Trying to Understand Language

Language is beautiful. It is one of the easiest methods of communicating something lengthy. As one may know, images express a thousand words, film may even express more, but both are ineffective when it comes to communicating something fast and immediately to someone (unless you have a polaroid of course).

English, particularly, is much more complex than I thought. As you may already know, I am rather _into _AI. One of the fields of AI is Natural Language Processing which involves speech recognition, syntactic and semantic organisation, separating words into parts of speech, language understanding, and finally speech generation, amongst others.

I genuinely used to believe there were only 8 parts of speech in English: Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Preopsitions, Conjunctions and Interjections. I stand corrected by Wikipedia. There are about 17 different types if we classify them correctly.

The open word classes:

• Adjectives
• Adverbs
• Interjections
• Nouns
• Verbs (except auxilliary verbs)

According to Wikipedia, “an open class (or open word class) is a word class that accepts the addition of new items, through such processes as compounding, derivation, coining, borrowing, etc.”

The closed word classes:

• Auxiliary verbs
• Clitics
• Coverbs
• Conjunctions
• Determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
• Particles
• Measure words
• Adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
• Preverbs
• Pronouns
• Contractions
• Cardinal numbers

According to Wikipedia, “a closed class (or closed word class) is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items.”

Now, I was not aware of such classification, but this for sure must have an impact on language parsers. I am currently starting to write my first Language Parser, and thought I would start out with an SQL dictionary structure. I will be posting my findings in this blog as I get along with this.