--- Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It could be done with a simple chain of word associations mined from a > text > > corpus: alert -> coffee -> caffeine -> theobromine -> chocolate. > > That approach yields way, way, way too much noise. Try it.
I agree that it does to the point of uselessness. > > > But that is not the problem. The problem is that the reasoning would be > > faulty, even with a more sophisticated analysis. By a similar analysis > you > > could reason: > > > > - coffee makes you alert. > > - coffee contains water. > > - water (H20) is related to hydrogen sulfide (H2S). > > - rotten eggs produce hydrogen sulfide. > > - therefore rotten eggs make you alert. > > There is a "produce" predicate in here which throws off the chain of > reasoning wildly. > > And, nearly every food contains water, so the application of Bayes > rule within this inference chain of yours will yield a conclusion with > essentially zero confidence. Since fewer foods contain caffeine or > theobromine, the inference trail I suggested will not have this > problem. But you cannot conclude from - coffee contains caffeine - coffee makes you alert that caffeine makes you alert either. > > I think adding common sense knowledge before language is the wrong > approach. > > It didn't work for Cyc. > > I agree it's not the best approach. > > I also think, though, that one unsuccessful attempt should not be taken to > damn > the whole approach. Well, there are many examples of AI failures where we add knowledge first, then language (BASEBALL, Eliza, SHRDLU, hundreds of expert systems, etc). We do this because abstract knowledge is easy to represent efficiently on a computer. But the brain doesn't work this way. A language model has to work like the brain, because language is adapted to it. We don't do it that way because it requires such a huge amount of computation. > yet I still feel you dismiss the text-mining approach too glibly... No, but text mining requires a language model that learns while mining. You can't mine the text first. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
