Recognition of Syntactic Structure by Computer

THE recent article concerning computer simulation 1 is refuted by its first sentence. As the first condition for an acceptable simulation of the way in which human beings recognize syntactic structure, the authors say “an analyser must not be dependent on looking up every word of an input sentence in a dictionary”. To meet this condition a dictionary is used which contains information “only about those words with fixed syntactic functions and about suffixes”. “With this dictionary alone, infinitely many English sentences can be analysed.” Unfortunately, there are also “infinitely many” sentences which cannot be analysed in this way. The first sentence of the article is one such sentence.