Unit Intervals

[Jukka K. Korpela]

2014-12-10, 13:15, Yury Tarasievich wrote:

> Then it's a natural language problem, and as such, (almost) completely
> un-algorithmisable, at least in such a context.
>
> yury
>
> On 12/10/2014 01:43 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> The term "interval" is badly chosen in what he
>> describes; Cameron actually wants to express
>> periodicity (without any implied start or end;
>> i.e. only the frequency).

It is “algorithmisable” in an essential way, though it is debatable 
whether this justifies inclusion into CLDR and how important this is 
relative to all kinds of things that might be included there.

For example, in questionnaires and reports, phrases like “every 2 
months” are common. And the amount of time might be something that is 
determined “dynamically”, i.e. during program execution, and should be 
presented without any contribution from a human being, i.e. automatically.

An obvious problem here is that different languages use different 
expressions, so that this is not just a matter of using a pattern 
consisting of a word like “every” and a designation of amount of time. 
Some languages use expressions that would be something like “each 2nd 
month” if applied in English. There are probably other approaches too, 
so some pre-study would be needed to find out the basic overall patterns.

Yucca