Filters on Text and Perception

Many of us are used to having incoming email filtered, decrypted, formatted, and shown in our favorite colors and fonts. These techniques can be taken further. Customization of spelling (e.g., American to British or archaic to modern) would be a straightforward process. Relatively simple conversions could also let you see any text with your favorite date and time formats, use metric or imperial measures, implement obscenity filters, abbreviate or expand acronyms, omit or include technical formulas, personalize synonym selection and punctuation rules, and use alternative numeric systems and alphabets (including phonetic and pictographic). Text could also be digested for a given user, translated to his native language, and even read aloud with his favorite actor’s voice.

My friend Gary Bean suggested possible implementation of “cliché translators” that would explicitly convey the meaning of a sentence that is known to the translator, but not necessarily to the reader. For example, the phrase “that’s an interesting idea” might be translated as “I have serious reservations about this.” In the reverse operation, words and phrases can be replaced with politically correct euphemisms.

After the recent Communication Decency Act, Robert Carr developed a remarkable “HexOn Exon” program that allows the user to convert obscene words in the messages into the names of the senators responsible for this Act, and vice versa. Besides presenting a humorous attempt to bypass the new obscenity censorship, this program demonstrates that allocating both responsibilities and rights for the contents of a message among multiple authoring and filtering agencies may not be easy.

Translation between various dialects and jargons, though difficult, should still take less effort than the translation between different natural languages, since only a part of message semantics has to be processed. Good translation filters would give “linguistic minorities” – speakers of languages ranging from Pig Latin to E-Prime and Loglan – a chance to practice their own languages while communicating with the rest of the world.

Some jargon filters have already been developed, and you can benefit from them by enjoying reading Ible-Bay, the Pig Latin version of the Bible, or using Dialectizer program to convert your English texts to Fudd or Cockney.

Such translation agents would allow rapid linguistic and cultural diversification, to the point where the language you use to communicate with the world could diverge from everybody else’s as far as the requirement of general semantic compatibility may allow. It is interesting that today’s HTML Guide already calls for the “divorce of content from representation,” suggesting that you should focus on what you want to convey rather than on how people will perceive it.

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Currently, we can structure our mental images any way we want so long as we can translate them to a common language. This has led to relatively stable standardized languages and a great variability among minds. Likewise, intelligent software translators could let us make our languages as liberated as our minds and push the communication standards beyond our biological bodies. (It really means just further exosomatic expansion of the human functional body, but the liberation still goes beyond the traditional human interpretation of “skin-encapsulated” personal identity.)

So will there be more variety or more standardization? Most likely both, as flexible translation will help integrate knowledge domains currently isolated by linguistic and terminological barriers, and at the same time will protect linguistically adventurous intellectual excursions from the danger of losing contact with the semantic mainland. Intelligent translators could facilitate the development of more comprehensive semantic architectures that would make the global body of knowledge at the same time more diverse and more coherent.

Information may be stored and transmitted in the general semantic form. With time, an increasing number of applications can be expected to use the enriched representation as their native mode of operation. Client translation software will provide an emulation of the traditional world of “natural” human interactions while humans still remain to appreciate it. The semantic richness of the system will gradually shift away from biological brains, just as data storage, transmission, and computation have in recent history. Humans will enjoy growing benefits from the system they launched, but at the expense of understanding the increasingly complex “details” of its internal structure, and for a while will keep playing an important role in guiding the flow of events. Later, after the functional entities liberate themselves from the realm of flesh that gave birth to them, the involvement of humans in the evolutionary process will be of little interest to anybody except humans themselves.

From Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko's "Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality"