mtbc: photograph of me (Default)
Mark T. B. Carroll ([personal profile] mtbc) wrote2017-05-22 01:38 pm

Parsing English sentence structure

I just read the Daily Mail's headline Daughter of hunter crushed by elephant posts tribute photo and was briefly confused.

I initially read it as that the elephant posted a tribute photo and that act of posting was what crushed the daughter. Then, congratulating myself on promptly reparsing, I read it that the hunter's daughter was crushed, then she posted a tribute photo, before realizing that I still had it wrong.

I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous. Latin? Lojban? I wonder what CMU's link grammar parser would make of that headline. Sometimes when I review others' writing at work I suggest a rephrasing arising from my having had to backtrack after a mistaken first reading.