1415	 Automatic Derivation of Microsentences	 The decomposition of long complex English sentences into shorter kernel-like constituent sentences microsentences has often been suggested as an avenue toward conducting automatic retrieval of natural language messages. To explore the prospects of such a step the authors attempted in to prepare a general program for deriving microsentences from longer sentences that had been syntactically analyzed by the Harvard Multipath Analysis Program. The basic idea was to extract the subject verb and object if any of each clause and to reassemble these materials into a grammatical microsentence. A program is described in this paper which was designed to operate on the tree structure output of the analyzer and the microsentences that were produced are exhibited. The authors conclude that while microsentences of the quality achieved do not open up immediate prospects for improving the performance of automatic message retrieval systems they may have practical value in man-machine systems using human monitors to select the preferred syntactic interpretation of a sentence.
