Subject: Re: Software Translation of Lojban (was: Re: [lojban] eurolinux proposing lojban for community patent

From: PILCH Hartmut <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 19:39:40 +0100 (CET)

> > We are not trying to prove that humans can write lojban, but that
> > a well written lojban text can be auto-translated to something
> > understandable, like Logician's English/Greek/Finnish etc.
> >
> > Since many promises concerning auto-translation have been broken in the
> > past, it is important to assess this possibility very objectively and
> > to let people understand that translating from a logical language is
> > really different from translating from a normal language.
>
> I am not sure that anybody would be convinced with a theoretical argument
> without any software to back it up. I should think we would need to at
> least have software that creates English from Lojban, with the result
> being English of a higher quality than what AltaVista Babelfish produces.
>
> Every now and then I suggest that this is actually a very important
> project for the jbocecmu, because it would prove that Lojban is a feasible
> interlingua with computer translation. But since I don't know anything
> about comp linguistics, I am not the one to spearhead this; all I can do
> it wave the pom-poms.
>
> Nick Nicholas thinks that the result of computer translation of Lojban to
> a Natural Language would still require a pass by a human, so it wouldn't
> save any money compared to what they do now, which is to use software to
> get a babelfish-quality result and have humans go over it.

It depends on for what a pass by a human is required.
Is it for correcting errors that mislead even a careful reader ?
Or only for improving the style to something more idiomatic ?

> In my abject ignorance I think we could do better with Lojban.

I would think that at least many of the babelfish errors could be avoided
and that the exercise would also induce people to write better patent
descriptions. Low quality of patent descriptions regularly causes a lot
of trouble.

It could help if we took some typical errors committed by babelfish on
current patent descriptions and showed that they are based on ambiguity or
other problems that can be solved by writing the orgiginal in LL.

Btw someone told me he is actually using UNL in production with useful
results. So something like this should be possible and meaningful.

A whitepaper on this is badly needed, and imho it should be placed
directly on the pages of LLG. There can no doubt about its conformity
with the public interest status of LLG. This has nothing to do with
lobbying, especially if it is written in a serious, non-propagandistic
way.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	http://swpat.ffii.org/
95000 signatures against software patents http://www.noepatents.org/