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From: John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>
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This is all very depressing: aside from
technological improvements (moving from
large-room -sized computers to vest pocket ones
with vast increases in processing speed and size
of handy memory so that "interactive" involves
less than a two-day turnaround) it sounds as
though "machine translation" hasn't gotten much
beyond where it was in 1962, when big
improvements were "just around the corner."  
To be fair, I can see that the linguistics is
better, with functioning parsers of reasonable
accuracy (and based on much improved analyses, I
suppose  -- though whether less arbitrary is not
clear). I assume that the distributional
semantics tables have been extended and improved
and their use better integrated into the process.
 And, of course, Lojban is much better than the
Loglan proposed as an intermediate language back
then -- on the basis of the 1960 article only
(JCB was not answering mail that decade).  Still,
it appears that the amount of human time involved
in a particular translation has not decreased
significantly (and, of course, the ratio of human
to machine time has gotten much worse).  That is,
the advantage of machine work over human
translator from scratch is still barely
perceptible.   

--- Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> > >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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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