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Re: [ontolog-forum] Summary on language and ontology

To: patrick@xxxxxxxxxxx, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Internet Business Logic <ibl@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 11:00:30 -0400
Message-id: <443D160E.8080203@xxxxxxxx>
Hi Patrick --

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, attached below.  I'll take up just one point for now, if that's OK with you.

You wrote....

If your argument that widespread use of formal ontologies or other methods will require better interfaces for the average user, I don't think you will find much disagreement on this list or elsewhere. But, and it is an important but, unless the underlying principles which are used by such an interface can be specified and discussed with precision, then the results of any interface are not going to be particularly useful.

The key here is that if one is doing "semantics" in the real world, it is no longer enough to produce a formal notation and hope that someone will produce a non-geek-human understandable user interface to it.  That approach leaves open likely semantic disconnects between the human meaning and the system meaning.

What we have done is essentially to integrate 3 kinds of semantics in one design and system [1]:

  • Semantics1 is "Data Semantics". as in RDB, XML or RDF
  • Semantics2 specifies what a reasoning engine should do (in our case via a model- and fixpoint-theory [2])
  • Semantics3 concerns the Application Semantics in the meaning of English concepts at the author- and user-interface.

In the system, the link between Semantics3 and Semantics2 is of course automatic, and two way.  You can verify that it works by using a browser to view, run and change the examples at [3], and by writing and running your own examples.

In principle, the way that this works is by automatically mapping English sentences, with place holders (variables) for values, to- and from-  predicates.  There are some complexities our implementation of  this, but it is conceptually quite simple.   It is in no way  a contribution to research in natural language processing [4],  just a  minimalist and robust way of grounding  Semantics 1 and 2 out to  something meaningful to  nontechnical humans (Semantics3).

I hope this makes sense.  Thanks in advance for your further comments.

                                                                 -- Adrian Walker



[1]  http://www.semantic-conference.com/program/sessions/S2.html

[2]  Backchain Iteration: Towards a Practical Inference Method that is Simple Enough to be Proved Terminating, Sound and Complete. Journal of Automated Reasoning, 11:1-22.

[3]  www.reengineeringllc.com

[4]  Footnote -- I have worked in NLP research, and I really like it.  But making full NL UIs practical and robust for non-technical authors and users is a hard, maybe "AI-complete" problem.  In the meantime, we need something that works, even if it is not very ambitious NLP-wise.
-- 

Internet Business Logic (R)
Executable open vocabulary English
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com
Shared use is free

Reengineering,  PO Box 1412,  Bristol,  CT 06011-1412,  USA

Phone 860 583 9677     Mobile 860 830 2085     Fax 860 314 1029



Patrick Durusau wrote:
Adrian,

Internet Business Logic wrote:

Adam, Patrick, All --

Yes, indeed, quite a lot of meaning is in the relations (=>, ->, &, or...) between atomic items in formal notations.

But there's more, much more!

Err, I was trying to understand Adam's position, not necessarily endorse it. ;-)

BTW, your paper makes much of the need for "human-friendly sentences" but that isn't really a fair criticism of formal ontologies or other approaches. (Having written my share of human unfriendly prose and syntax I feel compelled to defend formal ontologies a bit.)

As was noted in KIF 3.0, there was no intention that KIF be used as a language for human users to compose ontologies. It certainly could be used that way but there was no requirement that it be used in that manner.

By analogy, PostScript and PDF are pretty user unfriendly as well, if you want to write them by hand, yet users manage to produce documents using them everyday.

If your argument that widespread use of formal ontologies or other methods will require better interfaces for the average user, I don't think you will find much disagreement on this list or elsewhere. But, and it is an important but, unless the underlying principles which are used by such an interface can be specified and discussed with precision, then the results of any interface are not going to be particularly useful.

To see this, consider slides 14-17, 35-43, and finally slide 52 of

http://www.reengineeringllc.com/Internet_Business_Logic_e-Government_Presentation.pdf

These slides argue that, if we limit "meaning" to technical notations (combinations of symbols like =>, ->, &, or..., RDF, URIs...), then there is no grounding in the world outside the computer. That in turn severely limits the usefulness of the "meanings" for real world tasks.

As I said above, part of your complaint (and it is a valid one) is about user interfaces and not the notations.

BTW, limiting "meaning" (an accusation of a limitation of a formal notation) and the grounding problem are different problems. Granted, given a limited enough notation I concede that it would prevent solving the grounding problem but your paper doesn't not make that case. True enough, all the things you say about formal notations being difficult for the average user to use are true, but that is not the same as proving a limitation in terms of what the formal notation can say.

In other words, to prove your point about the grounding problem you would have to show:

1. An _expression_ limitation of the formal notation, and

2. That the limitation prevents "grounding" in the world outside of computers.*

*Note that 2 presumes proof of a solution to the grounding problem and that a particular notation does not support that solution due to a lack of expressiveness.

Sure, we all know and love our succinct logic and programming notations, but they were invented before Von Neumann, and they deliberately leave out the pragmatics of natural language.

I am not sure what you mean by the "pragmatics of natural language?" Granted that logics and programming notations are more limited than natural languages but then they never pretended to be natural languages.

BTW, historically speaking, there have been a number of logics "invented" post von Neumann.

That said, full natural language understanding is of course the "AI-complete problem [1]". However, there is a minimalist approach that appears to work, and that does document executably the things that English sentences mean to people. It's in the implemented system online at www.reengineeringllc.com, and shared use of the system to write and run examples via a browser is free. The system functions as a kind of Wiki for executable English content, and there are already many ontological and other examples.

By "minimalist" approach do you mean entering rules that provide an English language interface?

Note that the system relying upon external entry of information and rules for processing is in part the definition of the grounding problem. A pocket calculator neither knows nor cares about the "grounding" of the number system in the real world. It is simply following instructions and data entered externally. How precise or imprecise the data may be really has no impact on the grounding problem.

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

Thanks in advance for comments.

-- Adrian Walker

[1] A reference to NP-completeness, the key open problem for nearly all of complexity theory.








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