Trying to find an element in a variable list.

[auto]

Hi,
I have a program that receives an argument and stores it into a variable. I need to determine if a specific word is part of the argument that was received. I was successful when matching one word to one other word. However, when the argument is a sentence I can not get the program to loop through the sentence and compare every word in the sentence to the one I am looking for. I am having little success using the examples in the Prolog reference manual. Can someone provide a brief example of how I can accomplish this?
Thanks

 

[afe]

It is useful to represent a sentence as a list of words. It's a nasty but efficient way. There are existing functions to implement this. Now I have a course of "Natural Language Processing" and we use program read_sent from (Clocksin, Mellish 1987), it is also available in Clive Matthews' "Introduction to NLP through PROLOG". It just reads a keyboard input and yields a list of words. Try to find this program! When your word list is completed you can easily process it (for example for translation purposes):
translate([],[]).
translate[Word|T],[WordTr|T1]):-
translation(Word,WordTr),
translate(T,T1).
translation(something1,something2).
...
If you just want to find out whether the specified word is present, use the following:
exist(Word,[Word|_]):-!.
exist(Word,[_|T]):-
exist(Word,T).
Good luck!