Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the reference. What I'm talking about is quite different, though.

Leibniz's proposal and similar ones are about a language intended to represent knowledge (formal concepts), and usable by people (with training).

I'm talking about simply a translation layer. It doesn't "know" or symbolize anything on its own -- it's merely a central mapping between all constructs in different languages. Nobody would read or write in it directly, and it couldn't be used to make inferences or anything like that.

What Abstract Wikipedia is proposing is actually quite similar to what Leibniz proposed, an intricately detailed map of knowledge and true propositions.

What I'm proposing is vastly less ambitious and vastly more useful: just a way to store the meaning of text in an intermediate representation that belongs to no single language. But that representation doesn't bother with what are facts or propositions or anything like that -- just entities and relations that mapped to however we ultimately understand languages in the real world. And assisted with a ton of ML, rather than built up from elementary propositions or set theory or something.

I think ultimately this endeavor would run into the same issues which befell the efforts of the GOFAI research program. A translation layer would need to "understand" embedded higher-order contexts of language making implicit references to the world, and which vary by different languages and cultures. Such contexts are not analytically decomposable in a manner which permits a centralized mapping.

As with GOFAI, a formalized representation of meaning entails certain ontological assumptions about "how the world hangs together". These assumptions often hold true for an isolated domain of inquiry but falter when dealing with more complex phenomena. I could, however, see such a system useful for 'Simple Wikipedia' articles which largely consist of existentially quantifiable sentences.

There is a wealth of philosophical scholarship on the issues of semantics and formal representation; I recommend the works of Hubert Dreyfus if you want to dig into this more.

hasn’t it been suggested that the internals of google translate and similar systems have effectively constructed such a meta-language?

It seems like you could construct a meta-linguistic sentence by writing a phrase in one language and choosing from possible translations in additional languages, which would hone the cross-linguistic meaning. You might not even have to define a representation of the metalanguage, you could just keep a set of (phrase, score) tuples, and interpolate translations of those phrases into the target language at display time! that almost sounds practical to me

>hasn’t it been suggested that the internals of google translate and similar systems have effectively constructed such a meta-language?

No, Google Translate and other state of the art machine translation software rely on large corpuses of linguistic data from which they make statistical inference. They do not have a 'centralized metalanguage' which ontologizes meaning in the manner described by OP.

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