>> IMHO that is an almost hopeless approach, ambiguity is too integral to >> English or any natural language ... e.g preposition ambiguity
Actually, I've been making pretty good progress. You just always use big words and never use small words and/or you use a specific phrase as a "word". Ambiguous prepositions just disambiguate to one of three/four/five/more possible unambiguous words/phrases. The problem is that most previous subsets (Simplified English, Basic English) actually *favored* the small tremendously over-used/ambiguous words (because you got so much more "bang for the buck" with them). Try only using big unambiguous words and see if you still have the same opinion. >> If you want to take this sort of approach, you'd better start with Lojban >> instead.... Learning Lojban is a pain but far less pain than you'll have >> trying to make a disambiguated subset of English. My first reaction is . . . . Take a Lojban dictionary and see if you can come up with an unambiguous English word or very short phrase for each Lojban word. If you can do it, my approach will work and will have the advantage that the output can be read by anyone (i.e. it's the equivalent of me having done it in Lojban and then added a Lojban -> English translation on the end) though the input is still *very* problematical (thus the need for a semantically-driven English->subset translator). If you can't do it, then my approach won't work. Can you do it? Why or why not? If you can, do you still believe that my approach won't work? Oh, wait . . . . a Lojban-to-English dictionary *does* attempt to come up with an unambiguous English word or very short phrase for each Lojban word. :-) Actually, hmmmm . . . . a Lojban dictionary would probably help me focus my efforts a bit better and highlight things that I may have missed . . . . do you have a preferred dictionary or resource? (Google has too many for me to do a decent perusal quickly) ----- Original Message ----- From: Ben Goertzel To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 11:11 AM Subject: Re: [agi] constructivist issues Personally, rather than starting with NLP, I think that we're going to need to start with a formal language that is a disambiguated subset of English IMHO that is an almost hopeless approach, ambiguity is too integral to English or any natural language ... e.g preposition ambiguity If you want to take this sort of approach, you'd better start with Lojban instead.... Learning Lojban is a pain but far less pain than you'll have trying to make a disambiguated subset of English. ben g ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
