3 ms·

- Tea that contains ice? Yes. That is the relationship... "contains". There are many other examples in English of that relationship in NN compounds, and I guar

by 3131s 10y ago

- Tea that contains ice? Yes. That is the relationship... "contains". There are many other examples in English of that relationship in NN compounds, and I guarantee you use them unconsciously without a second thought. You are also not getting my point, please reread my last post. > Bottom line: "ice tea" is ambiguous. "Iced tea" is not. This is how I know you and others in this thread have not spent a lot of time thinking about language. When has ambiguity ever prevented humans from using and understanding language? If you look at any piece of writing deeply, it is filled with an unimaginable amount of nuanced ambiguity. That's exactly why NLP is so hard.

defined 10y ago
But iced tea typically does not contain ice unless you add it. Buy a can of Lipton's Iced Tea - it's still iced tea, with no ice in it. But whatever, this is getting to angels on the head of a pin territory :) I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about me. I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about language; I just have different thoughts, or points of view, about it. I have been very interested in etymology for a long time. I neither claimed that natural language was capable of being entirely unambiguous, nor that people cannot communicate in the face of ambiguity. In fact, ambiguity in language allows for great artistic expression: humor, poetry, and other word play. So I agree with you on that point. But holy crap, do we have to make it harder than necessary to communicate, when we aren't deliberately playing with words? Surely you agree that much of the misery, pain, and suffering in this world of ours is due to avoidable language-related misunderstandings?
- 3131s 10y ago
  Sorry for being a bit rude. And yeah, this is the most hair-splitting argument I've ever been involved in on HN :) My work in linguistics and NLP is strongly related to ambiguity, so I tend to see things in those terms and I do not see resolving ambiguity as an impediment to understanding language (for humans at least, but for computers it is an enormous problem). We'll agree to disagree!

by 3131s 10y ago

defined 10y ago

But iced tea typically does not contain ice unless you add it. Buy a can of Lipton's Iced Tea - it's still iced tea, with no ice in it. But whatever, this is getting to angels on the head of a pin territory :) I think you are making an unwarranted assumption about me. I have indeed spent a great deal of time thinking about language; I just have different thoughts, or points of view, about it. I have been very interested in etymology for a long time. I neither claimed that natural language was capable of being entirely unambiguous, nor that people cannot communicate in the face of ambiguity. In fact, ambiguity in language allows for great artistic expression: humor, poetry, and other word play. So I agree with you on that point. But holy crap, do we have to make it harder than necessary to communicate, when we aren't deliberately playing with words? Surely you agree that much of the misery, pain, and suffering in this world of ours is due to avoidable language-related misunderstandings?

3131s 10y ago
Sorry for being a bit rude. And yeah, this is the most hair-splitting argument I've ever been involved in on HN :) My work in linguistics and NLP is strongly related to ambiguity, so I tend to see things in those terms and I do not see resolving ambiguity as an impediment to understanding language (for humans at least, but for computers it is an enormous problem). We'll agree to disagree!