They tried that in the 70s and 80s until they realized they were wasting their time. Probabilistic context free grammars were a thing, also.
Long story short, there's no such thing as grammar but they're a nice fiction for talking about communication. The deeper you get into NLP the more you (1) see what jelinek was talking about when he said "every time I fire a linguist, accuracy goes up" (he was hiring physicists and information theorists), and (2) realize that basically every thought, belief, and statement is deeply ambiguous, and that most human communication is ad hoc.
Also, the more time you spend looking at live data from users, the more you realize that the notion of language as a generally shared system of meaning is not real. Trivial communication about basic tasks is doable, although you often will fuck up there too when talking to someone with deeply different cultural expectations.
If you think that _any_ sentence has unambiguous meaning, you should try to meet some people who are more different than you are. Or get into deeper conversations with the people you know.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Certainly adjectives are a thing, and if I learn a new adjective, "anguilliform" for example, I have never heard that in context, but I know exactly how to use it. That is grammar, right?
I'm being hyperbolic, but what I'm suggesting is that grammar is a convenient fiction. The part where you speak of "how to use it" points to the break down in your thinking.
(Side note: look into the difference between prescriptive and descriptive linguistics for a sense of where I'm coming from on that point.)
So, you learn a new adjective. Surely you can use it like any other adjective, right? Sure. But someone can also very comfortably use it in a way that violates your notions of how adjectives work, and you'll probably know what they mean. Or you'll use it in a context that makes sense to you, but not to someone you're talking to. The way to use language is in the way that allows others to understand you. Paradoxically that doesn't actually mean adhering to some arbitrary set of rules. Here's an important paper [0]. Basic idea: you get a small community isolated, and they just rip the rules to shreds, but what they end up building is often much higher bandwidth and allows for more complex ideas.
The point I'm pushing on is this: engineers especially think of language as an agreed upon set of rules which can be used correctly or incorrectly. Turns out that in practice it's a chaotic mess of individuals who abuse the rules mercilessly with minimal regard for how they're supposed to use it, and still get along happily. Developing an understanding of the inherent fuzziness of words and structure in communication can actually help a person develop significant capacity for self expression.
The failure to understand this is one of the reasons most engineers write shitty poetry. :P
Let me try that again: grammar is a way of describing some conventions that are often used but whose force is much weaker than almost everyone thinks. Natural language processing on the basis of grammar gets some of the most frequent uses, but immediately its limitations become extremely clear.
I think your insistence on me being precise here is a wonderful illustration of two competing approaches to language and how they make a synthesis. I'm fairly confident you know what I mean but are choosing not to accept my phrasing, so this exchange may also be an interesting illustration of how language is also the negotiation of power.
Long story short, there's no such thing as grammar but they're a nice fiction for talking about communication. The deeper you get into NLP the more you (1) see what jelinek was talking about when he said "every time I fire a linguist, accuracy goes up" (he was hiring physicists and information theorists), and (2) realize that basically every thought, belief, and statement is deeply ambiguous, and that most human communication is ad hoc.
Also, the more time you spend looking at live data from users, the more you realize that the notion of language as a generally shared system of meaning is not real. Trivial communication about basic tasks is doable, although you often will fuck up there too when talking to someone with deeply different cultural expectations.
If you think that _any_ sentence has unambiguous meaning, you should try to meet some people who are more different than you are. Or get into deeper conversations with the people you know.
Edit: typo