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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. ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 77k
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 ...
mat's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Robert Columbia's user avatar
7 votes

Which writing script can represent all human sounds?

The only writing system that comes close to what you describe is the IPA, or the now-deprecated APA. However, if you add the consideration of being "phonemic", then we would have to know exactly what ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 77k
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 ...
Adam Bittlingmayer's user avatar
5 votes

Which writing script can represent all human sounds?

There is another universal script, called Shwa. It can be seen here : www.shwa.org Shwa has two huge advantages over IPA: - it's featural, so letterforms give you a good idea of the sound value, ...
user10458's user avatar
  • 110
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 ...
Luke Sawczak's user avatar
  • 2,239
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&...
James K's user avatar
  • 314
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 ...
Sylar's user avatar
  • 71
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 ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
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 ...
Dominik Lukes's user avatar
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 ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 77k
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 ...
Draconis's user avatar
  • 60.2k
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 ...
Greg Lee's user avatar
  • 12.3k
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 ...
jick's user avatar
  • 1,090
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 ...
Draconis's user avatar
  • 60.2k
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 ...
Atamiri's user avatar
  • 2,518
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 ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 77k
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 ...
TheLoneDeranger's user avatar
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 ...
Mitch's user avatar
  • 4,416
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 ...
Atamiri's user avatar
  • 2,518
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 ...
peschü's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Typhon's user avatar
  • 1,013
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 ...
peschü's user avatar
  • 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, ...
Dr Metin Yurtbasi's user avatar
1 vote

Which writing script can represent all human sounds?

Yes. It is called "International phonetic alphabet" (IPA).
fdb's user avatar
  • 23.4k

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