YKY,
If there is a major problem with Cyc, it is not the choice of basic
KR language. Predicate logic is precise and relatively simple.
Rather, the main problem is the impracticality of encoding a decent
percentage of the needed commonsense knowledge!
And, on a more technical level, I think that Cyc's **ontology** is
too complex and unwieldy. This is NOT an issue of the KR language,
but rather of the chosen vocabulary of "semantic primitives". I
don't feel that Cyc has a well-thought-out set of semantic
primitives. They have a small number of basic logical primitives,
and then a HUGE number of complex abstract concepts in their upper
ontology. IMO an intermediate level is needed, involving a few dozen
well thought out semantic primitives, and a few hundred additional
basic semantic relationships.
Lojban IMO has done a great job of this. The Lojban language
embodies a very well thought out commonsense ontology, which has been
shaped evolutionarily thru the usage of the language by the Lojban
community.
However, this still doesn't solve the problem that there is too much
commonsense knowledge to code-in explicitly ... so it has to be
learned...
-- ben
On Jan 24, 2007, at 3:55 PM, YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote:
On 1/24/07, Stephen Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Given my experience while employed at Cycorp, I would say that
there are two ways to work with them. The first way is to
collaborate with Cycorp on a sponsored project. Collaborators are
mainly universities ( e.g. CMU & Stanford) and established research
companies (e.g. SRI & SAIC) who have a track record of receiving
government grants, and whose technologies are complementary to
Cyc. I would not suggest this approach for MindPixel 2 yet.
>
> The second approach involves no exchange of money. Cycorp wants
to promote its ontology - its commonsense vocabulary, and has
released its definitions with a very permisive license as OpenCyc.
One can also obtain nearly the entire Cyc knowledge base with a
Research Cyc license for research purposes without fee, but with
the RCyc license you are not allowed to extract facts and rules for
MindPixel 2.
>
> You could contact the Cyc Foundation, which is an independent
organization run by a friend of mine and former Cycorp employee.
They are seeking to add knowledge to Cyc by using volunteers and I
believe that they would be very receptive to MindPixel 2 provided
it uses a form of the OpenCyc vocabulary for knowledge representation.
>
> I suggest obtaining an RCyc license to see how the Cyc inference
engine handles large rule and fact sets, and to see if the Cyc
vocabulary fits your idea of a commonsense representation language.
Somehow I feel that Cyc's knowledge representation scheme is not
good enough, but designing a new scheme is quite challenging. I'm
wondering if a MindPixel 2 project can sidestep this issue, by
being as unstructured as possible.
First of all we need to translate the NL sentences into logic;
this I have come up with some ideas.
Unfortunately that is not the whole story. Sometimes we need to
link one sentence to another. For example there may be 2 sentences:
S1 = "The French people executed Louis 16."
S2 = "Napoleon rose to power."
And we should connect S1 and S2 with the link "_later_in_time_".
Thus the facts exist within a large web of connections. Otherwise,
the sentences alone may be nonsense when taken out of context.
Cyc faces the same problem. I think they deal with it by using
what they call microtheories.
I don't want to make the project overly complicated, but it seems
that we must deal with these issues. I'll give it more thought...
If we end up using different knowledge representations, exchanging
data would be not so easy =(
YKY
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