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English has similar confusion even for plain, non negated questions. Q: "Do you mind if I sit here?" A1: "Not at all!" A2: "Sure!" Both are valid answers an
by reubenmorais 6y ago
English has similar confusion even for plain, non negated questions.
Q: "Do you mind if I sit here?"
A1: "Not at all!"
A2: "Sure!"
Both are valid answers and mean the same thing, the person asking is welcome to sit there. This has always amused me.
- Chris2048 6y agoI'm not sure I understand, "mind" means "object to", so they are asking "Do you [object to] me sitting here?"; "Not at all" == "I do Not [object to you sitting here] at all"
- Myrmornis 6y agoDefinitely what you say is the accepted meaning. But wouldn’t you say A1 is more correct than A2? Possibly relevant, there’s also A3: “Sure I do, last time you sat next to me you wouldn’t shut up.”
- lars 6y agoThat's an excellent example to show why statistical NLP outperforms discrete parsing using logical rules. That A1 and A2 means the same is something that is clear to us from the context. This is something a continuous vector space model can capture and a discrete rules based model cannot.