Vivekanand and ambiguity.......!

Yesterday I was reading a Marathi news paper "TARUN BHARAT".It had a special section about the stories and one of them was about the Swami Vivekananda. Story was some thing like.... leave it I will tell the story later....first see how the sentence is ambiguous in meaning.
Sentence: "Give him what you want" or "What you want, give it to him".
The above sentence is always taken as ...ex: you are told to give ur friend a pen or book. You give him book, as you wanted to give him that.
But there is another meaning to the sentence "Give him what you want" and that goes like this...
ex: you are asked what u want from the pen and book? say ur answer is pen. then you should give him pen and not the book.
Logically say ...what you want=X ..then..... give him what you want= give him X.
Isn't it funny?


And this sentence relates to the Vivekananda as:

Once Vivekananda and his friend had gone to the Vivekananda's home for the lunch break from school. The friend was from a poor family and was very hungry. Vivekananda took him to home and asked mother to give them some thing to eat. she was engaged in some work and said go and take LADDUS from the dabba. She actualy said,"There are two laddus in dabba, give him what you want." And Vivekananda gave him the bigger one took a smaller for himself. Mother had seen this and when vivekanand came back to home she asked him,"didn't you liked the laddu?"
He told he liked it and his friend too. Then she asked," why did you gave him the bigger one and took the smaller?" Intelligent Vivekanand replied ,"You had told me to give him what I want, I wanted the bigger one and So I gave it to him."

Salute to great Vivekanand!

unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language.

A baby is to be monitored by a network of microphones and video cameras for 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, in an effort to unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language.

Deb Roy at MIT's Media Lab, US, devised the unusual project and even volunteered his own family as its guinea pigs. Since his newborn son left hospital nine months ago, Roy's whole family has been monitored by 14 microphones and 11 one-megapixel "fish-eye" video cameras, attached to the ceilings of each room in their house.

By capturing a continuous stream of data about his son's experiences, Roy hopes to better understand the early development of language.

How babies go from gurgling at birth to fluent speech by the age of three is hotly debated. Most psycholinguists agree that simply listening to speech is not enough for a child to piece together the basic rules of a language. Yet they still argue about the importance of specific "language genes" and other non-verbal environmental stimuli.

Deleted scenes

In an effort to identify these extra environmental cues researchers have previously recorded mothers and babies playing, both at home and in the laboratory. But following babies in such an unnatural environment provides a distorted picture of their experiences, says Roy, and makes it difficult to tell whether changes in a child's speech are sudden or merely appear that way because of gaps between recordings.

To provide a more complete picture Roy has developed a surveillance network at his own home in a project dubbed "speechome". The cameras are switched on between 8am and 10pm each day and will capture 85 per cent of the baby’s waking hours up to his third birthday. For occasional privacy, Roy and his wife can switch off cameras or delete recordings using wall-mounted touch displays. A selection of video clips of the surveillance set up can be viewed here.

Footage recorded by the cameras is automatically transmitted to MIT for analysis. Computer algorithms identify activity in specific sections of each room and collect these into so-called "behaviour fragments". Human analysts then classify specific acts, such as making coffee or doing the dishes.

Unparalleled scale

Comparing footage with early sounds made by Roy's son should help his team better understand the stimuli crucial to language development. Algorithms are also being developed to automatically transcribe speech and recognise people and objects in each room.

"It allows us to put a microscope on the day-by-day and hour-by-hour changes that go into learning a language," says Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at Harvard University, who is an adviser to the project. "Nothing remotely on this scale has ever been done."

If successful, Roy says the project could lead to better strategies for diagnosing and treating language disorders. It could even spawn computer programs that can learn to how to speak for themselves, he adds.

Roy is aware that the project raises ethical issues. But ultimately he thinks he may be providing his son with an incredible gift. "He might be the first person to have a memory that goes back to birth," he says.

Dear All,We are pleased to inform you that C-DAC Mumbai is organizing the National Seminar and BOSS Workshop towards "Language Literate Computers" from 25-27 March 2008, at Bhubaneswar, Orissa. Anybody interested are welcome to attend.Please find the details at:<http://www.cdacmumb ai.in/index. php/cdacmumbai/ research_ and_publications/research_ groups/lcg_ language_ computing/ lcg_events/ llc_2008>

To+infinitive ..A Naughty Child!

some days before I came across a document which says English grammar is not able to define the clause in the perfect manner! As some books says..there are three types of clauses as Finite,
Non-finite, and verbless. But I haven't found much document related to non-finite clause & verbless clause which is authentic(If any one has Idea plz fwd me).
BTW the problem now I am discussing is "TO+Infinitive".
For the English to Hindi Machine Translation system....if the English sentence is:
"I want to go home."
the Hindi translation is: "Mai ghar jana chahata hun".......(I am not using any standard transliteration system..so excuse)
But the problem is that here the WANT is main verb and the TO GO is the To+infinitive...and here problem arrives that of what this TO Go should be considered as a NOun or Verb ...
if verb then many problems arise like only one sentence contains the 2 verbs....
if this is treated as the noun in many sentences like "I want him to go home"..
creates the problem as xlation in this case is :"Mai waha ghar jaye yaha chahata hun"...
here this "ghar" and "jaye" have changed their places/positions.
So it seems that here the To infinitive is working as the verb of subject HIM( though can't be in this form).....And if we see many sentences with To infinitive or the bare infinitive ..many other pattern will be found bringing more confusion into the process..!
What do u think Dear....?

NLP.....Challenge The Languages!

When I was child I heard that my Marathi Language changes at every step. Even its famous for the "Double meanings". Dada Kondake's movies have shown it in the very funny way. Every sentence he speaks has two meaning like "XXXXXX", aare yar why don't you go and watch his movies (or ask me for the links of his movies and songs AT pbpimpale@gmail.com).
Leave it, but I think he has used these "Ambiguities in natural languages" very well for the purpose of entertainment.Salute to DADA KONDAKE.
But the instant I statrted working in the field of NLP, I was exposed to the another side of languages. And it was really difficult for me to judge whether its interesting or boring.
If I leave that confusion aside NL has always put a challenge infront of human like generation of the language, why a "pen" is called as "pen" and not "gun"?, how to get meaning of sentense like "Prakash saw a man using binoculars"? and many more(like MT).
It is more challenging when you are doing these things on computer. So I think Why not you people help me in getting answers to all these questions and challenging languages to make new challenges for us (Because SOON THE old challenges will be tackled).
So keep on Reading and writting on this place.
I mean Keep on Challenging the language!

After all "NLP" is "CHALLENGE THE LANGUAGES"......!

Lets see who Wins and who Lose........!