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From: alan@allegra.UUCP (Alan S. Driscoll)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Sastric Sanskrit
Message-ID: <2855@allegra.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Oct-84 18:25:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: allegra.2855
Posted: Mon Oct 15 18:25:11 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Oct-84 06:29:30 EDT
References: <12975@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 37

I don't understand a number of points that Rick Brigg has made:

> I did not mean to imply that lack of word order is a sufficient
> condition for unambiguity, only that it is an indication.

Why is lack of word order an indication of unambiguity?  Unambiguity
means one meaning per utterance, right?  That says nothing about how
meaning is conveyed.

>        My comments about English stem from its lack of case.

Why is it better (less ambiguous, clearer) to communicate meaning by
case inflection than by word order?  Can you back this assertion up?

>        "There is an activity(vyaapaara:) , subsisting in the pot,
>        with agency residing in one substratum not different from
>        Caitra, which produces the softening which subsists in rice."

A bit verbose, isn't it?  You could starve before explaining to your
waitress, precisely and unambiguously, what you wanted...

> I also disagree with "...structural ambiguity is not particularly
> bad nor incompatible with 'logical' expression."  Certainly ambiguity
> is a major impediment to designing an intelligent natural language
> processor.

What is the connection between the quoted statement and your reply? In
my opinion, an "intelligent natural language processor" would have to
deal with ambiguity "intelligently".  Ambiguity is there in language,
whether computational linguists like it or not, and I would argue that,
rather than being gratuitous, AMBIGUITY CARRIES MEANING in many cases.

-- 

	Alan S. Driscoll
	AT&T Bell Laboratories