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[lojban] Re: (No Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1





> >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
>
> This is really only useful, IMHO, as a step toward the next one:

Not really true -- if you had an AI system that was deriving novel
conclusions and could express these conclusions in Lojban, then having a
crude English dump of its conclusions could be quite valuable...

> >-- translating Lojban into fully grammatical and elegant English would
> >be quite hard
>
> However, if we are able to accomplish this, it should be repeatable with
> a somewhat smaller but still substantial amount of workload for other
> target languages. This would be quite useful, IMO.

Correct

> >-- 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
>
> Is it even certain that this is possible?

I'm almost certain it's possible to do an *almost* complete job of this, but
also certain that it's hard.  There are tricky issues of pragmatics that may
be unresolvable without "strong AI", but I'm pretty sure you can do a 99%
job without solving these...

> I see this as a valuable - and possibly essential
> - step in conquering the problem of good machine translation.

Agreed.

Basically this is the same idea as in the Interlingua machine translation
project

http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/mt/interlingua.html

but using Lojban instead of their graph-based interlingua (which makes sense
because Lojban is more complete and more thoroughly battle-tested...)

-- Ben G






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