Re: Off Topic: NLP, le to'e melbi glico bo bangu

[xod <xod@bway.net>]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, Christopher Palmer wrote:

> From: Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>
> 
> On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, xod wrote:
> 
> > Do you doubt the appearance of real-time text language translation, to
> > 95% accuracy, in 50 years?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> As for why: 50 years ago they were predicting 9x% accurate machine
> translation 'by 1960' or some other it-didn't-happen date. Computer
> technology has not changed significantly (=revolved, as opposed to
> evolved) in the last 50 years. No theory of language has been able
> accurately and completely to describe the human language faculty, and
> computational theories are even less on the mark.


If you follow Moore's Law, and count the number of neurons it enables us
to simulate, you'll see that my prediction, though not certain, is
respectable.

Extend us off silicon into optical/protein/full nanotech computers, and
you'll agree that real-time better-than-human language translation of bad
handwriting and drunken accented speech is inevitable.


> 'Some guy that told me; I forgot who it was' is my source too, which is
> why I doubted it. L2 acquisition is a far more problematic and tangled
> issue than merely rating the 'difficulty' of acquisition: it's a whole
> field of study with piles of nasty, unasnwered questions. A blanket
> statement like 'English is hard' is meaningless.

"English is hard" is meaningless, but "English is harder than Spanish" is
both meaningful and measurable. 




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