urban@spp2.UUCP (10/22/84)
I understand that Esperanto is being used by an automated language-translation project in the European Economic Community as the intermediate language between the translated languages. I don't know what stage this project has reached at present. For knowledge representation, the only reason to choose a language like Esperanto or Unifon (can you cite a Unifon reference? It's a new one to me) would be so that humans can read your canonical representation of a proposition. Otherwise you can get by with some arbitrarily symbolic data representation, right? The language "Loglan", which is designed to be machine-parsable, and to have the real world as its domain of discourse, would seem to me to be a pretty good candidate for this. I'm told that some people are even starting to be able to "think in Loglan" well enough to carry on sustained conversation. However, I seem to have had a conversation with someone who felt that Loglan was deficient for this purpose, though his attitude was basically that I didn't have the background to understand his reason, so he didn't bother to explain. Can someone clue me in? Mike Urban [ucbvax|decvax]!trwrb!trwspp!urban (UUCP) urban@rand-unix (ARPA)
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (10/24/84)
[Mangu ci tion, insekto!] > I understand that Esperanto is being used by an automated > language-translation project in the European Economic Community > as the intermediate language between the translated languages. > I don't know what stage this project has reached at present. > ... > Mike Urban > [ucbvax|decvax]!trwrb!trwspp!urban (UUCP) > urban@rand-unix (ARPA) Here's some more information on the project, gleaned from press reports (not personal familiarity): Maintaining an online database in Europe is a royal pain because of the multitude of languages involved. EEC would like to make it possible to store a database in one language and translate on the fly into whatever the user wants. They are considering a version of Esperanto (modified to reduce ambiguity) for the internal language of the database. Data entry would be done in various languages and machine translated into Esperanto, with a dialog between the entry program and the human entering the data to clear up ambiguous material. An advantage of Esperanto as the intermediate language (as opposed to some abstract form) is that it can easily be edited directly. I believe the project is still in the initial study phases, but has been funded. Esperanto is a language derived from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic origins by Lithuanian-Polish physician and linguist Dr. L. L. Zamenhov. The first book on the subject appeared in 1877. The World Almanac gives the number of speakers as one million. Popularity has waxed and waned over the years, in part due to some wild myths about the language and its users. (Yes, it IS a real language, or so say Esperanto-speaking linguists and authorities on literature ranging from Mario Pei to Leo Tolstoy. No, Esperanto enthusiasts do not think it will bring about world peace.) The most vigorous interest in Esperanto at the moment seems to be (believe it or not) in China. I've been interested in the subject for years. I don't think Esperanto has a serious chance of becoming the "official" world international language, but it is certainly much easier to learn (regular grammar, spelling, and even vocabulary) than the competition. I studied French -- very hard -- for two years and I can read some very haltingly. I absorbed as much Esperanto in a few months of casual reading. No doubt I would be better off knowing French or German, but Esperanto is within the limits of my time and talents. So I'm a (borderline) Esperanto nut... D Gary Grady Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC 27706 (919) 684-4146 USENET: {decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgary
brennan@iuvax.UUCP (10/26/84)
One interesting problem with Esperanto is that when humans start using it on a regular basis, the language evolves away from it's totally regular verb construction. This would (probably) not happen if a human and a machine were using it. When the human said something that was not "correct", but was nonetheless understandable, the machine would not understand it, and the human would have to restate it correctly. Now, if the machine could understand "incorrect" utterances then the language would still evolve and that would be truly interesting. And intelligent?? JD Brennan ...!ihnp4!inuxc!iuvax!brennan (USENET) Brennan@Indiana (CSNET) Brennan.Indiana@CSnet-Relay (ARPA)
dgary@ecsvax.UUCP (10/26/84)
[] > From: brennan@iuvax.UUCP Thu Oct 25 18:17:00 1984 > > One interesting problem with Esperanto is that when humans start > using it on a regular basis, the language evolves away from its > totally regular verb construction. > > JD Brennan Just for the record, I've never heard of this happening in practice, unless you're talking about the -ata/-ita participle flap of many years back (that was more a matter of usage than conjugation, however). It has also been predicted that Esperanto would break up into dialects, and it practice this doesn't seem to happen because Esperanto speakers tend to read the same set of international periodicals and listen to the same set of international short wave broadcasts. Other than this quibble, the point you raise about understanding ungrammatical utterances is a good one, and applies across the field of natural language research. I wonder if the use of computers will have a stabilizing influence on languages over time the way the broadcast media have eroded regional dialects. D Gary Grady Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC 27706 (919) 684-4146 USENET: {decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgary