RE: [MLUG] AI - any suggestions?

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Michael wrote:

> English rarely actually follows proper syntax if you want to
> understant real conversations.

I think you're talking about "proper syntax" as a synonym for "proper
grammar" in the prescriptive grammarian (school teacher) sense.  But
that's not a very interesting point, since any intelligible dialect on
the planet will have syntactic regularities that can be studied, written
down, and used...up to a point.

> You can make English-like languages (such as Basic or SQL) and can
> understand subsets of English but making a fully working model in a
> strict system would be one hell of a job.

Neither Basic nor COBOL nor SQL have underlying structures anything like
English.  What they do have is some suggestive vocabulary and some very
low level similarities in some cases to things like noun phrases.  The
interesting thing about the so-called "English-like" languages is that
they turn out to be not very good solutions to anything.  So, SQL is a
horrible language for expressing many reasonable queries on relational
databases, yet most office workers can't effectively use it at all.
There is probably more "write-only" code written in (or around) the
"English-like" Cobol than most other languages combined.

Note that I don't have any good answers here.  But I do know what some
of the nasty questions are. :-)

jking


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