Results obtained with a New Method for the Automatic Analysis of Sentence Structures

We present in this paper a method for the automatic analysis of sentence structures. Our purpose is to constitute a frequency dictionary of the different structures used in the language. This dictionary will enable us to select the most useful sentence structures in order to recommend their exclusive use for the writing of texts intended for automatic translation. We think that the automatic translation will be possible only if the texts are submitted to rules which limit the complexity of their syntax. These limitations will be the less noticed by an author as only the most unusual structures would have been left out. Of course the number of permitted structures will increase as the automatic translation codes are improved. The sentence structures are obtained by a statistical analysis of the word strings according to procedures developed in the information theory. In the present paper we have analysed only groups of two consecutive words as an example of our method. The same type of analysis can be generalized by considering nonconsecutive words and groups of more than two words.