Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 20:33:29 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710230133.UAA02790@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: HACKER G N Sender: Lojban list From: HACKER G N Subject: Re: Linguistics journals X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2122 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Oct 22 20:33:41 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Steven Belknap wrote: > One possible application of lojban is as an "interlanguage" for translating > between other languages. For example, to translate from English to Russian, > one would translate from English to lojban then from lojban to Russian. I > would think that this would qualify as a legitimate area for linguistic > research. It would certainly be useful if lojban would simplify or improve > the accuracy of translation. Caterpillar, which is based here in Peoria > employs a Ph.D. computational linguist to assist in translating manuals > into the 30 or so languages of Caterpillar's customers. He expressed > interest in lojban when I described it to him. I presume you're talking about machine translation. If so, there are more powerful languages around for that. CycL is one that springs readily to mind. It allows for such things as skolemization, quantification of predicates and quantification of whole sentences. Needless to say, it is NOT suitable for communication between humans; it is JUST a computer language. But it is very easy to translate something into CycL given the ambiguities of natural language because of certain properties of Cyc. Cyc can disambiguate natural language very effectively simply by using commonsense knowledge about the world, which is stored in its knowledge base in CycL. Take the two sentences: John saw the airplanes flying over Zurich. John saw the mountains flying over Zurich. They differ only in ONE WORD, but that word affects the grammar of the rest of the sentence. The verb phrase "flying over Zurich" clearly appends to "the airplanes" in the first sentence, and "John" in the next sentence, and it seems difficult to see how you could disambiguate these two sentences if you didn't just have the common sense to know that planes fly, and mountains don't. Cyc "knows" this, so it can effectively disambiguate the sentence and translate it correctly. The ability to do things like this is something I think far more amenable to being an interlanguage and processing natural language than what Lojban can seem to provide. Geoff