On 11/24/06, J. Storrs Hall, PhD. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Friday 24 November 2006 06:03, YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote:
> You talked mainly about how sentences require vast amounts of external
> knowledge to interpret, but it does not imply that those sentences cannot
> be represented in (predicate) logical form.
Substitute "bit string" for "predicate logic" and you'll have a sentence that
is just as true and not a lot less useful.
> I think there should be a
> working memory in which sentences under attention would "bring up" other
> sentences by association. For example if "a person is being kicked" is in
> working memory, that fact would bring up other facts such as "being kicked
> causes a person to feel pain and possibly to get angry", etc. All this is
> orthogonal to *how* the facts are represented.
Oh, I think the representation is quite important. In particular, logic lets
you in for gazillions of inferences that are totally inapropos and no good
way to say which is better. Logic also has the enormous disadvantage that you
tend to have frozen the terms and levels of abstraction. Actual word meanings
are a lot more plastic, and I'd bet internal representations are damn near
fluid.
The use of predicates for representation, and the use of logic for
reasoning, are separate issues. I think it's pretty clear that
English sentences translate neatly into predicate logic statements,
and that such a transformation is likely a useful first step for any
sentence-understanding process. Whether those predicates are then
used to draw conclusions according to a standard logic system, or are
used as inputs to a completely different process, is a different
matter.
The open questions are representation -- I'm leaning towards CSG in Hilbert
spaces at the moment, but that may be too computationally demanding -- and
how to form abstractions.
Does CSG = context-sensitive grammar in this case? How would you use
Hilbert spaces?
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