in reply to detecting the language of a word?

One reminder, artificial intelligence as whole is a failure, although I don't deny there are some limited success in very limited number of particular areas. Machine translation is one of those things we wanted to archieve with artificial intelligence, and failed. Now you are talking about something probably even bigger than machine translation.

This has nothing to do with Perl, no language, no tool, no project so far archieved this, and during the recent years, the fever is dying down.

There are lots of foundamental problems, just give two examples:
  1. When to look up the dictionaries? Say you have a stream of words, majority English with some German, you see a word, is this a German or English? What if it exists in both languages? will you then also check grammar to make a determination, see which fits better in the overall sentence? It is getting bigger, is it?
  2. You see a word, and suspect it is not English, will you look it up in a German dictionary, or a Spanish dictionary?

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Re^2: detecting the language of a word?
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Dec 06, 2002 at 23:56 UTC
    One reminder, artificial intelligence as whole is a failure, although I don't deny there are some limited success in very limited number of particular areas. Machine translation is one of those things we wanted to archieve with artificial intelligence, and failed.

    Somebody should really tell all those people working away in AI research around the world that they're wasting their time then :-)

    AI has certainly been wildly over-hyped at various times - but tons of useful stuff has come out of it, and still is. The problem is that soon as it becomes popular people stop classifying it as AI. When I was a student GAs, expert system, GPSG parsers, neural nets, etc. were all AI. Now they're mainstream :-)

    <Adrian briefly considers his AI degree, sighs, and goes back to writing some perl>

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Off topic
by Nkuvu (Priest) on Dec 06, 2002 at 23:13 UTC
    "One reminder, artificial intelligence as whole is a failure..."

    Was there a time limit for AI that we somehow missed? The popularity of things come and go, that doesn't mean that no one is still working on those things.

    (And I agree with point 1, but the answer to point 2 is "yes".)

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