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From: nik@scs.leeds.ac.uk (Nik Silver)
Subject: Re: The Potential Pitfalls of Interlinguas
Message-ID: <1994Oct26.141422.20965@leeds.ac.uk>
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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 14:14:22 +0000 (GMT)
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Rene Andersen (flanhart@diku.dk) wrote:
> I have always seen the purpose of interlingua to be: 
>
> To resolve the ambiguity within natural language.
>
> And if the interlingua is ambiguous itself (by being a natural
> language) then we still have the difficulties of mapping, if we want
> to (say) generate a translation in a new natural language. Any
> arguments?

I think the above has to be clarified. If you want an interlingua
to be totally unambiguous then certainly a natural language is
unsuitable.

On the other hand, if you want an interlingua to remove ambiguity from
individual sentences then you could just restate the sentence unambiguously
in the same language. The interlingua is the language itself.

I also get the feeling from the above that we aren't distinguishing an
interlingua (used to translate between languages) from a knowledge
representation form (used for storing "knowledge").  This relates to the
question of what constitutes ambiguity. The sentence:
       (1) Please cut off the legs;
becomes ambiguous if we need to translate it into Spanish (which has
several words for English "leg"), but not if we just want to retain
it in an English-based system.

Nik.
