Re: need help with using a grammar to construct a sentence from a group of words

Glen Plantz <plantz@fgm.com> writes:


> Hello Folks,
>
> I have a problem where I need to do the opposite of parsing; given
>a grammar and a group of words, I need to use the grammar to construct
>a valid sentence. ...


This might be interesting. If you have a parser toolkit, so that the
tools are already present, it could be pretty easy, too.


Say that a language is a set of productions; a production is a mapping
from a nonterminal to a rule (vector of 0 or more term/nonterm).
Then, start with the top production, and repeat substituting rules for
nonterminals, randomly (or based on some preference criteria)
selecting the rule to use from the set of rules for a given lhs, until
you've got no nonterminals left.


What you have will be, by definition, a valid sentence in the
language. Sounds like a fun project!


Kevin Kelley
--
Starlight Software Co. Java Cannery: auto-package your projects!
kelley@iguana.ruralnet.net http://www.ruralnet.net/~kelley/index.html
[This came up a few years back; I believe there are sentence generators
available on the net. -John]
--

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