Context and its importance in natural language parsing

One issue with natural language parsing is context. As humans, when we see words in a sentence, we sometimes determine what they mean by their context, i.e., what they must mean based upon the surrounding sentences. As hard as it is for computers to deal with this, it is sometimes hard for humans as well.

I was on the PernMUSH Ista knot this morning (kind of an out-of-character chat area) and someone said,

Shimshon notes to himself something he's known for 5 years, "Never edit code the day before you wander off line for a whole day."

My context as someone who writes code for a living, was that Shim was taking about software in general. Probably some piece of code he was working on at work, and he returned to work (after the weekend) and wasn't sure where he had left off, etc. That has happened to me before. Furthermore, it wasn't something I didn't have an issue with when I worked at Digital, because our VAXes would stay up for years. Therefore, when going on vacation I'd leave 5 editors up, and editting different pieces of code, and return with context. I could look and see what I had been doing right before I left. Therefore, I made the following comment,

Jarill laughs - although on a Vax I'd leave my edit windows up w/o fear and return a week later. But w/o context it is rather hard. ;)

To which Shim replied,

Shimshon broke the runner parent, fixed it, and found out that the lead/follow code apparently hasn't working for a while. "Which is disturbing in and of itself."

"Runner parent?", "Lead/follow"??? What is he talking about? Maybe some other coding language term... then finally the context hit me. He wasn't talking about some software code... he was talking about the MUSH code. Shim, in character, works with animals. On Pern a 'runner' is a horse. What he was saying was that you should never mess with the MUSH code and be offline for a day, because if you just broke something you won't know about it - and you won't be around for other people to complain to.

I notice this kind of thing happening every now and then. I'll be at work and someone will call from church, and because my context is "work" I'll filter everything through that. Something they say will make no sense... but would if they had said it to me at church.

Anyway... just something I find interesting, having studied the problems computers have with it. Its not just computers... somtimes its us as well.