From hombre!uunet!math.ucla.edu!jimc Fri Nov 2 00:23:23 1990 Return-Path: Received: by marob.masa.com (/\=-/\ Smail3.1.18.1 #18.1) id ; Fri, 2 Nov 90 00:23 EST Received: by hombre.MASA.COM (smail2.5) id AA28576; 2 Nov 90 00:11:05 EST (Fri) Received: from cbmvax.UUCP by uunet.uu.net (5.61/1.14) with UUCP id AA29111; Thu, 1 Nov 90 16:35:29 -0500 From: uunet!math.ucla.edu!jimc Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore Jan 13 1990) id AA10515; Thu, 1 Nov 90 16:31:01 EST Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (smail2.3) id AA11630; 1 Nov 90 16:58:13 EST (Thu) Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore Jan 13 1990) id AA18358; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:40:11 EST Received: from sunset.math.ucla.edu by uunet.uu.net (5.61/1.14) with SMTP id AA12452; Thu, 1 Nov 90 11:21:06 -0500 Return-Path: Received: from localhost by julia.math.ucla.edu via SMTP (Sendmail 5.61/1.06) id AA08187; Thu, 1 Nov 90 08:20:02 -0800 Message-Id: <9011011620.AA08187@julia.math.ucla.edu> To: major@pta.oz.au (Major) Cc: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com Subject: Re: response to J. Prothero book review and comments of 12 Oct 90 In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 30 Oct 90 21:49:50 +0800." <9011011210.25742@munnari.oz.au> Date: Thu, 01 Nov 90 08:20:01 -0800 Status: RO > Date: Tue, 30 Oct 90 21:49:50 +0800 > To: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com > From: major@pta.oz.au (Major) > Subject: response to J. Prothero book review and comments of 12 Oct 90 major@pta.oz.au (Major) writes: > lojbab@snark.thyrsus.com (Bob LeChevalier) writes: > > > Sheldon Linker has claimed that he could do a Lojban conversing > > program with heuristic 'understanding' a la HAL 9000 in 5 man-years. > > If this is true, then he should be able to do English in 6; understanding > the chaos of natural language would not be particularly difficult after > understanding the chaos of natural thought. Don't underestimate the effect of language chaos! My experience with -gua!spi may be relevant here. I am writing the preprocessor for such a program, which maps language into phrases, with cases identified, pronouns linked to antecedents, replicated modal cases inserted a la pc's proposal about tenses, etc. Simple, eh? Particularly since -gua!spi is very similar to Loglan in grammar but super-simplified to make this step easier. In two weeks I had the lexer and parser down cold, and I have hardly touched them since. After about six months the phrases would almost always go into the right cases, taking into account placeholders and the like. The rest of the time has been spent mostly in nailing down nitpicky little details of what should be the antecedents of pronouns. For example, why is Kira's girlfriend the speaker (antecedent of "ji") in the subphrase of a direct quote while Kira is the speaker in the main phrase? I translate a little more (deliberately using difficult relations), run it through the program, and discover another point I hadn't thought of. Perhaps some theory will become evident but so far it's been slog, slog, slog. -gua!spi is pre-planned to be easier than Loglan to pronounize, while Lojban retains a lot of complicated structure which, every now and then, I moan about to Lojbab's annoyance. Imagine if you had to handle English! I think it would be a major achievement to reliably distinguish direct from indirect objects -- note: reliably, not just 95% of the time. I'm not sure that an algorithm exists for reliably dealing with antecedents in something like this: "Joe likes Jerry. He says that he tells cool jokes." And after that's done, you can start on the main project, the understander. -- jimc