September 2017 LSAT Section 4 Question 13

Columnist: Computer voice-recognition technology currently cannot distinguish between homophones such as "their" and ...

AndrewArabie on December 4, 2022

Mapping Help

I had lots of trouble mapping this and would like help on how to map this, and which indicators determine the sufficient and necessary terms. I understood this stimulus as: P1: Current tech can't distinguish between homophones (not DH). I figured the word "until" works like "unless" and "without" where you place the following in the necessary then negate the preceding and make it the sufficient so I have the conclusion as: C: If you have an Accurate Translation, the tech must recognize grammatical and semantic relations (AT --> RGSR). I knew I needed to connect (not DH) to this chain but I didn't know what to connect it to but I had a gut feeling to connect it to RGSR so my chain was AT --> RGSR --> DH I got it down to A and D but in the end chose D. Can someone help me map this, tell me where the indicator terms are, and where I went wrong?

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AndrewArabie on December 4, 2022

I retried again this morning and still got the same answer.

P: If it is current tech --> it cannot distinguish between homophones (CT --> not DH)
C: Therefore, if it cannot recognize grammatical and semantic relations between words, it will not be an accurate translation (not RGSR --> not AT)

Because we are concluding it will not be an accurate translation, that term must be in the necessary so I have:
CT --> not DH ... not RGSR --> not AT
so my necessary assumption is: [not DH --> not RGSR ] which is answer choice D.

Emil-Kunkin on December 11, 2022

Hi, I think this is a great example of a problem where a diagram is not particularly useful. I would probably diagram as follows:

If Ct then Not DH
THUS If not RGSR then Not AT.

It looks a lot like what you have, but I'm not really sure what it gets us. That said, this is a necessary assumption question, and each argument has many, many necessary assumptions. If we try to approach this from the standpoint of determining what the author has to believe, we might have an easier time.

For starters, the author seems to be equating having an accurate translation with being able to distinguish homophones. Is this necessarily true? Could we have a good translation that doesn't get the homophones right? I don't know, but the author clearly believes this is the case. The author also must believe that recognizing grammatical and semantic relations is necessary to recognizing homophones, since the author claims this is needed for a good translation.

With this approach, we can see why A is right p, it matches that second thing we know must be true.

Looking at D, let's find a way it could be wrong. It tells us that if not DH then not Rgsr. However, this does not have to be true. Maybe there is a program that is not able to distinguish between homophones, but is able to recognize grammar me context. Perhaps it is just not quite good enough that recognizing yet, or maybe it is for a language that has no homophones. The author is not committed to believing D, so it is not a necessary assumption.

AndrewArabie on December 14, 2022

This makes perfect sense, thank you Emil