[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is supposed to

[Chris Gray]

[Travis C:]

:I'm not sure how the above paragraph is meant to apply to the subject of
:natural language interfaces vs. traditional command-based interfaces... even
:command-
:based interfaces built by English speakers tend to use English sentence
:structure
:implicitly, and are therefore going to be more challenging for non-English
:speakers.  (E.g., "put red sword in bag" -- what if the user's native
:language
:would structure such a sentence as "sword red put bag in")

I ran solidly into that one when a person from Europe asked if I could
do a version of my system in his language (can't remember which it was!).
I thought about it for a while and decided that I would cop out and not
try it at all. There are simple things like changing the articles that
you allow. What about German, however, where many of the sentences have
verbs on the end? You need to change some basics of your parser or
grammar to handle that.

A friend and I did do a small scenario in Esperanto, but it doesn't
work very well due to the fact that my parser discards articles internally,
so a server change would be needed to handle the Esperanto forms. I did
it once, but have since deleted that code. Trying to generally support
multiple languages is a lot of work - you have to dive solidly into the
internationalization features of whatever system you want to run on.

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA