Hi everybody,

I need some advice, as the title says, with parsing natural text. I don't even know if this is called natural text, but I mean human language. IE I need to transform:

at nine o'clock wake me up
at 9, wake me up
wake me up at eight thirty

to

hours: 9, min: 0, msg: wake me up
hours: 9, min: 0, msg: wake me up
hours: 8, min: 30, msg: wake me up

I started to do it with regexps, but I don't know enough about them. I found on the internet the following related solutions:

* using a Domain Specific Language (DSL). I don't see my problem as a DSL thou.
* Computer Science parsing: making a grammar, parser, lexer, BNF, etc.
* Recursive descent, which AFAIU means nesting regexps in a saner way.
* Studying regexp *as a language*, meaning, know what you are using. I know regexps have a bad reputation, but maybe because the tutorials on the internet just show them shallowly.

And that's it. I searched the forum, with no hits. I searched again with the "Click to find similar threads", got 5, none of them talk about natural language.

I'm looking for advice, like in "how would you approach the problem".

Thanks in advance!
-- Diego.

Well, you could start by searching for the right phrase, which is "natural language processing" or "nlp".

This is not a topic I'm familiar with, but a quick search got me the following Youtube playlist for the video lectures from a Coursera course on NLP:

Columbia University - Natural Language Processing

I don't know what your favorite programming language is, but a Google search for "nlp library" got me the following for Python:

Natural Language Toolkit

And searching for that library on pyvideo.org got me the following videos:

Human as a Second Language: Succeeding with the Natural Language Toolkit
HOWTO: Teach Python to Read

I also saw this: Natural language processing: an introduction

Here's a thing I downloaded a couple of months ago but haven't had a chance to look at yet.

http://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/1...dency-parsing/

1 members found this post helpful.

Look up the date command and see if it will do the conversion for you, after you've done the parsing. For example

echo $(date "+%r" --date="9")

gives

09:00:00 AM

echo $(date "+%l %M %S" --date="9")

gives

9 00 00

You essentially want to implement a DSL, but that's a description of your problem not a technique to solve it.

Recursive descent is a technique for implementing parsers.

It looks like the language you want to parse could described like this:
Since you don't care about the structure of non-time part of the phrase, you can probably parse this with regular expressions. You'll need to think about all the different ways a time can be expressed. I think natural language processing techniques would be overkill, you're not interested in nouns vs verbs vs adverbs, subjects vs objects...

Thanks to everyone!! ntubski, BowCatShot, smallpond, and the rest that I already have thanked. I find NPL overkill for this, and sincerely, I don't want to learn it I like regexes better, so I will go that way.

Cheers,
-- Diego.