Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 23:17:55 +0100
To: Lojban List <lojban@egroups.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] le stura be la gihuste
Message-ID: <20000824231755.B237@rrbcurnow.freeuk.com>
Reply-To: Richard Curnow <rpc@myself.com>
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In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20000824085154.00a693e0@127.0.0.1>; from lojbab@lojban.org on Thu, Aug 24, 2000 at 10:23:56AM -0400
From: Richard Curnow <richard@rrbcurnow.freeuk.com>
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On Thu, Aug 24, 2000 at 10:23:56AM -0400, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> 
> Yes that is  a sufficient sample.  I think others can and should comment, 
> and I will have Nora look (she may very well disagree with me).  Comments 
> from others such as R Curnow, who have done computer tools based on the 
> existing list, would be especially informative.

OK, since I was invited to comment, here goes...

For jbofi'e, I haven't made any automated use of the definitions in the
gismu file at all.  Just the keywords are loaded into the dictionary as
a back-stop translation for each word if all else fails.  Most of the
data for showing the meanings of the places was initially going to come
from the oblique.key file.  I ran into the problem that the translations
in there are a mis-mash of different parts of speech, and I wanted a
scheme where jbofi'e could supply verbs, nouns, adjectives etc when the
context seemed to demand it.  Consequently, I started compiling the
places.dat file that comes in the jbofi'e source kit, which is like a
more sophisticated oblique.key which allows automatic generation of
appropriate forms of the words depending on the context.  This is only
part finished, and is not exactly the most exciting task to devote time
to. The oblique.key data is used where I've not got round to overriding
it.

The one thing that I've seen in the thread which would be a really big
improvement for jbofi'e is the 'sentence templates' for each brivla.
This would allow a reasonable translation with prepositions etc.  I'd
thought about generating something like this myself, but gave up because
of the sheer workload involved and my limited development time nowadays
(due to our 2 year old boy and 3 month old girl).  

The other area where I've had more cause to auto-process the gismu file
was to generate some LaTeX input from it to format as a typeset
dictionary.  The most intractable part was separating the English words
out of it to form a very rudimentary English->Lojban word list.

-- 
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Richard P. Curnow                                       rpc@myself.com
Weston-super-Mare
United Kingdom                            http://go.to/richard.curnow/