On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 02:58:07PM -0700, Matt Mahoney wrote: > --- Linas Vepstas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Thus, I find that my interests are now turning to representing > > conversational state. How does novamente deal with it? What > > about Pei Wang's NARS? It seems that NARS is a reasoning system; > > great; but what is holding me back right now is not an ability > > to reason per-se, but the ability to maintain a conversational > > state. > > If the matrix is sparse it can be compressed using singular value > decomposition (SVD).
[...] > This is not a model you can tack onto a structured knowledge base. Why not? Bot NARS and novamente have real-number-valued associative deduction abilities. I see no reason why simple matrix or nerual net algo's couldn't be layered on top of it. > Your approach has been tried > hundreds of times. Yes, I figured as much. I haven't yet seen a cogent explanation of why folks gave up. For shrdlu, sure .. compute power was limited. There's discussion about grounding, and folks wander off into the weeds. > There is a great temptation to insert knowledge directly, > but the result is always the same. Natural language is a complicated beast. > You cannot hand code all the language rules. After 23 years of developing the > Cyc database, Doug Lenat guesses it is between 0.1% and 10% finished. And hasn't stopped trying. We also have Wordnet, and assorted ontology projects. How many english words are there? About 250K, but this hasn't stopped classical dictionary authors, nor wordnet, nor Lenat. How many sentence parse patterns are there? 10K? 100K? 1M? Its not infinite, even though it can feel that way sometimes. Just because you personally don't feel like trying to hand-build an association matrix between sentence parse patterns and a semantic "current topic of conversation" dataset doesn't mean its unbuildable. I didn't claim the approach I described as being "good"; its not; and I can see its limitations already. I did claim that its "practical", and after half-a-dozen weekends coding, I have a demo. I'm trying to understand just how far the approach can be pushed. I get the impression that it hasn't been pushed very far at all, before people give up. --linas ----- 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=8660244&id_secret=60163983-af3ed3