Well, the sense in which computers cannot "understand" FOPL is limited, having to do with automatic proof recovery and the like (always running afoul of undecidability -- the cutoff point in reduction chains). As far back (a least) as 1961, when I was discussing Loglan as an interlingua at the ALDP group at RAND, the use of FOPL was considered a positive advantage (the unique parsing as always -- never mind that Loglan didn't have it then), though not enough to go forward with this line of development. The problem with FOPL is unsolvable, of course, though some types of meta procedures can push the practical limits back a long way (the meta proof that a particular line of reductions will never involve a conflict, for example).
From: "Jon "Top Hat" Jones" <eyeonus@gmail.com>
To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Tue, December 22, 2009 1:30:12 AM
Subject: [lojban] interlingua translation and first-order logic
I recently came across
this paper, which discusses various methods of machine translation methods. In it it is mentioned that computers are not able to understand first-order (i.e. predicate) logic. Since the paper is nearly 2 decades old, I was wondering if anyone here knows what progress there has been in making it understandable by computers.
--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu