From: Todd Benson Date: 2008-05-26T03:24:23+09:00 Subject: Re: #plural? or #singular? On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Axel Etzold wrote: >> 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. I was talking to the OP, but I guess I didn't say that outright. > > 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 .. Hmm. Most people unconsciously change their use of communication by location or the company they are in. > > 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 I pretty much agree with you, but I still think the side cases pop up more frequently than we think. With the non-spoken languages point, I meant things like symbology, programming languages, formal logic, and the like. "Plural" may take on a different meaning.