Confusing automated translators.

[Francois Pinard]

[Skip Montanaro]

>     >> Another similar classic, for French, is "Le pilote ferme la
>     >> porte.".

> Not being any sort of French speaker, I don't understand the "pilote ferme"
> one at all.  François?

Just to repeat publicly the content of a private reply, the two meanings
could be:

   "The driver closes the door."
   "The firm driver is carrying her."

The second meaning is clearly wrong to most listeners, but an automated
system has no real clue about this (unless it does wider context analysis
with the surrounding sentences, but this is fairly difficult.)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard