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I REALLY need a description of the english sentence structure in a way that can be translated by machine and is strictly rule based(no statistical stuff), it doesn't have to be a context-free grammar but that would be preferable(as it can't be and fully describe it). The best I've found was for a BNF but it was really basic. I need something that has no exceptions except where ambigious. Any links?

raven
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Sweating
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    One minor tip: it's usual to put a space *before* an opening parenthesis (it's not a function call, after all). – pavium Dec 31 '09 at 11:56
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    English simply isn't systematic, despite the heroic attempts of grammarians through the ages. It is an amalgam of two or three major Indo-European language traditions with bits and piece stolen from all the globe and stuck on where convenient. Even if you find something that works very well with modern English, an archaic turn of phase that is perfectly correct could throw you for a loop. And many people don' actually speak and write grammatical English in the first place. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Dec 31 '09 at 14:58
  • Basically English snuck out and beat up Latin, Saxon, Briton, and French in the dark alley of invasion and took their grammar and vocabulary. It then proceeded to do horrible things and mangled it into something that only children and grammar nerds can learn perfectly. Last I knew, it was a subject of current research to produce a perfect English grammar capturing corner cases. – Paul Nathan Apr 24 '10 at 15:48

4 Answers4

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Start with A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Quirk et al. It's good to read that you're not looking for a context-free grammar for English, as English is not a context-free language. I don't think any natural languages are context-free.

user229044
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High Performance Mark
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I am also looking into a similar issue and I will share the best that I found: http://lands.let.kun.nl/TSpublic/dreumel/formal_grammar_english.en.html

This is dependent upon the AGFL variant of grammar descriptions: http://www.agfl.cs.ru.nl/

torial
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You could have a look at LFG which is basically a context-free grammar enriched with functional descriptions that are usually interpreted as first-order logic formulae. Grammars for a few languages have been developed within the ParGram project.

Atamiri
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On a very generic level, have a look at Natural Language Processing. I'm afraid though, that this is not going to be very encouraging !

Steve De Caux
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