Mark,
There seems to be some problem with parsing monosyllabic proper nouns. We
hit the problem when trying to synthesise sentences for the testing such
as:
she was `born and `trained in `Wales
but have only just noticed the extent of the issue.
It appears that some monosyllabic proper nouns are being parsed as WEAK
even if stress marks (`) are included in the string to be parsed.
If the proper noun has a homophone, the homophone seems to parse OK.
eg:
Doug is wrong dug is OK
Gene is wrong gene is OK
Wales is wrong wales is OK
Mike is wrong mike is OK
Pearl is wrong pearl is OK
Flint is wrong flint is OK
Tyne is wrong tine is OK
Wear is wrong weir is OK
However, some proper nouns are wrong, even if there is no homophone (eg
Brent, Bert, Jake, Joan). Equally, some are right, even if there is a
homophone (May, may; God, god).
Interestingly, we have found three other cases where proper nouns are
correctly parsed:
pall is OK, as is Paul
mark is OK, as is Mark
Jill is OK, but Gill is wrong
John is OK
We suspect a bit of jiggery-pokery has been going on here ...
Love & Kisses,
John & Paul (George parses OK, but it doesn't know Ringo)
_ Paul Carter ________________________________________ pgc104@york.ac.uk _
Dept of Language & Linguistic Science|http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~pgc104/
University of York |telephone: +44 (0)1904 432660
Heslington, York. YO10 5DD |fax: +44 (0)1904 432673
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