NLP is a difficult challenge, as it demands the intimate interaction of many different techniques - lexing, collocations, parsing, semantics, structure building - all using the same knowledge representation (obviously what humans do), and all happening together. These processes cannot function effectively in isolation, so a technology that can span and represent them all is necessary.  The following material shows how Active Structure can achieve that. The crucial difference between this approach and all others is that here the structure is "soft" enough (and visible enough) to be modified by what it reads - the structure is actualised, not an algorithm or a rule.

Changing Technical Writing from a Craft to a Science

Tools to support meaning in the development of text

Hypothesising

The use of hypothesising to avoid an explosion in grammatical patterns.

Large parsing model

Text of model used to analyse legal documents

Extension to Active Structure to Handle Free Text

How much needed to be changed

Mathematics of the Law

Reading legal text and creating a valid logical/mathematical structure

Contract Driven Enterprises

Turning contract documents into active knowledge

Contract Clause Example

Converting a clause into Active Structure

General Legal

Beginning of representation of legislation

Outlining

Looking further afield, over the heads of adjacent symbols

Above the Fray

Eliminating ambiguity using constraint reasoning as the final step

PipeLine to Failure in BioInformatics

What is wrong with pipelining

Relation Structures

Structures build into patterns.

Embedded Lists

Handling list structures embedded in a sentence using indirection.

Dynamic Insertion

Inserting symbols in the parse chain that are implied by their surroundings.

Active Structure Grammar

The difference between a static view of grammar as an end in itself, and active structure grammar as a system component with intermingling of many simultaneous operations, including changing the grammatical structure

Active Structure in Law

Applying active structure to the representation of legal text.

Building Structure

Shows how structures built from words are manipulated to reveal the sentence structure.

Constraint Reasoning in Parsing

Dynamic building and solving of a constraint problem as a means of NLP.

Cutting and Healing

Putting the pieces back together in a more meaningful way after cutting them apart.

Prepositional Chains

Chains as a way that dense scientific or legal text builds a microcontext.

Searching

Searching structures transformed from text using search structures transformed from search text.

Wordgroups

A powerful way of avoiding parsing

Presentations 

• Gallery - Parsing - emphasises the "stitching and restitching" of structure
• Words Gallery
• Searching the Internet
• Searching Free Text
• Accessing Knowledge in Free Text

• Words To Knowledge - an overview
• Prepositional Chains

• Connections and Meanings - the same word can have many meanings
• Relations - treating Relations like Entities
• Wiring Up - creating the structure underlying the text
• Object Groups - properties from a group of objects

Design Notes
Medical Design Notes

Network Components

Some operators for handling free text:

NLP Specific Operators

Shells

Some operators for handling the structures that free text builds:

Hierarchy Specific Operators

Related Areas

Graphical Structure Building Tools

Orion KM

Searching an Active Ontology

Using Active Structure as a dynamic ontology, and then searching through it for information

The diagram is modelled after the Jacquard loom, and attempts to show how a structure can read words and build structure, which becomes part of the structure used to read more words.