From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Mar 27 20:40:45 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:40:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.44) id 1DFm3F-0008TP-CJ for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:40:33 -0800 Received: from n21a.bulk.scd.yahoo.com ([66.94.237.50]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.44) id 1DFm3C-0008Sm-Nz for lojban-in@lojban.org; Sun, 27 Mar 2005 20:40:33 -0800 DomainKey-Signature: Received: from [66.218.69.5] by n21.bulk.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 28 Mar 2005 04:39:54 -0000 Received: from [66.218.66.96] by mailer5.bulk.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 28 Mar 2005 04:39:54 -0000 X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: groups-email X-Sender: ben@goertzel.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (qmail 12081 invoked from network); 28 Mar 2005 04:39:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.166) by m13.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 28 Mar 2005 04:39:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO intelligenesiscorp.com) (208.234.8.229) by mta5.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 28 Mar 2005 04:39:52 -0000 Received: from zombiethustra (pcp06586041pcs.nrockv01.md.comcast.net [69.140.24.121]) by intelligenesiscorp.com (8.12.10/8.12.10) with SMTP id j2S4djDq004771; Sun, 27 Mar 2005 23:39:48 -0500 To: Cc: Message-ID: X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) In-reply-to: <1111982136.4247803898dca@hearst.cc.macalester.edu> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180 Importance: Normal X-Originating-IP: 208.234.8.229 X-eGroups-Msg-Info: 1:12:0 From: "Ben Goertzel" X-Yahoo-Profile: bgoertzel MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list lojban@yahoogroups.com; contact lojban-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list lojban@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 23:39:54 -0500 Subject: [lojban] Re: (No Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 9683 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: ben@goertzel.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list > >To make a long story short, > > >-- translating Lojban into weird, awkward, sometimes ungrammatical but > >basically comprehensible English is definitely a solvable problem, > >though requiring a moderate rather than trivial amount of work > > This is really only useful, IMHO, as a step toward the next one: Not really true -- if you had an AI system that was deriving novel conclusions and could express these conclusions in Lojban, then having a crude English dump of its conclusions could be quite valuable... > >-- translating Lojban into fully grammatical and elegant English would > >be quite hard > > However, if we are able to accomplish this, it should be repeatable with > a somewhat smaller but still substantial amount of workload for other > target languages. This would be quite useful, IMO. Correct > >-- translating English into Lojban would be extremely difficult given > >the current (somewhat pitiful) state of computational linguistics and > >AI technology. The right approach would be to create an interactive > >tool > > Is it even certain that this is possible? I'm almost certain it's possible to do an *almost* complete job of this, but also certain that it's hard. There are tricky issues of pragmatics that may be unresolvable without "strong AI", but I'm pretty sure you can do a 99% job without solving these... > I see this as a valuable - and possibly essential > - step in conquering the problem of good machine translation. Agreed. Basically this is the same idea as in the Interlingua machine translation project http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/interlingua.html but using Lojban instead of their graph-based interlingua (which makes sense because Lojban is more complete and more thoroughly battle-tested...) -- Ben G ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/EA3HyD/3MnJAA/79vVAA/GSaulB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: lojban-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/