Monday, August 22, 2005
"The main purpose of language is to provide information about who does what to whom"
But isn't that just a different way of saying that sentences are primarily of the form "subject verb object"? It's just one of the possible forms that a valid sentence can take. Consider the sentence "if you're OK with it, fuck off". What form does it have? It's a modal-imperative, but does it even make sense to categorize it? Its meaning is in the effect.
It seems to me that the reason that NLP (natural language processing) is so difficult to do is because the grown-up human language is really a scripting language -- the grammar itself is not that difficult (every major language on earth has had parsers written for it), but that it shamelessly utilizes all the other faculties that are so easily avaliable to a human -- sound, vision, general intelligence.
Try porting a Windows app to another platform. You'll find that it relies on a bunch of uniniteresting in themselves, but difficult-to-reproduce features. The primary purpose of language, is of course, communication, and the meaning of communication is always measured by what effect it has on the recepient. To simulate the proper effect on an NLP program, that program would have to have much more than a parser and a wordnet.
Wordnet
But isn't that just a different way of saying that sentences are primarily of the form "subject verb object"? It's just one of the possible forms that a valid sentence can take. Consider the sentence "if you're OK with it, fuck off". What form does it have? It's a modal-imperative, but does it even make sense to categorize it? Its meaning is in the effect.
It seems to me that the reason that NLP (natural language processing) is so difficult to do is because the grown-up human language is really a scripting language -- the grammar itself is not that difficult (every major language on earth has had parsers written for it), but that it shamelessly utilizes all the other faculties that are so easily avaliable to a human -- sound, vision, general intelligence.
Try porting a Windows app to another platform. You'll find that it relies on a bunch of uniniteresting in themselves, but difficult-to-reproduce features. The primary purpose of language, is of course, communication, and the meaning of communication is always measured by what effect it has on the recepient. To simulate the proper effect on an NLP program, that program would have to have much more than a parser and a wordnet.
Wordnet
# posted by Notetaker @ 3:17 PM 
