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25 Jan Pure Democracy: a New World Disorder

Indigenous Healer

Joe Roushar – January 2023 What are You Talking About? Is pure democracy possible in human society? Introducing everyone to a truly democratic society would put them on the same footing – provide a kind of equality and shared opportunity that philosophers have envisioned for millennia. Yet experience has shown us that some delegated decision […]

28 Jan Summarization and Translation Domains

Multi-National Translation

Translation as A Sample Domain For our sample domain, we need something that requires expertise, is not trivial, and about which the author knows something. This limits us significantly, so we are taking the easy way out and going with the domain of Machine Translation (MT) of human languages. We considered the intricacies of communication […]

19 Apr Learning by Doing or Active Osmosis

Thinking Before Speaking

Intuition When people use their native language, they don’t usually think about how verbs are supposed to be conjugated. They don’t stop to figure out number agreement, transitivity, or aspect. They just talk. Intuitions about language are probably not based on the grammar rules that govern how parts of speech go together. Instead, these intuitions […]

15 Apr The Myth of Inexpressibility

Dictionary

I have often heard how the the variety of Eskimo words for snow is more linguistically rich than any other language. I learned many words in Japanese for different types rain. I agree that the richness, and the simplicity, and elegance of describing different snow types with different words is remarkable. But I don’t think […]

14 Apr Translation: Inverted Communication

Translation Symmetry

Lately I’ve been concentrating on modeling communicative skills. Whether speaking, signing, gesturing or writing, we begin with intent and wrap symbols around the intent or message to encode it. Translating and encrypting start with a fully encoded message, and unwrap it, before rewrapping it in a different form that is intended to preserve the original intent. Translation is an application […]

10 Apr Talking About Computational Linguistics

Language Tools

Computational Linguistics Today Massive strides have been made in the cognitive definition of thought, perception, culture and language. The interaction or kinship of all these elements of the human experience is also better defined. This combined work has increased our self-awareness and provided the basis for synthesizing and modeling automata to extend our abilities and […]

07 Dec Probability of Understanding Meaning

Multivariate Statistical Distribution

Some suggest that computers can achieve full language understanding capabilities using statistical models. Others argue that heuristics or programmatic interpretation that uses special procedures tailored to linguistic phenomena. The two camps are as far apart as ever.   Consider the comments around this recent article on Tor.com. On the one side, Norvig demonstrates the validity […]

09 Jun Natural Language and Dialog

Speak 2 U 3