Re: Universal Networking Language
Christian Weisgerber writes:
> I could find little information under the mentioned URLs, but it appears
> that currently UNL is only a project some people would like to implement
> within the next 10 years.
I had a look at these pages, and I found a schedule, dated '96, that
planned to have working deconverters for 6 or 12 languages worked out in
'97, and corresponding enconverters in '98, together with improving
deconverters.
There is however no information on whether this schedule still holds.
Note that this schedule seems quite unrealistic to me, unless that
have several tenths of developpers to do the work.
> This appears to be just another meta-language project. I don't see why
> this should turn out more successful than previous attempts which ran
> afoul of obstacles inherent in the structure of human languages:
Maybe they are somewhat more realistic than the previous attemps.
> >From this, two conclusions should be rather obvious:
>
> 1. An automatic translation from a meta language into a natural language
> is theoretically possible. However, the meta language will be very
> clumsy due to the need to represent an extraordinary amount of
> grammaticalized features and very fine semantic distinctions.
They seem to address this problem with a central repository of
"universal words", which would be dynamically updated from
enconverters.
> 2. An automatic translation from a natural language into the meta
> language is impossible, since you need to *add* information that
> isn't there in the source. A human translator with his understanding
> of the text plus common knowledge can do this, but a machine can't.
> (Unless it's an AI with human equivalent understanding of a text.
> Which at this point in time is science fiction.)
Yes, that's why they propose the enconverters to be interactive
processes, that will ask the user to add the missing information,
and dynamically create new UNL words.
> In short, the whole UNL project appears to be very idealistic,
> unrealistic,
I think it is much more realistic than the other such projects I've
heard about.
> and at this time isn't remotely anything the Debian
> community should concern itself with.
All depends on what the project has achieved right now, which I
couldn't find in their WWW pages.
Anyone has such info ?
--
Yann Dirson <ydirson@a2points.com> | Stop making M$-Bill richer & richer,
alt-email: <dirson@univ-mlv.fr> | support Debian GNU/Linux:
debian-email: <dirson@debian.org> | more powerful, more stable !
http://www.a2points.com/homepage/3475232 | Check <http://www.debian.org/>
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-i18n-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: