The real problem is that an artificial language processing engine <i>will</i> find a parse for it.<p>One actual example I remember is a parse of "New fans run."  About the operation of recently acquired fans, right?<p>Well, the lexicon in our system found an instance of "New" as a proper noun (a band or something), the use of "fans" as a transitive verb, and one of the definition of "runs" as a noun (think baseball, for just one example).  So you had this proper noun New fanning this abstract usage of runs as the parse that the system selected.<p>This more than anything demonstrated to me the necessity of statistical techniques in NLP (now taken as a given, but a fairly recent development relative to the history of NLP research).