{"id":182,"date":"2006-08-29T01:25:09","date_gmt":"2006-08-29T06:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/2006\/08\/29\/parsing-natural-language\/"},"modified":"2006-08-29T01:28:16","modified_gmt":"2006-08-29T06:28:16","slug":"parsing-natural-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/2006\/08\/29\/parsing-natural-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Parsing natural language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Is the following statement true or false?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>IF YOU HAVE TWO AND ONE IS TAKEN AWAY<br \/>\nTHEN YOU HAVE ONLY ONE LEFT<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is true, right? I mean, it&#8217;s obvious. Whether you think of this as being a simple algebra problem or just common sense, that&#8217;s the answer that most of you just gave.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is, you&#8217;re wrong. Sort of. Without other cues, a machine attempting to parse this statement could legitimately look at this as involving a set of things labeled &#8220;one&#8221; and &#8220;two.&#8221; In this light, if &#8220;one&#8221; is taken away, <em>you have only &#8220;two&#8221; left.<\/em> It is true that we can write the question without ambiguity, usually by adding quotation marks, but this is much more difficult with spoken language.<\/p>\n<p>Just something to think about the next time you&#8217;re cursing an automated phone attendant&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is the following statement true or false? IF YOU HAVE TWO AND ONE IS TAKEN AWAY THEN YOU HAVE ONLY ONE LEFT This is true, right? I mean, it&#8217;s obvious. Whether you think of this as being a simple algebra problem or just common sense, that&#8217;s the answer that most of you just gave. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekstuff","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p706FA-2W","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}