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Wolfram Alpha suffers a bit from that, I think: You can query a great lot of things but for many of them it requires you to a) know about that you can query tha
by ygra 11y ago
Wolfram Alpha suffers a bit from that, I think: You can query a great lot of things but for many of them it requires you to a) know about that you can query that, b) knowing how to query for that, c) how to give options, parameters. The natural language interface sounds great and makes for awesome demos (like »Wow, they can actually understand that?«), but it's horrible for discoverability, especially in cases where you can try five different ways of saying the same thing but only the sixth would actually yield a result.
- miguelrochefort 11y agoThe shortcomings of natural language interfaces are obvious, and I cannot understand why so many people believe it to be the future. Humanity needs a formal language, which requires formal thinking. Ambiguity is not a problem when a language is used to browse, explore and clarify thoughts, but this kind of interaction needs to be feedback-driven. You can't just input an ambiguous natural language query and expects accurate results. However, you can start with an ambiguous natural language query, and quickly make it into a formal one thanks to smart auto-completion. Only when the query reach a formal threshold should it be executed.
- juliendorra 11y agoFormalization could be done in interaction with the computer. For a basic example today, we can look at how Google correct your query and suggest other queries, or any other form of auto-complete and auto-correct