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"I eat my rice with butter." could mean that you use butter as a utensil to eat your rice with. There is often an unlikely way of parsing the sentence that give
by changoplatanero 7y ago
"I eat my rice with butter." could mean that you use butter as a utensil to eat your rice with. There is often an unlikely way of parsing the sentence that gives an alternate meaning. The point is to test the computer to see if it can distinguish the likely parse from an unlikely one.
- nl 7y agoThese aren't really alternate _parses_ though (in the sense that they don't give different parse trees). They do highlight the different possible meanings of "with" though. I think "I eat my rice with chicken" vs "I eat my rice with children" vs "I eat my rice with chopsticks" is the canonical example here. There's a whole field in NLP involved in showing what changes happen to entities mentioned in a sentence as a a side effect of the sentence, and this example shows it pretty well.
- changoplatanero 7y agoWouldnt those be different parse trees? Like the "with X" could either be attached either to the verb or the noun
- nl 7y agoYes, possibly.
- lultimouomo 7y agoI think it's more clear if you say "I usually eat X with Y", i.e. Y it's either the company, the tool or the condiment that you eat with (contrasted with "I'm eating my X", where X is a dish like "rice with chicken")