The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
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Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#2While this is tagged as PDF the link is actually to the website where you can read the abstract.
The PDF link is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#3I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this.
Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.)
Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world).
Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#4I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…
P.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#5Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation.
Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#6I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…
It seems like using a model that can estimate its certainty about the meaning of a sentence might be a good way of going about this. If the model is uncertain then it could recommend re-writing the sentence.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#7Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
For me, Thing Explainer was like a funny joke at first which got old VERY fast.
To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful."
I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#8Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
I'm a fan of Guy Steele's Growing a Language, a talk about programming language design where he limited himself to using mostly only single-syllable words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#9Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words.
For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!")
I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something.
Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.
Re: The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
#10I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a…
P.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.
I don't think that's an easier problem than machine translation between "different" languages. You still need to understand the source text well enough to figure out the meaning and reproduce it using different words.