Language Translation

[FC01@USC-ECL@sri-unix.uucp]

I like the APL person's [Shrager's] point of view on translation.
The problem seems to be that APL has all the things it needs in its
primative functions. Lisp implementers have seen fit to impurify
their language by adding so much fancy stuff that they depend on so
heavily. If every lisp program were translated into lisp 1.5 (or
so), it would be easy to port things, but it would end in
innefficient implementations. I like APL, in fact, I like it so much
I've begun maintaining it on our unix system. I've fixed several
bugs, and it now seems to work very well. It has everything any
other APL has, but nobody seems to want to use it except me. I write
simulators in a day, adaptive networks in a week, and analyze
matrices in seconds. So at any rate, anyone who is interested in APL
on the VAX - especially for machine intelligence applications please
get in touch with me. It's not ludicrous by the way, IBM does more
internal R+D in APL than in any other language! That includes their
robotics programs where they do lots of ARM solutions (matrix
manipulation being built into APL has tremendous advantages in this
domain).

FLAME ON!
[I believe this refers the Stan the Leprechaun's submission in
V1 #43. -- KIL]

So if your language translation program is the last word in
translators, how come it's not in the journals? How come nobody knows
that it solves all the problems of translation? How come you haven't
made a lot of money selling COBOL to PASCAL to C to APL to LISP to
ASSEMBLER to BASIC to ... translators in the open market? Is it that
it only works for limited cases? Is it that it only deals with
'natural' languages? Is it really as good as you think, or do you only
think it's really good? How about sharing your (hopefully non
NPcomplete) solution to an NP complete problem with the rest of us!
FLAME OFF!

[...]
Fred

[Stanley T Shebs]

You have heard of my parser. It's a variant on Berkeley's PHRAN, but
has been improved to handle arbitrarily ambiguous sentences. I submitted
a paper on it to AAAI-83, but it was rejected (well, I did write it in about
3 days - wasn't very good). A paper will be appearing at the AIAA
Computers in Aerospace conference in October. The parser is only a
*basic* solution - I suppose I should have made that clearer. Since
it is knowledge-based, it needs **lots** of knowledge. Right now
we're working on ways to acquire linguistic knowledge automatically
(Selfridge's work is very interesting). The knowledge base is woefully
small, but we don't anticipate any problems expanding it (famous last words!).

The parser has just been released for use within Boeing ("just" meaning
two days ago), and it may be a while before it becomes available
elsewhere (sorry). I can mail details on it though.

As for language analysis being NP-complete, yes you're right. But
are you sure that humans don't brute-force the process, and that
computers won't have to do the same?

stan the lep hacker
ssc-vax!sts (soon utah-cs)

ps if IBM is using APL, that explains a lot (I'm a former MVS victim)

[T J Jardine]

OK, you turned your flame-thrower on, now prepare for mine! You want to
know why things don't get published -- take a look at your address and
then at mine. You live (I hope I'm not talking to an AI Project) in the
academic community; believe it or not there are those of us who work in
something euphemistically refered to as industry where the rule is not
publish or perish, the rule is keep quiet and you are less likely to get
your backside seared! Come on out into the 'real' world where technical
papers must be reviewed by managers that don't know how to spell AI, let
alone understand what language translation is all about. Then watch as
two of them get into a moebius argument, one saying that there is nothing
classified in the paper but there is proprietary information, while the
other says no proprietary but it definitely is classified! All the while
this is going on the deadline for submission to three conferences passes
by like the perennial river flowing to the sea. I know reviews are not
unheard of in academia, and that professors do sometimes get into
arguments, but I've no doubt that they would be more generally favorable
to publication than managers who are worried about the next stockholder's
meeting.

It ain't all that bad, but at least you seem to need a wider perspective.
Perhaps the results haven't been published; perhaps the claims appear
somewhat tentative; but the testing has been critical, and the only
thing left is primarily a matter of drudgery, not innovative research.
I am convinced that we may certainly find a new and challenging problem
awaiting us once that has been done, but at least we are not sitting
around for years on end trying to paste together a grammar for a context
sensitive language!!

Ted Jardine
TJ (with Amazing Grace) The Piper
ssc-vax!tjj