[Legend2440]

That's okay - that just means your parser needs to model what the speaker was thinking when they said it. That's extra information that's required to decode the message. It is not necessary for the same text to always mean the same thing.

[gizmo686]

If you need to already know what the speaket meant in order to understand them, then there is no point in communication.

Human language has a pretty clear distinction between syntax and sementics. This is how we recognize that "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" are perfectly well formed, if meaningless. In contrast, "I is happy" is meaningful and unambiguous, but grammatically incorrect.

In terms of syntax, English (like most, if not all) languages is literally ambigous.

Consider the sentence structure:

Subject Verb Object Prepositional-Phrase.

This can be either:

(Subject Verb (Object Prepositional Phrase))

Or

(Subject Verb Object ) Prepositional Phrase.

For instance, consider the sentence "I saw a man with binoculars".

In any sense of the word, this example is structually ambigous.

[_0ffh]

If I already knew what the speaker was thinking, there would be no need to parse his words at all.

[thfuran]

Fine, a parser that is a perfect oracle for authorial intent can reliably parse English. But no real parser can. And anyways, that effectively extends the English grammar to include the entire world state, which isn't really what people mean when they talk about English as a language or parsing strings—a fact which perhaps helps to illustrate the problem.

[Legend2440]

>that effectively extends the English grammar to include the entire world state

Exactly! So glad we're on the same page.

Language is created by and intended for big brains with huge amounts of knowledge about each other and about the world. Relying on external knowledge makes it extremely compact and flexible, but also means your parser needs a similar level of knowledge to function.

[thfuran]

>So glad we're on the same page

We're really not. I'm saying you've incorrectly defined the English language. By that definition, no piece of text is English.