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About Me
- Jenelle
- I'm a first-semester MLIS student at the University of Pittsburgh. Last spring I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a BA in History/Political Science. My interests in Library Science include Reference Services and Community/Public Services.
2 comments:
this is because human language are notoriously flexible and ambiguous. Just think how many ways we can ask someone to close the door, or refer to something called a car.
computer need clear and fixed structure in its commends so there would not be different meanings for the same thing, or different things but mean the same meaning.
A couple of other reasons I can think of:
We don't yet understand the structure of human languages well enough to be able to train a machine to use them. Syntax is a field within linguistics that is still in its infancy. I used to teach French at the college level, and it was always obvious when students used translation programs to write their papers, because they were full of strange phrases that could never be invented by a human brain!
Another problem is that there are currently between 5,000 and 6,000 languages spoken on Earth! Dozens of these are currently used on the Internet. If we were to invent a computer programming language that was a human language, which human language would we use? English, because it's currently the most commonly-used Internet language and global lingua franca? Chinese or Hindi, because they have the most native speakers? No matter which we chose, we would be putting huge numbers of speakers of other languages around the world at a disadvantage.
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