Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Software Translation of Lojban

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 15:40:44 EST

In a message dated 12/14/2001 12:06:18 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Titles? Author(s)? Journals? Dates? Even an elaboration of the details as
> you recall them would speed up a search for the articles.

I know this stuff exists, but I never went into it very deeply (one of the 
disadvantages of having only undergrads is that you never get to do much fun 
stuff, even the good ones, being CS majors, want to do Goedel rather thna 
mere logic). What I can lay my hands on or vaguely remember are rather 
diffuse.

The best is by Hans Kamp (and somebody), one of the logico-linguistics from 
UCLA at the time of Montague and Prior. It was called something like "From 
Discourse to Logic" or so and probably was published by Kluwer in the 
mid--90's (my copy disappeared in the last move, I think). It probably has a 
bibliography.

Herbert Otto: Step for a system of translation from ordinary discourse into 
an applied logic", PhD Thesis, U Pa, 1968 (University Microfilms 69-152) is 
near the beginning of the work but is pretty advanced for the time. What he 
left out turned out to be the really big problems, for the most part; 
similarly, what he put in is mostly right.

John Barker: ProtoThinker (I have version 4.1, but I think there is at least 
one later version) Wadsworth Publishing cd-rom (ISBN 0-535-53490-2, for the 
instructor's version). This has a program that actually does a bit of the 
work, with varying degres of plausibility. It is a step beyind the 
thumb-rules in every imaginable logic textbook, but is rather shaky on 
interesting cases. There is a website -- or was -- for the ProtoThinker 
project which may have supplemented this material more.

Beyond these there are several articles that I remember seeing but can not 
recall any details of, but that I can runs scans on over the vacation (Phil 
Doc Cen is just jammed during finals weeks -- meaning it has a small staff, 
mostly students, not that there are that many demands on it absolutely). 

So there is a largely useless start.