Re: DTD of natural language

On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> SGML and XML just aren't *useful* for expressing the structure of English
> or any other natural language.  Lisp data values, yes.  Prolog data values,
> yes.  Either would be considerably more compact than XML.  You might raise
> RDF as a counter-example, but RDF is inexpressibly clumsy and bulky, and
> the structural constraints could not be expressed as a DTD.

You mean SGML and XML DTDs: you can express any kind of structure (that
can be captured as directed, cyclic graph) in SGML and DTD.  A grammar
abstracts away certain aspects to reduce the amount of markup needed.

People involved in this area may be interested in exploring the Schematron 
toolkit, which is a schema language for XML based on making
assertions about the presence or absense of patterns (guarded XPaths) in
an XML document.  This allows non-regular-expression-based patterns in a
document to be reported or required.

http://www.ascc.net/xml/resource/schematron/schematron.html

It is a very simple language, and people find it pretty friendly.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 2000 05:22:19 UTC