From rspeer@MIT.EDU Wed Jan 05 22:21:10 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:21:10 -0800 (PST) Received: from south-station-annex.mit.edu ([18.72.1.2]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (TLS-1.0:DHE_RSA_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA:24) (Exim 4.34) id 1CmR13-0002u0-W4 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:21:02 -0800 Received: from pacific-carrier-annex.mit.edu (PACIFIC-CARRIER-ANNEX.MIT.EDU [18.7.21.83]) by south-station-annex.mit.edu (8.12.4/8.9.2) with ESMTP id j066Kx30019364 for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 01:20:59 -0500 (EST) Received: from grand-central-station.mit.edu (GRAND-CENTRAL-STATION.MIT.EDU [18.7.21.82]) by pacific-carrier-annex.mit.edu (8.12.4/8.9.2) with ESMTP id j066Kv6O017432 for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 01:20:57 -0500 (EST) Received: from outgoing-legacy.mit.edu (OUTGOING-LEGACY.MIT.EDU [18.7.22.104]) by grand-central-station.mit.edu (8.12.4/8.9.2) with ESMTP id j066KvU8026675 for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 01:20:57 -0500 (EST) Received: from torg.mit.edu (TORG.MIT.EDU [18.208.0.57]) ) by outgoing-legacy.mit.edu (8.12.4/8.12.4) with ESMTP id j066KtcO023666 for ; Thu, 6 Jan 2005 01:20:55 -0500 (EST) Received: from rob by torg.mit.edu with local (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 1CmR1Z-00052G-00 for ; Thu, 06 Jan 2005 01:21:33 -0500 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 01:21:33 -0500 From: Rob Speer To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: some thoughts about lojban use and future Message-ID: <20050106062133.GB19161@mit.edu> Mail-Followup-To: lojban-list@lojban.org References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-Is-It-Not-Nifty: www.sluggy.com User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040907i X-Spam-Score: -4.9 X-Spam-Flag: NO X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.42 X-archive-position: 9173 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: rspeer@MIT.EDU Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 12:36:33AM -0800, xah lee wrote: > The task of having computers understanding natural languages at > parsing level is basically solved. *sputter* There are thousands of people in my field (natural language processing) who will be very very surprised to hear that. Have you seen any NLP applications that work and aren't carefully rigged demos? There aren't many. Here's the state of the art in NLP: * We can recognize spoken text with accuracy on about 95% of words. The programs that do this don't use any real linguistics; they work based on the finite-state model of language, which was discredited 50 years ago, because it's easy to program and they have bigger problems to deal with first. * We can translate text, badly, with results that tend to be more amusing than informative, between languages in the same family. Companies like Xerox write their manuals in an artificial dialect of English designed to survive machine translation. * We can make phone-answering systems to replace touch-tone systems, like airports use. I maintain that this isn't natural language, though, because these systems work in the finite world of city names, yes/no responses, and tracking numbers, and you can't use any grammar in your responses. * We can convert Japanese kana to kanji and back. This requires a significant amount of understanding of syntax, and is to me the most impressive practical achievement of NLP so far. * We can recognize handwriting, usually. * We can make clever, overhyped demos that fool the public and get grant money. Here are the things we can't do outside of demos: 1. We can't translate between vastly different languages (like English and Korean) with any success at all. 2. We can't parse arbitrary sentences. 3. Even if we have parse trees, we can't turn them into accurate semantic representations. 4. Even if we have accurate semantic representations, we can't put them together and hold a natural discourse. I'm working on a project to use Lojban to get a foot in the door on 2, 3, and 4. The problem is convincing a professor that artificial language processing will help natural language processing, but it's not because the things I'm doing in Lojban have already been accomplished with natural languages. It's because it seems that we won't accomplish these things in natural languages for another 15 to 50 years, and most people have given up on them. -- Rob Speer