Re: Natural Language Processing Using Lojban

[Lionel Bonnetier <lionelb@ASI.FR>]

John Glossner <glossner@LUCENT.COM> wrote:

> Are there any researchers subscribed to this list who are
> currently researching natural language processing? I
> would like to discuss the merits of using lojban as an
> interlingua for NLP.
>
> I am interested in doing some long-term research in language,
> linguistics, machine translation, and functional programming.


I am currently designing an interpreter that runs programs or single
instructions written in natural language. In order to handle the so-called
ambiguities caused by
- homonymy: *Set* it to zero. Create a button *set* (...)
- or anaphory (backstream reference): Pop up a message box displaying "OK to
continue?" with the YesCancel button set. If *the* box returns cancel, escape.
it drives ahead the syntactic and semantic analyses together, the way we
humans probably do. It is intended also for the speech communication with
the future machines.

The background of its creation is an AI designed to analyse biological
phenomena such as metabolism or ecological interactions. This AI uses some
English pidgin to code the sentences, but the deep semantical representation
is a congregation of chatting things rather than a linear or tree-like
frame. I first looked around to decide whether to use Lojban, English,
French, Esperanto, or a numeric table, or a great mess made of all those,
but now i'm persuaded that any language may fit in the job, for every
language is actually a moving crust on the hot magma of the mind.

It is true that Lojban tries to thrust deeper roots into the mantle and
allows to shrink the scope of contextual insinuation in some situations. On
the other hand, it may give a harsher task to determine the role of an
element in the case of a maimed communication where the "parameter ranks"
are made unclear. I am rather new to Lojban and I may have uttered some
stupidities. Thank you for pointing me them.

Lionel.



* Lionel Bonnetier * lionelb@asi.fr * Tel: 33 / (0) 478 601 862 *