From robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR Tue Jun 18 07:51:42 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: robin@bilkent.edu.tr X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_2); 18 Jun 2002 14:51:42 -0000 Received: (qmail 24139 invoked from network); 18 Jun 2002 14:51:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 18 Jun 2002 14:51:42 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr) (139.179.30.24) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 18 Jun 2002 14:51:41 -0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix) with ESMTP id C924312564 for ; Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:51:38 +0300 (EEST) Received: from bilkent.edu.tr (ppp136.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr [139.179.111.136]) by manyas.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr (Postfix) with ESMTP id 029351241B for ; Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:51:36 +0300 (EEST) Message-ID: <3D0F7305.5050500@bilkent.edu.tr> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:51:01 +0000 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Automatic Lojban -> English translation? References: <02061720522600.01303@linux> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS snapshot-20020300 From: robin X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810606 X-Yahoo-Profile: digambaranath Björn Gohla wrote: >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- >Hash: SHA1 > >On Monday 17 June 2002 10:41, pmak0 wrote: > >>Since Lojban is supposed to be unambiguously parsible, would it be >>theoretically possible to write a computer program that parses Lojban and >>outputs readable English (or any other language) without loss of meaning? >> > >i do think so, i did once post about this in message ><01121721050200.01120@linux>. > I'd say readable and grammatical, but not idiomatic. We already have parsers and glossers; all that is needed is something that will generate the English syntax. Even so, it would probably be a long time before we had anything remotely resembling natural-sounding English. It's pretty easy to get a program to render "mi dunda le cukta le ninmu" as "I give the book to the woman", and you might even be able to, with much more advanced programming, get it to guess unspecified tenses with 70% accuracy (I wonder how current machine translation performs with Chinese). The problem would come with rendering stuctures which have no natural English equivalents - you end up with something that is understandable but weird, as with a lot of natural language translation software. OTOH, it would be pretty easy for someone to look at a machine-generated tranlsation and rewrite it in more idiomatic English (or whatever). robin.tr -- "It suits the poet himself to be dutifully chaste, his verses not necessarily so at all" - Catullus Robin Turner IDMYO Bilkent Üniversitesi Ankara 06533 http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin