Recognising nouns verbs etc

[rline101]

Is Excel able to recognise what type of word a word is? so i type "cat" in a cell and have some function which returns "noun"? If there's nothing specific, could something be made or imagined for this?

Thanks

 

[Norie]

I'm pretty sure this is possible.

But how do you recognise a "noun" or "verb"?

Why is "cat" a "noun" and not a "verb"?

I've studied this at university and it invlolves setting up various rules etc.

In fact it's called AI.

 

[PaddyD]

on a word by word basis, I guess you could do something like:

1) identify your preferred on-line dictionary
2) write a procedure that will automate the lookup for a single word in, eg, a1 & return some subset of the results to , eg, b1

...but more than that you'll need to give us a lot more info on the task - it would take a fair amount of effort to shoe-horn excel into a text parsing machine, as Norie indicated.

 

[rline101]

Oh OK. Well I guess the ultimate task is to create a set of randomly generated sentences from predefined words. So I have some list of words from somewhere (perhaps Word can help here?) and in a corresponding list, whether they are nouns, verbs, whatever. Then I have some formula like ="The "&randomnoun&randomverb&"the "&randomnoun. So a finished result might be "The cat eats the hat" or "The milk runs the table". At this stage, whether the sentence makes sense is irrelevant to me. (It might be later) Anyway, the random part I'm fine with, but I need the list of words and their type in order to do it. Does this help? I'm aware that excel treats values as values and not as actual words, so if i type sdfhhg into a cell, it doesn't complain. Perhaps this is one of the issues...

Thanks

 

[Barry Katcher]

Seems to me that Excel is not the optimum program to be doing this in. Try googling (recently introduced verb) on "generate random words" and you'll see gadzillions of programs, on sites such as:

http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/

 

[PaddyD]

1) go on line and find some word lists. a quick google took me here, for example:

http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl850_nouns1.htm

2) set up a worksheet for each part of speach - e.g. a "nouN' worksheet with nouns listed in col A; a "Verb' sheet, with verbs in col a etc

3) generate the random sentences with a formula of the forM

="The "&INDEX(noun!A:A,RANDBETWEEN(1,10000))&" "&INDEX(verb!A:A,RANDBETWEEN(1,10000))&" "&INDEX(preposition!A:A,RANDBETWEEN(1,10000))&" "&INDEX(noun!A:A,RANDBETWEEN(1,10000))

 

[rline101]

This is fantastic! Thanks, particularly PaddyD. Much appreciated.