Re: lojban newbie: an outsider looking in

[Richard Curnow <richard@rrbcurnow.freeuk.com>]

On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, Michal Wallace (sabren) wrote:

> From: "Michal Wallace (sabren)" <sabren@manifestation.com>
> 
> 
> > I've seen parsers, but they all seem to barf incomprehensible diagrams
> > instead of sentences, even crappy sentences like babelfish.
> 
> I think I might be able to manage a crappy sentence with a lot
> of parentheses on my own.. And probably do a lot better after
> studying YACC.

Given all the talk of parenthesis, I guess it's my jbofi'e program being
discussed.

To set the record straight, my aims were not so ambitious as to include
the production of reasonable English sentences as direct translations.
The goals were more :

1. To check syntax and subtle errors of meaning in Lojban I wrote myself.
2. To do the drudgery of looking up words in the dictionary when reading
other people's Lojban posted to this list.
3. To mark the sumti with a reminder of their meaning within the
definition of the main selbri within the sentence, to assist in the
interpretation once the individual words have been translated.

Goal (2) often fails to be realised, because so much published Lojban does
not in fact have the correct syntax :-(

Once you get used to the output format, it is a useful 'half-way house'
between the raw Lojban and a smooth English translation.

I'd bet that if you try doing a Lojban -> English translator more akin to
Babelfish, you'll find the front-end YACC/Bison stuff a piece of cake
compared to the back-end task of producing reasonable English with the
same meaning.  OK, you can probably do quite well for a limited range of
Lojban constructions, but I'm sure the task is very hard indeed in its
full generality.  One particularly dull aspect that I've jibbed at doing
is re-formulating all the gismu definitions depending on which of the
places has the 'focus' in the sentence (i.e. which of se, te etc precede
the selbri).

The parentheses in jbofi'e's output, incidentally, show how various
constructions nest within each other.  It's useful for seeing the nesting
order of connectives, the binding order of the brivla within tanru etc.  
I agree they're a bit of a distraction as well, but they are useful for
checking subtle details of meaning that differ depending on binding order.

> 
> part of the reason I suggested a perl version was because the dictionary
> looks like: "x1 eats x2 ..." and it would be fairly easy, once you know
> which sumti are x1 and x2, to do a search and replace (at least with
> perl's regular expressions)..

Fine for 'citka', however you need to generate templates for

se citka : x1 is eaten by x2
ctigau   : x1 feeds x2 with x3
te se ctigau : x1 feeds x2 to x3
citka jubme : dining table
ctijbu      : ditto

and so on, ad infinitum.  The construction of this template dictionary is
the really dreary part of the project.

Richard.

-- 
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Richard P. Curnow                    richard@rrbcurnow.freeserve.co.uk
Stevenage               Network time sync for Linux/Solaris/Dial-up at
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