4 ms·

I'm just making this stuff up based on what seems sensible. For all I know, my hypothesis has been made countless times before and refuted by practicing linguis

I'm just making this stuff up based on what seems sensible. For all I know, my hypothesis has been made countless times before and refuted by practicing linguists. But, from what I can see so far in this conversation, the hypothesis seems plausible.

dfc 14y ago
So what is all the extra markup supposed to indicate? ([_] - [great _]) * ([great _] - [great green _]) What is the first [_] ? Why do you alternate between *s and -s? What is the point of "[x _] denotes the expected number of substitutions admitted by the hole (_) in the context x." if everything seems to have the same number of substitutions? When I first saw the markup without examining it closely I was excited that I might learn a new markup/sentence diagramming format. Upon closer inspection it seems its just a bunch of characters that when interrogated closely add very little value. I think smackfu was correct: substituting different adjectives of the same type should not change the order of the adjectives. How are people supposed to discuss things they are not familiar with? What should I do if I do not know what portion of houses are brick? What proportion are colonial versus modern? Or what proportion of craftsman style houses are brick? It is beyond me why this is the lead thread under a pretty interesting and out of the ordinary link on HN.
- tmoertel 14y ago
  I defined [x _] to denote the size of the hole _ in the context x. By "size" I mean some measure of the width of the distribution of things that can sensibly fill the hole. One reasonable measure would be entropy. So, for example, we could say that [_] means the entropy of the distribution of things that could sensibly fill a hole in the empty context, which is to say start a new phrase. Similarly, [great _] denotes the entropy of the phrases that could sensibly follow "great". Does the notation make sense now? Update: The * and - symbols are just the usual arithmetic operators applied to the sizes.
- jlees 14y ago
  Look into LKB, if you haven't already. I used it extensively in my master's (computational linguistics) and though I've forgotten most of what I knew, you might find it an interesting rabbit hole in terms of sentence representation formats. Especially if you dig Lisp.

dfc 14y ago

So what is all the extra markup supposed to indicate? ([_] - [great _]) * ([great _] - [great green _]) What is the first [_] ? Why do you alternate between *s and -s? What is the point of "[x _] denotes the expected number of substitutions admitted by the hole (_) in the context x." if everything seems to have the same number of substitutions? When I first saw the markup without examining it closely I was excited that I might learn a new markup/sentence diagramming format. Upon closer inspection it seems its just a bunch of characters that when interrogated closely add very little value. I think smackfu was correct: substituting different adjectives of the same type should not change the order of the adjectives. How are people supposed to discuss things they are not familiar with? What should I do if I do not know what portion of houses are brick? What proportion are colonial versus modern? Or what proportion of craftsman style houses are brick? It is beyond me why this is the lead thread under a pretty interesting and out of the ordinary link on HN.

tmoertel 14y ago
I defined [x _] to denote the size of the hole _ in the context x. By "size" I mean some measure of the width of the distribution of things that can sensibly fill the hole. One reasonable measure would be entropy. So, for example, we could say that [_] means the entropy of the distribution of things that could sensibly fill a hole in the empty context, which is to say start a new phrase. Similarly, [great _] denotes the entropy of the phrases that could sensibly follow "great". Does the notation make sense now? Update: The * and - symbols are just the usual arithmetic operators applied to the sizes.
jlees 14y ago
Look into LKB, if you haven't already. I used it extensively in my master's (computational linguistics) and though I've forgotten most of what I knew, you might find it an interesting rabbit hole in terms of sentence representation formats. Especially if you dig Lisp.