Re:A Simple Structure Unites All Human Languages
by ajuc on Saturday September 21, 2019 @10:58AM
(#21035734)
> Regarding “expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation”: this should just translate straightforwardly to an implied subject.
Yes you can express any set as a tree (in fact as many possible trees) but if different possible tree representations of that set are equally as valid - then the tree structure isn't really there, it's just an arbitrary interpretation imposed on the data.
If a sentence A B C can be reordered to any permutation, and some parts can be dropped without changing the meaning - then what lets you decide that the proper representation is this tree:
.
/ \
A .
/ \
B C
and not this:
.
/ \
. C
/ \
A B
And if any of these is as valid as any other - why insist that the underlying structure is even a tree?
Another hint that these kinds of interpretations are wrong is that most succesfull NLP software typically uses word vectors which ignore the tree-like structure and just treats the data as unordered set :)
To understand a sentence it is more important to know all the words in it, than to know how they are nested. Even for analytical languages like English :)
Yes you can express any set as a tree (in fact as many possible trees) but if different possible tree representations of that set are equally as valid - then the tree structure isn't really there, it's just an arbitrary interpretation imposed on the data.
If a sentence A B C can be reordered to any permutation, and some parts can be dropped without changing the meaning - then what lets you decide that the proper representation is this tree:
and not this: And if any of these is as valid as any other - why insist that the underlying structure is even a tree?Another hint that these kinds of interpretations are wrong is that most succesfull NLP software typically uses word vectors which ignore the tree-like structure and just treats the data as unordered set :)
To understand a sentence it is more important to know all the words in it, than to know how they are nested. Even for analytical languages like English :)