How do I make MATLAB list the various sequences possible for a specific purpose?

I need to find a way to list all the possible sequences of a sentence, for example if I have a set of 8 possible attributes of a certain word, and I have a sentence which is just a combination of words. I need to find a way to list the various possible sequence of attributes for that sentence. For example, I have the sentence 'the shark killed the man'. I know that 'the' has the attribute 'DD', and I know that the word which follows a word with attribute 'DD' has the attrbute 'NN' or 'ADJ'. So how do I get MATLAB to list the sequences : DD NN ? DD NN DD ADJ ? DD ADJ DD NN ? DD ADJ DD ADJ ? DD NN In other words, I want to say that the attribute of the second word (let's say T2) is either NN or ADJ, and the same for the fourth word (T4).

This doesn't work :

if true
  % code
  Tag = cell(1,size_string);
  for i = 1:size_string
      for j = 1:size_art

            if strcmp(string(i),art{j})
                disp(string(i+1));
                (Tag(i+1) = 'NN') || (Tag(i+1) = 'ADJ');
                disp(' ');
                disp(string(i));
                disp('is an article');
           end
       end
    end

end

Answer 1

[Lokesh Ravindranathan]

I think there could be couple of issues in the code. I could not execute your code completely, since I do not have access to your variables.

You define Tag as a cell and you are trying to assign using a normal circular parentheses. You should assign variables using curly parentheses.

 Tag{i} = 'NN'

would work in your case. When using logical OR operator (), you should have a lhs and rhs which could be converted of type logical type.

Even otherwise, when you are using |, in your case, you should expect the lhs and rhs of equal sizes.

In your case, I am not sure what you are expecting of your code.

[Samyukta Ramnath]

I basically want it to have two possibilities, that the tag could be NN and it could also be ADJ. Should I use a matrix for this? But I also have to get MATLAB to recognize that there could be different possible tags for every word in the sentence. The number of possibilities are subject to certain rules.

[Lokesh Ravindranathan]

You could use the cell array inside a cell array.

 Tag{i}{1} = 'NN'
 Tag{i}{2} = 'ADP'

This will ensure you have various tags and for the count, you could simply do

numel(Tag{i}{:})

Answer 2

[Muthu Annamalai]

@Samyukta you seem to need a 'generative grammar'. You can do this via mutually recursive functions. You should type the following in MATLAB and watch the program

>> for i = 1:10, why; pause(1); end
>> edit why

While my favorite demo doesn't directly solve your problem, you can definitely see how to build a generative grammar.