Boffins build a NAZI AI – wait, let's check that... OK, it's a grammar nazi Pedants, imagine how much more relaxed your life would be if artificial intelligence automatically corrected grammar mistake's in online forum and social network posts. Never again would you explode with frustration and anger over misplaced apostrophe's, commas full stop's and exclamation! marks! The faults could be fixed up …
Any kind of playful use of language will be translated into AI generated "Newspeak" and turgid prose will come of the computer controlled word sausage machine.
Why not simply develop an AI to write the text in the first place? its probably easier than trying to fix language it cannot really appreciate.
I look forward to the AI art critic suggesting "It's just a pile of bricks..."
Why not simply develop an AI to write the text in the first place?
Have you met amanfrommars?
More seriously, AI is already being used to do the boring bits.
Why not simply develop an AI to write the text in the first place?
Done long ago. One well-known example is Phillip Parker's patented book-generation system, which has been used to create hundreds of thousands of books on specialty topics. Which, yes, he sells, and apparently makes quite a lot of money from.
Generating usable natural-language prose is actually quite easy, just like generating passable music (algorithmic generation of classical and jazz music good enough to fool expert judges has been demonstrated for decades). Creating writing that's stylistically interesting, and generating new ideas on a subject, are somewhat more difficult challenges.
In any case, the point of Shan's system, and others like it, isn't to fix broken prose. It's to attempt to add punctuation to text streams that lack it, such as ASR (speech-to-text) output, to make it easier to parse correctly. This was in the article.
"At the moment, it can only deal with commas and full stops, the most common and easiest of English's punctuation marks."
If they were that easy how come so many people do without them writing enormous walls of text without so much as a pause as if their taking one deep breath and just letting out a single massive belch of their stream of consciousness ooh look a cat video ?
whatyouhadforbreakfastwhatpyjamasyouwerewearingyoudontwriteassuminganyoneisactuallygoingtoreadyyourwalloftextyouareminlesslyfidgetingwithyourphoneinsteadofinteractingwiththosearoundyouwhichleadstoyouhavingnofriendsapartfromyourphoneandtellitallaboutyourlifebecuasethereisnootherrealityaroundyou.
Written language (especially kludge known as "English"!) is entirely too flexible for a mere computer to figure out. See such (t)witticisms as "Ode to a Spell Checker" for one way to completely balls-up an AI-bot that most readers wouldn't even realize was an issue. There are many more.
For the curious:
Ode to the Spell Checker
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
"Eye halve a spelling chequer [...]"
Living in a small village near Stockholm was a good place to learn Swedish - which I did mostly by reading Asterix the Gaul. That gave me a fairly good grasp of everyday usage - but did little for my pronunciation.
One day I went into the bakery shop and used my new skills to ask for my favourite cake - a long pastry crusted with nuts. "En av den där nötter kakor, tack". (one of those nut cakes please).
I knew that "den" was locally pronounced as "dom" - but wasn't sure about "av" so tried my best guess.
She picked the cake up - good - and then started to cut it in half!
My mistake was to pronounce "av" sounding like "halv" (=half) - rather than the same sound as the English "of". Presumably there was a prior context for customers only wanting a half of that cake.
"Living in a small village near Stockholm was a good place to learn Swedish - which I did mostly by reading Asterix the Gaul. That gave me a fairly good grasp of everyday usage - but did little for my pronunciation."
I have Esperanto translations of Asterix (er Asteriks I mean) books for that same reason. Though apparently my pronunciation is perfect. That's why they moved me to the advanced Esperanto class, so they could all listen to my pronunciation in awe, despite the fact I had no idea what it was I was saying. Which is why I left those classes, it wasn't teaching me anything. I later found out I pronounce Esperanto with the same thick Aussie accent I pronounce English with, just all the other Aussie Esperanto students and teachers didn't notice.
" I later found out I pronounce Esperanto with the same thick Aussie accent I pronounce English with, [...]"
My Swedish colleagues in the Stockholm office said my accent was good - like a native of Gothenburg. They then explained that the Gothenburg Swedish accent is equivalent to the Scouse accent in English.
Written language (especially kludge known as "English"!) is entirely too flexible for a mere computer to figure out
So are you claiming human beings rely on something formally more powerful than a Turing machine to interpret language? What might that be?
Of course this is a long-standing debate. Searle, though he argued forcefully against one particular approach ("symbolic manipulation") to strong AI with his Chinese Room thought experiment, believed that the human mind was a mechanical effect, and therefore that someday, assuming continued progress, we would eventually have machines that were human-mind-equivalent. Penrose believes otherwise, and thinks human minds are formally more powerful. There are many others on both sides.
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Was " shoots, and leaves" an Oxford comma? It was merely a pause - not a comma separated list of items.
I'm afraid you're wrong; it was indeed a serial comma. The series in question is three verbs in a compound predicate. (They could also be described as three clauses, the latter two abbreviated. It comes down to the same thing.)
Truss's eats-shoots-leaves example isn't actually much of an argument for or against the serial ("Oxford") comma, because the comma that's important for distinguishing the sense of the two constructions is the one between "eats" and "shoots". The second comma is largely irrelevant to interpretation.1
The Ustinov-Mandela example someone else quoted above is a better one. In general, the serial comma really pulls its weight in cases like this, where it helps the reader distinguish between a series on the one hand, and an appositive or parenthetical phrase on the other.2
The interesting thing, to me, about the serial-comma war is that it cuts across the lines of the other Great Comma War, between the "naturalists" and the "scientifics".3 The former want English punctuation to reflect style, pacing, and often the rhythm of speech. The latter want it to conform to some sort of grammatical principles: this construction calls for a comma, and that one does not.
You might think that the scientifics would endorse the serial comma, say, because it can clarify an ambiguous phrase. But it seems plenty of them simply classify it as "unnecessary" and therefore undesirable. And similarly the naturalists are divided between those who abhor it as an ugly interruption, and those who feel its omission is lazy and jarring.
And then there's the ongoing fight over comma typography, specifically whether commas should be moved within closing quotation marks, in the style still preferred by many US copy-editors, or left unmolested when they aren't part of the quotation. It's a holdover from the days of lead type, and now pointless, but habits die hard.
1Which makes it no less contentious, of course, since proponents and opponents are perfectly happy to wage this war over questions of style, euphony, and consistency.
2Alas, a great many writers have trouble with appositives in general, or rather with treating adjectival phrases as appositives. I particularly note this when people put unnecessary commas after job titles: "Department chair, Bob Smith, said...". Those commas are not preferred and serve no purpose - "department chair" is an adjectival noun phrase preceding the compound noun it modifies. Now, if the phrase were "The department chair, Bob Smith, said..." then "Bob Smith" is an appositive phrase, and it is customary to set those off with commas. It's an appositive because "the department chair" is a complete noun phrase on its own. Really, it' s not hard.
3I'm ignoring the war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, because the latter are patently wrong and there's no point in discussing that further.
It should then be trained to assassinate anyone who follows "but" with a comma.
I was tempted to agree, but, on reflection, it occurred to me that there are many cases where the clause introduced by "but" will begin with some type of phrase that is traditionally set off with commas, such as an adverbial.
That said, there is a nasty tendency among some writers these days to move the comma that traditionally appeared before a coordinating conjunction (such as "but") to after it, and this should be greeted with scorn and derision.
My experience of reading junior engineers' English was of seeing clause after clause separated by commas, with only the occasional full stop. No other type of punctuation mark.
It was English written as it is spoken, but often with very limited vocabulary. No concept that writing is a more formal performance.
One of them told me once that I was the first person who had ever gone through their writing to point out the mistakes. This from a person in their early twenties.
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