Re: misc practical questions

[Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group <lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx]

At 07:40 PM 5/28/99 +0200, Max Kubierschky wrote:
>From: Max Kubierschky <max@isinet.it>
>
>> The limitation is in the natural langauge side of the interface. If there
>> is an engine that could generate smooth text from coarse keyword glosses,
>> we would be very close in Lojban to English, since the parser/glosser can
>> output coarse keyword glosses. The major limitation here remains in the
>> lexicon - too few words are defined well enough for an MT program to
>> translate them.
>
>As far as i understand, a "coarse keyword gloss" is some isomorphic
>transcription of lojban, that is more readable to non lojbanists. True?
>Have problems similar to the keyword gloss -> english problems yet
>been attacked (with or without success) in computer linguistics?

No idea. Maybe someone else knows, but i am far from a computer-linguistics
guru %^)

>> Only to the level of the parser/glosser that I mentioned, which would be
>> "low quality" by any standard. Anything higher would take serious work,
>> probably funded research or graduate-studies research work, because the
>> person-months of work needed to produce the lexicon and reasonably fast and
>> sophisticated code are not going to be easily found among volunteers
>> working occasionally in their spare time.
>
>No doubt that the amount of work needed is high. But how high is it
>compared to translating tons of linux manuals to a target language
>by hand (which is actually done on a non fundned basis for some
>languages)?
>I don't think that there is lack of resources on the programming side
>of the problem (considering the tremendous amount of free software on
>this planet). So the question reduces once again to: 
>How hard is it as a linguistic problem?

Probably more time-consuming than "hard", I would suspect, given that you
are looking for "OK" text and not colloquial text. But I would be the last
person to trust for a definitive answer.

lojbab
----
lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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