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Yes, I agree. Still, one of the reasons I think the Latejami-to-English translation software is so exciting is that for every Latejami sentence, it produces a corresponding English sentence with the same meaning. Therefore, it seems that even though a full-on English-to-Latejami translation program would be impossible, a "constrained English"-to-Latejami translation program that **only handled the subset of English sentences that the Latejami-to-English program could produce as output** would be much more tractable. Therefore, if a clever interface were to help the user input English sentences that the parser could actually handle--maybe via some kind of interface that continually displayed acceptable sentence completions, just as Google Suggest displays possible query completions--then you'd have an easy-to-use "constrained English"-to-Latejami translator. If others constructed such Latejami-to-natlang and "constrained natlang"-to-Latejami programs for other natlangs, you'd have essentially created the first universal translator. (E.g., if monolingual Japanese speakers wanted to translate something into another language, they'd only have to formulate their sentences in a way acceptable to the "constrained Japanese"-to-Latejami translator, which wouldn't necessarily be too hard if the interface helped them out. Then the Latejami-to-(other natlang) translator could translate their passage into the target language. Even if it was a hassle to formulate utterances in "constrained Japanese", there are definitely lots of important cases in which a good translation would be worth the work!) Obviously this would be a huge job probably requiring multiple people, and I know you're taking a break from all things Latejami for now. It's also hard to say how good the resulting translation would be given that the into-Latejami and out-of-Latejami translation steps would both likely introduce inaccuracies in the semantics and pragmatic meaning of the original utterance. But if you ever consider releasing your Ada code either as open source or under some sort of commercial license, please let this list know! Your work is fantastic, and could one day go a long way towards helping people bridge the language barrier. --- In Latejami@yahoogroups.com, <ram@...> wrote: > > "rexxia" <grecchia@...> wrote: > > > > Back in the day, I remember hearing mention of a Latejami-to-English > > translation program, presumably being written by Rick Morneau. I > > found this pretty impressive, given that Latejami certainly seems no > > "closer" to English than any other natural language. Did anything > > ever happen with this? Was such a program ever completed? > > > > The software exists, written in Ada. One of the reasons why I stopped > working on Latejami is that the basic design algorithms were becoming > too complex because I didn't anticipate some of the problems I would > eventually run into. A complete redesign is needed (which will also > require some morphological changes to the langauge). > > You can judge the quality of the software yourselves - the English > translations of all of the dictionary examples and all of the lesson > examples and drills are the unedited output of the translation software. > > It's not fair to compare translation software for Latejami-to-English > vs. natlang-to-English. Latejami syntax is simple, precise, and without > exception, and Latejami morphology is totally regular. Because of this, > software to parse and analyze Latejami is much, much simpler than for > any natural language. For example, the Latejami parser is short, simple > and 100% accurate. The equivalent software for a natural language would > be incredibly complex and fraught with error. > > > Regards, > > Rick Morneau > http://www.eskimo.com/~ram >