"Random Generation of English Sentences"
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From 1958-1961, Victor Yngve, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago, worked on a program that generated random sentences in English. Yngve’s generator was an early attempt to program the grammar rules proposed by Noam Chomsky, including the sentence tree parsing displayed on the journal page here. Ynvge wrote a new computer language, COMIT, specifically for his “Random Sentence Generator.” The program would derive grammar rules from input text and then generate random sentences based on those rules. When researchers at MIT fed Lois Lenski’s The Little Train to Yngve’s “Random Sentence Generator,” it generated 77 grammatical rules. On display here a selection of that code.
Introduction
- Label
- "Random Generation of English Sentences"
- Author
- Victor Yngve
- Original Publication Date
- 1961
- New Publication Date
- 1961
- Publisher
- International Conference on Machine Translation of Languages Proceedings
- Location
- Butler Stacks
- Case
- 7