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The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]
- 0x0 10y agoSounds very similar to Simple English Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia#Simple_English https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_W...
- andreareina 10y agoIn fact, Randall makes an explicit mention of it in a comic: https://xkcd.com/547/ https://xkcd.com/547/
- stepanhruda 10y agoI have Thing Explainer right here, my main issue is I'd like a separate version with the actual terms so I can have a conversation about the covered topics without sounding like a moron.
- vanderZwan 10y agoWhat I think would be interesting is if he tried another version without the 1000 most common words.
- andreasvc 10y agoI don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.
- weinzierl 10y agoSomeone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29
- theoh 10y agoThere are multiple examples. It is difficult but apparently not so difficult that nobody attempts it. The accepted term for texts like that is "lipogram"; it's a popular form of the broader category of constrained writing. Wikipedia has a page for "logology" which is apparently a term for the general activity of playing with language in that kind of way on a per-letter basis (so, including anagrams and palindromes, etc.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology
- slazaro 10y agoIf you sort all English words by frequency, the ones that contain 'e' would be distributed more or less randomly, so it seems more doable. Banning the first 1000 would prevent you from using the most useful words. I don't think you could construct sentences that wouldn't sound totally weird.
- andreasvc 10y agoI know, it's fascinating. But it doesn't detract from my point.
- gohrt 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void (from the original _La Disparition_) is a noir/fantasy story, its actual plot is the story's lack of 'e'. It's amazing. It's difficult and confusing to follow the writing, but it's an amazing book.
- Dylan16807 10y agoI'm not sure why you got downvoted for that. It's a reasonable request. Restrict yourself to the thousand words for words, but not for names.
- teh_klev 10y agoLooking at the diagram of "Bags of stuff inside you" in "Thing Explainer" I was surprised to find that when annotating blood vessels, intestines etc he uses "hallway" and not "pipe", which I thought would be in the 1000 most often used english words. How curious.
- impostervt 10y agoself-plug: let's you explore which English words are the most common The Long Tail of the English Language http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-language.html http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-la...
- rspeer 10y agoIs that your site? You have a spam problem in your comments.
- jsingleton 10y agoWhile this is tagged as PDF the link is actually to the website where you can read the abstract. The PDF link is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf
- GolDDranks 10y agoI thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.) Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world). Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.
- GolDDranks 10y agoP.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.
- andreasvc 10y agoText simplification and summarization are active fields of research. Machine translation is indeed more active, but this is understandable given its commercial applications.
- adrianN 10y agoI don't think that's an easier problem than machine translation between "different" languages. You still need to understand the source text well enough to figure out the meaning and reproduce it using different words.
- TuringTest 10y ago
- adrianratnapala 10y agoThing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
- jeffwass 10y agoFor me, Thing Explainer was like a funny joke at first which got old VERY fast. To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful." I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoI'm a fan of Guy Steele's Growing a Language, a talk about programming language design where he limited himself to using mostly only single-syllable words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoNot to mentioned hand crayon drawn transparencies.
- e12e 10y agoThis seems like a good companion (probably as a sequel) to: "Richard Feynman - Computer Heuristics Lecture": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA In general, Feynman might be a poster child for using simple language to explain complex things.
- jgrahamc 10y agoAgreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words. For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!") I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something. Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.
- mendelk 10y agoOff topic: I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things. At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming. If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO. As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again! [0] http://amzn.com/0785824324 http://amzn.com/0785824324
- tomc1985 10y agoThing Explainer was a nice experiment, but, really... what's the value in trying to parse CNL explanations that are harder to understand than using the actual word?