
Icelandic language at risk; robots, computers can't grasp it - mdekkers
http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2017-04-22-EU--Iceland-Language%20Threatened/id-918aa392b55b459eb07d59214ff0f4bf
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bobsam
On the plus side, this could come handy against skynet

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rspeer
Let's suppose the machines are spying on you and you want to learn a secret
language of humans, a language with the highest ratio of human speakers to NLP
technology. Which language should it be?

I think it would be a language spoken in populous but under-served areas,
where English is a widely-used second language, so those who do use computers
are content to use them in English. But not spoken by _so_ many people that
you could expect people to be prioritizing it for NLP anyway.

Tamil and Hausa would be my guesses. 70 million speakers each, largely in
India and Nigeria respectively, both awash in English as a second language.

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paraboluh
I think American Sign Language would probably be an okay choice, given the
extra overhead of image and video processing, and the added requirement of
line of sight possibly disrupting partial conversations. It would also force a
strict interpretation of multiple channels, sight and sound, in case
information gets dropped.

Anyway, recontextualizing existing languages often works well against
adversarial humans, and probably would find some effectiveness against
computers, since computers are rarely permitted to deviate from commonly
understood norms, because when they do it is often an error.

Consider humor in foreign languages. Puns and punchlines often just disappear
when you cross the language barrier. People wind up laughing at jokes that
only a fluent speaker acclimated to local norms could ever understand, and you
often find yourself reduced to elementary school conversations, unable to deal
in the sophisticated sense of humor adults develop as part of culture. It
takes a special person to immerse and bridge cultural divides like that.

