3 ms·

less than lay person, but in your example > "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Why is it not as simple "no belongs

less than lay person, but in your example > "no evidence of cancer" and "evidence of no cancer" are very different things. Why is it not as simple "no belongs to the word it precedes" ? like unary operator, ! (not), in typical computer languages.

d1str0 7y ago
Because theres a big difference between english and computer/query languages. You can deduce a lot from a query language, but not necessarily english.
munk-a 7y ago
You need to actually build up noun comprehension though, because "evidence of no remaining cancer" or other qualifier words can greatly confuse the situation. You'd also have quite a bit of fun trying to parse the phrase "no means no" or other usages where "no" is being used as a noun... And for bonus points, folks talk to search engines in broken english all the time so "shirts no single striped" is a totally reasonable query to submit to a server and expect to be parse-able.
- bad_user 7y ago
  The broken English aspect also happens because we know search engines don't understand English anyway.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I don't know the usage stats on AskJeeves but that search engine specifically purported itself to do well when asked a question in english. Now, the tech at the time wasn't even near close to being able to support it, but their advertising targeted it. That all said I never typed in "Who is Derek Jeter?" and I don't know anyone who did. I think the basic issue is that people just don't respect machines and want to minimize the amount of effort spend on communicating with them - I don't say "Alexa please bring up songs by Death Grips if you don't mind" I shout "Alexa! Play! Death Grips!" and then yell at it when it misunderstands.
DenisM 7y ago
- evidence of no liver cancer - no textbook evidence of cancer Statements have structure, parsing them with simple rules like this is akin to parsing C++ with regular expressions.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Or even HTML https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454

d1str0 7y ago

Because theres a big difference between english and computer/query languages. You can deduce a lot from a query language, but not necessarily english.

munk-a 7y ago

You need to actually build up noun comprehension though, because "evidence of no remaining cancer" or other qualifier words can greatly confuse the situation. You'd also have quite a bit of fun trying to parse the phrase "no means no" or other usages where "no" is being used as a noun... And for bonus points, folks talk to search engines in broken english all the time so "shirts no single striped" is a totally reasonable query to submit to a server and expect to be parse-able.

bad_user 7y ago
The broken English aspect also happens because we know search engines don't understand English anyway.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I don't know the usage stats on AskJeeves but that search engine specifically purported itself to do well when asked a question in english. Now, the tech at the time wasn't even near close to being able to support it, but their advertising targeted it. That all said I never typed in "Who is Derek Jeter?" and I don't know anyone who did. I think the basic issue is that people just don't respect machines and want to minimize the amount of effort spend on communicating with them - I don't say "Alexa please bring up songs by Death Grips if you don't mind" I shout "Alexa! Play! Death Grips!" and then yell at it when it misunderstands.

DenisM 7y ago

- evidence of no liver cancer - no textbook evidence of cancer Statements have structure, parsing them with simple rules like this is akin to parsing C++ with regular expressions.

tsimionescu 7y ago
Or even HTML https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454