Universal Networking Language - Scope and Goals

Scope and Goals

The UNL is an effort to achieve a simple basis for representing the most central aspects of information and meaning in a machine- and human-language-independent form. As a language-independent formalism, the UNL aims at coding, storing, disseminating and retrieving information independently of the original language in which it was expressed. In this sense, UNL seeks to provide the tools for overcoming the language barrier in a systematic way.

At first glance, the UNL seems to be a multilingual machine translation system, i.e., a kind of Interlingua, to which the source texts are converted before being translated into the target languages. It can, in fact, be used for such a purpose, and very efficiently too. However, its real strength is to represent knowledge and its primary objective is to serve as an infrastructure for handling knowledge that already exists or can exist in any given language.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that at this point in time it would be foolish to state it possible to represent the “full” meaning of any word, sentence or text for any language. Subtleties of intention and interpretation make the “full meaning”, whatever concept we might have of it, too variable and subjective for any systematic treatment. The UNL avoids the pitfalls of trying to represent the “full meaning” of sentences or texts, targeting instead the “core” or “consensual” meaning that is most often attributed to them. In this sense, much of the subtlety of poetry, metaphor, figurative language, innuendo and other complex, indirect communicative behaviors is beyond the current scope and goals of the UNL. Instead, the UNL targets direct communicative behavior and literal meanings as a tangible, concrete basis for much or most of human communication in practical, day-to-day settings.