Talk:Case role

I suspect that "natural language processing" means something done with computers. If so, the article should say so, so that people like me won't have to suspect. I have seen the words "agent" and "patient" used in linguistics as it developed long before computers existed, and of course everone has heard of "nominative case", "accusative case", etc., when they studied grammar. So I suspect that this is yet another case of software experts thinking something that existed 200 or 2000 years before computers existed was invented by software experts. I've seen this in regard to, for example, mathematical induction (a standard part of high-school math long before computers were around), lattice theory (introduced in the 19th century), and even Euclid's algorithm. I will be pleased if I am wrong in this suspicion. Michael Hardy 23:00 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)

Patient is about the medical use of the word. Is there a linguistic meaning beyond a dictionary definition? If so, disambiguation is necessary. Tuf-Kat

IEEE SUMO describes it as follows... is this text free of copyright restrictions?

SUMO property patient: instance of CaseRole; ( patient ?PROCESS ?ENTITY ) means that ?ENTITY is a participant in ?PROCESS that may be moved, said, experienced, etc. For example, the direct objects in the sentences 'The cat swallowed the canary' and 'Billy likes the beer' would be examples of patients. Note that the patient of a Process may or may not undergo structural change as a result of the Process. The CaseRole of patient is used when one wants to specify as broadly as possible the object of a Process.