Roland's next step: http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Linguistics-Talking-Robots-Processing/dp/3642224318/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363984424&sr=8-1&keywords=talking+robots+roland+hausser Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots: Processing Content in Database Semantics Publication Date: September 14, 2011 | ISBN-10: 3642224318 | ISBN-13: 978-3642224317 | Edition: 2011The practical task of building a talking robot requires a theory of how natural language communication works. Conversely, the best way to computationally verify a theory of natural language communication is to demonstrate its functioning concretely in the form of a talking robot, the epitome of human–machine communication. To build an actual robot requires hardware that provides appropriate recognition and action interfaces, and because such hardware is hard to develop the approach in this book is theoretical: the author presents an artificial cognitive agent with language as a software system called database semantics (DBS). Because a theoretical approach does not have to deal with the technical difficulties of hardware engineering there is no reason to simplify the system – instead the software components of DBS aim at completeness of function and of data coverage in word form recognition, syntactic–semantic interpretation and inferencing, leaving the procedural implementation of elementary concepts for later. In this book the author first examines the universals of natural language and explains the Database Semantics approach. Then in Part I he examines the following natural language communication issues: using external surfaces; the cycle of natural language communication; memory structure; autonomous control; and learning. In Part II he analyzes the coding of content according to the aspects: semantic relations of structure; simultaneous amalgamation of content; graph-theoretical considerations; computing perspective in dialogue; and computing perspective in text. The book ends with a concluding chapter, a bibliography and an index. The book will be of value to researchers, graduate students and engineers in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, in particular those who deal with natural language processing.
For you, Steve, the next step is to write a book about your approach and sell it for $100 a pop, or $75 for the e-book, and do a book tour (if possible). Then gain some early adopters and market traction. The point is to make money WHILE promoting your idea. Cheers, ~PM Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:13:23 -0700 Subject: [agi] 40 years of parsing NL... From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Piaget, Logan, et al, We have had some interesting discussions about which method is best and fastest, but is it even possible?!!! My own big wake-up call came many years ago, when I recorded a class I presented, and had it transcribed with instructions "don't edit it, just transcribe what I said". It was FULL of fragments, missing words, and even misstatements, but the class had NO problem grokking what I had said. Similarly, just take any unedited posting (you can easily recognize editing by the lack of ANY spelling errors) and try hand-diagramming its sentences. They will be better than spoken sentences, but still, you will have problems with around half of them. Several early NL projects set out with dictionaries that identified every part of speech that each word could be, and programmatically set about identifying a set of assumptions wherein each sentence would hang together. Unfortunately, few sentences had exactly one solution, and the presence of any presumed words fractured the entire process. More recently, "ontological" approaches have attempted to sub-divide the parts of speech, e.g. identifying whether a particular noun can have color, weight, etc., to assist in assigning the targets of adjectives and adverbs. The present consensus seems to be that speech is made to a particular audience with a particular set of presumed knowledge to use to fill in the gaps, and an automated listener/reader will NOT be able to understand "plain English" without similar real-world experience as an intended reader. Without that experience, lots of gaps and disambiguation errors will persist regardless of how much programming effort is expended. Language translation can skirt many/most of these issues, by preserving the semantic ambiguities in the translation, to let the reader/listener figure out what the computer failed to figure out. No, there will never ever be "full understanding", if for no other reason than some of what I say simply doesn't make sense. Instead, what can be done, and what is needed for present applications, are various forms of partial understanding. You can see this in throwing some numerical problems at WolframAlpha.com and watching the parsing of it. It picks out key words and tries ways of relating them together. Similarly, DrEliza.com picks out key words and phrases that are associated with symptoms and conditions it knows about. The MOST important part of "understanding" is often identifying what the writer does NOT know (and the computer does know), sort of a reverse analysis. I refer to these as "statements of ignorance" and this is an important part of DrEliza.com My parsing proposal was made as a component in a larger system in support of problem solving and sales (it is just one box among many in figure 1 in my patent application). My approach appears to be general purpose and applicable to other applications. Given that a universal parser appears to be impossible until it can walk among us, and even then will have some problems, each application must consider what it needs to obtain from the text/speech to do its job. So, when relating performance of parsers, it is important to disambiguate just WHAT is being performed, e.g. just WHAT is "parsing", and what applications will a particular approach work best for? Logan, what do you see are the "best fit" applications for reverse ascent descent parsing? Piaget, what do you see are the "best fit" applications for LA parsing? Any thoughts? Steve AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
