[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] my opinion on why lojban isn't specifically well suited for human-computer interaction
M@ wrote:
First, a disclaimer; while I have put a significant amount of time into
thinking about this kind of thing I’m certainly not an expert.
In this area, even the experts aren't experts.
The
difference between MI and AI is as fundamental as the difference between
1 and 0. Thus, the two potential uses of a syntactically unambiguous
language (SUL for brevity) in a computer have no grey area between them.
Guessing what you mean by MI and AI, I think it is the grey area that
you don't see that is precisely the area of interest.
The short term use (dream) is to teach computers to utilize the
language’s unambiguous nature to provide an interface that can be read
and written to in a spoken language.
That could be done with FORTRAN, but the issue is "what is a 'language'"
The problem I have with this goal is that it’s a solution to a problem
that has been solved for decades. There are many SULs that are already
written and in use as computer interfaces across the world. My personal
favorite is bash. To compare bash to lojban I would say that bash is
easier to learn (it is much smaller after all) and every bit as
versatile as a cross-programming-language interaction framework as
lojban could possibly be in a classical computing environment.
That's fine, if the only thing you want to do with a computer is write
programs. But computer languages are limited to ONLY writing computer
programs. One has to at least get to the versatility of SQL in order to
be useful to users, and even there the ideal is to have a somewhat more
natural-language interface.
> Both
languages are equally not my first, and I would say I’m truely fluent in
neither, but comfortable with both.
One cannot be fluent in a computer language, unless perhaps one is a
computer, since the language is too small to think in. You therefore
have to translate your thoughts from English or whatever into the
computer language, which takes time, and is subject to error, especially
when you are trying to be as fluent as possible (i.e. fast).
Another way to say it, is no matter how hard you try classical computers
will never be able to figure anything, they rely on unambiguous meanings
to get things done, lojban doesn’t necessarily provide that, bash does.
Which is where AI comes in, because AI doesn't require unambiguous
meanings. It is significantly aided by unambiguous meanings when they
are intended, known and can be conveyed, but an AI is ideally capable of
asking a quasi-intelligent question to resolve an ambiguous meaning, to
seek additional specificity for a vague meaning, or perhaps do a
probabilistic or other analysis of user intent when these aren't possible.
The real beauty of lojban isn’t the fact that it’s a SUL.
By being SUL, it cuts out one chunk of the processing load in
interpreting user input. There is still speech processing, and semantic
ambiguity, and syntactic/semantic errors as sources of processing load,
but a complete solution to one problem should in theory make the total
task of natural language processing easier.
>As with any real beauty there is always a converse beast, which
in this case is the fact that it’s silly to be more creative than the
person (or computer) you’re talking to.
They call this "art".
Of course, the other dream is to actually teach a MI how to speak and
understand lojban. Assuming such an auto-associative system could be
made hardware wise, there would be absolutely nothing preventing it from
being a perfectly natural feeling interface in spoken or typed lojban.
You could ask it absurd questions and it could give you obviously
considered answers. The problem I find with this is that once you’ve
built MI there’s no reason whatsoever you couldn’t teach it English as well.
English is a much more difficult problem, because it is not an SUL, and
has evolved as a non-SUL so that it has extremely odd semantic
relations. If you ran your computer the way that run your dog or the
way you run a lap on the track (as opposed to sitting on the lap of your
girlfriend - I wouldn't want you to run her lap, or to have the runs on
her lap - she wouldn't exactly lap it up).
And those are the obvious kinds of problems. Much of the difficulty
with English is that the problems are NOT obvious, and every structural
analysis of English runs into some problems that violate any
generalizations that have been otherwise made. I was just reading a
short discussion of the possible determiners in a noun phrase in
English, and the restrictions are as clear as mud.
And then we have "pretty little girls school" ...
lojbab