On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Brian <[email protected]> wrote: > I was privy to a #mediawiki conversation between brion/tim where tim pointed > out that at least one person plans to implement a Natural Language > Processing parser for English using StringFunctions just as soon as they are > enabled. > > It's pretty obvious that you can implement all sorts crazy algorithms using > StringFunctions. They need to be limited so that is not possible.
If you are referring to the conversation I think you are, then my impression was Tim was speaking hypothetically about the issue rather than knowing someone that had this specific intent. I'm fairly dubious about anyone actually trying natural language processing to any serious degree. Real natural language processing needs huge lookup tables to identify part of speech and relationships etc. Technically possible I suppose, but not easy to do. I'm even more dubious that full fledged natural language processing -- in templates -- would find significant uses. It is more efficient and more practical to view templates as simple formatting macros rather than as a system for real natural language interaction. There are very useful things that can be done with simple string algorithms, such as detecting the "(bar)" when given a title like "Foo (bar)", but I wouldn't expect anyone to be answering queries with them or anything like that. When providing tools to content creators, flexibility is generally a positive design feature. We shouldn't go overboard with imposing limits in the advance of actual problems. The current implementation is artificially limited to 1000 characters or less, which does prevent huge manipulations, however. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
