Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
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Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
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Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#2bill clinton, is that you?!
but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness.
the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because the world is ambiguous and language reflects that.
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#3Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#4bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…
I immediately thought of slick willy as well.
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#5bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…
>but because the world is ambiguous and language reflects that.
This doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation. Take one particular example of a structurally ambiguous sentence of English:
"The company couldn't make the car fast enough".
The two meanings are completely distinct (speed of production vs. speed of the car). There's no fuzziness about this distinction out there in the world. The speed at which a car travels and the speed at which it's made are two completely distinct properties.
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#6It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world:
> I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed
> I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed
Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#7bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…
Also time constraints. It's possible to be much more precise even with informal language, but it would take forever.
So, for efficiency, words don't really deliver an idea to the listener. Instead, it's assumed that the listener is working toward the idea through their own reasoning, and words fill in only the necessary gaps to help them get there or to help them get there more quickly.
You more or less reverse engineer what their thought process must be, then you do a gap analysis between what they're probably thinking and what you want them to be thinking, and you give them the pieces of info necessary for them to make the leap.
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#8It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.
Also, the basis of a lot of humor is when the opposite of what you expect is what is intended.
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#9bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…
>but because the world is ambiguous and language reflects that. This doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation. Take one particular example of a structurally ambiguous sentence of English: "The company couldn't make the car fast enough". The two meanings are completely distinct (speed of production vs. speed of the car). There's no fuzziness about this distinction out there in the world. The speed at which a ca…
And yet, in the real world, people could use that sentence as part of a discussion without causing any confusion or ambiguity. Because sentences don’t exist on their own, they have a wider context which can focus their meaning.
Human language is succinct. We don’t generally say twenty words when ten would do. If the context made your example sentence clear, why would a speaker need to add any words to clarify it further?
Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is
#10bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…
>but because the world is ambiguous and language reflects that. This doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation. Take one particular example of a structurally ambiguous sentence of English: "The company couldn't make the car fast enough". The two meanings are completely distinct (speed of production vs. speed of the car). There's no fuzziness about this distinction out there in the world. The speed at which a ca…
That is an interesting example because it looks like semantic ambiguity rather than syntactic ambiguity. But actually it is about structure as you commented -- something like this:
[S [DP [D The [N company]]] [VP [AuxP [Aux couldn't] [V make]] [DP [D the] [NP [N car] [AdjP [Adv fast] [A enough]]]]
vs
[S [DP [D The [N company]]] [V' [VP [AuxP [Aux couldn't] [V make]] [DP [D the] [N car]]] [AdjP [Adv fast] [A enough]]]
Regarding the meat of your comment, it is quite difficult to banish all ambiguity from natural language for a variety of reasons, but we don't really need to: humans are incredibly good at handling linguistic ambiguity. There has been a lot of fascinating research on the topic: in particular, I recommend reading up about anaphora resolution[0] and garden path sentence repair[1], because the literature includes some info on what is happening in the brain, which is significantly more detailed than what exists for most other types of linguistic ambiguity.
All of this ambiguity in natural language is something that continues to be huge hurdle for NLP: it turns out that fetching the right information from the context to resolve all the ambiguities that arise in a single conversation is completely non-trivial, despite how easy humans make it look!
An interesting case study in the opposite direction (ie attempting to remove ambiguities from natural language) is Ithkuil[2]: it is a conlang that attempted to completely banish (semantic and lexical) ambiguity and it ended up being ridiculously hard to use or learn at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(linguistics)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
If anyone is curious, you can plug those trees into here (http://mshang.ca/syntree/) and it will draw them for you. But my tree drawing skills are very rusty, so they are pretty basic/bad.