This article on today’s MIT front page sketches an argument that I’ve been thinking about for a while, ever since the IBM Watson Jeopardy contest — that natural language processing is hopeless to the extent that there is additional context (side information) not visible to the machine.

Many prominent linguists … have argued that language is … poorly designed for communication [and] … point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information…, they argue, each word would have just one meaning. … Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head … [T]hey claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

Although this is just talking about homophonic ambiguity at the word level, the same applies to all levels of language, including full messages whose decoding requires potentially deep context.
(Read the article)

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Got an invitation to Google Wave today. The problem I find immediately is the lack of structure. Say what you will about the restrictions of email or IM, but the same restrictions of those ways of communication, namely time-flow or thread-flow, are also well enforced structures to keep things sane. Wave takes away these and substitutes “playback.” Unfortunately, playback is not natural. (The other way is to fall back on social convention to keep order, but that rarely works with more than 2 peers.)

I think there are two options here. Either structure needs to be explicitly enforced or presentation needs to be refined.

In the former, perhaps it is better to only allow replies in certain places. Perhaps it is better to only allow edits in certain places. Perhaps it is better to separate the two and keep the distinction between edit mode, thread mode, and conversation mode, and only allow mixing in very restricted settings (or require some extra steps to discourage its use). After all, in preparing a shared endeavor, the purpose should be defined and known ahead of time.

In the latter, perhaps a lot of hiding and collapsing should be used. Perhaps hyperlinks should be used for in-place edits that often hijack a topic. And now that subthreads can sprout like a tree, it makes little sense to retain the linear structure of conversations. Perhaps a topic based graph, or a conversation stack would be the more appropriate presentation metaphor.

Wave is a good idea, but not well thought out. In its attempt to differentiate, it has forsaken useability for chaotic flexibility, which would have had redeeming value, were it matched by equally ambitious presentation/visualization.

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