Re: Natural Language Processing Using Lojban

[Lionel Bonnetier <lionelb@ASI.FR>]

John Glossner about ambiguity:

>Now, I really don't know how to represent this in Esperanto (or any
>other language) unless I add a whole lot of words. I am hoping that Lojban
>can "optimize" some of these sentences and clarify the ambiguity. It may
>be only a hope but if it can be done (which I do not yet know), then I can
>have an interesting way of representing knowledge. Plus, with Lojban, it
>seems I can determine the truthfulness of falseness of a statement.

I think the natural languages can cancel ambiguities rather easily when
needed -- when the context is not clear or when explaining new things to
children. Unless I mistake some English structures or misunderstand your
example, it seems to me that, without adding bunches of words, "the water
can't be too high" may be turned to "no water level will be considered too
high" in the case of the nuclear power plant, and "the water can't be higher
than the brim" in the case of the glass. Could a Lojban speaker propose
translations for the sentence?

An efficient NLP system should be able to conserve the simplicity of a
sentence when kept inside its context, and built a richer representation of
this sentence when processing a smart work such as translation or data base
retrieval.

Another case from our private mails: I misunderstood "I had a baby girl on
Tuesday" as "I was baby-sitting on Tuesday". One reason for my error is that
I don't speak English fluently, and in French we usually say "My wife gave
birth (to a baby girl) on Tuesday" -- mere expression conventions. Another
reason is my dumbness :[ The context wasn't really leading to the meaning I
invented. Here again, could someone give Lojban translations for the sentence?

>> Have you heard about the Distributive Language Translation (DLT) Project
>> sponsored by the Netherlands in the '80s. It used Esperanto as the
>> turntable, and was competing with another project using numeric entries,
>> whose name I can't remember now. The money stopped flowing in at some >>
point, and I don't know what all that became.
>>
>If this is now the program Ergane at http://www.travelang.com then yes I
>know of it. The S/W is free, the support is excellent, and I have found
>it very useful for learning Esperanto and Dutch!

Ergane may be related, but the DLT project meant fully automated translation
of whole texts. I guess they were overtaken by the other
projects with lesser budget who have brought out today's translators.
Ergane is a useful tool. We should include Lojban in its data base.

To be continued :)

Yours,

Lionel


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