14
votes
Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?
In the realm of natural language, the "ideas a language can be used to express" are basically "any": all languages are capable of expressing any idea, so there's only one category of expressive type. ...
- 82.1k
11
votes
Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?
In computer science, one essential property of all Turing-complete languages is that they are able to describe, "in their own way", how they themselves work.
For example, you can use a Turing ...
- 211
10
votes
Accepted
Is it OK to render Hebrew words with the final form missing?
N, yo nee t spel ou you word completel. I fina letter ar trul no a optio, yo ca us th no fina form. Fo exampl, yo ca writ:
ראשונ
Thi doesn' loo righ, bu shou b understandabl. Omittin th las lette ...
- 1,046
5
votes
Are European Union parallel multilingual texts ideal for machine learning of machine translation?
Europarl is a classic corpus for research papers, used at the main conference - WMT - and by some of the top people in the field.
It would be useful for training a translation system specifically for ...
- 7,531
4
votes
Reversing text -- how do different cultures and languages approach this?
I think James K's answer gives valuable insight, and shows the way to the general principle: Text reversal in any language is the reversal of the order of the units. Text reversal for a given writing ...
- 2,392
4
votes
Reversing text -- how do different cultures and languages approach this?
Kaibun (circle sentences) are a poetic form in Japanese, for example (in romaji)
Ta-ke-ya-bu ya-ke-ta (The bamboo grove has been burned) from Wikipedia, Kaibun.
(they are also a "uncle joke&...
- 324
4
votes
Are there two senses of "grammar" with respect to semantics?
You could say that there are myriad senses of grammar. For example, even here, some people speak of "grammar" as referring to syntax. Since syntax has connections to morphology, it can also ...
- 82.1k
3
votes
Natural languages, programming languages, and information theory
As I interpret your question, you propose an alternative theory of syntax to CFG for linguistics. It's a thought, but do you have any evidence? I didn't see any. Don't you think you should have ...
- 12.4k
3
votes
Are there two senses of "grammar" with respect to semantics?
There are indeed different senses of "grammar". In the scientific (linguistic) sense, it has a broader meaning than in everyday language. Grammar in the broader sense is any system of rules ...
- 755
3
votes
Speech and Language Processing without Representation of Language?
Well, even a character based neural network (CNN) does not only take the letters of a text into account, but also the their order. So, a text is not just reduced to a bag of characters.
However, a ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
How to find a given text's complexity?
Yes and no. There are a number of well-known algorithms for determining a text's complexity. There are several generations of these and most of them are tied to educational attainment such as years of ...
- 10.6k
3
votes
Can we simulate the pronunciation of sounds that we can't make?
I think it is not possible to accurately model the acoustics of the impossible sounds. The greyed-out impossible cells are cases judged to be incompatible with human physiology (as opposed to the ...
- 82.1k
3
votes
Accepted
Can we simulate the pronunciation of sounds that we can't make?
Good question!
For vowels, the chart actually shows a continuous space, with height, backness, and rounding corresponding to values we can measure (and synthesize): the formant positions.
For ...
- 64.1k
3
votes
Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?
I have had the same thought before and this is what I have found.
There are two main concerns. Semantic completeness and grammatical completeness.
Semantics: A language needs a minimum set of ...
- 71
2
votes
Do humans differ from other animals by being able to push and pop memory?
I'm sure you know more about this than I do, but problems like center embedding make me question whether push/pop memory is a useful abstraction for human brain. Quoting Wikipedia:
A man that a ...
- 1,111
2
votes
Accepted
Find the 5 most-different-from-each other adjectives in the English language
Here's one way you could do this:
Find a suitable corpus; there are plenty out there, but which one is best depends on your specific application. This'll be easier for English than for most other ...
- 64.1k
2
votes
Is formal semantics useful for computational linguistics and NLP?
Yes, it’s useful. Formal semantics can serve as a basis for the stochastic methods. There are many approaches, let me just mention one — abductive parsing and interpretation. It’s based on formal ...
- 2,570
1
vote
Are there two senses of "grammar" with respect to semantics?
From a programmer's perspective, there are languages with a clear split between "grammar" and "semantics", and languages where that distinction becomes murky.
For example, a ...
- 111
1
vote
Is there a most "efficient" / most "simple" / most "logical" language?
The standard answer is Lojban or some similar constructed "logical" language. English is a perfectly satisfactory natural, but many people dislike the complex spelling ("lead" has ...
- 82.1k
1
vote
Natural languages, programming languages, and information theory
The situation with natural languages is more convoluted because the analysis of sentences crucially depends on background knowledge, which makes use of metaphors, metonymy etc. widespread. Consider ...
- 2,570
1
vote
Seq2seq translation model. ValueError: An operation has `None` for gradient
This error means that an operation in your graph is not differentiable. In this case, it's one of the operations within the embedding layers. For this reason, it's generally said that embedding layers ...
- 251
1
vote
Natural languages, programming languages, and information theory
If you are thinking of formal language theory to compare programming languages and human languages, make sure you compare apples to apples. Don't mix up what a program can compute with what grammar ...
- 4,445
1
vote
Formalization and representation of semantic and pragmatic knowledge?
I would say that the whole research area of Knowledge Representation, including Description Logics, Modal Logics, Temporal Logics, Fuzzy Logics, aims at formally representing semantics (and sometimes ...
- 251
1
vote
Formalization and representation of semantic and pragmatic knowledge?
There have been efforts to formalize pragmatic knowledge for quite some time now.
The main formalisms I know of that attempt to go beyond the sentence-level are things like RST (rhetorical structure ...
- 1,023
1
vote
Accepted
Speech and Language Processing without Representation of Language?
To your question 1)
Your question assumes that neural networks have no representation. Fact is, that neural networks have a layout (of layers, convolutional weight schemes) that are setup before ...
- 251
1
vote
Which writing script can represent all human sounds?
No doubt IPA surpasses all existing writing systems as it not only provide specific symbols for phonemes and allophones on the segmental level, but it also provide varying degrees of stress patterns, ...
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