Re: Does natural language skill translate to programming skill?


Ar an t-aonú lá déag de mí Márta, scríobh Helmut Wollmersdorfer:

Aidan Kehoe wrote:
Ar an t-aonú lá déag de mí Márta, scríobh LEE Sau Dan:

> For comparison, many AI reseach try to process natural language using
> LISP or Prolog, whose grammars are so much more regular and simpler
> than Perl.

Spamassassin, one of the few widely useful and deployed natural language
processing applications, was written entirely in Perl.

If Spamassassin does language processing, then Google (and any other search
engine) also does. They use very simple techniques like pattern matching,
edit distance and maybe a simple thesaurus.

I’m happy to say Google does natural language processing, yes. Cf. the big
different in results between these two queries:

http://www.google.de/search?q=bart&hl=de
http://www.google.ca/search?q=bart&hl=en

I’m not sure why one would question it without heavy personal investment in
pre-AI-winter-based approaches to NLP.

I switched from Prolog to Perl, because Perl is powerful and fast. My Perl
scripts provide impressive results on text (written natural language), like
information extraction, collect simple semantic nets, detect the use of
synonyms and homonyms. But for parsing a complete sentence and do some
reasoning with it, I would use Prolog.

I’m not aware of any natural language processing applications written
in Prolog or Lisp that have served a useful purpose beyond a) absorbing
research grant money or b) proving that Prolog, Lisp and traditional
computational linguistics approaches are ill-suited to natural language
processing.

About 1987 I supervised a student, who did his diploma thesis on
"application of conceptual graphs". His program written in Prolog was able
to read in laws, and a user could enter an individual problem (case) related
to this law, and the program solved the problem. The results were
impressive.

Where can I buy this technology, or some development of it? Or did it turn
out to be unmarketable, since there was such a strictly limited subset of
German understood by it that phrasing the cases was not any easier than
formulating SQL queries?

But it is easier to parse German texts than English ones.

--
On the quay of the little Black Sea port, where the rescued pair came once
more into contact with civilization, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been indiscriminating. (Saki)
.

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