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I would agree with EDW, and I have argued here in a similar way. I am not against use of NL in negotiation or poetry. If you find ambiguity useful there, be my
by js8 19d ago
I would agree with EDW, and I have argued here in a similar way.
I am not against use of NL in negotiation or poetry. If you find ambiguity useful there, be my guest. But engineering specifications, mathematics, as well as other sciences or even philosophy would IMHO benefit from more rigor.
I also strongly disagree with the notion that logical or programming languages cannot express ambiguity. (It actually took me many years to understand.) I used to think you need something like fuzzy logic or probability, but that's unsatisfactory in some ways. Eventually, I settled for a really simple understanding of the problem.
Take lambda calculus for instance. I define the term to be ambiguous iff it has a normal form. So it is ambiguous if it expects additional argument, which resolves (part of or all) the ambiguity. Terms with no normal form are completely unambiguous, their "output" is completely given.
In classical logic, this corresponds to formulas that are conditioned on additional assumption. Again, the extra assumption can resolve the ambiguity.
So it is kind of my conviction (although we could show that by translating an LLM as a program into LC) that all the words in natural language can be formalized as sufficiently complicated lambda terms, that all have normal forms and react to each other in a way that resolves some ambiguity without ever resolving all of it.