3 ms·

Are there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern technology?

by dlo 15y ago

davidst 15y ago
Yes, depending on your expectations. With a LOT of effort it would be entirely possible to build something like SHRDLU that could handle a specific game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU Caution: Don't be misled by the impressive-looking conversation transcript. With no disrespect meant to Terry Winograd and the ground-breaking work he did it was- like every natural language demonstration since the dawn of computing- fragile, prone to odd mistakes and the transcripts were usually generated by someone already acclimated to the idiosyncrasies the system to make it look its best. You could build something that recognized a richer grammar and even engaged in limited conversational discourse. It would be good enough that a person might briefly forget they were dealing with a system of limited capabilities until, inevitably, it would break down and remind them they are not conversing with a human. The risk is those failures could be sufficiently frequent and severe as to make it worthless. The user might be better off with something less ambitious, more predictable and less frustrating. Then again, that wouldn't do anything to push the state of the art, so it should be worth the risk to try it.
jonhendry 15y ago
Simply having modern RAM capacity helps, because authors can add many more synonyms in their code to handle various player inputs. The early parsers were constrained by having to run in tiny RAM spaces (64k, 128k, 256k); expanding vocabulary was difficult to do without removing space for description text and other important game data. In Inform 7, when targeting the glulx VM the memory limits are much larger (i.e., the sizes we expect today) and you can define synonyms to your heart's content.

3 ms·

Are there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern technology?

by dlo 15y ago

Are there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern technology?

davidst 15y ago
Yes, depending on your expectations. With a LOT of effort it would be entirely possible to build something like SHRDLU that could handle a specific game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU Caution: Don't be misled by the impressive-looking conversation transcript. With no disrespect meant to Terry Winograd and the ground-breaking work he did it was- like every natural language demonstration since the dawn of computing- fragile, prone to odd mistakes and the transcripts were usually generated by someone already acclimated to the idiosyncrasies the system to make it look its best. You could build something that recognized a richer grammar and even engaged in limited conversational discourse. It would be good enough that a person might briefly forget they were dealing with a system of limited capabilities until, inevitably, it would break down and remind them they are not conversing with a human. The risk is those failures could be sufficiently frequent and severe as to make it worthless. The user might be better off with something less ambitious, more predictable and less frustrating. Then again, that wouldn't do anything to push the state of the art, so it should be worth the risk to try it.
jonhendry 15y ago
Simply having modern RAM capacity helps, because authors can add many more synonyms in their code to handle various player inputs. The early parsers were constrained by having to run in tiny RAM spaces (64k, 128k, 256k); expanding vocabulary was difficult to do without removing space for description text and other important game data. In Inform 7, when targeting the glulx VM the memory limits are much larger (i.e., the sizes we expect today) and you can define synonyms to your heart's content.