Re: Natural language
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From: Wallace B. Riley[SMTP:wryly at MINDSPRING.COM]
Sent: Sunday, 29 March, 1998 7:33 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list EUPHORIA
Subject: Natural language
Hello all -
On this business of coding in 'natural language', has anybody thought of
Esperanto?
I am not an expert in that language or any language other than English. =
But
I had the experience of participating in a performance of a choral work =
with
the text in Esperanto a few years ago, and was surprised to note the =
number
of words, the syntactical structure, and other characteristics that were
similar to English and a few other languages to which I have been =
exposed.
Again, I know a few words in German, and a few words in Spanish, and a
*very* few words in French, but I can't carry on a conversation in any =
of
them. I've tried. I even have problems in Australian English and =
'English'
English (as opposed to American English). As an amateur singer I have =
been
exposed to Hebrew, Russian, Chinese(Mandarin) and maybe one or two =
others.
I don't 'know' any of those languages but I could recognize some of the
structural similarities in Esperanto.
Somebody start a movement to program in Esperanto. You might trigger a
landslide.
Wally Riley
wryly at mindspring.com
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While my native language is English (and hence that would be the first =
phase of the interface), I've lived in Japan for 2years teaching =
English as a foreign language (and with some of my students, I think the =
computer could learn faster with or without neural nets:)). I've =
studied Spanish, French, Russian, and Japanese; and have sung in German, =
Latin, and a few other languages I've never heard of. If you have the =
syntax of Esperanto (SVO or SOV, etc.) and some kind of vocabulary list, =
once my skeleton translator is finished for English, changing it to =
another human language would be *very* easy.
As far as other recent comments go, one of my intentions is to build =
a web crawler to allow the program to build a knowledge base on its own. =
A web crawler would also be required to answer such questions as =
"What's tomorrow's weather?" and "How much does it cost to fly to St. =
Petersburg? (Florida or Russia?)" However, I don't have much ability in =
that kind of programming yet.
Also, I posit that a computer does have a language. The machine =
language (accessible through Euphoria) is the computer's native =
language. It's not a human language, just like cat's and dog's don't =
have human language. But it is a form of communication, which is the =
base that's needed. I've read the research that's being done with =
neural networks and teaching language to computers like it's taught to =
infants. It's a valid idea and will probably work, but it wouldn't be =
practical to implement on a large scale for a long time. Until then, I =
believe I have a method that could work sooner. My "intermediate" =
language, would act more like a native language for the computer. Once =
built, the only thing required is a series of translation programs. =
But....I'm too lazy and impatient, so I'm piecing together both at the =
same time. The drawback: the scope of the intermediate language will be =
slow in coming. It'll be a while before it will respond "Dammit Jim, =
I'm a computer, not a painter!" :)
BTW: If there are any Euphoria programmers in upstate New York, let me =
know. I'll be going home sometime this next year.
Mike Sabal
mjs at osa.att.ne.jp
http://home.att.ne.jp/gold/mjs/
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