Free-Form Linguistic Input In Mathematica 8

vbraga writes "With the release of Mathematica 8, it now allows input through free-form English instead of the Mathematica syntax, just like the Wolfram|Alpha engine. The results are impressive. From the blog post: 'I routinely found myself using free-form linguistics as an integral part of longer computations — randomly interspersing Mathematica syntax and free-form linguistics on different lines in a Mathematica session, and just using whichever was most convenient for a particular input. And here's an exciting part: in Mathematica 8 the free-form linguistics doesn't just operate line-by-line. It knows the context in which it's used in a notebook, so you can use it to build things up.'"

Comments

Basically just Wolfram Alpha integration

[IICV]

Judging from the article, this amounts to some fairly rich integration with Wolfram Alpha.

Now why would it make sense to, in essence, turn Mathematica into a partially cloud-based application? Could it be because of all the millions of college students around the world who have pirate copies? Surely not!

Freeform linguistics no good unless perfect

[presidenteloco]

There is an inherent problem with free-form linguistic input to computer systems.
If it doesn't have near-perfect comprehension of a wide range of topics, it's
frustrating as hell. It's like talking to a person that is mostly there, but has
brain lesions that wiped out part of their memory or frontal lobe, making them
oblivious to some common concepts and ways of speaking.

It's directly analogous to the "uncanny gulf" between a near-perfect computer-graphics person
and a real person. It freaks the hell out of people.

I'm not saying that natural language interfaces are always going to be a bad idea, but
the system underneath needs true comprehension of the world and the motives of speakers,
and of many ways of expressing the same thing. The bar is very, very high.

Re:Freeform linguistics no good unless perfect

[swillden]

Did you read the article?

I think that they've hit on an excellent way of making imperfect freeform linguistics very useful. Basically, it's provided as an alternative to a more precise input language, one that works a lot of the time and when it does requires less effort by the user. When the computer can work out what you mean, it does. But it also always translates what it thought you meant into the precise, formal language and displays that so that you can tell whether it got it right. Further, if there are a few competing interpretations of the vague, freeform input, the tool makes it easy for you to pick the one that you meant.

As long as it gets what you mean right enough of the time, while allowing you to be vague enough that using the freeform input really is saving you mental effort, I can see tremendous value in this approach. And over time it will continue to get better.

I have no doubt that you'll quickly learn that there are some kinds of things which are just better-expressed in formal notation. Heck, we sometimes find that to be the case even when we're communicating with other humans. But there are also a LOT of cases where informal language works just as well and is a lot easier. I'm sure that set will be smaller when working with Mathematica than another person -- but it looks to me based on the article like the set is large enough to be useful.

In particular, I can definitely see using this as an easier route to a lot of the more obscure commands and options, such as the options to tweak graphs in various ways. And if it turns out that using the natural language didn't work, well, your next step was going to be to dig through the manual to figure out the formal notation anyway, so it didn't cost you much time.

I can see this freeform linguistics approach being quite valuable, even though it's quite imperfect.

ability to turn it off

[e**(i pi)-1]

I could not yet try Mathematica 8 out, but I hope one will be able to turn the feature on and off. A switch like in "perl -w" should be built in. Mathematica is first of all also a programming language, especially for Mathematics and colloquial language is not precise. It could be be frustrating if wrong syntax still produces reasonable results. Incorrect, but working code might become the standard if one does not notice. Its like with memory allocation errors in C produced by incorrect code which still compiles. It will haunt the programmer in the long term.