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Date: Sun, 07 Jul 2002 08:45:12 -0400
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
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Subject: Re: NLP Question
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John wrote:
> Big snip!
[...ditto...]
> I agree that bashing the establishment would be bad.  I would like to make
> sure though that I am not bashing anything.  If someone thinks I am, please
> let me know.

I was actually responding to the (small) assortment of "people doing
their own thing is the only way to escape our mire of stagnation"
comments.

I wouldn't classify your comments as "bashing," by any means, but I
can see how some might be offended by your insistence that "things
cannot be done" in systems you haven't taken the time to examine.

[...]
> I am not trying to change text adventures, even if I could.

Oh, don't get me wrong.  Change is a very good thing when it's useful
or interesting.  When it's done "just because" or to "avoid sameness"
(which doesn't exist), then it's a pretty bad thing.

It's also pretty bad when the change is presented in such a way as to
alienate any users (again, I point to IBM's RealPhone and RealCD
applications) that might have benefitted from the change...

Since you seem to want to play with NLP in an IF environment, I would
heavily suggest learning Inform.  The Z-Machine, and hence the Inform
language, has some inbuilt lexical capability, which should give you
a decent boost in the direction of parsing.  Hand in hand with that,
also read through at least Section 36 of the Inform Designer's
Manual, which deals with leveraging the existing parser to deal with
a different input language than the common English subset.

There's also source code on the archive for Eliza in Inform which,
while not really approaching NLP, might give some vague hints about
direction.

