Screen Shots From Project Turing
The Project Turing tour on this web site provides examples of the type of patterns successfully matched.
This page introduces examples of the type of display created by the program.
To introduce the program, let's start with a look at the grammatical capabilities.
In the image below, the central element of a matched phrase is displayed and is showing the response to the sentence "tell me about those people who like politics, aliens and John Howard.". After the match key is pressed at the top of the screen, the remainder of the screen is displayed as shown. From a grammatical perspective, the main elements of a clause are the subject and the predicate. You can see that the subject is summarised as a noun phrase below the subject title, and the predicate is a verb phrase with its verb, "to tell".
Further, in the example shown, the subject is implied, as the sentence contains an imperative request. The predicate contains everything else!
Of course a program that only displays this block of text isn't very helpful, so we need to select the more button below the predicate to continue the analysis. This button expands the grammatical view for the matched text as shown below.
This confirms that the verb itself is the word "tell", which is also summarised as a verb phrase: "to tell". Now let's look at the rest of the information on the page.
In this case, a lot of information is contained within a prepositional phrase, starting with the word "about". Additional information is displayed about the indirect object, which is also a noun phrase which means tell "to me".
More information is available by pressing the more button on any of the identified patterns, which results in the next screen.
You can see that the words embedded within the prepositional phrase are a noun phrase - summarised as "person" in the singular form, but "people" in the text. In this case, looking at the attributes column, a determiner starts the noun phrase, followed by the word people, which is a third person plural form of the noun, and then by an additional clause that provides additional information about the people.
Let's finish this introduction to the grammar screens by drilling down a bit further into the clause about the people. In this case, the clause contains a compound noun phrase. One of the elements is John Howard, identified as a Prime Minister and containing attributes like male.
The idea of the program is to match the grammatical and semantic patterns in the text to allow a student, teacher or other computer program to utilise the patterns.