Slashdot Mirror
New Algorithm for Learning Languages
An anonymous reader writes "U.S. and Israeli researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences."
Paper here for those who have PNAS access.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain
Used this (easy to compile) C program:
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/markov/
to create these:
http://www.mintruth.com/mirror/texts/
Mod points to whomever can tell us what texts they use. (No mod points can actually be given)
Get your Unix fortune now!
What they've develloped is something which interprets grammar; the ruleset behind the organisation of buildingblocks, apparently buildingblock agnostic.
A dictionary is just words. This algorythm cant assign meaning to the buildingblocks, it can only dicide how and in what order the buildingblocks go together.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Yes! I'd have thrown a mod point at you just for this paragraph if I could.
English is very precise (when used as directed) in matters of time and sequence -- we have more than 20 verb tenses where most languages get away with three.
Not really. Firstly, English only has two or three tenses. (Depending upon which linguist you ask, English either has a past/non-past distinction or past/present/future distinctions. See [1], [2]. The general consensus seems to be in favor of the former, although I humbly disagree with the general consensus.) It maintains a variety of aspect distinctions (perfective vs imperfective, habitual vs continuous, nonprogressive vs progressive). See [3]. Its verbs also interact with modality, albeit slightly less strongly.
It's a very common mistake to count the combinations of tense, aspect, and modality in a language and arrive at some astronomical number of "tenses". It's an even more common mistake (for native English speakers, anyway) to think that English is special or different or strange compared to other languages. In most cases, it's not -- especially when compared with other Indo-European languages.
Secondly, and more interestingly IMHO, most languages do not have three distinct tenses. The most common cases are either to have a future/non-future distinction or a past/non-past distinction. In any case, the future tense, if it exists, is normally derived from modal or aspectual markers and is diachronically weak (which is linguist-babble meaning "future tenses forms don't stick around for very long"). See [3].
English is a perfect example: will, of course, used to refer to the agent's desire (his or her will) to do something. Only recently has it shifted to have a more temporal sense, and it still maintains some of its modal flavor. In fact, the least marked way of making the future (in the US, at least) is to use either gonna or a present progressive form: I'm having dinner with my boss tonight. I'm gonna ask him for a raise. See Comrie [1] again.
So as not to be anglo-centric, I'll give another example. Spanish has three widespread means of forming the future tense. Two of these are periphrastic and are exemplified by he de cantar 'I've gotta sing' and voy a cantar 'I'm gonna sing'. The last is the synthetic form, cantaré 'I'll sing'.
Most high school or college Spanish teachers would tell you that the "pure" future is cantaré. Actually, it's historically derived from the phrase cantar he 'I have to sing' (from Latin cantáre habeo), and is being displaced by the other two forms all across the Spanish-speaking world. I'm told, for example, that cantaré has been largely lost in in Argentina and southern Chile (see [4]).
In any case, the parent's main point still holds. It's a b?tch to deal with cross-linguistic differences in major semantic systems computationally. But good lord, it's fun to try. :)
References: