RE: [lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal

["Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org>]

> The example, though I assume it is not meant
> seriously, illustrates the problem that has been
> found in these regimented English proposals:

Loglish is not fairly called "regimented English", because its syntax is 98%
Lojban; only its vocabulary is English

>the
> whole range of ambiguity of the natural language
> creeps in

I disagree -- Loglish uses Lojban syntax, so that most of the ambiguities of
English do not creep in.  The only English ambiguities that creep in are
ambiguities regarding

-- word sense
-- argument position

but this is a small percent of all English ambiguities, and is resolved by
proper use of qui and quu.

> Loglish also loses what is practically Lojban's
> most significant feature for any computer use:
> the unique decomposition and parsing.

That is sort of correct; however Loglish as I defined it will have *close to
unique* parsing IF quu is used correctly, so that it's possible to resolve
the intended argument position from the quu specifier using simple,
automated semantic inference.

In nearly all cases it will be possible to achieve successful results via
simple algorithms such as

"Resolve 'X qui Y' to the sense of X whose WordNet definition has the
smallest semantic distance to Y."

"Given 'X quu Y' , assign Y to the argument position of X whose description
in the Loglish dictionary has the smallest semantic distance to Y."

I'm quite confident these algorithms would work with 97%+ accuracy, and 99%+
accuracy after some training and fiddling.

Of course, this quu algorithm requires a Loglish dictionary to be written,
but this dictionary doesn't have to be complete because one can use another
algorithm:

"Given 'X quu Y' , if X is not in the Loglish dictionary, find the
semantically closest Z to X so that Z is in the Loglish dictionary, and
assign Y to the argument position of Z whose description in the Loglish
dictionary has the smallest semantic distance to Y, and then assign Y to a
corresponding argument position for X"

I bet this will work with 90%+ accuracy.

Obviously this is more complex and funkier than Lojban parsing, but OTOH
having the full English vocabulary to use is a big thing...

> I suppose that
> "qui" -- and in another way "quu" -- would come
> to function like this in Loglish, both
> disambiguating simple expressions and
> constructing new complexes. It seems a viable --
> though remarkably messy and uninteresting --
> idea.

I agree it's viable and messy, but I don't find it uninteresting.  But of
course, this is a matter of taste ;-)

Tanru are also messy, and semantically underspecified.

What I like is that this messiness of compound formation -- like the
messiness of tanru -- occurs within a context of predicate-logic-based
syntax/semantics (defined by the Loglish cmavo and sentence structure)


-- Ben G