[Attempto] Words chaining

[Norbert E. Fuchs]

On 12 May 2011, at 17:12, Pierre-Alexandre Voye wrote:

> Hello, I'm still playing with Attempto. It takes several day to learn how we have to writea sentence.
> So I have some trouble with word chaining. It won't work.
> 
> For instance :
> 
> "There is a list of tree"  must be rewrite like " There is a tree's list." because the first does'nt works.
> But how can I write : "There is a list of tree of comments." ?
> "There is a comment's tree's list." ? It won't works of course.
> 
> So I could split the sentence :
> "A thread is a tree of comment. There is a list of thread."
> 
> But when I want to express very common concept like : "An agent may know the person's date of birth." 
> it's difficult to split the sentence.
> 
> So, is there another solution ?

Pierre-Alexandre

Let's have a look at what you call word chaining. 

If the construct "list of tree" is to be interpreted as the *two* nouns "list" and "tree" conjoined by "of" then ACE requires that each noun has a determiner, thus your sentence "There is a list of tree." could, for instance, be written as "There is a list of a tree."

If the construct "list of tree" is to be interpreted as *one* multi-word then ACE requires that you hyphenate its components, i.e. "list-of-tree" that is now considered as one noun. The sentence "There is a list-of-tree." is now accepted – provided that you either insert the noun "list-of-tree" into the lexicon or switch on word guessing.

Similarly for your other examples.

Regards.

   --- nef