Yes, the big weakness of the whole Cyc framework is learning. Their logic engine seems to be pretty poor at incremental, experiential learning ... in linguistics as in every other domain.
I don't think they have a workable approach to NL understanding or generation ... I was just pointing out that they *are* explicitly devoting a lot of resources to the problem ... ben g On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- On Sun, 9/28/08, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >FYI, Cyc has a natural language front end and a lot of folks have been > >working on it for the last 5+ years... > > It still needs work. I found this undated (2004 or later) white paper which > is apparently not linked from cyc.com. > http://www.cyc.com/doc/white_papers/KRAQ2005.pdf > > And also this overview. > http://www.cyc.com/cyc/cycrandd/areasofrandd_dir/nlu > > The overview claims to be able to convert natural language sentences into > Cycl assertions, and to convert questions to Cycl queries. So I wonder why > the knowledge base is still not being built this way. And I wonder why there > is no public demo of the interface, and no papers giving verifiable > experimental results. > > It seems to me the main limitation is that the language model has to be > described formally in Cycl, as a lexicon and rules for parsing and > disambiguation. There seems to be no mechanism for learning natural language > by example. For example, if Cyc receives a sentence it cannot parse, or is > ambiguous, or has a word not in its vocabulary or used in a different way, > then there is no mechanism to update the model, which is something humans > easily do. Given the complexity of English, I think this is a serious > limitation with no easy solution. > > -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > ------------------------------------------- > agi > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome " - Dr Samuel Johnson ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
