🚀 go-pugleaf

Yan King Yin's wrote:
>                    my idea is to remove the "semantic"
> part of this problem so that the remaining task for the
> computer is reduced to syntax / transliteration aspects,
> things that computers do well.  

Is this possible?

First of all you will obviously need disambiguation (i.e. for words and
syntactic structures that can be interpreted in two ways you have to
state which interpretation is intended) for this to work. Let's suppose
this is possible for the fragment of speech and the languages you have
in mind (e.g. mathematical texts, technical manuals or law texts and the
languages English, French and German).

But even then there are simple examples where a purely syntactic
approach has to fail, even between relatively similar languages like
English and German. In these two languages the most salient examples for
this are negation and the generic use of articles. A universal language
thus has to contain additional semantic information in order to suffice
as a basis for a correct translation (generation) into other languages. 

There are many ways to formalize semantic information. One approach is
the go for a purely semantic representation as Lee Sau Dan proposes. UNL
possibly uses another. On the other hand one could try to use a natural
language as a basis for the universal language and add a minimum of
semantic information. 

Boyd

-- 
Boyd Buchin                - Fakult�t f�r Informatik
Universit�t der Bundeswehr - 85577 Neubiberg, Germany
http://inf1-www.informatik.unibw-muenchen.de/Boyd