[sword-devel] Semantic & Bible study

[Chris Little]

On 07/23/2012 07:38 AM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> On 21/07/12 03:37, Kunio Nakamaru wrote:
>
>> So far I found this language seems to be good at making things
>>   "semantic" or "AI", like LISP in a way. I am wondering if this feature
>> can be well applied to the Bible study.
>
> One of the places where "AI" would be helpful is creation of intelligent
> linking/marking up.
>
> There are databases for e.g. Bible names and places, but mostly in English.
>
> There are also Strong encoded Bibles - again mostly in English.
>
> For the last few years I have been working on/off on the creation of
> tools to create study bible modules in arbitrary languages - not just
> English.

Kunio,

Does this happen to be the Functional Programming course from Coursera? 
(https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun) I signed up for that when they 
announced it, though mostly to learn Scala, since I'm already 
comfortable with functional programming.

I would say that the core tasks that people think of as AI and that are 
taught in introductory courses, like planning/search, adversarial 
search, machine learning, CSPs, perception, and robotics, are not 
particularly useful to anything we do here. However, there are many 
useful applications of natural language processing (NLP) to our work. 
(Coursera also has a course on that topic, but it's quite challenging: 
https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp)

What Peter's talking about could employ a number of NLP topics, such as 
named entity recognition (NER), alignment, edit distances, and even 
machine translation. I also recently posted a commentary module that 
shows the value of each verse according to a sentiment analysis 
algorithm (based on OpenBible.info's data).

So there are many useful applications of NLP to Bibles. The only 
question is what interests you.

--Chris