6 ms·

The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]

176 points by tkuhn 10y ago

jsingleton 10y ago
While this is tagged as PDF the link is actually to the website where you can read the abstract. The PDF link is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf
GolDDranks 10y ago
I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.) Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world). Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.
- GolDDranks 10y ago
  P.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    I don't think that's an easier problem than machine translation between "different" languages. You still need to understand the source text well enough to figure out the meaning and reproduce it using different words.
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    I think it is more likely that computers will first manage to understand texts written in Simple English way before they are able to do the same with English. That is not surprising, as that's exactly how humans learn to work with language.
  - andreasvc 10y ago
    Text simplification and summarization are active fields of research. Machine translation is indeed more active, but this is understandable given its commercial applications.
- foota 10y ago
  It seems like using a model that can estimate its certainty about the meaning of a sentence might be a good way of going about this. If the model is uncertain then it could recommend re-writing the sentence.
- Pitarou 10y ago
  This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs. Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up, with and upon. You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with, set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be separate vocabulary items.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    As a person whose first language is not English, I find phrasal verbs one of the most challenging parts of the language. In fact I just searched set upon and was greatly surprised that it means attacking violently! I would have never guessed that from the words alone.
    - alanfalcon 10y ago
      Context helps: "His foe set upon him with such vigor that he knew he was hopelessly outmatched. He began to silently pray for assistance."
    - Angostura 10y ago
      From what I recall, 'set' is the word in the English language which has most meanings - over 50.
      - Pitarou 10y ago
        Depending on which dictionary you use, it's either put or set.
        e12e 10y ago
        Perhaps it's time to revisit some OO/database terms, to avoid things like: Person.set(up), db.put(down), set.contains(Person) ;-)
    - gotodengo 10y ago
- eutectic 10y ago
  You could train a language model from a corpus of writing by e.g. ESL students or young children, and then disallow any words with p<p(thousandth_word) given the preceding context. :)
- drb311 10y ago
  The text editor is here: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ Try it! 1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better. Or... Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.
  - eddieroger 10y ago
    I wasn't familiar with that tool, so I put a few of my last HipChat messages in there to see how I faired. Once I removed specific words or proper nouns, I still didn't do all that well. Even the preceding sentence had four problem words, and I'm pretty sure "preceding" would join them. I agree, sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But I don't think I agree that it makes the writing better. I look at language as a form of expression, and some words are just more colorful than others, but it takes all of them to paint a picture. I honestly don't know if I could limit myself to the 1,000 most common words, but I wouldn't want to do that if I could. That said, I'm curious why you think it makes your writing better? Is it that you think more about what you're saying? Or that you think it will be more easily digested by others?
    - acjacobson 10y ago
      I am not sure anyone believes that writing with only 1000 words is better - but it should make the writing more understandable. There is a sharp curve in understanding from text that is easy (most magazine or newspaper articles) to dizzyingly complicated (most academic writing). For me the utility in simple writing is its accessibility to a wider audience. Incidentally you did rather well in your second paragraph - only 'honestly, limit, common, curious, digested' were out of bounds, and they are easily swapped without much loss in expression.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      To me, language is wielded with dual intention: (1) to convey meaning ("A thorough lecturer") & (2) to convey meaning in a pleasing manner to the listener ("A good lecturer"). Expanding vocabulary to accentuate (2) by necessity compromises (1) for classes of listeners / readers who are not familiar with that vocabulary superset. Which decomposes the optimization problem to "Who is my audience and what is their comfort vocabulary set?" I would expect it's >1,000 words even for ESOL listeners. However, it's certainly < "the full set of florid English words". And furthermore, I think English writers writing for English consumers (I count myself among these, sadly) often undervalue writing in the most effective style for the widest audience when applicable (and nowadays it almost always is: research papers, comments on a public forum, blog posts, how to's, etc etc). Does anyone have any links to courses to help develop a working minimally spanning English vocabulary for international technical communication? This is one problem I've had with academic literature in historically liberal arts fields. "Just learn the obscure English vocabulary (before you can understand, work, or research in a field)" is a ridiculous bar to set in front of contributions.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
adrianratnapala 10y ago
Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...
- jeffwass 10y ago
  For me, Thing Explainer was like a funny joke at first which got old VERY fast. To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful." I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  I'm a fan of Guy Steele's Growing a Language, a talk about programming language design where he limited himself to using mostly only single-syllable words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Not to mentioned hand crayon drawn transparencies.
  - e12e 10y ago
    This seems like a good companion (probably as a sequel) to: "Richard Feynman - Computer Heuristics Lecture": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA In general, Feynman might be a poster child for using simple language to explain complex things.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words. For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!") I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something. Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.
0x0 10y ago
Sounds very similar to Simple English Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia#Simple_English https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_W...
- andreareina 10y ago
  In fact, Randall makes an explicit mention of it in a comic: https://xkcd.com/547/ https://xkcd.com/547/
stepanhruda 10y ago
I have Thing Explainer right here, my main issue is I'd like a separate version with the actual terms so I can have a conversation about the covered topics without sounding like a moron.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  What I think would be interesting is if he tried another version without the 1000 most common words.
  - andreasvc 10y ago
    I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.
    - weinzierl 10y ago
      Someone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29
      - theoh 10y ago
        There are multiple examples. It is difficult but apparently not so difficult that nobody attempts it. The accepted term for texts like that is "lipogram"; it's a popular form of the broader category of constrained writing. Wikipedia has a page for "logology" which is apparently a term for the general activity of playing with language in that kind of way on a per-letter basis (so, including anagrams and palindromes, etc.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology
      - slazaro 10y ago
        If you sort all English words by frequency, the ones that contain 'e' would be distributed more or less randomly, so it seems more doable. Banning the first 1000 would prevent you from using the most useful words. I don't think you could construct sentences that wouldn't sound totally weird.
teh_klev 10y ago
Looking at the diagram of "Bags of stuff inside you" in "Thing Explainer" I was surprised to find that when annotating blood vessels, intestines etc he uses "hallway" and not "pipe", which I thought would be in the 1000 most often used english words. How curious.
impostervt 10y ago
self-plug: let's you explore which English words are the most common The Long Tail of the English Language http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-language.html http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-la...
- rspeer 10y ago
  Is that your site? You have a spam problem in your comments.
mendelk 10y ago
Off topic: I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things. At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming. If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO. As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again! [0] http://amzn.com/0785824324 http://amzn.com/0785824324
tomc1985 10y ago
Thing Explainer was a nice experiment, but, really... what's the value in trying to parse CNL explanations that are harder to understand than using the actual word?

176 points by tkuhn 10y ago

While this is tagged as PDF the link is actually to the website where you can read the abstract. The PDF link is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.02457v1.pdf

GolDDranks 10y ago

I thought Thing Explainer is a fun experiment and a delightful book, but as an attempt (and it isn't a serious attempt) to use only simple and super-commonly-used language, it doesn't hit the home base. As I speak English as my second language I'm acutely aware of this. Thing explainer uses the 1000 most commonly used lemmas, but words have multiple senses, and some of them are commonly used and some are not. From a viewpoint of a language learner, an unfamiliar use of a word might be another word for what it's worth. (Of course they might have a clear semantical connection, which helps guessing.) Another thing is that phrasal verbs and set phrases are essentially vocabulary items too – you can't decode them using only extralinguistic knowledge (that is, knowledge about the world). Randall Munroe developed a text editor that highlights any words outside his word list to help with writing the book, but I think an editor that could handle word senses and multi-word phrases would be a formidable thing. Of course it needs much more high-level NLP, word sense disambiguation and such. (Possibly impossible to pull that off cleanly with the current level of tech?) I'd love to see one.

GolDDranks 10y ago
P.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.
- adrianN 10y ago
  I don't think that's an easier problem than machine translation between "different" languages. You still need to understand the source text well enough to figure out the meaning and reproduce it using different words.
- TuringTest 10y ago
  I think it is more likely that computers will first manage to understand texts written in Simple English way before they are able to do the same with English. That is not surprising, as that's exactly how humans learn to work with language.
- andreasvc 10y ago
  Text simplification and summarization are active fields of research. Machine translation is indeed more active, but this is understandable given its commercial applications.
foota 10y ago
It seems like using a model that can estimate its certainty about the meaning of a sentence might be a good way of going about this. If the model is uncertain then it could recommend re-writing the sentence.
Pitarou 10y ago
This is also a common complaint about Simple English books written for English learners. The books claim to have a restricted vocabulary, but they cheat by using phrasal verbs. Their vocabulary includes verbs like put and set along with prepositions like up, with and upon. You can combine these to generate an enormous number of phrasal verbs like put up with, set upon and so on, which are normally considered to be separate vocabulary items.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  As a person whose first language is not English, I find phrasal verbs one of the most challenging parts of the language. In fact I just searched set upon and was greatly surprised that it means attacking violently! I would have never guessed that from the words alone.
  - alanfalcon 10y ago
    Context helps: "His foe set upon him with such vigor that he knew he was hopelessly outmatched. He began to silently pray for assistance."
  - Angostura 10y ago
    From what I recall, 'set' is the word in the English language which has most meanings - over 50.
    - Pitarou 10y ago
      Depending on which dictionary you use, it's either put or set.
      - e12e 10y ago
        Perhaps it's time to revisit some OO/database terms, to avoid things like: Person.set(up), db.put(down), set.contains(Person) ;-)
  - gotodengo 10y ago
eutectic 10y ago
You could train a language model from a corpus of writing by e.g. ESL students or young children, and then disallow any words with p<p(thousandth_word) given the preceding context. :)
drb311 10y ago
The text editor is here: http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ http://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ Try it! 1,000 words is an unrealistic constraint. But I'm amazed how often I use a complex word when the simple alternative is better. Or... Sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But doing it often makes my writing better.
- eddieroger 10y ago
  I wasn't familiar with that tool, so I put a few of my last HipChat messages in there to see how I faired. Once I removed specific words or proper nouns, I still didn't do all that well. Even the preceding sentence had four problem words, and I'm pretty sure "preceding" would join them. I agree, sticking to 1,000 words is hard. But I don't think I agree that it makes the writing better. I look at language as a form of expression, and some words are just more colorful than others, but it takes all of them to paint a picture. I honestly don't know if I could limit myself to the 1,000 most common words, but I wouldn't want to do that if I could. That said, I'm curious why you think it makes your writing better? Is it that you think more about what you're saying? Or that you think it will be more easily digested by others?
  - acjacobson 10y ago
    I am not sure anyone believes that writing with only 1000 words is better - but it should make the writing more understandable. There is a sharp curve in understanding from text that is easy (most magazine or newspaper articles) to dizzyingly complicated (most academic writing). For me the utility in simple writing is its accessibility to a wider audience. Incidentally you did rather well in your second paragraph - only 'honestly, limit, common, curious, digested' were out of bounds, and they are easily swapped without much loss in expression.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    To me, language is wielded with dual intention: (1) to convey meaning ("A thorough lecturer") & (2) to convey meaning in a pleasing manner to the listener ("A good lecturer"). Expanding vocabulary to accentuate (2) by necessity compromises (1) for classes of listeners / readers who are not familiar with that vocabulary superset. Which decomposes the optimization problem to "Who is my audience and what is their comfort vocabulary set?" I would expect it's >1,000 words even for ESOL listeners. However, it's certainly < "the full set of florid English words". And furthermore, I think English writers writing for English consumers (I count myself among these, sadly) often undervalue writing in the most effective style for the widest audience when applicable (and nowadays it almost always is: research papers, comments on a public forum, blog posts, how to's, etc etc). Does anyone have any links to courses to help develop a working minimally spanning English vocabulary for international technical communication? This is one problem I've had with academic literature in historically liberal arts fields. "Just learn the obscure English vocabulary (before you can understand, work, or research in a field)" is a ridiculous bar to set in front of contributions.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

adrianratnapala 10y ago

Thing explainer is fun -- but I don't think the descriptions in it are particularly clear. It's just fun to see how he solves the problem of describing them given his self-imposed limitation. Even more fun is Poul Andersons "uncleftish beholding": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/students/dtc/students2011/maitland/fun/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/complexity/people/st...

jeffwass 10y ago
For me, Thing Explainer was like a funny joke at first which got old VERY fast. To paraphrase an old Andrew Dice Clay quote : "It was like masturbating with a cheese grater. Slightly amusing, but mostly painful." I lost all interest in the book within five minutes of browsing it.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
I'm a fan of Guy Steele's Growing a Language, a talk about programming language design where he limited himself to using mostly only single-syllable words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Not to mentioned hand crayon drawn transparencies.
- e12e 10y ago
  This seems like a good companion (probably as a sequel) to: "Richard Feynman - Computer Heuristics Lecture": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA In general, Feynman might be a poster child for using simple language to explain complex things.
jgrahamc 10y ago
Agreed. Often you have to already know what he's talking about to get meaning from his words. For example, his description of the Saturn V Rocket (he replaced rocket with 'up goer') has this description of hydrogen: "The kind of air that once burned a big sky bag and people died (And someone said "Oh the [humans]!") I guess that's amusing if you already know about the Hindenburg, or something. Also, speaking of the propellant used for the Saturn V's F-1 engine he states: "This is full of that stuff they burned in lights before houses had power". The propellant in the F-1 engine was RP-1 (kerosene). I assume he was talking about 'town gas' for lighting.

0x0 10y ago

Sounds very similar to Simple English Wikipedia: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia#Simple_English https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_W...

andreareina 10y ago
In fact, Randall makes an explicit mention of it in a comic: https://xkcd.com/547/ https://xkcd.com/547/

stepanhruda 10y ago

I have Thing Explainer right here, my main issue is I'd like a separate version with the actual terms so I can have a conversation about the covered topics without sounding like a moron.

vanderZwan 10y ago
What I think would be interesting is if he tried another version without the 1000 most common words.
- andreasvc 10y ago
  I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.
  - weinzierl 10y ago
    Someone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29
    - theoh 10y ago
      There are multiple examples. It is difficult but apparently not so difficult that nobody attempts it. The accepted term for texts like that is "lipogram"; it's a popular form of the broader category of constrained writing. Wikipedia has a page for "logology" which is apparently a term for the general activity of playing with language in that kind of way on a per-letter basis (so, including anagrams and palindromes, etc.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology
    - slazaro 10y ago
      If you sort all English words by frequency, the ones that contain 'e' would be distributed more or less randomly, so it seems more doable. Banning the first 1000 would prevent you from using the most useful words. I don't think you could construct sentences that wouldn't sound totally weird.

teh_klev 10y ago

Looking at the diagram of "Bags of stuff inside you" in "Thing Explainer" I was surprised to find that when annotating blood vessels, intestines etc he uses "hallway" and not "pipe", which I thought would be in the 1000 most often used english words. How curious.

impostervt 10y ago

self-plug: let's you explore which English words are the most common The Long Tail of the English Language http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-language.html http://blog.wordsapi.com/2015/01/the-long-tail-of-english-la...

rspeer 10y ago
Is that your site? You have a spam problem in your comments.

mendelk 10y ago

Off topic: I attended a school with little to none "secular" education, but I was by nature really curious about things. At some point, I got my hands on "How Stuff Works", the book[0], and devoured it. It was a super-enlightening book. I'd even venture to say it set me on my autodidactic path to programming. If this book serves the same purpose for someone as that book did for me, it's benefits cannot be overstated IMO. As an extra bonus, I was considered by my peers to be far more knowledgable than I actually was, due to having a layman's understanding (or at least the appearance thereof) of _so many_ esoteric concepts. 10/10 would read again! [0] http://amzn.com/0785824324 http://amzn.com/0785824324

tomc1985 10y ago

Thing Explainer was a nice experiment, but, really... what's the value in trying to parse CNL explanations that are harder to understand than using the actual word?