Thanks for the compliment Lukasz. I am reading your slides and here are my comments:
(1) I had seven years experience with the Cyc project. Would you agree that Cyc aspires to be a KRS as you define it? (2) Sadly, Cyc lacks procedural methods as first class KB objects. Also known as codelets, these are pieces of procedural code that can be fired as the consequent of a rule. Cyc has a facility to do this but the procedures themselves are semantically opaque, being calls into the Cyc runtime engine. In my own work I want to fully represent procedures, using Cyc action scripts as the starting point, so that the system can "do things" in addition to answering questions. (3) The Question Answering System diagram on page 6 is very nice. (4) Conceptual Dependency Theory (CD) - This is somewhat like Cyc in that Doug Lenat is a mathematician and was strongly attracted to symbolic representations that are independent of natural language. The glaring problem with this approach is that coverage of commonsense phenomena is harder without guidance from natural language sources. To illustrate my point, rather than start with an English encyclopedia and represent it entirely, the Cyc project began with some commonsense situations, (e.g. one day in the life of Fred) and represented them from first philosophical/mathematical principles. In my own work, I want to extend the Cyc ontology to cover all the concepts mentioned in the glosses (definitions) of WordNet, and ultimately the propositional content of Wikipedia articles. (4) Description logics - these sacrifice expressiveness for deductive inference tractability. Cyc always makes this tradeoff in favor of expressiveness, realizing that some queries may not answer. My own approach will be for maximum expressiveness (e.g. OWL-full with horn rules) and use special purpose inference modules for tractability in common use cases, as does Cyc. One can commonly detect the expressiveness used by the query (or desired by the user) and employ a fast subsumption reasoner when applicable. (5) Sorts and Features - To me these are Cyc-like, except that Cyc made the decision to represent appropriate features as class membership (e.g. the property cyc:mainColorOfObject is a sub-property of cyc:isa / rdf:type). Supposedly, this representation is faster for Cyc deductive inference. (6) Knowledge types - Multinet appears more expressive in this respect than the Cyc ontology, although the Cyc KR language CycL allows meta assertions so I believe that MultiNet could be encoded in a Cyc KB. (7) Conceptual capsule - interesting, Cyc has the supporting assertions but not the notion of what assertions uniquely define an object. (8) How does Multinet address connectionism or probabilistic inference (e.g. Bayes)? Did I miss where a probability may be associated with an assertion, or with an argument place in an assertion? (8) lexicon - need more examples for me to comment. I would be interested in your comments on my adoption of Fluid Construction Grammar as a solution to the NL to semantics mapping problem. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Lukasz Stafiniak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, April 8, 2008 5:51:50 PM Subject: [agi] Between logical semantics and linguistic semantics I have recently polished my copy-and-paste slides on Multinet: http://www.ii.uni.wroc.pl/~lukstafi/pmwiki/uploads/AGI/Multinet.pdf Pei Wang also gives an interesting chapter about semantics in AGI-Curriculum. By "logical semantics" I mean the meaning of the contents of mind, and by "linguistic semantics" the meaning of the contents of communication. What AGI-importance do you assign to capturing the semantics of natural language? (And NL-semantics' impact on logical semantics, as opposed to letting the computer build the representation for itself, out of some elementary thought mechanics.) P.S. Thanks to Pei Wang for the interesting curriculum and to Stephen Reed for the great work on Texai. ------------------------------------------- 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/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------- 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=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
