Page "Parsing" Paragraph 4

In some machine translation and natural language processing systems, human languages are parsed by computer programs.

Human sentences are not easily parsed by programs, as there is substantial ambiguity in the structure of human language, whose usage is to convey meaning ( or semantics ) amongst a potentially unlimited range of possibilities but only some of which are germane to the particular case.

So an utterance " Man bites dog " versus " Dog bites man " is definite on one detail but in another language might appear as " Man dog bites " with a reliance on the larger context to distinguish between those two possibilities, if indeed that difference was of concern.

It is difficult to prepare formal rules to describe informal behaviour even though it is clear that some rules are being followed.