I was listening to a neuro-linquistic teacher talk about learning, words, and communication, and wondered a new thought for me :-) Can we actually mathematically model the linguistic communication process, so that we can write equations to describe how words and concepts get conveyed.

For instance, couldn't there be an initial distinction, between static entities, and dynamic energy, where dynamic words and concepts are the ones which convey a sense of the flow of Time, the Tao. So words could be classified to either have no sense of time flow, or a sense of flow... a male female distinction of sorts... a 1 or 0 for a static or dynamic evoking concept or word. Might not there be some weird , yet undocumented patterns where something like a sequence of static and dynamic words, can actually be codified, so that a sentence of speech can be turned into an actual equation, in the form of variables transforming themselves into the future... a time-flow-equation.

Well, has cabin stir-craziness set in for me yet? :-)

Is there an Institute for Time Flow studies?, a Perl module??? heh heh :-)

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
  • Comment on mathematically modelling language and communication... a time-flow equation

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Re: mathematically modelling language and communication... a time-flow equation
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 06, 2011 at 22:21 UTC
    Whatever it is you're smokin', I'd like some... 8-)
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Re: mathematically modelling language and communication... a time-flow equation
by JavaFan (Canon) on Nov 06, 2011 at 21:50 UTC
    Is there a mathematical model that can make any sense of your rambling? You write nouns and verbs, but I've no idea what idea you're exploring in your meditation. Perhaps you're actually asking a question, but even that I cannot distill from it.
[reply]
      Is there a mathematical model that can make any sense of your rambling?

      My first thought at a model, from my ingrained Catholic grade school training, would be the sentence diagraming model, that we all used to do on the blackboards.

      Words all become objects, which can either be standalone or modifiers for other objects. These word objects all would have multiple state variables, which would indicate the subtle nuances in meaning for the object's current usage, maybe stored in a set of AoA's.

      The ultimate goal would be to make a universal language, which conveys conventional linquistic concepts, thru mathematical relations. Like ship 3 crates of grapes to America, would end up $ship( crates,3, seedless ) ; $to( America, ocean-container, refrigerated)

      It would probably evolve into some sort of heiroglyphic-like pictogram communication, where a series of properly placed and aligned data sets, or pictograms, would evoke a concept in the receiver's mind.... like those international signs for bathroom, or taxi-stand, or food courts.

      I guess I'm trying to convey concepts with data sets arranged in a clever order, much the way pictograms are used for international signage.

      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
      Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
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[reply]
        Well, if before you start implementing something like that, be sure to read up on the many decades of (academic) research that has been performed on this topic.

        It's going to be a little bit more subtle that a set of AoAs.

        --
        Time flies like an arrow.
        Fruit flies like a banana.

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Re: mathematically modelling language and communication... a time-flow equation
by cavac (Prior) on Nov 07, 2011 at 12:08 UTC

    I'm not exactly sure what you are rambling about, but sounds like statistical text analylis to me.

    You may want to look into Text analytics and Text mining.

    Also, reading about Markov chains, Bayesian statistics and Neural networks might be a good idea, since they all can be used to mathematically model different aspects of text. Good examples for this usage would be spam detection and matching anonymous text snippets to their potential authors.

    What you have be aware of, though, is this aspect: Speech itself has no intrinsic value in terms of meaning, it is merely one of the methods of communicating thoughts. If you want to do more than mathematical analysis of text, you would have to find a way of associating meaning to the text snippets. Since humans always combine emotions with learnings, this you would have to replicate as well. There is an article here that describes this.

    Don't use '#ff0000':
    use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
    All colors subject to change without notice.
[reply]
      Since humans always combine emotions with learnings, this you would have to replicate as well.

      Maybe not, if the language was designed for computers to speak to one another, the various emotions would just be numbers in a scale, in the word-object's state variables. I guess that would be replicating them, with a computed number. For instance, on a scale of 1 to 100, just how happy are you? :-)

      Thanks for the good thoughts.

      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
      Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
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Re: mathematically modelling language and communication... a time-flow equation
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 08, 2011 at 14:19 UTC
    Lojban perhaps?
[reply]
      Wow, nice link, I wonder if Watson's internal language is Lojban based or derived?
      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
      Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
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