Disagree. The brain ALWAYS tries to make sense of language - convert it into 
images and graphics.  I see no area of language comprehension where this 
doesn't apply.

I was just reading a thread re the Symbol gorund P on another group - & I think 
what's fooling people into thinking purely linguistic comprehension is possible 
is  the "Dictionary Fallacy". They think the meaning of  a sentence can be 
derived by looking up meanings word by word in a dictionary (real or in their 
mind).

But to understand sentences you have to understand how the words FIT TOGETHER.

There are no rules in any dictionary that tell you what words fit together.

How do you know that the sentences:

"The man climbed the penny"
"The mat sat on the cat"
"The teapot broke the bull"

are probably nonsense (but not necessarily)?   

The brain understands these and all sentences by converting them into composite 
pictures. It may and does use other methods as well but "making sense"/ 
"getting the picture"/ "seeing what you're talking about" are fundamental. 
Understanding depends on "imagination", (in the literal sense of manipulating 
images).

It is by testing these derived pictures against its visual (& sensory) models 
and "visual logic" of things that the brain understands both what they are 
referring to and whether they make sense (in the 2nd meaning of that term - are 
realistic).

The brain uses a picture tree, as we discussed earlier, Ben,  and that picture 
tree is not only how the brain understands, but also the source of its 
adaptivity.Lot more to say about this.. but as you see I have a very hard line 
here, and yours seems to be considerably softer, and I'm interested in 
understanding that.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Benjamin Goertzel 
  To: agi@v2.listbox.com 
  Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 2:02 PM
  Subject: Re: [agi] rule-based NL system



  I agree about developmental language learning combined with automated 
learning of grammar rules being the right approach to NLP. 

  In fact, my first wife did her PhD work on this topic in 1994, at Waikato 
University in Hamilton New Zealand.  She got frustrated and quite before 
finishing her degree, but her program (which I helped with) inferred some nifty 
grammatical rules from a bunch of really simple children's books, and then used 
them as a seed for learning more complex grammatical rules from slightly more 
complex children's books.  This work was never published (like at least 80% of 
my work, because writing things up for publication is boring and sometimes 
takes more time than doing the work...). 

  However, a notable thing we found during that research was that nearly all 
children's books, and children's spoken language (e.g. from the CHILDES corpus 
of childrens spoken language), make copious and constant reference to PICTURES 
(in the book case) or objects in the physical surround (in the spoken language 
case). 

  In other words: I became convinced that in the developmental approach, if you 
want to take the human child language learning metaphor at all seriously, you 
need to go beyond pure language learning and take an experientially grounded 
approach. 

  Of course, this doesn't rule out the potential viability of pursuing 
developmental approaches that **don't** take the human child language learning 
metaphor at all seriously ;-)

  But it seems pretty clear that, in the human case, experiential grounding 
plays a rather huge role in helping small children learn the rules of 
language... 

  -- Ben G



  On 4/28/07, J. Storrs Hall, PhD. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
    I think YKY is right on this one. There was a Dave Barry column about going 
to
    the movies with kids in which a 40-foot image of a handgun appears on the
    screen, at which point every mother in the theater turns to her kid and 
says, 
    "Oh look, he's got a GUN!"

    Communication in natural language is extremely compressed. It's a code that
    expresses the *difference* between the speaker's and the hearer's states of
    knowledge, not a full readout of the meaning. (this is why misunderstanding
    is so common, as witness the "intelligence" discussion here)

    Even a theoretical Solomonoff/Hutter AI would flounder if given a 
completely 
    compressed bit-stream: it would be completely random, incompressible and
    unpredictable like Chaitin's Omega number. Language is a lot closer to this
    than is the sensory input stream of a kid.

    There's a quote widely attributed to a "William Martin" (anybody know who 
he 
    is?): "You can't learn anything unless you almost know it already." In
    general, the hearer needs a world model almost the same as the speaker's.

    Let's call this "Winograd's Theory of Understanding": that having a model 
    capable of simulating the domain of discourse is necessary and sufficient 
for
    understanding discourse about it. (NB: (a) there are different levels of
    completeness and accuracy for simulations and also for understanding; (b) 
    "symbol grounding" in the sense of associations to physical sensory/motor
    signals is *not necessary*.)

    I find SHRDLU and its intellectual descencents a convincing demonstration of
    WTU. This implies that understanding an NL sentence consists not only in 
    parsing it into an internal representation and stashing it somewhere, but, 
if
    it's something you didn't already know, modifying and augmenting the
    mechanism of your world model to reflect the new knowledge in future 
    simulations. In other words, building a working mechanism and integrating it
    into an existing vast, complex machine.

    Josh

    On Saturday 28 April 2007 03:29, YKY (Yan King Yin) wrote:
    > "Layered learning" is not just better, it's actually the only 
    > computationally feasible approach.
    >
    > We may talk to a baby like:
    > "MILK?"
    > "You want to play BALL?"
    > "Oh you POO-POO again" etc.
    > And these things are said simultaneously as some *physical* events (eg 
    > milk, ball, poo) are happening, which allows the baby to correctly *bind*
    > the words to concepts, ie achieve grounding.
    >
    > Contrast this with something from Wall Street Journal:
    > Headline: "Employees of a new plan to get Dell back on the road to 
growth, 
    > including streamlining management and looking at new methods of
    > distribution beyond the computer company's direct-selling model."
    > Can a baby really learn from THIS ^^^ ?

    -----
    This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
    To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
    http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; 



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
  To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  No virus found in this incoming message.
  Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
  Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.6.1/778 - Release Date: 27/04/2007 
13:39

-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936

Reply via email to