Date: Tue, 1 Dec 1998 01:19:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>
Message-Id: <199812010619.BAA26995@access5.digex.net>
To: lojban@onelist.com
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Subject: [lojban] UNL, Lojban and MLHT 
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From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>


>On Tue, 24 Nov 1998, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> Sounds pretty crude and primitive compared to Lojban.
>
>Why not outperform the UNL vaporware then?
>Could a Lojban parser output intelligible English some day? 

The glosser that nora has been working on will output somewhat 
intelligible English, and it is hardly as sophisticated as anyuthing
the UNL people are contemplating.  The problem is not the Lojban
so much as it is making the English intelligible.

No doubt an approach similar to whjat you describe of converting parse to
Prolog to Lisp to English would be more effective than what Nora is
doing, but Nora's solution is easy (if she only had time to work on it)


A good glosser is a useful learning tool.  A good translator would also be
good.  But the main thing needed to make either very useful is some kind
of AI based error correction - something that couild look at a bad parse and
figure out what was likely to be wrong (a missing "cu", two selbri in the
bridi, etc.) and perhaps even suggest the corrections.

Right now if a user makes an error that leads to non parsing the glosser
cannot do anything with it, which in turn means that the user/learner has
very little clue as to what was wrong.  The YACC-based diagnostic that 
the parser puts out is useful only to those really aware of how a YACC parser
works, and then only sometimes.

lojbab

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