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Lu�s Pedro Machado <zwei@hidden.email> wrote: > > I already knew that Katanda was replaced by Nasendi! I was only saying > that I was surprised because nobody was sending messages, specially when > your project is at a very important phase... Should this group be > renamed to Nasendi?... > I did not create this group, so I have no idea how to do it. Ideally, it should be changed, but it doesn't really matter to me. > > Why don't you make a service available at Nasendi's web-site capable of > doing translations from Nasendi/Katanda to English? Although it seems to > me that it is best for you to outcast the program under Gnu Public > Licence (GPL), you may make available only the service, or the > executable... Is your current translation software good enough? > A translation server on my web site would serve no useful, MT-related purpose. Since the software is being completely rewritten, and since I just started doing it recently, it is not very robust. The only things I've implemented are what you see in the lessons. I plan to eventually release the software under the GNU GPL, but only after it is substantially done. I am also willing to provide a copy of it before that time to people who are seriously interested in using Nasendi in MT and who are also experienced in MT. Unfortunately, most people on this mailing list seem to be primarily interested in IALs or hobby use of the language. My ONLY interest is in MT. > > I also asked you about which programming language did you use to build > the software (Prolog, C?) and also which "translation system" > (transfer... etc.)? (I love Haskell, a pure functional programming > language, (www.haskell.org), but perhaps this is not the best one suited > for machine translation (MT)...) > The software is written in Ada. I chose Ada because of its many advantages over other compiled languages for programming large, robust, and easy-to-maintain programs. For more info about Ada, check out http://www.adaic.org/whyada/index.html. Nasendi is designed to be an MT interlingua, thus the overall system is interlingual. However, the individual translation programs can use whatever method tickles your fancy (direct, transfer, memory-based, statistical, etc). My Nasendi-to-English translator is essentially a transfer system with rich semantic analysis. > > since several flaws were discovered in the design of Katanda, what > guaranty (/guarantee?/warranty??) do we have that Nasendi has no flaws > at all? More generally, is it not necessary, first of all, to prove that > it is possible to design a language (Nasendi, in particular) which will > function perfectly well in MT??... If you don't prove that, could not > the design of Nasendi (or any other else) be a loss of time? > Perfection is not possible because I'm only human. I'm simply trying to make Nasendi as good as I can make it. By the way, I have no idea how anyone could prove that the design of an MT interlingua is flawless. It would require linguistic science that is far more advanced than anything we have today. Proving the correctness of an interlingua would be orders of magnitude more difficult than proving the correctness of a piece of software. > > I haven't analysed Nasendi enough to be sure that its syntax can be > captured by a program written in YACC/bison. What do you say about this, > Rick? > It should be trivially easy to implement a parser using either yacc or bison. However, I wrote the parser directly in Ada for consistency with the other modules, and because it was so easy to implement because of Nasendi's precise syntax. > > Do you think that an optimally MT-designed language is good as an > auxiliary international language, or otherwise it has certain > characteristics which make it too "heavy" for that purpose? > Sorry, but the world already has an interlingua. It's called English. > > I am sorry for the extent of this message and for my english errors > What errors? I didn't notice any. You write English better than most native speakers. Regards, Rick Morneau http://www.eskimo.com/~ram