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I would jokingly say that English is halfway between natural languages and programming languages. I mean: English grammar is so simple and all sentences are so

by mamon 7y ago

I would jokingly say that English is halfway between natural languages and programming languages. I mean: English grammar is so simple and all sentences are so well structured that processing English is order of magnitude easier than, say, German.

ben_w 7y ago
Yeah right. Examples of well-recognised sarcastic phrases that would mess with simple sentiment analysis aside, I think the fact that it’s easy to think that English is simple and well-formed has probably held back serious development of chatbots etc. — the hard work of learning the real rules can be substituted with a simple grammatical approximation that gets a lot wrong and can’t be easily improved. Or, to put it another way: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is treated as a string of nouns, not [proper noun] [noun] [proper noun] [noun] [verb] [verb] [proper noun] [noun].
gbear605 7y ago
English is in fact not particularly simple, especially not if your only comparison is German. Both English and German can be modeled at approximately the same level of difficulty, with only a few minor differences. There is case assignment, but that’s simple compared to everything else (and English has deal with case too, if not to the same extent). The field of linguistics has been trying to fully model English syntax for the last 70 years and is still turning up new corner cases. And a lot of languages are in fact a lot simpler. To quote one of my bilingual friends after waking up from general anesthesia: > [I] couldn't put English in order so I just switched to Russian since I knew what syntactic roles I wanted, just not how to order words Latin, a supposedly more complex language, is another example of a language with much less strict syntax than English. And Google Translate is horrible at Latin. Mandarin, on the other hand, has a more complex grammar than English, but that doesn’t mean that it is more or less easy for NLP. After all, Google Translate is horrible at Mandarin.

by mamon 7y ago

ben_w 7y ago

Yeah right. Examples of well-recognised sarcastic phrases that would mess with simple sentiment analysis aside, I think the fact that it’s easy to think that English is simple and well-formed has probably held back serious development of chatbots etc. — the hard work of learning the real rules can be substituted with a simple grammatical approximation that gets a lot wrong and can’t be easily improved. Or, to put it another way: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is treated as a string of nouns, not [proper noun] [noun] [proper noun] [noun] [verb] [verb] [proper noun] [noun].

gbear605 7y ago

English is in fact not particularly simple, especially not if your only comparison is German. Both English and German can be modeled at approximately the same level of difficulty, with only a few minor differences. There is case assignment, but that’s simple compared to everything else (and English has deal with case too, if not to the same extent). The field of linguistics has been trying to fully model English syntax for the last 70 years and is still turning up new corner cases. And a lot of languages are in fact a lot simpler. To quote one of my bilingual friends after waking up from general anesthesia: > [I] couldn't put English in order so I just switched to Russian since I knew what syntactic roles I wanted, just not how to order words Latin, a supposedly more complex language, is another example of a language with much less strict syntax than English. And Google Translate is horrible at Latin. Mandarin, on the other hand, has a more complex grammar than English, but that doesn’t mean that it is more or less easy for NLP. After all, Google Translate is horrible at Mandarin.