Back in the office

First of all, I’d just like to say that I am back in the home-office after the honeymoon, and working hard! So I am now picking up emails, having meetings and doing work as usual… so do feel free to get in touch.

Language Processing

Secondly… Beki and I went to Sicily (a town called Cefalu’) on our honeymoon, and before we went I decided that it would probably be a good idea to learn some of the basics of Italian. I know a bit of Spanish, and a tiny bit of French and a very tiny bit of Swedish, so picking up the basics of another language could potentially be a bit easier than learning a language from scratch. While learning Italian it came to me that Italian, and the other Latin-based languages are incredibly “rules-based“, they follow quite strict grammar rules which are almost followed, even the shortening of sentences follow a certain rule. This differs from English, which I would call “lexicon-based“, where words have set meanings with a very subtle grammatical influence and are strung together using very liberal grammar rules.

The question then comes then, that, maybe it would be easier (i.e. more semantically viable) to do computational language processing - in its logical form rather than its statistical form - on a language such as Italian, or even Latin.

This is relevant for my research and development in Natural Language Processing, which I have always favoured the symbolic processing over the connectionist or statistical approaches. Maybe it is something I need to look into in more detail, and maybe there is some research about it elsewhere (if my readers know of any then please do let me know, either by a comment or by sending me an email!).