Part III. Language
In this section, Perl demonstrates what makes it the language of choice for manipulating language, with fifteen articles covering everything from state-of-the-art research in natural language processing and speech synthesis to practical problems like formatting text and matching names.
Natural language processing—getting a computer to understand human language—is one of those fields that seems easy at first but is actually fraught with difficulties. NLP textbooks often demonstrate the perversity of English with sentences like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” which is grammatical but nonsensical; “The horse raced past the barn left,” which seems ungrammatical but isn’t; and “Time flies like an arrow,” which is perfectly good English but has four competing interpretations.
The section begins with two articles about programs that converse: John Nolan’s article on a bot that dispenses psychiatric advice, and Kevin Lenzo’s article on the purl bot, which helps out Perl novices on Internet Relay Chat. The ever-prodigious Kevin follows up with another of the research areas that he pursues at Carnegie Mellon: open source speech synthesis in Perl.Next, Prof.Damian Conway shows you how to format text automatically with Text::Autoformat, which manipulates the indentation, quoting, bulleting, and margins of ...
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