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RE: [lojban] Lossless Lojban <--> English Converter?

 
Hi,
 
Yeah, I think a Lojbanic Ramona would be a great thing to have, and wouldn't be very hard to create as an extra service running on top of a LojLink system.. 
 
While I agree of course that it's a wrongheaded approach to AI, I also think that the knowledge entered into such a DB could be useful for educating a genuine Lojban-speaking AI (though creating a genuine Lojban-speaking AI is obviously an entirely different process).
 
-- Ben
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Arnold [mailto:mattarn@123.net]
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2005 1:02 PM
To: lojban@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [lojban] Lossless Lojban <--> English Converter?

Would a LojLink database be a useful component of Lojban teaching software? For instance, perhaps entering knowledge (just general stuff about the world around us) and having LojLink reason about it might generate lots of new Lojban sentences for a student to try to translate, without bothering the uber-Lojbanists about it.

I've often pondered that the most important thing for the growth of Lojban would be personal tutoring. This is of course geographically impractical, and even on the internet one never knows when a knowledgeable person will be available to speak to. No human Lojbanist can be expected to have the 24-hour availability to total strangers possessed by a computer program, nor its patience with the constant mistakes of proto-Lojbanists. But that's what is needed: a Lojban equivalent of Kurzweil's "Ramona." Even if it's stupid, as long as it knows the rules of the language it would cause the sheer quantity of conversation actually taking place in Lojban to take off like a shot.

Once LojLink is done, I recommend creating a common sense knowledge base in LojLink, just to have an interactive conversational context for Lojban other than IRC. I am aware that this approach to AI is considered wrongheaded, and I don't dispute that one way or the other, but  I am not proposing that this is for OpenCyc's purposes. It's just an excuse for the knowledge enterers to practice a lot of Lojban without actually needing other Lojban speakers to be socially available at the moment.

-Matt

ben@goertzel.org wrote:
>Nick --
>No, and this would be a quite difficult project.  For some of my recent
>thoughts on this and related issues see
>http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/lojban_AI.pdf
>To make a long story short,
>-- translating Lojban into weird, awkward, sometimes ungrammatical but
>basically comprehensible English is definitely a solvable problem, though
>requiring a moderate rather than trivial amount of work
>-- translating Lojban into fully grammatical and elegant English would be
>quite hard
>-- translating English into Lojban would be extremely difficult given the
>current (somewhat pitiful) state of computational linguistics and AI
>technology.  The right approach would be to create an interactive tool for
>doing this, and then have the tool learn from its mistakes so as to
>adaptively get better and better at translation.  I have written down some
>related thoughts at http://www.goertzel.org/new_research/LojLink.pdf
>If any of y'all are seriously interested in working on this sort of thing I
>am definitely will to lend my (considerable, if I do say so ;-) knowledge of
>and experience with computational linguistics.  Unfortunately, however, I
>don't have time to do much hands-on work on such things these days.
>--
> Ben Goertzel
>www.goertzel.org
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org
>[mailto:lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org]On Behalf Of Nick LaForge
>  Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 2:11 PM
>  To: lojban@yahoogroups.com
>  Subject: [lojban] Lossless Lojban <--> English Converter?
>  Hi,
>  Does there exist a computer program that can convert lojban text to
>  english text, and then back into the original lojban text without
>  changes? (And visa-versa).
>  I think this would be very useful for a project I envision, where data
>  is stored in lojban and converted into English only when an english
>  user needs to read it.  When the user inputs text, it would be
>  converted into lojban and stored, but when the user wants to read the
>  text, it needs to be converted back into english without change.
>  Thank you. :)
>  --
>  Nick LaForge
>  Mystic0

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