Bank robber

The program contains lexical information about the domain of crimes, committed by actors such as bankrobbers, hi-jackers, burglars, and kidnappers. The parser parses assertions that correspond, for example, to the following description: The bankrobber with the knife rang up the bank. It first builds a model of the actor, by accessing its lexical semantics for the noun, bankrobber.

In both questionnaires - in the 1970s and the 1980s - positive and negative adjectives had to be underlined when they were thought to be applicable to a bankrobber and a drunken driver. No positive attributes in either of the two surveys were underlined. Also, no change in the attribution of adjectives to the two types of offender can be perceived. Bankrobbers are typified by words like dangerous, mean, greedy, and dishonest pertaining to the total image of the person.

The Sounds reviewer pointed out that Joe’s Daddy was not a bankrobber but a Foreign Office diplomat. Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan had never been called to account for singing about bankrobbers, and in May 1979 the Clash themselves had released a song about ‘robbing people with a six gun’ without anyone turning a hair. Why was ‘Bankrobber’ being interpreted so literally, and deemed so unacceptable?