<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi, Kristian,</div><div><br></div>Right. Thanks. As a mathematician, it's kind of embarrassing to forget Gödel! Actually, I should go back and read his proofs, though perhaps I should look up a translation into English (my originally lousy German is now quite rusty from disuse!). I don't have anything in principle against specialized terminologies (and, besides, unlike many Americans I don't own any guns and don't have any plans to, so you are safe from me!), especially as long as you take care to define your terms, and if it's a book you're doing, include a glossary.<div>
<br></div><div>Jim</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>James L. Fidelholtz<br>Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje<br>Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades<br>Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO</div>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 1:10 AM, Kristian Kankainen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kristian@eki.ee" target="_blank">kristian@eki.ee</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
It was the mathematician Kurt Gödel who proved it in 1931 with his
two incompleteness theorems (read more on Wikipedia). It is a very
good point to bring out into the semiosphere of linguistics.<br>
<br>
Alas this discussion on unstructured vs structured, I defend
specialised terminologies (so shoot me too) but I do confess that
collisions between terminologies is a headaching but forwardbringing
force.<br>
<br>
Kristian<br>
<br>
<br>
<div>08.12.2013 07:42, Jim Fidelholtz
kirjutas:<br>
</div><div><div class="h5">
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Hi Mike et All,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>One supposes that ambiguity is a principle cause of
contradictions. I forget who proved it (about a century or
more ago), but *all* structured entities of any complexity
whatsoever (e. g., theories) are mathematically *guaranteed*
to produce contradictions! Also, one thing early (1960s)
attempts at automatic semantic analysis of sentences (e.g.,
the Harvard project at that time) showed was that apparently
inoffensive sentences turned out to be surprisingly multiply
ambiguous--not quite the number of each word in a sentence's
meanings multiplied by that number for each other word in the
sentence, but still a rather large number for even short
sentences. Unambiguous sentences are extremely difficult to
produce, much less find. So if even designed languages
ineluctably lead to contradictions, good luck with relational
databases!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>[Note: (I'm aware I skipped several steps in the above
'proof'', but just sayin' ...)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Jim</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all">
<div>James L. Fidelholtz<br>
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje<br>
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades<br>
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO</div>
<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 3:04 PM, maxwell
<span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu" target="_blank">maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>On 2013-12-06 15:47, Otto Lassen wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
If texts are structured or unstructured data depends on
their origin.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div>
I think a cross-cutting problem, and perhaps a more easily
quantified (but maybe still useful) one, is that of
ambiguity. Structured data is often designed to avoid
ambiguity. (Structured data may provide an explicit
representation of ambiguities, but the explicit
representation should not in itself be ambiguous.)<br>
<br>
I'm sure someone will come up with counter-examples, but
relational databases and XML documents are both designed to
be unambiguously parseable (given a database schema or an
XML schema). So were blueprints, if anyone remembers those.
Natural language, otoh, is inherently (and often
exceedingly) ambiguous. So are Nekker cubes.<br>
<br>
So it might be helpful (if possible) to re-phrase the
question to ask how much data is potentially ambiguous, and
at what level (syntactically, morphologically, lexically,
semantically, pragmatically). By "potentially" ambiguous, I
mean in principle; a particular instance of a natural
language sentence might be syntactically unambiguous, but
natural language in general is syntactically ambiguous. I
suppose anything is _pragmatically_ ambiguous.<br>
<br>
Mike Maxwell
<div>
<div><br>
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