Free-Form Linguistic Input In Mathematica 8 84
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Soulskill
from the differentiates-concepts-and-integrates-words dept.
from the differentiates-concepts-and-integrates-words dept.
vbraga writes "With the release of Mathematica 8, it now allows input through free-form English instead of the Mathematica syntax, just like the Wolfram|Alpha engine. The results are impressive. From the blog post: 'I routinely found myself using free-form linguistics as an integral part of longer computations — randomly interspersing Mathematica syntax and free-form linguistics on different lines in a Mathematica session, and just using whichever was most convenient for a particular input. And here's an exciting part: in Mathematica 8 the free-form linguistics doesn't just operate line-by-line. It knows the context in which it's used in a notebook, so you can use it to build things up.'"
Re:Freeform linguistics no good unless perfect (Score:3, Informative)
That's actually exactly how it does work! If you look at the images in the article, you'll see that each has a line of natural language, followed by a line showing how it was parsed into Mathematica syntax, and then the output below that.
Re:Freeform linguistics no good unless perfect (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ability to turn it off (Score:3, Informative)
To use freeform syntax, you prepend your command with an equals sign. So even if you cannot turn it off, you can very easily just ignore it as a feature. The idea is to use it where convenient, like tell it to graph a function, and let it take a guess at an appropriate range to graph it over. If you don't like the results, you can edit the displayed Mathematica syntax command it displays, and you still saved yourself a bit of work.
It emphatically is not intended for being used in scripts, but is only intended for use in an interactive session, so you will notice the errors. Indeed using it in scripts is a very bad idea, since Alpha will continue to be updated, and may interpret the same phrase differently at a later date.
Re:Basically just Wolfram Alpha integration (Score:3, Informative)
More likely it makes sense because it