this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Wikifunctions is a new site that has been added to the list of sites operated by WMF. I definitely see uses for it in automating updates on Wikipedia and bots (and also for programmers to reference), but their goal is to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information. I have mixed feelings about this, as I don't like existing programs that automatically generate articles (see the Cebuano and Dutch Wikipedias), and I worry that the system will be too complicated for average people.

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

but their goal is to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information

That'll get unruly really fast.

Languages simply don't agree on how to split the usage of words. Or grammatical case. Or if, when and how to do agreement.

Just for the sake of example: how are they going to keep track of case in a way that doesn't break Hindi, or Basque, or English, or Guarani? Or grammatical gender for a word like "milk"? (not even the Romance languages agree in it.) At a certain point, it gets simply easier to write the article in all those languages than to code something to make it for you.


I think that the best use scenario is to automate tidbits of highly changing data. It's fairly limited but it could be useful.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'll reply to myself to highlight a point, and issue a challenge for those who assume that WMF's apparent goal - to translate Wikipedia articles to more languages by writing them in code that has a lot of linguistic information - is actually viable:

Here's an excerpt from an actual Wikipedia article: "the solubility of these gases depending on the temperature and salinity of the water." Show me all the linguistic information that a writer would need to input, to convey the same information, in that system idealised by the goal, in a way that would not output "then who was phone?" tier nonsense for some languages. Then I'll show you why it would still output nonsense for some languages.

Too much work? Then feel free to do it just for "of the water". It's a single PP, how hard would it be? /s

Hic Rhodes, hic salta.

[Edit reason: clarity.]

[–] Silentiea@lemm.ee 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They're just going to write all the articles in lojban.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 points 8 months ago

Not even that would do the trick - practical usage of Lojban heavily relies on fu'ivla, that carry with themselves the semantic scope assigned to the original words. .u'i I want to see them trying though.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Languages simply don’t agree on how to split the usage of words. Or grammatical case. Or if, when and how to do agreement.

Just for the sake of example: how are they going to keep track of case in a way that doesn’t break Hindi, or Basque, or English, or Guarani? Or grammatical gender for a word like “milk”? (not even the Romance languages agree in it.) At a certain point, it gets simply easier to write the article in all those languages than to code something to make it for you.

I don't know what the WMF is planning here but what you're pointing out is precisely what abstraction would solve.

If you had an abstract way to represent a sentence, you would be independent of any one order or case or whatever other grammatical feature. In the end you obviously do need actual sentences with these features. To get these, you'd build a mechanism that would convert the abstract sentence representation into a concrete sentences for specific languages that is correctly constructed according to those specific languages' rules.

Same with gender. What you'd store would not be that e.g. some german sentence is talking about the feminine milk but rather that it's talking about the abstract concept of milk. How exactly that abstract concept is represented in words would then be up to individual languages to decide.

I have absolutely no idea whether what I'm talking about here would be practical to implement but it in theory it could work.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Abstractions are not magic, and they cannot make info appear out of nowhere. Somewhere inside that abstraction you'll need to have the pieces of info that Spanish "leche" [milk] is feminine, that Zulu "ubisi" [milk] is class 11, that English predicative uses the ACC form, so goes on.

And you'll need people to mark a multitude of distinctions in their sentences, when writing them down, that the abstraction layer would demand for other languages. Such as tagging the "I" in "I see a boy" as "+masculine, +older-person, +informal" so Japanese correctly conveys it as "ore" instead of "boku", "atashi, "watashi" etc.

Even the idea of "abstract concept of milk" doesn't work as well as it sounds like, because languages will split even the abstract concepts in different ways. For example, does the abstract concept associated with a living pig includes its flesh?

And the language itself cannot decide those things. A language is not an agent; it doesn't "do" something. You'd need people to actively insert those pieces of info for each language, that's perhaps doable for the most spoken ones, but those are the ones that would benefit the least from this.

[–] ibt3321@lemmy.blahaj.zone -1 points 8 months ago

This is an encyclopedia, so there are no pronouns like "I", so this simplifies this issue. The remaining ones are in the third person, and if we link them to data about the person that is referred to it would solve this. A longuist doesn't necessarily need to know a language in order to analyze its grammar, and a lot of the work needed in Wikifunctions is like this.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml -1 points 8 months ago

Somewhere inside that abstraction you’ll need to have the pieces of info that Spanish “leche” [milk] is feminine, that Zulu “ubisi” [milk] is class 11, that English predicative uses the ACC form, so goes on.

Of course you do. The beauty of abstraction is that these language-specific parts can be factored into generic language-specific components. The information you're actually trying to convey can be denoted without any language-specific parts or exceptions and that's the important part for Wikipedia's purpose of knowledge preservation and presentation.

you'll need people to mark a multitude of distinctions in their sentences, when writing them down, that the abstraction layer would demand for other languages. Such as tagging the "I" in "I see a boy" as "+masculine, +older-person, +informal" so Japanese correctly conveys it as "ore" instead of "boku", "atashi, "watashi" etc.

For writing a story or prose, I agree.

For the purpose of writing Wikipedia articles, this specifically and explicitly does not matter very much. Wikipedia strives to have one unified way of writing within a language. Whether the "I" is masculine or not would be a parameter that would be applied to all text equally (assuming I-narrator was the standard on Wikipedia).

Even the idea of "abstract concept of milk" doesn't work as well as it sounds like, because languages will split even the abstract concepts in different ways. For example, does the abstract concept associated with a living pig includes its flesh?

If your article talks about the concept of a living pig in some way and in the context of that article, it doesn't matter whether the flesh is included, then you simply use the default word/phrase that the language uses to convey the concept of a pig.

If it did matter, you'd explicitly describe the concept of "a living pig with its flesh" instead of the more generic concept of a living pig. If that happened to be the default of the target language or the target language didn't differentiate between the two concepts, both concepts would turn into the same terms in that specific language.

The same applies to your example of the different forms of "I" in Japanese. To create an appropriate Japanese "rendering" of an abstract sentence, you'd use the abstract concept of "a nerdy shy kid refers to itself" as the i.e. the subject. The Japanese language "renderer" would turn that into a sentence like ”僕は。。。” while the English "renderer" would simply produce "I ...".

A language is not an agent; it doesn't "do" something. You'd need people to actively insert those pieces of info for each language, that's perhaps doable for the most spoken ones, but those are the ones that would benefit the least from this.

Yes, of course they would have to do that. The cool thing is that this it'd only have to be done once in a generic manner and from that point on you could use that definition to "render" any abstract article into any language you like.

You must also keep in mind that this effort has to be measured relative to the alternatives. In this case, the alternative is to translate each and every article and all changes done to them into every available language. At the scale of Wikipedia, that is not an easy task and it's been made clear that that's simply not happening.

(Okay, another alternative would be to remain on the status quo with its divergent versions of what are supposed to be the same articles containing the same information.)