Simplifications

Natural language processing includes several steps, each with their separate problems. There are problems with ambiguity in grammars and words, and these are the things which the seminatural language attempts to address. But there are other types of difficulties. Often one wants to start with spoken language, which leads to several sources of errors; the task of segmenting speech into sentences and words, the difference between dialects and individuals, and simple acoustic noise. Even if one starts with text, there is the possibility of spelling mistakes and other errors. This project does not deal with speech, nor with any kind of automatic error correction. Can this be justified, and is there any other way to make sure that the input is reasonable? In some applications the user does supply the input in the form of text, and even when it is in spoken form, interpreting it as text is largely a separate problem. Assuming that all input is correct would be a severe limitation, but that does not mean that it is necessary to have any sort of error correction in the form of "guessing" what the user meant. The important thing is not really to find the intended interpretation of every sentence; far more important is to identify which sentences are wrong. A seminatural language system can do this very well. Pointing out which sentences do not follow the grammatical rules and asking the user to correct them is trivial.