From: Paul Fidika (Fidika@new.rr.com)
Date: Mon Oct 06 2003 - 08:02:33 MDT
Mike Williams wrote:
> I'm personally interested in the number of misunderstandings that
> occur due to language--the stock market dives if Greenspan uses the
> wrong adjective, world leaders have teams of people polish their
> speeches to check each nuance of meaning, etc. Does anyone know of any
> studies on designing a true "grammar" for humans, in the sense of a
> fully defined, unambiguous grammar such as those used for computer
> languages?
> Mike
It's a good idea, but it would never work (at least for humans!).
Philosophers and Scientists constantly invent new terms which they attempt
to give rigorous and complete definitions, but if these words become popular
and come into common use, whatever unambiguous or rigorous definition they
had is lost (usually within 50 years time at the most). People use words
fluidly (unlike commands in programming languages), for example, it might be
cool to insert lots of French or Latin terms in English-texts (if the terms
are used frequently enough, they become part of the English language!), but
if you just started inserting LISP or Visual-Basic commands in your C++
programs, the debugger would dish out some serious punishment to you in
syntax-errors up the wazzoo! Definition is determined by use, not by
dictionaries; words will acquire different meanings by being "exapted" by
various writers / speakers to fill different roles. The protests of
Grammarians or "Language-Mavens" simply cannot halt the drift of word
meanings. (As mentioned earlier, Pinker's book "The Language Instinct"
discusses language-engineering.)
Anyway, Microsoft Word translated:
"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl
mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do
not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe."
As:
"Occurring to rscheearch at an Flings uinervtisy, it doesn't matter in
what order the letters in a word are, the only pigment thing is that
the first and last letter is at the right place. The rest can be a total
mess and you can still read it outfit problem. This is busier we do
not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole."
(All words were replaced with MS Word's first suggestion, since for all
incorrectly changed words, MS Word never had the correct one on its
suggested changes-list anyway. For example, for "Elingsh" MS-Word never
suggested the correct word, "English". Words for which MS Word has no
suggestion were not changed.)
MS Word did a fair job, but it's only capable of getting the right answer
for smaller words. Making a program which can translate messed up paragraphs
like these as accurately as a human can would be very interesting (and
probably very hard!). Hey, we could have Word-Processing competetions to see
which programs can translate these jumbled paragraphs the best, how geeky
would that be? ;-)
~Paul Fidika
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Williams" <mikew12345@lvcm.com>
To: <sl4@sl4.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2003 3:49 PM
Subject: RE: Pattern recognition
> Thanks for the additional notes on this piece, but whether the topic
> was actually studied at a university or not, if you understood the
> piece, it makes its own case. To a certain degree anyway, since
> figuring out anagrams sometimes takes considerable effort. Programming
> a spellchecker/grammar checker to check this kind of paragraph would be
> interesting, considering the number of permutations needed.
> There are similar claims that displaying only the top half of each
> letter is similarly understandable, again, based on humans' tendency to
> recognize patterns.
> I'm personally interested in the number of misunderstandings that
> occur due to language--the stock market dives if Greenspan uses the
> wrong adjective, world leaders have teams of people polish their
> speeches to check each nuance of meaning, etc. Does anyone know of any
> studies on designing a true "grammar" for humans, in the sense of a
> fully defined, unambiguous grammar such as those used for computer
> languages?
> Mike
>
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