Cc: "Ari Heljakka" <heljakka@iki.fi>,
        "Izabela Lyon Freire Goertzel" <izabela@goertzel.org>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 23:21:43 -0400
Message-ID: <JNEIJCJJHIEAILJBFHILGENHFFAA.ben@goertzel.org>
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From: "Ben Goertzel" <lojban-out@lojban.org>
Reply-To: ben@goertzel.org
Subject: [lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal
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Hi,

> So, you will just use Lojban grammar with English
> words for the predicates -- well, English + "qui"
> and "quu" (which latter is looking less useful
> the more Lojban comes in -- {sepi'o} in place of
> "quu weapon" for example (also simplifying the
> matvch up to FrameNet categories).  This still
> leaves all the Lojban cmavo to learn -- without
> the at leat occasional aid of matches with gismu.
>  It might be better to use English for at least
> BAI type cmavo to make the learning easier.  Of
> course, then we again wonder about how much tis
> is based on Lojban and whether the grammar can
> take the shift (predicate quu would have to go
> before, not after, probably).

Clearly, learning the cmavo is far easier than
learning the cmavo + all the vocabulary.

> > 1) Loglish is much easier to train users in
> > than Lojban
>
> Yes, because of the vocabulary learning.  The
> rest would be on a par, with the cmavo learning a
> bit harder perhaps. I don't know how significant
> the difference would be.

IMO, for an individual with some background in
logic and a high IQ -- but without a photographic
memory -- learning the vocabulary will be
by far the most time-consuming part of learning
Lojban.

For an individual with lower IQ and no background
in logic, the formulation of thoughts in predicate
logic may be difficult and unnatural, and may form
the largest obstacle to learning Lojban.  I don't
know if anyone has any experience with this -- so
far as I know, everyone who's bothered to learn a
significant amount of Lojban is pretty clever and
with an explicitly rationalist mindest.

> > 2) Loglish queries can automatically be used to
> > query databases of knowledge
> > built up using English-language
> > information-extraction tools (whereas to do
> > this using Lojban would require building a real
> > Lojban-English dictionary,
> > including a translation of Lojban words into
> > WordNet senses and Lojban
> > argument-positions into FrameNet argument
> > labels, or something similar)
>
> I am not sure I understand this.  If the enquiry
> is in Loglish than (grammar aside) the text can
> be processed like ordinary English, using tools
> devised for that ordinary language.  If the
> inquiry say is in Lojban, either these tools have
> to be replicated for Lojban or the Lojban query
> has to be translated into English at least to the
> extent of using English words in place of Lojban
> ones.  Now, in Loglish this will have to be done
> already with the cmavo, I suppose.  Anbd the
> replacement in the case of predicates will
> require  so fairly fancy processing toight
> translation in the context (working through
> WordNet and FrameNet and whatever else is
> available.  On the other hand, presumably words
> are ultimately to be represented as WordNet +
> FrameNet entries for the purpose of processing in
> the various ways.  If Lojban words were once so
> represented, then -- without passing through
> English -- they could be used directly, sparing
> the need to diambiguate (or pick the right
> meaning given all the contextual stuff).  That
> is, the small extra effort (OK, not so small)
> pays off bigtime in the end (and points the way
> to a mass of databases that are less dependent on
> English (or Lojban for that matter) than the
> present plan.

Yes, if a Lojban dictionary were created that

-- included cognates of all the words in English

-- included mappings of each Lojban word into
appropriate WordNet senses

-- included mappings of each Lojban argument-position
into an appropriate FrameNet case-role

then Lojban queries could be used to query English-
language databases.

However, this kind of Lojban dictionary does NOT exist,
and

1) Creating it looks like a big job, far bigger
than building a Loglish parser (since the latter can
be easily done by combining the ideas of the existing Lojban
grammar parser with my current software tools for handling
WordNet and FrameNet)
software tools

2) So far as I can tell, no one seems to have the money
or initiative to get this big job done.

> > 3) Loglish can immediately be used to discuss
> > complex topics in any area of
> > discourse without needing to spend time
> > continually inventing new vocabulary
> > words
>
> Word inventing doesn't take much time and only
> need be done once in a given topic.

The need to do word-invention makes language usage an awful
lot more difficult though.

Suppose I'm talking to a friend in Lojban about, say, polysemy

Then, if I don't know the word, I have to make up a word for
polysemy, so we can use it in our conversation.

But if I'm not near a computer, I can't check whether someone
else has already made up a word for this and uploaded it to
jbovlaste....  So it may be that the word we made up is "wrong"
in the sense of not being the first one invented for the intended
meaning....

Even if I'm sitting at or near a computer, every time I encounter
a word I don't know, I need to consult jbovlaste to see if it's been
invented before, and otherwise I need to invent it.

This makes conversation in Lojban a lot slower than conversation in
other languages -- NOT because of any intrinsic flaw in Lojban, but
just because Lojban is young and not yet complete.

Of course, one can always use English words in Lojban via the quotative
mechanism, but if one is going to do this heavily, then one may as
well use Loglish ;-)

> And, of course, the ;lack of
> vocabulary is a temporary matter, not a long term
> one -- and the sooner people start using Lojban
> to talk of many things, the sooner the problem
> will disappear.

Well, realistically, I am not that hopeful that a lot of people
are going to start using Lojban to talk about a lot of things
anytime soon.

I would like to see it happen -- I hope it happens -- but it doesn't
seem terribly likely to me, frankly.

I don't think a lot of people will start learning and conversing in
Loglish any time soon either, even if a parser is created and nice
educational materials are created.

However, I *do* think these languages may play a valuable practical
role in mediating communication between humans and AI's.

In this role, both Lojban and Loglish have their own advantages.

Lojban requires less of the AI's, because it's much less ambiguous
(the only significant ambiguity, so far as I can tell, residing in tanru
and in reference resolution mechanisms).

On the other hand, I believe Loglish requires less of the humans, because
it requires much less vocabulary memorization and invention.

I think that beefing up parsing software to handle Loglish is going to be
easier than convincing a lot of humans to go through the extra hassle of
learning Lojban in order to communicate with AI's.

> As noted, Lojban grammar is close enough to
> English that the problem will likely be the
> restrictions, not new constructions. The
> experience with radically different grammars from
> the home one would suggest that -- if Loglish
> really had such a different grammar -- it would
> be worse than learning Lojban vocabulary to get
> doing it right.

This is the main point on which our opinions differ.

> > I emphasize that this is not entirely a
> > theoretical discussion.  In
> > 2003-2004 I managed a project building an NLP
> > information extraction system
> > for a government customer -- and in late 2004 I
> > actually tried to sell them
> > on making a Lojban query front end to the
> > knowledge repository, but the idea
> > was just too weird for them.
>
> Would Loglish seem (or be made to seem) less
> weird?

Yes, definitely.  From a marketing perspective, one can pitch Loglish as a

"more logical version of English, modified to be easier for computers to
understand"

which is a far better pitch than saying you want knowledge-encoders to learn
a whole
new language.

It's not really quite true that Loglish is a "more logical version of
English",
but this seems to me like a viable sort of marketing pitch, and I have had
no
success in coming up with a workable pitch for Lojban....

In a presentation context, you could show people simple Loglish sentences
and they
would be able to basically understand them.  OTOH, showing people Lojban
sentences
will just result in total bafflement...


-- Ben


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