Re: [lojban] semantic parser - tersmu-0.1rc1

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Wait.  If we have a means of converting FOL into Lojban, it has -- to be 
acceptable -- to provide a rule for a means of converting some logical 
expression into each Lojban sentence.  So, in particular, it has to provide a 
systematic explanation for even those sentences which are problematic to the 
back conversion.  This does not seem to be a trivial exercise (nor should it be 
since its reverse is not trivial, apparently). This is what a grammar does: 
convert a semantic deep structure into a surface sentence, by rules, such that 
every acceptable sentence of the language is covered (and hard cases are 
decided).  To be sure (well, actually I am not sure) that every FOL sentence can 
be converted into some Lojban sentence in a trivial way; the trick is to convert 
into all of the Lojban sentences that a speaker might use to express that deep 
structure.  A PEG grammar or a YACC etc. are not really grammars but parsers: 
they tell whether something is a legitimate sentence (usually -- there may be 
some undecided cases) and provide a sort of analysis, but that analysis does 
little in the way of working back to the semantic content of the sentence ({ro 
nanla e nai ro nixli} just an NP, with not implications about its semantic role 
(or very few -- I haven't actually looked at the printout on this, though I have 
looked at enough to get a sense, I think,  of how they are likely to go).

Yeah, what do you do with a quantifier in the restriction on another quantifier 
if the first one requires a fixed satisfaction set an the internal quantifier 
depends on that set already being fixed.  Messy.



----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, December 11, 2011 4:57:50 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] semantic parser - tersmu-0.1rc1

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 7:37 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Dec 11, 2011, at 2:52 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Converting FOL into Lojban is trivial.
>
> Not obviously, since you are about to introduce expressions which are more 
>remote from FOL and thus,

Converting FOL into Lojban is not the same thing as converting Lojban
into FOL. The first is trivial, the other has some complications.
Lojban has expressions that do not convert into FOL without some
manipulation, whereas FOL expressions convert into Lojban directly and
rather trivially.

> even if arbitrary and conventional, subject to things like unintended 
>consequences (omitted arguments, {zo'e}, and, I assume, all the descriptions are 
>the currently interesting cases).

But that's not a part of converting FOL into Lojban.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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