Automatic Derivation of Microsentences

The decomposition of long complex English sentences
into shorter kernel-like constituent sentences 
(microsentences)has often been suggested as an avenue
toward conducting automatic retrieval of natural 
language messages.  To explore the prospects of such
a step, the authors attempted in 1963 to prepare 
a general program for deriving microsentences from longer
sentences that had been syntactically analyzed 
by the Harvard Multipath Analysis Program.  The basic
idea was to extract the subject, verb and object 
(if any) of each clause and to reassemble these materials
into a grammatical microsentence.  A program 
is described in this paper, which was designed to operate
on the tree structure output of the analyzer, 
and the microsentences that were produced are exhibited.
 The authors conclude that while microsentences 
of the quality achieved do not open up immediate prospects
for improving the performance of automatic 
message retrieval systems, they may have practical
value in man-machine systems using human monitors 
to select the preferred syntactic interpretation of a sentence.

CACM June, 1966

Carmody, B. T
Jones Jr., P. E.

CA660606 JB March 3, 1978  8:47 AM

1415	5	1415
1415	5	1415
1415	5	1415