The purpose of the UniLang project is to enable communication between humans,
which don't necessary speak the same language.
This dream is unreachable if we don't restrict a little bit our ambition.
So our aim is to apply cross translation to chat communications within the
framework of limited concepts.
Language is here taken in the sense of a mean to transfer information between
two persons.
In order to communicate, the persons must share a set of concepts about which
they will exchange information.
The main restriction in our project is precisely that this set is fixed.
It represents the universe of concepts shared by everyone using the chat room.
It consists in a set of classes describing the objects of our world as well as
actions we can perform and information we can exchange on them.
For instance consider the universe made of two objects (Human and Cat), two
relations (is, have); two kind of exchange information:(affirmation and
question).
Then we can imagine the following communication: “Paul” is Human, “Paul” has a
cat, does Paul's cat a human ?...
But the following are meaningless here: how many cats do you have? (no counting
notion), Paul's cat is blue (no colour notion)...
Communication between A and B involve three processes
1) Translate A's natural language into information about universe
objects,
2) transfer the information;
3) translate this information into B's natural language.
Naturally these processes as well as the precise structure of the
universe is not given in this page since it's the job to be done.
Our hope is that this project will interest you enough to participate...
Nevertheless you'll found here a schedule for the project:
June 2002: Tests of the first multilingual chat room.