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I think you missed the main claim (the paper is definitely poorly written, also it's easy to miss unless one is familiar with its subject already): what it's po

by svat 6y ago

I think you missed the main claim (the paper is definitely poorly written, also it's easy to miss unless one is familiar with its subject already): what it's pointing out is that a particular “dialect” of Sanskrit (called “Shastric Sanskrit” in the paper) was/is basically an artificial language (that's what was intended by “a natural language can serve as an artificial language also”) that has been used for essentially something like knowledge representation. More details in my comment on this post about “Attempto Controlled English”, which is something similar in English: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20950126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20950126 Of course there's no point doing any of this now, it's only a curiosity as far as AI is concerned (though interesting from the viewpoint of intellectual history), and it's not surprising that the paper has been a dead end.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
Perhaps that's the paper's main claim. But it's really not clear from the paper itself. You have to apply a good amount of interpretation to extract such meaning from the paper. That's what makes it a poorly written paper and I think that's the main reason why it has not been influential. For example, I know (of) Attempto and have done a bit of reading on CNLs in general (mainly because I've done some undergraduate and post-graduate stuff with the Magic: the Gathering CNL, "ability text" :). There is no attempt by the author to describe "Shastric sanskrit" as a CNL for knowledge representation. That would have been a clearly stated claim and it would make a lot of sense- but, it's nowhere to be seen.