Richard, Rather than getting lost in responding to the details of your posting, my entire discussion hinged on one apparent fact that may be in dispute here. With all of the challenges of the English language, I will try to make a short statement of that apparent fact.
You can listen to a passage and completely understand what it says. You can read the same passage and completely understand what it says. However, when YOU (and not some imperfect computer program that you might design and write) sit down and carefully identify parts of speech, construct the potential diagrams for the sentence, go through domain-specific disambiguation, etc., with full opportunity to go back and correct any mistakes that you might have made; that as often as not, sentences in that passage do NOT communicate what you got from them when you first heard or read them. If YOU can't do this job, (I sure know that I can't because I have tried), then how the heck are you going to design a computer program to do this job? Going a step further, you (as a simulated ultimate AGI program) would start considering words to fill in any recognized and potentially unrecognized (because the sentence still "hung together") gaps. If you are at all open minded about this, you will see that there are LOTS of potential gap-fillers for most sentences, so that no particular "filled in" sentence would seem to be preferred, even with limitless domain-specific knowledge. I presume that you have a PhD and have been in this since the days of Joe Weizenbaum, whose lectures I have attended at the very first AI conference at Stanford. You can plan and design forever, but unless you have done enough raw-data analysis, which seems to be REALLY lacking in this field (no reflection on your particular efforts), then all of the clever whiz-bang technology that you have developed during the last 40 years ain't worth spit. If you could for a moment, please explain: How is it potentially possible for a computer program to succeed in extracting detailed meaning from gapped sentences, when this is apparently impossible to do by hand? My own unproven belief is that people use their input as constraints to bound the range of reality, and NOT as precise statements of reality itself as has apparently been the presumption in the "understanding" efforts that I have looked at. Where ambiguities in a sentence might erect redundant constraints, there is no foul, because ineffective constraints change nothing. I have looked into this area only deeply enough to process problem statements, which have many powerful simplifying assumptions that do NOT exist in explanations, directions, etc., that an AGI would be expected to process. Has anyone else done this sort of homework? Steve Richfield ================= On 5/18/08, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Steve Richfield wrote: > >> Richard, >> >> On 5/18/08, *Richard Loosemore* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto: >> [EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: >> >> Steve Richfield wrote: >> >> <large snip> >> >> With luck we can wring things out at this level. With a little >> less luck, a couple of weeks of attempted high-level design will >> lead you to these same conclusions. With no luck at all, you >> will dismiss the need for high-level design guiding the >> functionality of low-level modules and continue on your present >> bottom-up path, and quite probably spend much of your life >> working on this apparently impossible and useless module. >> >> >> The above text is gibberish. >> >> Matt seemed able to deal with it. >> > > That does not persuade me to re-evaluate my statement. > > >> You make wild, sweeping and sometimes incoherent statements about >> people and their work, based on complete ignorance of what those >> people are actually doing. >> >> Not 100% complete ignorance. Can we agree on 95%? I do believe that AGI >> is possible, but my agreement with any of the viewpoints about how an AGI >> might be constructed stops with that simple statement. I see lots of >> counter-evidence of any understanding of the real world of natural language >> (and that ~50% of real-world sentences will be mis-diagrammed using good >> grammar rules), of the structure of real-world problems (that they are >> usually a mental phenomena and not a real-world phenomena). I have enough >> experience with software that WORKS in these problematical domains to make >> some accurate statements about the domains themselves, even though you might >> disagree on my software views. >> > > Look, we both criticize the 'establishment' line on how to do AGI, but if > you are going to tell everyone they are wrong, you had better have a cogent > argument. If you have 95% ignorance about what is being done by other > people, don't criticize them. > > Sure, cheap 'language understanding' systems are sometimes very bad. But > attacking them as if they represent the state of the art (not true) or as if > nobody is thinking about how to solve the problems (not true) or as if there > are no good techniques currently under development (not true) is not > constructive. > > > >> Your "Dr. Eliza" may be a modestly useful program, within its own >> terms of reference. But it has nothing to do with AGI. >> Allow me to restate the above in different terms that maybe we can both >> agree on: There is nothing "intelligent" about Dr. Eliza - it is a curious >> knowledge management program. It doesn't recognize patterns, learn, >> experiment, argue, or do any of the usual things that we attribute to >> "intelligence". However, it DOES accomplish some of the more useful goals >> that people have been hoping that a future AGI can do - some of the things >> that don't require recognizing patterns, learning, experimentation, >> argument, etc. >> My point is that there is no reason NOT to use what works now while we >> work on something better, and the fact that Dr. Eliza does anything useful >> at all tells us a LOT about the nature of complex problems, human speech and >> writing, knowledge structure, what is currently missing on the Internet and >> Wikipedia, etc. >> My entire thesis was that the present AGI effort here really hasn't even >> started the "analysis" phase, as evidenced by the lack of so many >> considerations that were wrung out in creating Dr. Eliza. Nearly all of the >> postings that I see here are about design issues, which cannot be usefully >> approached until analysis has been substantially completed. You appear to be >> discussing the details (that are in my 95% ignorance area) to create modules >> that cannot work (for reasons that would be obvious in analysis) and even if >> they could work, would have no place in an AGI system (due to the >> incompatibility between correct- and erroneous-paradigm statements). >> >> My unsupported suspicion is that most of the posters here generally do NOT >> understand foreign languages (some of which express the world VERY >> differently), have NOT become world-class experts in multiple domains (to >> see the extreme parallels between domains and problems therein), and haven't >> even bothered to diagram a few dozen real-world sentences to see that the >> grammar rules that everyone seems so willing to "bet the farm" on simply >> don't work. In short, without a substantial breadth of real-world knowledge >> and experience, there is simply no hope of designing an AGI that isn't just >> as myopic. That my writings appear to be gibberish to you is proof (at least >> to me) of this point. >> It appears that you are on the "with no luck at all" path that I outlined >> above. >> > > Describe to me what my approach is. Give a summary of my paradigm, my > previous research, or the relationship between my approach to AGI and > someone else's. Give me, failing any of that, even a hint that you know how > long I have been working in this field. > > You know absolutely nothing about what I am doing. Is that correct? > > And yet you criticize it? > > Some of us have known full well that 'grammar rules' do not describe the > actual speech (and colloquial writing) of people who communicate meanings > perfectly well. This is a standard piece of information that anyone who > studies psychologuistics knows from their first course on the subject. Your > tirades on the subject have about the same significance as a solitary > inventor bursting into a high-school physics class shouting "Aristotle was > wrong! Things keep moving in a straight line unless a force acts on > them!!!". > > > > > Richard Loosemore > > ------------------------------------------- > 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 > ------------------------------------------- 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=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
