[lojban] Re: experimental cmavo in lojgloss.

["Chris Capel" <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 03:58, Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 12:23 AM, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Right, but it would still be unparsable. The problem is that the text
>> before it is ungrammatical, and so has to be ignored by the parser to
>> get the whole thing to parse, which requires that the parser
>> understand which words the lo'ai is nulling out. It can't be treated
>> half-way and have things still parse.
>
> The obvious way to implement {lo'ai .. sa'ai .. le'ai} in a parser is to
> just treat it as a self-contained construct that requires morphologically
> correct Lojban inside it, just like {lo'u .. le'u'}, and syntactically
> correct Lojban before it (just like everything else).

How far before it? Up to the beginning of the sentence? The statement?

> Of course it would require extraordinary methods to get things like {kwama
> lo'ai kwama sa'ai klama le'ai} --- or why not {fsen.45ynl5tnerg98ehg4n su
> coi} --- to parse.  It's not practical and not cost-efficient.  The {kjama}
> example falls in this category because {kj} is morphologically invalid.

Hmm. I think you overestimate the difference in effort between the two
implementations. They both require the same tricks, just at a slightly
different level in the grammar.

> What _would_ be useful and cost-efficient would be to get things like {.i
> .ai mi cakla sa'ai ckakla le'ai} to parse.

Actually, this is the only useful one I can think of. If the text
isn't grammatical before the le'ai clause, then the user is probably
going to want to manually correct it anyway before feeding it to the
parser. This example happens to be both grammatical, and having nearly
the same parse tree as the corrected version (since the before and
after words are both brivla).

> The parser shouldn't try to
> actually replace anything at the parser level.  It should just parse the
> {le'ai} construct and report its syntax tree to the client.

Right, I'm with you on that.

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)


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