re: #151 klystron

The number of times I proofread and corrected an e-mail for an officemate and said “I can’t tell you the rule behind this, but this is what will be correct” was not small.

This is what makes natural language processing devilishly hard. Human grammar is riddled with this stuff. You can get the basics written out, and that works for helping people trying to learn the language from scratch. Then what humans do to get the advanced bits of a language is we just expose ourselves to native speakers.

But those basics fall apart in horrible ways when you try to teach them to a computer and then point said computer at real human language.