Saturday, September 10, 2011

Expressing Language Mathematically

My phone has a pretty cool function: speech to text. In short, I talk into the mic and it types out what I said. It's incredibly handy for small stuff like putting an address into the GPS, but is pretty lousy for anything long than a phrase.

My major issue is the complete lack of punctuation. I cannot get this thing to put in commas, colons, dashes, not even a period. And turning speech to text without any punctuation is worthless.

It occurs to me, though, that computers do not seem to really understand English, and that it is because the language is not expressed mathematically. Either there are no set of formulae that can encompass all of English, or nobody has made them.

Now, granted, I have not been able to play with more advanced software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, so I could be totally wrong, but in my experiences, language seems too complex and nuanced to be expressable by a computer program.

Still, I find it a worthy endeavor. For as much as I am interested in the musicality of language, and in its freedom and evolution of usage, I find myself endlessly fascinated with the mathematics of language.

No matter how often they change, languages have rules. They are established and agreed upon (until people agree upon a new set of them). As such, these rules should be solid, which means computers should be able to understand them. Even if the rules have exceptions, those exceptions are also firmly rooted rules.

Consider that aspect next time you write, expressing language mathematically. See how it affects your views and usage of language, knowing that it is no more than an elaborate set of rules. Then tell me what you find.

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