BC5 (Brainchild version 5) parses new sentences by referring to a corpus of sentences it has already successfully parsed. The larger the corpus, the higher the probability that BC5 will be able to parse any incoming sentence correctly.

The orthography I have used here employs the digits, 1-7, in place of the traditional Vietnamese diacritical markings. 1=acute, 2=grave, 3=hook, 4=tilde, 5=dot, 6=breve, and 7=circumflex.BC5 can read utf8 and traditional typewriter Vietnamese ('`?~.(^) as well as this orthography, which I call the Paulette Nguyen orthography in honor of my colleague in this enterprise. A utility program is provided for converting texts from one to another of these three orthographies.

BC5 is interactive but does not initiate conversations, so it will be up to you to get your session going. You might begin by asking something simple like Ba5n la2 ai? to get things started.

BC5 will be fun for two kinds of people, namely (1) the serious student of linguistics who will want to see his sentences diagrammed in real time, and (2) the casual user who wants to get some entertainment out of conversing with a computer.

If you are interested in learning how the system works and would like to see your sentences diagrammed, click here.