Esperanto as an AI language [1021.1999]

I have always thought that a highly expressive, but grammatically simple constructed language would make a lot of sense when dealing with computers and AI. In particular, I always wanted to build an Esperanto-based natural language engine.

Because Esperanto was designed to be simple, there are no irregular verbs, and every word is spelled and pronounced phonetically. Even if you don't know what particular words mean, you can easily tell what kind of words they are (nouns, verbs, etc) simply by looking at the last syllable. Also, the words themselves often contain information about their meanings, through extensive use of affixes. (For example, if you know "hundo" is dog, "-axc" is an affix indicating you dislike something, and "-in" indicates the female gender, then you can deduce that if someone calls you a "filo de hundinaxco", it's probably not a compliment.) The whole grammar is summed up in 16 rules.

There is also a lot of esperanto information available in computer readable form. http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/lojban/ has a wide assortment of language-to-language dictionaries, all generated by compiling esperanto-to-XXX dictionaries and then generating the rest.

Esperanto is probably the most well-known constructed language, with the most speakers worldwide. One difficulty, however, is that there are 28 Esperanto letters, six of which don't appear on the QWERTY keyboard (or any other, as far as I know). However, I believe Unicode covers them. In any case, the special ones are all just regular english-style letters with accent marks, and since there's no "x" in Esperanto, internet-esperantists have long used the "x" to mean: "the next letter's got an accent mark".

A more serious deterrent to using esperanto (or another great reason to use it, depending on your point of view) is that Esperanto is a completely western language. It's very much a simplified Romance language, and so may not map well to non-romance languages (but I don't know because I don't sepak any) (english being mostly romantic and germanic, or so I've been told).

All languages will have some patterns that are incompatible with other languages (idioms, ideas about time, notions about genders of inanimate objects, granularity (eg, our zillion words for car, versus the proverbial zillion eskimo words for snow), etc), but there is one constructed language that is meant to be equally distant from all natural language *and* just happens to be designed to be completely logical, which might come in real handy if you're, say... a computer. That language is called Loglan, or, in that language, Lojban. I don't know much about it, but you can read more at http://www.animal.helsinki.fi/lojban/.

For more on esperanto: http://www.esperanto.org/

originally posted to the Perl-AI list.