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Mr. Bob's avatar

I think the difficulty there is that once you get into math formulas, you're no longer doing natural language processing. You have to have certain syntax and such.

What will the computer do if the user puts it in wrong? Try to fudge it? You risk catastrophic error. Force them to correct it? At that point you might as well bust out MATLAB or whatever.

I understand the sentiment but I think this is more complicated than most people realize.

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Kelly Green's avatar

BTW to clarify the request, my case was “give me the average of the ten numbers in this table”. Not inputting math syntax but asking for math in natural language. i got three different wrong answers before doing it myself.

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Cranky Frankie's avatar

At least MATLAB produces results that mimic the human solution process, are accurate, are repeatable and replicable with paper, pencil and brain cells.

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Kelly Green's avatar

Yes, I get confused that "natural language processing" is actual natural language processing, i.e. abstracting the words into ideas and then going from there. If you're doing that, realizing the user is asking for math to be done is on the menu. But if you're just appending words using an algo as you described, not so much.

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