May 1st, 2022
This morning, in our monthly Zoom meeting, Lin (damn! I cannot remember the man’s name or find it anywhere in my contacts lists) from Wuhan, China, asked one of those simple questions that makes me punch myself in the face and ask myself “Why didn’t I ever think of that?”
His question concerned the problems of toy languages, specifically the Deikto system that builds words into sentences. I have always thought of Deikto as a language for bidirectional communication: the user speaks in Deikto, and the computer responds in Deikto. It seems so natural, so balanced.
But Lin had a suggestion: why not use the toy language (Deikto) only for user input, and return output in full natural language.