Just a quick note about a natural language interpretation that came up for the following sentence:
- Under that test, the rental to an oil well driller of a “rock bit” having an effective life of but one rental is a transaction in lieu of a transfer of title within the meaning of (a) of this section.
The NLP system comes up with many hundreds of plausible parses for this sentence (mostly because it’s considering lexical and syntactic possibilities that are not semantically plausible). Among these is “meaning” as a nominalization.
From Wikipedia:
- In linguistics, nominalization is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation.
It’s quite common to use the present participle of a verb as a noun. In this case, Google comes up with this definition for the noun ‘meaning’:
- what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action.
The NLP system has a definition of “meaning” as a mass or count noun as well as definitions for several senses of the verb “mean”, such as these:
- intend to convey, indicate, or refer to (a particular thing or notion); signify.
- intend (something) to occur or be the case.
- have as a consequence or result.