Re: [ontolog-forum] Axiomatic ontology

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 4:46 PM +0200 2/1/08, Avril Styrman wrote:

> Quoting Pat Hayes
> <phayes@xxxxxxx>:
>
> > >A large number of simple "X is Y" NL sentences
> gives a quite
> > >good approximation that "X is a subclass of Y"
>  
> > OK, if you believe this, find me some. Actual examples from the
> Web.
> 6 040  hits "tulip is a
> flower".
> 56 200 hits "flower is a plant".
> plant > flover > tulip
>
> In course of objectivity, we also get:
>
> 67 000 hits "plant is a flower"
> 4 100  hits "flower is a tulip"
> tulip > flover > plant 
>
> The point is, that we do get all these very
> easily, and after we have got them, we can
> reason about them based on their
> relations.

You only 'get' them if you already know what you are looking for. (In fact, I even doubt this, as this search will be finding a large number of sentence fragments, whose actual meaning might be almost anything: consider for example "This particular plant is a flower that blooms during the day" (from the first Google page of hits) which inverts the class relationship suggested by the match to the "plant is a flower" search.

If you search instead for patterns of the form 'X is Y', you will get an overwhelming number of instances which do not map into simple class relationships. Now, to establish your case, you need to show me how your system will distinguish one kind from the other.

By the way, your example would seem to suggest that the preponderance of evidence (67K rather than 56K) is that plants are a subclass of flowers, which is clearly nonsense.

> > >The main point was the web is more
> > >likely to be the repository of common sense than Cyc.
> >
> > This is false on many grounds. First, common sense is not
> commonly
> > written down, even in English. Some of it may *never* be written
> down
> > because we all learn it (or are born with it) before becoming
> > literate. Second, it is not currently or for the forseeable
> future
> > possible to extract meaning from free NL text without already
> having
> > a CYC-scale ontology to help one comprehend the NL sentences
> with.
> > Third, although there may indeed be a great deal of information
> on
> > the Web, there is no way to distinguish facts from opinion or
> sense
> > from nonsense, unless one already has a great deal of common
> sense
> > (more than many adult humans) to help one do the sorting out.
>
> Imagine that you had the task to build a machine that passes the
> Turing-test. Suppose that you had 100 years to do this, and you
> had
> 100 experts working for you full-time.

I would not accept this task. The Turing Test is over-rated, and bears almost no relationship to actual AI work. But this is a poor start for you to make your case, as even a human being could not extract common sense from the entire Web.

> You would also have all the
> current equipment that you need. But you would have to manage with
> either 1) Cyc as it is now, of with 2) Internet as it is now,
> without
> Cyc of course. Would you choose Cyc?

Yes, though admittedly with gritted teeth. Its not that I particularly love Cyc, but there is currently no alternative.

> If you did, your experts would
> be eventually typing the same common-sense knowledge that is
> already in the Internet.

It isn't in the Internet.

> If you'd choose Interner, you wouldn't
> have
> to type the common sense knowledge that
> is in Cyc.

Yes, you would. Or at any rate, nobody has come up with any alternative yet.

Pat

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