Prepositions and Parsing...

[S001GMU at nova.wright.edu]

Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 22:21:39 +0000 (PST8PDT)
From: cg at ami-cg.graysage.edmonton.ab.ca (Chris Gray)

>[Greg:]
>
>:[many arguments on how to clarify a prepositional statement]
>:
>:A thought I had...
>:
>:parse each statement into a default interpretation.  if the players wish to
>:override that, they can use parentheses.  For example:
>:
>:>put the book on the rug behind the pillar.
>:
>:Default parsing:
>:
>:put (the book) on (the rug behind the pillar).
>:
>:the player could, however, explicitly override that with:
>:
>:>put (the book on the rug) behind (the pillar)
>:
>:or whatever.
>
>Hmmm. Intriguing. Not really all that hard - if the paren's don't match
>up, you just complain and abandon the command. It's a bit unnatural, but
>that doesn't really bother me that much.

Well, in order to get away from requiring proper, natural language
usage on the players part, you'd have to substitute something... :)
You may even be able to build some intelligence into the paren parser
and have it try to match the paren's (maybe with a prompt to the player
asking if <blah> was what they really meant... but that gets back to nested
prompts... (shrug)).  That and the parser could be built to not always need
some of the parens.. something like..

>put <object-specifier> <preposition> <object-specifier>

with the ability to nest an (<o-s> <p> <o-s>) as an <object-specifier>.

pretty simple, and not all that far fetched for a newbie to learn.

-Greg