Re: [ontolog-forum] Axiomatic ontology

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:51 AM -0500 2/1/08, John F. Sowa wrote:

> Pat,
>
> The amount of "common sense" info on the WWW dwarfs Cyc by
> many
> orders of magnitude.

Nonsense. But go ahead, prove me wrong: find some. I'd be delighted if you could.

> PH> Remember, common sense isn't
> encyclopedia knowledge: its
>  > the 'obvious' stuff that any child knows about the way
> the
>  > world works, such as: things fall if they aren't
> supported;
>  > roofs protect you from rain unless it is very windy; if
> you
>  > fall into a liquid you will get wet; parties are events
> which
>  > people go to in order to socialize and have fun, and
> often
>  > though not always celebrate an event such as a
> birthday;
>  > objects are made of kinds of stuff; Jello is a kind of
> stuff;
>  > hitting something fragile is likely to break it if you hit
> it
>  > hard enough; being in a cold space makes you feel cold;
> you
>  > can walk on sand but it can also be poured, if it is
> dry;
>  > being covered with paint is similar in some ways to
> being
>  > covered with hair, but not in all ways; people like
> eating
>  > sugar; animals die if they stop eating or stop drinking;
> if
>  > you are in a room in a building then you are in the
> building,
>  > but if you are in a ship floating in water, you are not
> in
>  > the water; and so on and on and on.
>
> It's not stated in a list of that sort, but it's implicit
> in
> the way those words are being
> used.

Well, yes that is true, in a sense; but because its 'implicit' doesn't mean it can be extracted by any algorithm. All claims like this are just noise until someone actually finds a way to extract such information. I know a lot of people are trying very hard, but nobody (including you and Arun) have so far managed to actually do any of this. I don't think most of the required content is even implicitly on the Web. Find me, anywhere on the Web other than in Cyc, an account of the different senses of 'cover' used in:

cover with paint

cover with skin

cover with hair

cover with a sheet

cover with dust

under cover

taking cover

Or talk to a linguist about the many senses of "in" used in English (approximately 30, though it is hard to be exact), which require an ontology to be used in order to disambiguate them.

>  You can test that claim
> by a crude, but simple use of Google.
>
> For example:
>
>     "parties are events which people go to in
> order to socialize and
>     have fun, and often though not always celebrate an
> event such as
>     a birthday"
>
> Check pairs of words from that sentence on Google, look at the
> count
> of hits, and check a few of the pages in the top hits:
>
>     party event -- 29,100,000 hits
>
>     party people -- 39,500,000
>
>     party socialize -- 1,280,000
>
>     party fun -- 34,000,000
>
>     party celebrate -- 14,200,000

This tells one nothing more than that the words are associated. That is not enough to state a coherent proposition, let alone a coherent piece of ontological content.

> This is an enormous amount of data about
> how parties are related
> to those other things.

Really? How does one extract information about relationships from free text or word associations? Associations, remember, are symmetrical.

>   Furthermore, much more detailed
> information
> about how they're related can be found in the top few pages.
>
> I certainly do not recommend that one should use the Google method
> of indexing to find the related information.  What I would
> recommend
> is the method of indexing described in the following paper by Arun
> and me:
>
>     http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/analog.htm
>     Analogical Reasoning
>
> I don't believe that the information has to wait until somebody
> "tags" it with XML tags.  Tags are fine for various
> formal purposes.
> But for commonsense info, I would rather start with the raw data,
> as it is stated by people talking or writing for other
> people.

As Ive already pointed out, most common sense is never said or written to other people. And even for that which has been, I don't accept that random free NL text is 'the raw data' for common sense. Even if we could extract formalizable content from free text, the text does not tell us how to represent it in an ontology (just think, for example, of all the alternative ways of formalizing temporal relationships which are expressed by English tenses.) But in any case, any claims like this are at best a theoretical idea which has not yet been tested. Many very smart people are trying very hard to extract useful information from the unstructured Web, and they havn't managed to do very much of it yet. I don't know of ANY methods or projects (including analogical structure matching, by the way, which is being used actively by dozens of people at NorthWestern, where it was invented) which can be said to reliably extract a single nontrivial ontological proposition from the entire Web. If anyone reading this knows of one, by all means tell us about it. Not an idea or a belief, but a working system.

Pat

> John
>
>  
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