Alan Grimes wrote:
According to my rule of thumb,I more or less agree...
"If it has a natural language database it is wrong",
Currently I'm trying to learn Italian before I leave
New Zealand to start my PhD. After a few months working
through books on Italian grammar and trying to learn lots
of words and verb forms and stuff and not really getting
very far, I've come to realise just how complex language is!
Many of you will have learnt a second language as an adult
yourselves and will know what I mean - natual languages are
massively complex things. I worked out that I know about
25,000 words in English, many with multiple means, many
having huges amounts of symbol grounding information and
complex relationships with other things I know, then there
is spelling information and grammar knowledge and.... I'm
told that English grammar isn't too complex, but my Italian
grammar reference book is 250 pages of very dense information
on irregular verbs and tenses etc... and of course even that
is only a high level ridged structure description not how the
language is actually used.
Natural languages are hard - really hard. Humans have special
brain areas that are set up to solve just this kind of problem
and even then it takes a really long time to get good at it,
perhaps ten years! To work something that complex out using
a "general intelligence" rather than specialised systems would
require a computer that was amazingly smart in my opinion.
One other thing; if one really is focused on "natural language"
learning why not make things a little easier and use an artificial
language like Esperanto? Unlike like highly artificial languages
like logic based or maths based etc. languages, Esperanto is just
like a normal natural language in many ways. You can get novels
written in it, you can speak it, some children have even grown
up speaking it as one of their first languages along side other
natural languages. However the language is extremely regular
compared to a real natural language. For example there are only
16 rules of grammar - they can fit onto an single sheet of paper!
All the verbs and adverbs and pronouns and so on obey neat and tidy
patterns and rules. I'm told that after two weeks somebody can
become comfortable enough with the grammar to be able to hold a
conversation and then after a few months of learning more words
is able to communicate quite freely and read books and so on.
Why not aim at this and make the job much easier? If you ever
did build a computer that could hold a good conversation in
Esperanto I'm sure moving to a "natural language" would only be
a matter of taking what you already had and increasing the level
of complexity to deal with all the additional messiness required.
Enough rating for today! :)
Shane
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