Re: Linguistics journals

[HACKER G N <c9709244@ALINGA.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU>]

On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Steven Belknap wrote:

> One possible application of lojban is as an "interlanguage" for translating
> between other languages. For example, to translate from English to Russian,
> one would translate from English to lojban then from lojban to Russian. I
> would think that this would qualify as a legitimate area for linguistic
> research. It would certainly be useful if lojban would simplify or improve
> the accuracy of translation. Caterpillar, which is based here in Peoria
> employs a Ph.D. computational linguist to assist in translating manuals
> into the 30 or so languages of Caterpillar's customers. He expressed
> interest in lojban when I described it to him.

I presume you're talking about machine translation. If so, there are more
powerful languages around for that. CycL is one that springs readily to
mind. It allows for such things as skolemization, quantification of
predicates and quantification of whole sentences. Needless to say, it is
NOT suitable for communication between humans; it is JUST a computer
language. But it is very easy to translate something into CycL given the
ambiguities of natural language because of certain properties of Cyc.

Cyc can disambiguate natural language very effectively simply by using
commonsense knowledge about the world, which is stored in its knowledge
base in CycL. Take the two sentences:

John saw the airplanes flying over Zurich.
John saw the mountains flying over Zurich.

They differ only in ONE WORD, but that word affects the grammar of the
rest of the sentence. The verb phrase "flying over Zurich" clearly appends
to "the airplanes" in the first sentence, and "John" in the next sentence,
and it seems difficult to see how you could disambiguate these two
sentences if you didn't just have the common sense to know that planes
fly, and mountains don't. Cyc "knows" this, so it can effectively
disambiguate the sentence and translate it correctly.

The ability to do things like this is something I think far more amenable
to being an interlanguage and processing natural language than what Lojban
can seem to provide.

Geoff