00:27:48 +0900 > >> Von: "Robert Dober" > >> An: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org > >> Betreff: Re: #plural? or #singular? > > > >> On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 5:08 PM, Dave Bass > wrote: > >> Even worse sometimes it is undefined I guess, or caption may play a > role. > >> > >> I can see data. > >> > >> Maybe some native speakers will tell me that this is not a correct > >> sentence, I do not know, but than there is > >> > >> I can see Data. > >> > >> Languages (plural) are just a big mess (singular) ;) > >> > >> Robert > >> -- > >> http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/ > >> > >> --- > >> Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. > >> Ludwig Wittgenstein > > > > Dear Robert and Dave, > > > > well, this is what tree-tagger (see tags output below, for the tagset > > see my previous post) says: > > > > I can see data. (noun plural) > > I can see Data. (proper noun singular) > > England is a country. (proper noun singular) > > England are bound to lose the match. (proper noun singular) (nobody is > perfect). > > English is a language. (proper noun singular) > > The English are eccentric. (noun plural) > > Languages (noun plural) are just a big mess (noun singular). > > You will always have problems with collective nouns (brood, flock, > pride, etc), especially if you train yourself on languages that aren't > spoken. > > > > > Parts-of-speech tagging uses a Bayesian decision model, requiring > > training on a set of human-tagged text. > > There are large amounts of texts available for many languages, such > > as newspaper articles. > > The authors of tree-taggers claim about 96 % correct tagging somewhere > > in the docs ( can't find it right now). > > It's also fast - you can tag an entire novel in just a few seconds - > > and it's available for several major languages, not just English. > > I think many people balk at your question because you didn't specify > the terms of the problem. What language? What vernacular? What > venue? > > cheerio (plural), > Todd Dear Todd, well, I didn't start the thread ... so I don't have to specify the problem. The OP wanted to decide whether a given noun is singular or plural. As I see it, in English, nouns can be grouped into four groups: 1) Those that form a plural by adding an 's' : eg., house -> houses 2) Those that don't belong to the first group and have different forms for singular and plural : eg., man -> men, mouse->mice 3) Those that don't belong to the first two groups, because singular and plural forms both exist and coincide (eg. moose->moose) 4) Those that don't belong to the previous groups, as they don't have two forms, because they describe some collective (eg. police (at least in British English)) or something uncountable (eg. pride). The first two groups and the last can be dealt with by a program that generates a plural from a singular (ie., the linguistics gem). Especially due to the group 3 nouns, a program that 'pluralizes' a given noun doesn't answer the OP's question, because it cannot decide (from the missing information of the circumstances) whether a given noun is singular or plural. Dave and Robert gave several examples for this. My point is that there exists a type of software - parts-of-speech taggers - that can resolve these questions from circumstance information - not always correctly, as it's a computer program relying on probabilities, but remarkably well. I didn't understand your point about languages that aren't spoken ... if you had a Latin text, say, (there's a large collection available on project Gutenberg), and you manually tagged a part of it, to let a Bayesian classification program learn probabilities, it would be able to identify the parts-of-speech of another Latin text, e.g., identify plural nouns in it in Latin (that's certainly much easier than in English, as there's hardly anything in the group 3 for Latin - I'd bet you'd find a nice little list of words printed in fat in every grammar (oh, please remember - hand is 'manus' and 'hands' is also 'manus'). > What language? What vernacular? What > venue? I assume that the OP is talking about some standard written form of a language, like standard English, French, German, etc .. Now, you get ready-made taggers on the net for some of these languages, so your computer can say, this Italian word is a plural noun, even if you don't know any Italian. If you wanted to identify plural nouns from singular ones in Turkish, you could still use eg. treetagger for that, but you have to get a Turkish text tagged manually first to teach the program the probabilities that a given word form is a plural or a singular - it pays to have a native-language Turk to do that. :) For those language that there are ready-made solutions offered, somebody has already taken a large amount of typical texts (novels, newspaper articles, poems etc.), tagged them manually and provided parameter files for download, so no training from the user's part is necessary anymore. Best regards, Axel -- Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen! Ideal f�r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer