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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 172
AIList Digest Friday, 7 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 172
Today's Topics:
Linguistics - Indonesian & Aymara' & Translation & Deficiencies
Conference - Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding
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Date: 3 Dec 84 08:48 PST
From: Newman.pasa@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Indonesian
In reply to the note from rob@ptsfa about "Indonesian".
Just one question in regard to your note about "Indonesian". Do you mean
that all dialects spoken in Indonesia have the features that you
mention? Or do you mean that the official language of Indonesia (called
Bahasa Indonesia I believe) has these features? Could you be more
specific? It has been many years since I lived in Indonesia, and I never
really learned enough of the language to have an opinion about your
assertions, but I do know that there are many languages spoken in
Indonesia, and that what you say may be true of any number of these
languages.
>>Dave
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Date: Sat, 1 Dec 84 20:20:49 pst
From: weeks%ucbpopuli.CC@Berkeley (Harry Weeks)
Subject: Andean interlingua monograph.
Some mention has been made on this list recently of Aymara'
(that is an accent mark), an Andean language purportedly used
successfully by Iva'n Guzma'n de Rojas of La Paz, Bolivia, as
an interlingua for machine translation. An article appears
in today's New York Times (Saturday, December 1) on page 4.
Probably of most interest to those involved in the interlingua
debate will be a reference to a 150 page monograph by Mr. Guzma'n
(no title given) published by the International Development
Research Center in Ottawa. The article also mentions that
Mr. Guzma'n uses ``three-valued formulas, following the Polish
scientist Jan L/ukasciewicz'' to represent the Aymara' logic.
The remainder of the article seems to largely repeat what has
previously been cited on this list from articles in the Los
Angeles Times.
-- Harry
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Date: Mon, 3 Dec 84 9:16:12 EST
From: Pete Bradford (CSD UK) <bradford@Amsaa.ARPA>
Subject: Translation.
The October 1 Electronic News article on Japanese-English translation
reminds me.........
A young guy in the Pentagon devised this remarkable program to
translate English into Russian, and vice-versa.
The Secretary of State for Defense was to visit his office and be
given a demonstration of the system. On the arrival of the 'big-wig', our
hero asked him if he had a phrase he would like translated. "What about 'The
spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak'?" asked the top man.
This phrase was duly typed in, and after much flashing of lights etc,
the Russian translation appeared on the screen. This was smugly read out to
the Secretary of State who pointed out, rather sheepishly, that he did not
speak Russian and was in no position to judge the quality of the translation.
Things were about to break up in a very unsatisfactory and embarrassing
manner when our hero yelled "I've got it! I'll just reverse the polarity of
the program and feed back the phrase it just came up with!". "Brilliant!"
gulped his Director, recovering just sufficiently from his recent apoplexy
to enable him to talk again, "Let's do that.".
The Russian phrase was then fed back into the machine which had now
been switched into the Russian-English mode, and the small crowd waited
expectantly while more lights flashed and blinked.
They say that the Director is still recovering in George Washington
Hospital and our hero has, of course, given up all thoughts of a successful
carreer in the Defense Department. How was he to know the program would play
such a dirty trick on him. It certainly performed the translation it had
been asked to do, but it did seem too loose or colloquial a translation -
'The whisky's OK, but the meat's lousy!....
------------------------------
Date: Monday, 03 Dec 84 10:46:51 EST
From: thompson (ross thompson) @ cmu-psy-a
Subject: Language deficiencies (or wife beating)
There was a mention earlier on this bboard that it is often difficult
to answer questions, because there is an implication which is not
true contained in the question. The example given was the question
"Do you persist in your lies?" A more well known example of the same
phenomenon is the classic "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
I don't know a lot about eastern religions, and I am sure I will be
shot down in flames for going out on a limb, but I believe that Zen
provides us with at least one answer to this problem. If, in response
to a question, you reply "Mu," then you have ``unasked'' the question.
The situation in which you do this is precisely what is described above.
The interesting thing about this (to me) is not what word they chose,
but the fact that there is an excepted linguistic practice among
these people for dealing with what many people around here
would call a ``deficiency.''
Ross Thompson
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 84 10:00:59 EST
From: Bruce Nevin <bnevin@BBNCCH.ARPA>
Subject: Communication
A General Semanticist named Harrington
Returned from his colloquy swearing ten
Natives could count
Only half the amount
Any properly trained investigator could while ignoring the fact
that it was not really counting that they were doing, but
rhyming.
Ancient chestnut from anthropological lingustics:
Anthropologist (pointing): What's that?
Native: <forefinger>
Anthropologist (pointing again): And what's that?
Native: <forefinger>
(This goes on for a while.)
Anthropologist: You see, they have only the word <forefinger>
for all these things, and make up for their deficient vocabulary
by grunts and gestures.
(In fairness, this combines the (true) `finger' story with the persistent
canard about a `primitive language with grunts and gestures'.)
Opinion: language, properly speaking, is principally a means of transmitting
information. It happens to be used together with representational and
gestural systems (including the gestural system we know as intonation and
inflection) as a means of communicating a great deal more than (and sometimes
contrary to) the bare-bones information that it transmits. See e.g.
Z. S. Harris, Mathematical Structures of Language, esp. ch 2 `Properties
of language relevant to a mathematical formulation'.
(By `contrary to' I refer to irony and the like. Though I know no
Dutch, I bet there are instances where speakers say something like `That
must have been a gezellig meeting!', referring to e.g. a collection of
`strange bedfellows' brought together by political expedience.)
Much of this discussion confuses linguistic competence with communicative
competence. Communicative competence boils down mostly to skills in
engaging others in a willing desire to communicate and understand.
I have seen an affable extrovert on a Greek train
communicate quite well with speakers of at least three
languages of which he knew perhaps two words each. (My
companion identified Hungarian and Slovenian, I recognized
German.) A gezellig time was had by all, proof positive of
satisfactory communication (whether or not much information
is transmitted), and liquor played a miniscule role.
I have seen fluent speakers of the same dialect of English
unable even to transmit information to one another, because
of their abject failure to communicate. And so have you.
Stereotypically, right-limbic communicative skills are best developed and
exemplified by women in western cultures, and by Japanese and Chinese
cultures in our reluctantly waning ethnocentricity. What we call `small
talk' (software aside).
(Is there any AI work miming right-cerebral and right-limbic functions,
other than visual pattern perception?)
An important part of `engaging others in a willing desire to communicate
and understand' is the range of what I call gestures of solidarity--
affirming that we are comembers of the same gezellig in-group. Jargon
plays a central role, especially in an electronic-mail environment.
Denigration of outsiders is felt necessary when the boundaries have not
yet been clearly defined and the door so to speak is not yet shut or
when an unwelcome interloper is suspected. There are many unconscious
and semiconscious identifiers of class, ethnos, region, and so on in the
range of vocabulary choice and pronunciation (dialect), application of
standard or nonstandard grammatical rules (to call them standard and
nonstandard of course begs the sociological question), shared references
(`remember the old man who bought licorice there') and so on.
(Fade to track of Frank Sinatra crooning `Gezelligheid is made of this'.
Bring up following quote from Harris op. cit. 216:
. . . the very simplicity of this system, which
surprisingly enough seems to suffice for language, makes
it clear that no matter how interdependent language and
thought may be, they cannot be identical. It is not
reasonable to believe that thought has the structural
simplicity and the recursive enumerability which we see
in language. So that language structure appears rather
as a particular system, satisfying the conditions of
[the chapter cited above], . . . which is undoubtedly
necessary for any thoughts other than simple or
impressionistic ones, but which may in part be a rather
rigid channel for thought.)
Bruce Nevin, bn@bbncch
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 4 Dec 84 15:59:27 EST
From: Bruce Nevin <bnevin@BBNCCH.ARPA>
Subject: re: saying the unsayable
> Languages are not differentiated on the basis of what is
> possible or impossible to say, but on the basis of what
> is easier or harder to say.
--Larry Wall (V2 #167)
My understanding of tense morphemes is that they have the same semantic
relation to adverbs of time that pronouns and classifier nouns have to
nouns: having said the adverb, the tense morpheme is obligatory; having
said the tense morpheme, certain non-specific adverbs (`in the future',
`in the past') need no longer be said. But whether a given language has
a particular tense morpheme or not, the equivalent information about
temporal relationships may be expressed with adverbs of time or
conjunctions (`before', `after'). (Cf. Harris, A Grammar of English on
Mathematical Principles, 265-79.)
I don't think even Whorf claimed that Hopi lacked all adverbs of time
and temporal conjunctions.
Achumawi, a Hokan language of northern California on which I have done
some work, has a dual number, like Classical Greek. The dual is
obligatory whenever referring to a pair of something. Having said the
dual suffix, the actual noun pair is almost always tacit. The dual is
also obligatory in direct address to one's mother-in-law (if a man) or
father-in-law (if a woman), and also in certain religious invocations
and prayers. A whole range of nuance expressing social relationships
and attitudes is thereby easy to express in Achumawi and awkward in
English. But the `objective information' is transmitted in a pretty
obvious way, even in English. Sometimes, the `objective information'
transmitted is that the speaker is referring to a pair; sometimes, the
`objective information' is that the speaker affirms a certain special
deference with respect to the intended audience. Irony and the like can
complicate this further. In each case, the dual suffix is an obligatory
choice given presence of certain explicit constructions; and given the
presence of the dual suffix those constructions need no longer be
explicitly said and are instead tacitly understood.
Honorifics in Japanese present a rich field for issues of this sort.
Indeed, every language abounds with reductions of explicit constructions
to concise, nuance-laden forms.
Translating from a nuance-laden reduced form to an explicit,
spelled-out, fully explanatory form always loses the impact that the
reduced form has on a native speaker. Closely analogous to translating
a joke. Which is why `getting' native humor is such an excellent test
of fluency. (For many years, anthropologists speculated whether or not
American Indians joked! My experience suggests they probably were the
frequent butts of deadpan setups and putons.)
Ross recently proposed differentiating languages along a Macluhanesque
`hot/cool' spectrum according to how easy or difficult it is to recover
tacit information from under pronominal references; an article in the
last issue of Linguistic Inquiry reviews and extends this work. (Sorry,
I don't have either reference at hand.)
Bruce Nevin, bn@bbncch
------------------------------
Date: Tue 27 Nov 84 11:10:47-PST
From: ISRAEL@SRI-AI.ARPA
Subject: Conference - Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding
CALL FOR PAPERS
WORKSHOP ON
Theoretical Approaches to
Natural Language Understanding
Dalhousie Univeristy
Halifax, Nova Scotia
28-30 May, 1985
General Chairperson: Richard Rosenberg, Mathematics Department,
Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. B3H 4H8
Program Chairperson: Nick Cercone, Computing Science Dept., Simon
Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. V5A 1S6
Theoretical Approaches to Natural Language Understanding is intended
to bring together active researchers in Computational Linguistics,
Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive
Science to discuss/hear invited talks, papers, and positions relating
to some of the 'hot' issues regarding the current state of natural
language understanding. The three areas chosen for discussion are
aspects of grammars, aspects of semantics/pragmatics, and knowledge
representation. In each of these, current methodologies will be
considered: for grammars - theoretical developments, especially
generalized phrase structure grammars and logic-based meta-grammars;
for semantics - situation semantics and Montague semantics; for
knowledge representation - logical systems and special purpose
inference systems.
Papers are solicited on topics in any of the areas mentioned above.
You are invited to submit four copies of a paper (double-spaced,
maximum 4000 words) to the program chairman: Nick Cercone, before 12
January, 1985. Authors will be notified of acceptances by 27
February. Accepted papers, typed on special forms, will be due 30
March 1985 and should be sent to the program chairman. To make
referring possible it is important that the abstract summarize the
novel ideas, contain enough information about the scope of the work,
and include comparisons to the relevant literature. Accepted papers
will appear in the Proceedings; those papers so recommended by the
reviewers will be considered for inclusion in a speacial issue of
Computational Intelligence, an international Artificial Intelligence
journal published by the National Research Council of Canada.
Presentation of papers at the Workshop will be at the discretion of
the program/organizing committee in order to maintain the focus and
workshop flavor of this meeting. Information concerning local
arrangements will be available from the general chairman: Richard
Rosenberg. Proceedings will be distributed at the workshop and
subsequently available for purchase.
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End of AIList Digest
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