Tour Page 2 - Ambiguity example
We take for granted a number of things when we recognise English. For a program
to recognise language, it needs to know a bit about the world. In the example below
you can see how the program differentiates between people with tattoos and guns.
Of course a person can have both, but a person can only shoot with one of them!
These screen shots illustrate the program's ability to address more complex patterns
in which ambiguity exists at more than one level. Grammar tools alone, the basis
for many language tools in the past, cannot determine the correct relationships
between these words.
The first shows and ambiguous version. Did the men carry guns, or is that what they
were shot with? The text entered is:
The jailor shot the men with guns.
In this example screen, you can't see the relationships within the second phrase.
(please click for a larger image)
However, when you drill down, the program has selected the longer phrase to group
the verb with the subsequent prepositional phrase to make "shot with guns". While
both patterns are matched including "the men with guns", the interface currently
only displays one of the phrases at the moment. Consider an alternative version
with the same structure but without the ambiguity.
In the second example, the text entered is:
The jailor shot the men with tattoos.
As you can see from the following screen, the clause looks identical. But drilling
down into the verb phrase following the subject, you can see that the verb isn't
connected the the prepositional phrase, but the noun phrase is "the men with guns".
(please click for a larger image)
The verb phrase shows it has a direct object "the men with tattoos".
(please click for a larger image)
So if we combine the text to make:
The jailor shot the men with tattoos with guns.
By drilling down into the verb phrase following the subject below, you can see that
the verb isn't connected to the first prepositional phrase "shot with tattoos",
but with the second to form "shot with guns". The noun phrase "the men with tattoos"
is found to be the object of this verb phrase.
(please click for a larger image)
This is an important capability. Pick up just about any English newspaper and each
page will contain numerous examples of clauses of this type. Normally you will deteremine
what the author intended as in the final example on this page, but often the ambiguity
is very strong.