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Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

The problem is slippery though, people always reuse words to express different ideas :

"We can't buy any bread because we haven't got any bread."

And it's not just English. In Chinese one is taught that "ni hao ma?" is the greeting equivalent to "hello, how are you" but try it on a Chinese person and it amuses them. My Chinese friend at Uni says that Chinese people use "Ni chi ma?" which is literally "have you eaten?" (although we both appreciate that is a bit of a generalisation for 1bn people).

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> The problem is slippery though, people always reuse words to express different ideas : > "We can't buy any bread because we haven't got any bread."

As long as we are talking about syntactic parsing, this is not a problem as long as the attachment is the same. In both cases 'bread' is the direct object of the main verb.

Of course, there are cases where a particular word can be used both as a direct object and a subject of a particular verb. E.g.:

The man ate the pig.

The pig ate the apple.

Of course, what such systems are learning are not rules, but probability distributions that combine information about the distributions of word orders, association strengths between heads and dependent with a particular dependency relation, configurations of dependent pairs, etc.

I think they're saying tho that in one case "bread" means a kind of food, and in the other, it means money. If the different uses were more directly connected to particular words that could disambiguate, it wouldn't be too hard -- head features typically can do this -- but the disambiguation here is far more conceptual in original. You know that you need money to buy things, and so you know that not having money is a good reason for not being able to buy things. But bread-the-food is not needed to buy things, so not having it isn't a good reason for not being able to buy things. So probably the second "bread" is the bread-money version. This kind of disambiguation is super tricky without broader world knowledge.

Ah, also I just remembered the thing I was "quoting"

Rick: Why haven't we got any bread?

Neil: Because we haven't got any bread.

The Young Ones?

yes

The Taiwanese say "ni hao ma". That's probably where pedagogy got it from.

I imagine plenty of Chinese say it too, really, just like we are taught in my Chinese class at Uni.

The point being though, that even if you are taught "Hello, how are you" in an English class then you could well be stumped when you come to my region and we say "How's tricks?"

The referenced papers are about syntactic parsing, not semantics.

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