GURP and NLP two great acronyms

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

a brief report on GURP (The Georgetown University Round Table of
Linguistics, which Athelstan and I attended the last 4 days.  There were
just under 800 attendees.  After initiially being hesitant for fear of
adverse reaction from linguists, on Wednesday I put out about 30
brochures with a short note on Lojban's applicability to lingusitics
research.  They were gone within two hours.  On Thursady I put out 110 more,
and nearly all were gone when the conference ended at 4PM.  We got some
awesome name recognition out of this, even if none of these brochure readers
decides to do something about Lojban now.

Actually I suspect some will.  Almost everyone we talked to seemed
mildly interested in the concept of an AL designed for non international
language purposes, and a coupole of researchers thought we had some
interesting research angles that they might like to investigate.  I
would say that Athelstan and I together threw up more questions (usually
good from the reaction of the audience and the speaker) than most people, so
I'm sure we were noticed.

There will be a lot of follow-up, and it won;t be high priority, since
we have so many things going at once right now.  But just one researcher
might mean a share of a grant that would end our constant worry about
money, as well as allow us to get Athelstan and maybe someone else
working full time on the project, immensely speeding things up.  So the
postive reaction is heartening.

The natural language processing people had some of the tougher questions for
us.  Jeff P. and Guy among the rest of you - I'd like some feedback and ideas
since this is out of my expertise:

- What are the relative advantages/disadvantages of using Lojban vs. PROLOG
or LISP for internal langauge data storage and processing?  Are the advantages
of Lojban enough to justify someone spending the money to develop it?

- Possible advantage mentioned for Lojban - easier construction and
maintenance of a knowledge base written in Lojban, because it would be more
"natural" than a programming language.

- Another possible advantage - using a large corpus of English to Lojban
translations coupled with a heuristic learning program to have the
program 'learn' to translate English words naturally.  Producing such a
corpus would be relatively easy, since you add samples as needed
whenever the computer makes a translation error.  How tough is this, and
has anything like it been tried?

- How much work would it be to prepare a "Lojban compiler" that could translate
Lojban sentences into a data base structured for efficient processing as is the
data bases used by NLP that are loaded and accessed through LISP?

- How much work would it be to create an English to Lojban 'translator' at
the rudimentary level needed to show the feasibility, especially compared with
existing parser/translator capabilities?

- How much extra would it take for the heuristic processor I mentioned above?

Some hard estimates would be useful here, as well as alternative ideas.
I think a grant is possible within a year if we get good ideas and a
credible approach.  This list has some of the best and most experienced
minds in Comp Sci., as well as some very creative people with perhaps less
experience.  I need help in this, and I've got some ears who will isten if I
come up with good words that aren't pie-in-the-sky.

-lojbab