On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:23 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:10 AM, Abram Demski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > How much will you focus on natural language? It sounds like you want > > that to be fairly minimal at first. My opinion is that chatbot-type > > programs are not such a bad place to start-- if only because it is > > good publicity. > > I plan to make use of Steven Reed's Texai -- he's writing a dialog > system that can translate NL to logical form. If it turns out to be > unfeasible, I can borrow a simple NL interface from somewhere else. > Whether using an NL interface like Stephen's is feasible or not, really depends on your expectations for it. Parsing English sentences into sets of formal-logic relationships is not extremely hard given current technology. But the only feasible way to do it, without making AGI breakthroughs first, is to accept that these formal-logic relationships will then embody significant ambiguity. Pasting some text from a PPT I've given... *** Syntax parsing, using the NM/OpenCog narrow-AI RelEx system, transforms Guard my treasure with your life into _poss(life,your) _poss(treasure,my) _obj(Guard,treasure) with(Guard,life) _imperative(Guard) Semantic normalization, using the RelEx rule engine and the FrameNet database, transforms this into Protection:Protection(Guard, you) Protection:Asset(Guard, treasure) Possession:Owner(treasure, me) Protection:Means(Guard, life) Possession:Owner(life,you) _imperative(Guard) But, we also get Guard my treasure with your sword. Protection:Protection(Guard, you) Protection:Asset(Guard, treasure) Possession:Owner(treasure, me) Protection:Means(Guard, sword) Possession:Owner(sword,you) _imperative(Guard) Guard my treasure with your uncle. Protection:Protection(Guard, you) Protection:Protection(Guard, uncle) Protection:Asset(Guard, treasure) Possession:Owner(treasure, me) Protection:Means(Guard, sword) Possession:Owner(uncle,you) ***** The different senses of the word "with" are not currently captured by the RelEx NLP system, and that's a hard problem for current computational linguistics technology to grapple with. I think it can be handled via embodiment, i.e. via having an AI system observe the usage of various senses of "with" in various embodied contexts. Potentially it could also be handled via statistical-linguistics methods (where the contexts are then various documents the senses of "with" have occurred in, rather than embodied situations), though I'm more skeptical of this method. In a knowledge entry context, this means that current best-of-breed NL interpretation systems will parse People eat food with forks People eat food with friend People eat food with ketchup into similarly-structured logical relationships. This is just fine, but what it tells you is that **reformulating English into logical formalism does not, in itself, solve the disambiguation problem**. The disambiguation problem remains, just on the level of disambiguating formal-logic structures into less ambiguous ones. Using a formal language like CycL to enter knowledge is one way of largely circumventing this problem ... using Lojban would be another ... (Again I stress that having humans encode knowledge is NOT my favored approach to AGI, but I'm just commenting on some of the issues involved anyway...) -- Ben G ------------------------------------------- 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
