21.06.2006, 10:05 Chris Capel wrote:
> Many of the older texts mention that Lojban might be uniquely suitable
> for human-computer communication. The idea is that since computers are
> so bad at resolving the meaning of polysemous words, and at resolving
> ambiguity in grammar, (two things that humans are extremely good at,)
> that the absence of these things will make it much easier to allow
> computers to understand human speech. But the fact is that computers
> that don't have a flexible enough language model to resolve
> ambiguities from polysemy and grammar ambiguity are unlikely to be
> nearly subtle enough to correctly resolve ambiguities in extent. So
> creating a language like Lojban for that purpose (which was never the,
> or even a, primary purpose for the language, as I understand) is
> analogous to taking a course in mechanical engineering and building a
> shovel cleaner before starting the work on digging a tunnel to China.
> Any application in which some restricted subset of English could be
> used, except for problems with polysemy and grammar ambiguity, is an
> application that probably doesn't need to use a natural language at
> all.
The passage with the shovel to China is great! ;)
I think no one has ever pretended that Lojban can 10 times ease the understanding of the language by a machine.
Lojban just allows to throw away lots of debris present in any natural language (and constituting just 1% of the difficulties, IMHO) and concentrate on the main and biggest problem, namely the chain:
symbolic system -- [a lot of hidden, mysterious AI stuff, including context resolving] -- internal knowledge representation in a mind.
mi'e .ianis.
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