dyer@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA (09/29/84)
From: "Dr. Michael G. Dyer" <dyer@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA> A recent comment was made that natural languages can serve as an interlingua. I disagree. There's an ancient language used by scientists to communicate that's called "mathematics"... but is that a "natural" language? Natural languages have certain features, namely, ambiguity, reference to complex conceptualizations regarding human affairs, and abbreviated messages (that is, you only say a tiny bit of what you mean, and rely on the intelligence of the listener to combine his/her knowledge with the current context to reconstruct everything you left out). If that ancient language spoken by Iranian scientists was unambiguous and unabbreviated, then it's probably about as "natural" as mathematics is as a language. Then, also, there's LOGLAN, where, when you say (in it) "every sailor loves some woman", you specify whether each sailor has his own woman or whether everyone loves the same woman. Fine, but I'd hate to have to use it as an everyday "natural" language for gettting around. Natural languages are complicated because people are intelligent. The job of AI NLP researchers is to gain insight into natural languages (and the cognitive processes which support their comprehension) by working out mappings from natural languages into formal systems (i.e., realizable on stupid machines). It's hard enough mapping NL into something unambiguous without mapping it into a language that itself must be parsed to remove ambiguities and to resolve contextual references, etc. It's conceivable that a system could parse by a sequence of mappings into a sequence of slightly more formal (i.e., less "natural") intermediate languages. But then disambiguation, etc., would have to be done over and over again. Besides, people don't seem to be doing that. Natural languages and formal languages serve different purposes. English is currently used as an "interlingua" by the world community, but that is using the term "interlingua" in a different sense. The interlingua we need for NLP research should not be "natural".