At 10:39 PM +0200 1/30/08, Avril Styrman wrote:
>Bill,
>
>Lainaus Bill Andersen <andersen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> To say the web is an "ontology" is nonsense. What requirements does
>> an arbitrary jumble of text need to meet to count as an ontology on
>> this view?
>
>Compare these two ways of expressing the same thing:
>
>1:
>Human is a mammal
>
>2:
><class> Mammal </class>
><class subClassOf:Mammal> Human </class>
>
>A NL parser can extract the same information (human is
>a mammal) from NL that can also be given in a formal ontology. (01)
NL parsers cannot extract information. One needs
also NL semantics. Which of course amounts to an
ontology. This whole topic of NL understanding
belongs in AI. One needs a basic acquaintance
with the subject before forming a useful opinion. (02)
Your comparison above is childishly simple, and
does not properly reflect the real problem, which
has remained intractable for several decades with
many very clever, highly motivated, people and
with millions of dollars in funding, trying their
very best to solve it. (03)
The Web is NOT an ontology. If you think I am
wrong, don't argue with me: go ahead and
implement a tiny fraction of the needed
functionality, and you will be richer than
Croesus. (04)
>
>E.g. Lotfi Zadeh's Precisiated Natural Language PNL
>is all about using the internet as the source of
>knowledge, and turning it into a formalized form. (05)
As are many other projects, including IBM's
multimillion-dollar WebFountain project. None of
them will ever come remotely close to being able
to extract coherent structured ontological
content from free text. The best one can do is to
'scrape' some approximate shallow, very
unreliable, propositions and to identify things
like proper names of people and cities. This is
of course extremely useful, but it does not come
anywhere near being able to treat the Web as an
ontology. (06)
>This way, the naturally evolving internet contains
>similar sort of information than that what is
>inserted into Cyc by hand. (07)
No, it does not. If only because the Web does not
comprise simple declarative sentences of the kind
found in reading primers. (08)
Pat (09)
>
>Avril
>
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