alternative interlingua
pfps@allegra.tempo.nj.att.com (Peter F. Patel-Schneider)
Message-id: <9008131833.AA28971@vaxa.isi.edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 90 14:34:18 EDT
From: pfps@allegra.tempo.nj.att.com (Peter F. Patel-Schneider)
To: bobrow@parc.xerox.com
Cc: interlingua@vaxa.isi.edu
In-reply-to: Danny Bobrow's message of Mon, 13 Aug 90 11:15:33 -0700 (PDT) <4alit5IB0V0w01R7x7@nero.parc.xerox.com>
Subject: alternative interlingua
I am afraid that the major use of the interlingua will turn out to be
satisfying a, possibly implied, desire of various funding agencies. In
this climate, the main gain from using the interlingua will be to state
that it was used, and not putting it to good use. So, if it is easiest to
use the interlingua via a side-agreement between representation systems
that subverts the meaning of statements, then it will be so used.
Forbidding this sort of side-agreement, and requiring that the mapping into
the interlingua be faithful to the meaning of the constructs of the source
language, and not allowing a quote mechanism, would, I think, make it much
harder for these political pressures to overwhelm the research benefits
inherent in a good interlingua.
My "interest" in an interlingua is that it is an attempt to build a
universal, or at least more powerful, representation logic. The "utility"
of an interlingua is simply using it as an intermediary to translate
between two representation systems. I painted a picture where this
"utility" did not come along with any real representational benefits.
peter