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Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

mw.lojban.org

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Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#51

Post by adastra22 »

bradrn wrote: post #50
adastra22 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I'm happy to continue this conversation here, although it's late where I am and I'll be going to bed soon, and HN threads are ephemeral. Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually collaborate on this. > Looks interesting… where should I start reading? IIRC he did some graduate summer schools that were recorded online and have attached lecture notes. Those plus the referenced papers would be a good place to st…

> Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually collaborate on this. Emailed, though I’m not sure how much time I’d actually have available to collaborate. > The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics." I’ll have a look at it, thanks! > When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something very specific: monoparsing of sen…

Well I'm working two jobs and beginning the process of fundraising a new startup, all while parenting two kids. I'll be lucky to have any time myself ;) But it's good to keep in contact with like-minded individuals, in case the opportunity arises to get some work done on it.

> OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous, but it’s an interesting goal nonetheless.

I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#52

Post by TeMPOraL »

bmacho wrote: post #46

Why is it so hard, and why hasn't anybody done it before? The whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language where - first you need your words to have only one meaning. You can even use an existing vocabulary, like English, or Esperanto. - then you need to be express math/logic/structured programming. That's it, now you have a language without any ambiguity. If there are some ambiguity in the objects/concepts…

> Why is it so hard, and why hasn't anybody done it before? The whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language where

> - first you need your words to have only one meaning

There's your answer. There is no such language, there are no such words. It's questionable if it's even possible - to me, it sounds like a category error. "Words" aren't keys in a hash table, and "meaning" isn't a discrete thing.

> now you have a language without any ambiguity. If there are some ambiguity in the objects/concepts that you are referring, then use your language more to specify the object.

Thing is, I don't think ambiguity comes from language. Concepts and categories are naturally fuzzy for us. Precision is a continuum.

If you need to express something more precisely than your language allows with single word or term, you just create a new word and attach a long-form description to it to position and connect it to other words in the latent^H^H^H^H^H^H^H concept space. That's how we always did it, and it was never hard.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#53

Post by bradrn »

adastra22 wrote: post #51
bradrn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually collaborate on this. Emailed, though I’m not sure how much time I’d actually have available to collaborate. > The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics." I’ll have a look at it, thanks! > When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something very specific: monoparsing of sen…

Well I'm working two jobs and beginning the process of fundraising a new startup, all while parenting two kids. I'll be lucky to have any time myself ;) But it's good to keep in contact with like-minded individuals, in case the opportunity arises to get some work done on it. > OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous…

> I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.

Yeah, I can agree with all of this. (Although Anna Wierzbicka’s work on the ‘Natural Semantic Language’ is an attempt to control the latter sort of ambiguity… you might find it quite interesting, actually.)

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

tagyro wrote: post #9

I 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 amb…

The one with the Sheliak?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ensigns_of_Command_...

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sheliak

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#55

Post by adastra22 »

xavivives wrote: post #28
yosito wrote: post #6

I 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

Ambiguity is an intrinsic quality of language. The first words that an infant learns are exclusively learned through ostensive definitions (defining by pointing). This implies that the meaning of those words is fundamentally different to each of us, as it's founded on our phenomenological experience and not through the dictionary. Further words are learned to combine previous definitions and more ostensive definition…

Lojban could have gone further to eliminate logical ambiguity, allowing monoparsing from sentence to an explicit statement in a framework of computational semantics (e.g. Davidsonian event semantics). That Lojban did not was one of its great failings.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#56

Post by adastra22 »

bradrn wrote: post #53
adastra22 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm working two jobs and beginning the process of fundraising a new startup, all while parenting two kids. I'll be lucky to have any time myself ;) But it's good to keep in contact with like-minded individuals, in case the opportunity arises to get some work done on it. > OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous…

> I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct i…

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#57

Post by bmacho »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #52
bmacho wrote: post #46

Why is it so hard, and why hasn't anybody done it before? The whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language where - first you need your words to have only one meaning. You can even use an existing vocabulary, like English, or Esperanto. - then you need to be express math/logic/structured programming. That's it, now you have a language without any ambiguity. If there are some ambiguity in the objects/concepts…

> Why is it so hard, and why hasn't anybody done it before? The whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language where > - first you need your words to have only one meaning There's your answer. There is no such language, there are no such words. It's questionable if it's even possible - to me, it sounds like a category error. "Words" aren't keys in a hash table, and "meaning" isn't a discrete thing. > now you…

I still don't get it. In the linguistic part the only problem is to make to word->object mapping unambiguous. And it is trivial problem. If the world is fuzzy (i don't think so) then is not a problem in linguistics.

Yet linguists seem to aim for a language that eliminates ambiguity (see TFA). Where am I wrong?

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#58

Post by lez »

themodelplumber wrote: post #4
lez wrote: post #3

I 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...

Slippery slope fallacy here. Why should I care if my online customer is he/she/they as long as they pay the price? Or if I talk about technology through the Internet? All I want is effective communication with no insults.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#60

Post by int_19h »

ftxbro wrote: post #2

I 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…

GPT-4 doesn't do well at it, either. The problem is that there simply isn't that much text written in Lojban, so it can't learn it the way it does other languages. You can see similar problems with other languages with a relatively small corpus, such as Old Norse.
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