4 ms·

I wonder what happens in more literal languages, where "center" doesn't mean "main area".

by StavrosK 6y ago

willbudd 6y ago
Hopefully some word sense index is applied (or implied).
- sbergot 6y ago
  This is one big hurdle I think. If one has to refer to the english meaning of words for the whole project to work, then how is this different from just writing the whole thing in english and translating everything from this?
dan-robertson 6y ago
Also the grammars of English and German are pretty similar. How well would it scan in other languages? Perhaps “well enough” is sufficient.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The key idea is that if the semantic description is abstracted enough, a grammar engine can convert the ideas encoded in it into the right structure for the language. Not all languages have "X is Y" constructs, but all known human languages have some structure to declare that object X has property Y. Capture the idea "Object X has property Y" in your semantic language, and a grammar engine can wire that down to your target language. The largest risk is that the resulting text will be dry as hell, not that it's an impossible task.
  - popinman322 6y ago
    Though being dry doesn't diminish the value of the text, though. Very exciting. I'd also be worried about ambiguity; humans can (sometimes) detect when they may be parsed the wrong way in context. I wonder if there will be a way to flag results that don't properly convey the data. How would that be integrated into the generator? (There's probably an answer in the literature.) Lots of fun questions to explore.
  - knolax 6y ago
    The main problem is that language X has an implicit definition of Foo, which is similar but not identical to language Y's definition of Bar. This might work when the languages share common ancestry like German and English, where Foo and Bar are both descendent from Baz and have similar meanings, but will not work when you try to translate to language Z, whose speakers have a different word Foobar which has a meaning that encompasses Baz and Qux but excluding Xyzzy and with a completely different connotation.
- dmortin 6y ago
  Try Finnish or Hungarian, for example.
  - Ekaros 6y ago
    Finnish would likely work, though it would require very extensive rules on declinations. Some compound word and list rules are also fun... Finnish is rather liberal in word-order, but that's a simple fix. What is hard in that the conjucts do not have unique identifiers in the example. That is an essential thing to have. As there is plenty of synonyms and meaning might change. Same applies to center.
Vinnl 6y ago
But the word/concept 'Center' does not appear anywhere in the input data, as far as I can see? It just lists a number of things for which SF ranks highly, and whether that means you call it a 'center' is up to the template writer - unless I'm misreading.
- hobofan 6y ago
  Yes it does. Line 6: "object: center"
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    Well... I retract my previous comment then. Thanks for pointing it out. (I blame viewing it on mobile.)
spupy 6y ago
In Input 2 "center" is a keyword, because the markup is using English for keywords. The example output just happens to be in English as well. I assume it will be mapped to a more appropriate word in another language.
mormegil 6y ago
Yes, this. Well, in this case, the solution is obvious: you need to have two separate concepts for center. But… When I first learned about the OmegaWiki project (called WiktionaryZ then, I think), I was thrilled. It tried to represent lexical (Wiktionary) definitions and other language concepts using data. For each sense of each word, a so called DefinedMeaning was created. In the same sense, Wikidata has its entities. But soon, I learned about a problematic aspect of OmegaWiki’s concept, and the same thing appears on Wikidata: You represent some set of concepts in a single language, then another language comes and needs to split some concepts in two, because your language uses one word for both, but the other differentiates between them. Then, a third language comes and it maps its concepts to your existing set still a bit differently, so you might get four entities for just three languages. Etc. On Wikidata, more focus is, I guess, on “concrete” entities: people, places, etc., where this does not appear that often. But it contains the abstract entities as well, and the problem appears there all the time. You might try to “fix” the problematic entities by splitting them to more elementary, linked using “subclass of” etc.; in some cases it might work quite fine (but losing the interwiki links in the process, which is unfortunate, given those were the original use case of Wikidata), in others, it is basically impossible without a degree in philosophy and deep understanding of ten languages, to be able to correctly distinguish and represent their relations. And imagine somebody trying to _use_ those entities. Like “I would like to say this person was a writer”, but there are seventeen entities with the English label of “writer”, distinguished by some obscure difference used by a group of Sino-Tibetan languages. And… Wikidata entities represent basically just nouns. So… I am a bit sceptical.
- Luk3 6y ago
  I believe that Wikidata's Lexeme system is trying to fix that, is it not?

I wonder what happens in more literal languages, where "center" doesn't mean "main area".

willbudd 6y ago

Hopefully some word sense index is applied (or implied).

sbergot 6y ago
This is one big hurdle I think. If one has to refer to the english meaning of words for the whole project to work, then how is this different from just writing the whole thing in english and translating everything from this?

dan-robertson 6y ago

Also the grammars of English and German are pretty similar. How well would it scan in other languages? Perhaps “well enough” is sufficient.

shadowgovt 6y ago
The key idea is that if the semantic description is abstracted enough, a grammar engine can convert the ideas encoded in it into the right structure for the language. Not all languages have "X is Y" constructs, but all known human languages have some structure to declare that object X has property Y. Capture the idea "Object X has property Y" in your semantic language, and a grammar engine can wire that down to your target language. The largest risk is that the resulting text will be dry as hell, not that it's an impossible task.
- popinman322 6y ago
  Though being dry doesn't diminish the value of the text, though. Very exciting. I'd also be worried about ambiguity; humans can (sometimes) detect when they may be parsed the wrong way in context. I wonder if there will be a way to flag results that don't properly convey the data. How would that be integrated into the generator? (There's probably an answer in the literature.) Lots of fun questions to explore.
- knolax 6y ago
  The main problem is that language X has an implicit definition of Foo, which is similar but not identical to language Y's definition of Bar. This might work when the languages share common ancestry like German and English, where Foo and Bar are both descendent from Baz and have similar meanings, but will not work when you try to translate to language Z, whose speakers have a different word Foobar which has a meaning that encompasses Baz and Qux but excluding Xyzzy and with a completely different connotation.
dmortin 6y ago
Try Finnish or Hungarian, for example.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  Finnish would likely work, though it would require very extensive rules on declinations. Some compound word and list rules are also fun... Finnish is rather liberal in word-order, but that's a simple fix. What is hard in that the conjucts do not have unique identifiers in the example. That is an essential thing to have. As there is plenty of synonyms and meaning might change. Same applies to center.

Vinnl 6y ago

But the word/concept 'Center' does not appear anywhere in the input data, as far as I can see? It just lists a number of things for which SF ranks highly, and whether that means you call it a 'center' is up to the template writer - unless I'm misreading.

hobofan 6y ago
Yes it does. Line 6: "object: center"
- Vinnl 6y ago
  Well... I retract my previous comment then. Thanks for pointing it out. (I blame viewing it on mobile.)

spupy 6y ago

In Input 2 "center" is a keyword, because the markup is using English for keywords. The example output just happens to be in English as well. I assume it will be mapped to a more appropriate word in another language.

mormegil 6y ago

Yes, this. Well, in this case, the solution is obvious: you need to have two separate concepts for center. But… When I first learned about the OmegaWiki project (called WiktionaryZ then, I think), I was thrilled. It tried to represent lexical (Wiktionary) definitions and other language concepts using data. For each sense of each word, a so called DefinedMeaning was created. In the same sense, Wikidata has its entities. But soon, I learned about a problematic aspect of OmegaWiki’s concept, and the same thing appears on Wikidata: You represent some set of concepts in a single language, then another language comes and needs to split some concepts in two, because your language uses one word for both, but the other differentiates between them. Then, a third language comes and it maps its concepts to your existing set still a bit differently, so you might get four entities for just three languages. Etc. On Wikidata, more focus is, I guess, on “concrete” entities: people, places, etc., where this does not appear that often. But it contains the abstract entities as well, and the problem appears there all the time. You might try to “fix” the problematic entities by splitting them to more elementary, linked using “subclass of” etc.; in some cases it might work quite fine (but losing the interwiki links in the process, which is unfortunate, given those were the original use case of Wikidata), in others, it is basically impossible without a degree in philosophy and deep understanding of ten languages, to be able to correctly distinguish and represent their relations. And imagine somebody trying to _use_ those entities. Like “I would like to say this person was a writer”, but there are seventeen entities with the English label of “writer”, distinguished by some obscure difference used by a group of Sino-Tibetan languages. And… Wikidata entities represent basically just nouns. So… I am a bit sceptical.

Luk3 6y ago
I believe that Wikidata's Lexeme system is trying to fix that, is it not?