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Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Date:Friday, May 7, 2004, 22:18
* Mark P. Line said on 2004-05-07 23:26:24 +0200
> Responding to taliesin and Philip here on this topic. (I'll respond to > And Rosta's suggested ambiguous sentence after I've reviewed what I > used to know about CY scope semantics.) > > taliesin the storyteller said: > > * And Rosta said on 2004-05-06 05:02:33 +0200 > >> > >> I may have mixed CY up with another conlang in my memory, but my > >> recollection is that it adopts Word Net as the inventory of its > >> word senses. By so doing, it gets rid of ambiguity arising from > >> polysemy. > > > > It gets rid of *English* polysemy. > > What other kind of polysemy does it *fail* to get rid of, or what > other kind of polysemy does it (unintentionally) introduce?
Uhm, you do know that polysemy is wholely dependent on the language it occurs in, right? If the world's languages divided the world up in the same categories, Machine Translation would have been a lot further along by now. I'm not saying there isn't an overlap, I'm not saying it adds ambiguity, all I'm saying is that it makes the divisions a slightly abstracted English makes, and that other languages makes other divisions.
> What difference does it make what (real or engineered) language is > taken as the starting point as long as (a) the resulting lexicon is > unambiguous, and (b) the semantic scope of the resulting lexicon is > broad and deep enough to support at least the same range of > communication as a natlang would
You'd need a deeper/broader Net than Princeton WordNet for that. Have you had a look at CyC? Don't think that I am against WordNet in any way, it's great! I've actually started to map the meanings of words in Taruven to WordNet meanings, and it is interesting to see what WN covers and what it doesn't...
> (other than the fact that it's not sexy to start from English)?
You might already know this but curious onlookers might not: EuroWordNet is a collection of Word Nets for european languages. They have not attempted to map non-english languages onto the Princeton WordNet as, for instance the French refuse to divide their language up into (American) English categories. I'm not making this up. The EuroWordNet was funded by the EU... I haven't studied this sub-EuroWN in depth but it's a fun toy: <http://sisx03.si.ehu.es/tresnak/wwni/index.htm> A less ridiculous reason for not using the original WN is that it makes up several more or less arbitrary (not words original to me, now where is *that* paper...) words to "fill in" the tree and make it almost binary and the resulting graph does not necessarily adequately encode tha language "as she is spoke". The Dutch WordNet for instance, is a lot flatter... let me find that paper... <http://glahn.hf.ntnu.no/~torbjorn/undervisning/ling3304/elra.rtf> Have a look at the picture on page 4. t.

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Mark P. Line <mark@...>