whichwho

Whichwho is a fictional software project and knowledge resource used here to illustrate the intersection of linguistics and natural language processing. It centers on the problem of choosing between which and who in English relative clauses, and it is presented as a hypothetical tool for education and demonstration.

The design of Whichwho combines a rule-based grammar module with a probabilistic language model. The rule component encodes conventional English constraints— for example, using who for animate referents and which for inanimate referents— and handles exceptions such as set phrases. The statistical component analyzes large text corpora to estimate pronoun preference in context, aiding disambiguation when grammar rules alone are insufficient. The project provides a library interface and a lightweight web API intended for integration with writing assistants and NLP workflows.

Origin and scope: Whichwho was described in the fictional project documentation in the mid-2020s as an open-source, non-commercial reference implementation. It is imagined as cross-platform, with sample datasets, tutorials, and test suites to facilitate classroom instruction and experimentation.

Usage and reception: In this imagined setting, Whichwho is used in linguistics courses to demonstrate how grammar rules interact with data-driven inference. It is also used by developers exploring pronoun resolution in natural language applications. Limitations acknowledged include residual ambiguity in edge cases and potential biases in training data.

See also: relative clauses, English pronouns, natural language processing, grammar checking tools.