Computer Science, asked by vishalgarg8639, 1 year ago

Is computer science a vernacular language?

Answers

Answered by laylamcdow8

Simply put, it is because English and other natural (or normal) languages are inherently ambiguous.

One of the most important steps in a computer understanding what it should do is that the computer should be able to parse the language telling it what to do.

Humans are able to parse languages because of a lot of other reasons, which may not be limited to the language alone. I will enumerate some of the reasons here:

1. Parsing ambiguity

Consider the sentence: "I saw a boy with a telescope." This sentence is perfectly correct in English, but is ambiguous, mainly because English is that type of language, with a poor morphology. With just this sentence, how do we know who has the telescope, the boy, or me? Computers resolve this by using probabilistic parsers to find out which parse tree is most probable, and will always return the same. In other words, if the boy has the telescope, according the the parser, I would have to come up with another sentence to show that I have the telescope.

2. Coreference resolution

Consider the sentence(s): "The Head of Homeland Security was asked to submit a report on the status of President Obama's security detail for his trip to India. He submitted the report in time for the President's perusal." In the second sentence He should corefer to 'The Head of Homeland Security'. Unfortunately, that usually does not happen.

3. Preposition attachment

Consider the sentences: a) "I saw a boy with a telescope which I dropped", and b) "I saw a boy with a telescope which he dropped." Both these sentences should yield different parse trees. However, depending on the data, both sentences will give rise to only one possible parse tree.

4. Polysemy

There was a famous poem, called English Language (English language), which begins:

"Some words have different meanings, and yet they're spelt the same.

A cricket is an insect, to play it, it's a game.

On every hand, in every land, it's thoroughly agreed,

The English language, to explain, is very hard indeed."

For example: "The English teacher ..." could mean either that the teacher teaches English or is from England (a source of ambiguity). On the other hand, the phrase "The English and Italian teacher ..." is not ambiguous, because the teacher can't have 2 nationalities that conflict with each other. However, "The English teacher is from Pisa" is again ambiguous, because again there is nothing in the sentence to distinguish whether English is a nationality or a language.

An interesting case is the phrase "The English Italian teacher ... " While at first glance, it may seem ambiguous, it is actually not - it means that the teacher's nationality is English and the language he (or she) teaches is Italian. To find out which is which, substitute both English and Italian (one at a time, of course) by a language that does not have a nationality (or vice versa), like Hindi (or Indian). In other words, we get the phrases "The Hindi Italian teacher ..." and "The English Hindi teacher ...". We know that the second phrase is factually more correct. Hence, we can say that the nationality of the teacher is English and the language taught is Italian.

These are just a few of the problems that computers will face which trying to understand a natural language. This is why programming languages are designed to be more robust as compared to natural languages.

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