Can We Translate English To English?
rjlipton.wordpress.com
rjlipton.wordpress.com
The developer in me thought, "Oh man. That would be effing sweet."
When you code, mustn't you be aware of what the code constructs literally say, because that is how the compiler will interpret then?
Similarly, if someone was using what you proposed, they would have to keep in mind that the other person would see the proper English, not the net-speak. So they would - I think - end up thinking in proper English first, then coding the proper English using net-speak. They must think in terms of the end result, in terms of what the person they're communicating with will read. For that reason, I disagree with your assessment that people would be able to think "I don't need to bother learning to communicate effectively."
Edit: It's worth noting that something about it still feels horribly wrong to me, but I can't seem to find the right words to express it. So I will concede... for now! :-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898053
Even if a computer could translate netspeak to "Proper English," it would still be computer-translated "Proper English." The idea of allowing a computer to choose which words to use, or where punctuation should go, or anything like that, is unsettling to me. The translation model works for programming languages because compilers have no emotions, but any message that starts out in shorthand with the intention of being read by a human is intrinsically hamstrung.
In fact, this can be true for programming languages, too! C is like short-hand; the compiler is what turns our netspeak (C) into "Proper English" (assembly/machine code). It usually works, but sometimes you just have to dip into assembly to really express what you mean.
But what it basically boils down to is a counting argument; if you are a human and you have ten thoughts of various kinds that in your illiteracy all get "translated" (putting it politely) to "lolz that suckz", no computer algorithm, or indeed anything else, can translate that back out to the original ten thoughts. It could pick one of them and use that, and that chosen though may be extremely eloquently expressed, but that's all it can do. A fixed number of inputs can only go to a fixed number of outputs; there's no magical process whereby anything, not even a human, can take truly useless semantic garbage text and turn that into accurate informative well-written text without loss. There's radically more well-formed, coherent thoughts than there are fuzzy thoughts and there simply isn't any sort of mapping at all from fuzzy to coherent. If someone wishes to communicate precisely, they will always have to put the effort into it, there is no magical shortcut. There's no need to worry about the effects of the magical shortcut on people or on society, no such thing exists.
In fact this is actually just another form of the following argument in heavy disguise: http://matt.might.net/articles/why-infinite-or-guaranteed-fi... I'm making the same argument in the other direction; that argues there is no such thing as a "guaranteed compressor", I'm arguing in the other direction, that there can not exist a decompresser than can take some smallish set of gibberish and map it to the much richer set of interesting thoughts. Information theory is fun for being able to make arguments about this hypothetical translator and a hypothetical perfect decompresser the same argument in the end.
The obvious counterargument is that a human might be able to use more context and extract more details to get a richer sense of the details; a stream of poorly written text can still mean more than one bad tweet. The problem is that the source information is everything that a human or anything else uses to make its decisions. Anything a human could use, a program could in principle use as well, even if we couldn't write it today. Differences between humans and computers are only issues of how good the translator may be; the theoretical limit on both is unaffected by those differences.
you seem to contradict yourself a bit, first you agree that an algorithm could take "lolz that suckz" and produce "one of" the original thoughts that got transcribed as it, then you say there "simply isn't any sort of mapping" from "fuzzy thoughts" (sentences produced by transcribing thoughts?) to coherent ones. but obviously there are many such mappings, it's just that they aren't guaranteed to produce the same thought the author of the "fuzzy thought" had when he wrote down what he was thinking.
now, what is the actual cause for fear? is it the idea that we might someday be able to communicate without taking too much effort (what you say is impossible), or that people with nothing going on between their ears will be able to produce computer-mediated output that is indistinguishable from coherent thought? i think the latter is more cause for concern/more interesting but i dont think anything youve said really addresses it. tbh i also dont think your brief discussion of information theory does much in the way of arguing against the former either. (your argument could be adapted to show that morse code is impossible, because messages are shorter in morse code than they would be in a straightforward ternary ascii encoding. but actually, it's just that the messages we typically wish to send are generally shorter.)
But something like Photoshop filters for text style might be possible. You can imagine the cheesy use of, say, gothic-romanticising, like overdone HDR tone mapping. But there are useful image manipulations too, when well deployed, and there must be similar potential for text, maybe more so given its more structured form . . .
That's eminently quotable.
edit: "rant reviewer" => "grant reviewer"
edit2: proposal => proposals (even though it's proposal in the link, putting proposal[sic] just looks odd).
I'd pay $10 without thinking twice for a chrome extension that simply ensured the correct versions of there, their and they're were replaced based on context when they were misused. Hmm, I wonder how hard that would be.
I feel the same about some older English works. For a long time, I've thought it'd be cool to have one talented author translate an older English book into modern Japanese, and a second author who hadn't read the original to translate it back to English. I bet it'd be more readable.
It's just not a reasonable thing to expect from the general populace.
I'm thinking particularly here of the process inside, say, a news agency. Many of the changes made by sub-editors are fairly mechanical modifications, to conform to a standard style. They might well be sufficiently repetitive to train a 'translator'.
You could also take a corpus of 'good' and a corpus of 'bad' writing, and compare the features in each. sentence length, constructions used. Origin of words would be an interesting one ('never use a Latinate word where an Anglo-Saxon one will do').
Unfortunately, most of the difference between good and bad writing is in the ordering of ideas; you can't really deal with that on statistical grounds.