Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
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Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#2I tried it with gpt 3.5 but it doesn't seem to know lojban so well. I asked it to translate the following in to Lojban, then separately after deleting that history I asked it to translate that to English. Here's what it did:
Original English: "I heard of the TinyStories research project that unlocked cognitive capabilities in LLMs with fewer parameters. I wonder if something similar would be possible with lojban?"
Lojban round trip English: "We interpret the use of the LLM as a way to confuse the knowledge from TinyStories.gy, which is greater than that from the experimental findings. I find it amusing to use Lojban instead. Does the ability to confuse the experimental findings also mean the ability to confuse Lojban?"
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#3I like this point very much: "You can be as vague or detailed as you like when speaking lojban. For example, specifying tense (past, present or future) or number (singular or plural) is optional when they're clear from context.".
LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one that just complicates matters.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#4I like this point very much: "You can be as vague or detailed as you like when speaking lojban. For example, specifying tense (past, present or future) or number (singular or plural) is optional when they're clear from context.". LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one…
> LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one that just complicates matters.
I thought it was more of a pro-caring thing than a pro-uncaring thing.
Those focusing too much on the latter are really quite good at bumbling into insulting behavior...
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#5If memory serves, Attempto was recently on HN. It's another natural (invented) language that parses unambiguously.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#6I don't know if eliminating ambiguity is even possible, much less a key feature of the language. There's even prominent ambiguity on this page:
> Lojban means different things to different people
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#7I spent a few weeks with Lojban around 2006. imho it felt really dense as a language. Definitely interesting. Back then there wasn’t as much material in Lojban as is now available.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#8I tried it with gpt 3.5 but it doesn't seem to know lojban so well. I asked it to translate the following in to Lojban, then separately after deleting that history I asked it to translate that to English. Here's what it did: Original English: "I heard of the TinyStories research project that unlocked cognitive capabilities in LLMs with fewer parameters. I wonder if something similar would be possible with lojban?" Lo…
hmm since there is a CFG for lojban, it’d be interesting to give [some LLM you can do fancy things woth] what corpus of lojban there is, and then use the work on constraining LLMs to a grammar, and see if that’d help its output.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#9I vaguely remember a TNG* episode in which humans encounter an alien race that found our language too ...inaccurate, and spent a lot of time going over each word and sentence, to precisely define its meaning.
* Was it TNG or am I dreaming?
*edit: Thank you everyone, but it wasn't "Darmok". The humans and the aliens were working, for a long time, on a treaty of sorts because the human language was so confusing and ambiguous and they had to go over every small details, over and over ... Need to re-watch TNG
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#10I don't know if eliminating ambiguity is even possible, much less a key feature of the language. There's even prominent ambiguity on this page: > Lojban means different things to different people
A lot of communication is intentionally ambiguous at that. Be it diplomatic texts written to let both sides present a victory, or comedy intentionally obscuring key facts for a later reveal. Having the ability to be unambiguous is great, but human communication is full of situations where that's not what we want.