Image via Wikipedia
Looking at the following four line story illustrates the problem.
Man milks cow with machine.
Man attacks cow with ax.
Police hit man with nightstick.
Police arrest man with ax.
Subject,verb, object, modifier. Is the structure is the same for all three sentences. Yet a person has very little trouble interpreting the correct meaning.
So, what was the cow doing with the ax?
1) The man would have used a miking machine to milk the cow with.
2) The man used the ax to attack the cow.
3) The police used a nightstick to stop and disarm the man who had an ax.
Why would the police use an ax to arrest a man?
4) The police arrested a man who had an ax.
Typing the four line story in Microsoft Word does not result in an of the "green squiggly" lines to let an author know that there is a misplaced modifier used in any of the sentences.
Does Microsoft Word need a better grammar check? Not necessarily, although it would be nice, since most readers would interpret the meaning correctly, and the average writer would never finish writing if they had to correct absolutely everything.
Yet if the computational linguistics is trying to extract information out of the four line story then pure structure rules break down. Some cognitive linguistic processing is needed to get this simple example correct.
Interesting enough the Wikipedia seems to have misplaced it's misplaced modifiers by redirecting to "dangling modifiers".













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