The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.02457

by tkuhn • 10 years ago

176 91 10 years ago

arxiv.org

jsingleton• 10 years ago

While this is tagged as PDF the link is actually to the website where you can read the abstract.

The PDF link is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf

GolDDranks2• 10 years ago

I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this.

Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.)

Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world).

Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.

GolDDranks2• 10 years ago

P.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.

adrianN• 10 years ago

I don't think that's an easier problem than machine translation between "different" languages. You still need to understand the source text well enough to figure out the meaning and reproduce it using different words.

TuringTest• 10 years ago

I think it is more likely that computers will first manage to understand texts written in Simple English way before they are able to do the same with English.

That is not surprising, as that's exactly how humans learn to work with language.

andreasvc3• 10 years ago

Text simplification and summarization are active fields of research. Machine translation is indeed more active, but this is understandable given its commercial applications.

foota• 10 years ago

It seems like using a model that can estimate its certainty about the meaning of a sentence might be a good way of going about this. If the model is uncertain then it could recommend re-writing the sentence.

Pitarou6• 10 years ago

This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs.

Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up, with and upon. You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with, set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be separate vocabulary items.

JorgeGT• 10 years ago

As a person whose first language is not English, I find phrasal verbs one of the most challenging parts of the language. In fact I just searched set upon and was greatly surprised that it means attacking violently! I would have never guessed that from the words alone.

emartinelli• 10 years ago

I remember when I was studying English in the U.S. with other foreign students some years ago, when the topic was phrasal verbs the grades decreased for entire class. I am Brazilian, the class was composed most of South Koreans and Saudi Arabians.

eutectic• 10 years ago

You could train a language model from a corpus of writing by e.g. ESL students or young children, and then disallow any words with p<p(thousandth_word) given the preceding context. :)

drb3114• 10 years ago

The text editor is here:

http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/

Try it!

1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better.

Or...

Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.

eddieroger• 10 years ago

I wasn't familiar with that tool, so I put a few of my last HipChat messages in there to see how I faired. Once I removed specific words or proper nouns, I still didn't do all that well. Even the preceding sentence had four problem words, and I'm pretty sure "preceding" would join them.

I agree, sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But I don't think I agree that it makes the writing better. I look at language as a form of expression, and some words are just more colorful than others, but it takes all of them to paint a picture. I honestly don't know if I could limit myself to the 1,000 most common words, but I wouldn't want to do that if I could. That said, I'm curious why you think it makes your writing better? Is it that you think more about what you're saying? Or that you think it will be more easily digested by others?

aptwebapps2• 10 years ago

Try writing only in red ...

theandrewbailey2• 10 years ago

The constraint made me realize that the complex word isn't that helpful when the other person doesn't know much behind the word. You need to get inventive, and at some point, you might start having fun. I used this to explain encryption, and from the feedback I've got, I seem to have done a good job. It gets repetitive at times, but I managed to slip in PKI, password storage, and a brief summary of the Crypto Wars.

https://theandrewbailey.com/article/177/Hidden-Writing

majewsky• 10 years ago

I would love this editor with a heatmap instead of a hard cutoff at 1,000 words. So common words are green, less common ones turn yellow, and rare ones are orange to red. That would be really nice in highlighting parts of a text that are unnecessarily more complicated than the rest.

Symbiote2• 10 years ago

In English lessons (in England) we had to write newspaper articles in the style of The Times and The Sun.

Writing for The Sun was more difficult, since it required keeping a reading age of about 8, and a very distinct style.

adrianratnapala• 10 years ago

Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation.

Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...

jeffwass• 10 years ago

For me, Thing Explainer was like a funny joke at first which got old VERY fast.

To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful."

I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.

TazeTSchnitzel• 10 years ago

I'm a fan of Guy Steele's Growing a Language, a talk about programming language design where he limited himself to using mostly only single-syllable words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0

seanmcdirmid• 10 years ago

Not to mentioned hand crayon drawn transparencies.

e12e4• 10 years ago

This seems like a good companion (probably as a sequel) to:

"Richard Feynman - Computer Heuristics Lecture": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

In general, Feynman might be a poster child for using simple language to explain complex things.

jgrahamc2• 10 years ago

Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words.

For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!")

I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something.

Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.

paol• 10 years ago

Kerosene lamps were ubiquitous before electric lighting. Look at the pictures in the wikipedia page[0], you'll recognize them for sure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene_lamp

eterm2• 10 years ago

To be fair, Up-goer Five is the original for the comic, it was hardly intended at the time that it would take off the way it did. That it generated so much interest led to the book.

Symbiote2• 10 years ago

I'm interested to know what German, Dutch or Norse-descendant speakers think of that.

I'm learning Danish, and reading that is similar, but easier, to deciphering letters from the electricity company.

0x0• 10 years ago

Sounds very similar to Simple English Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_W...

andreareina• 10 years ago

In fact, Randall makes an explicit mention of it in a comic:

https://xkcd.com/547/

stepanhruda• 10 years ago

I have Thing Explainer right here, my main issue is I'd like a separate version with the actual terms so I can have a conversation about the covered topics without sounding like a moron.

vanderZwan• 10 years ago

What I think would be interesting is if he tried another version without the 1000 most common words.

andreasvc3• 10 years ago

I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.

Dylan16807• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why you got downvoted for that. It's a reasonable request. Restrict yourself to the thousand words for words, but not for names.

teh_klev• 10 years ago

Looking at the diagram of "Bags of stuff inside you" in "Thing Explainer" I was surprised to find that when annotating blood vessels, intestines etc he uses "hallway" and not "pipe", which I thought would be in the 1000 most often used english words. How curious.

impostervt• 10 years ago

self-plug: let's you explore which English words are the most common

The Long Tail of the English Language http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-la...

rspeer2• 10 years ago

Is that your site? You have a spam problem in your comments.

mendelk• 10 years ago

Off topic:

I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things.

At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming.

If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO.

As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again!

[0] http://amzn.com/0785824324

tomc1985• 10 years ago

Thing Explainer was a nice experiment, but, really... what's the value in trying to parse CNL explanations that are harder to understand than using the actual word?

The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

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