Re: [ontolog-forum] Building on common ground

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 1:19 PM -0400 3/29/08, John F. Sowa wrote:

> Pat C. and John B.,
>
> PC>> We are, after all, all grandmasters at the use of our
>  >> native tongue, and no one else's intuition is going
> to
>  >> be superior to our own.
>
> Note the word 'use' in the first clause.  Being an expert in
> doing or using something does not imply any ability to describe
> how one does it.
>
> We are all "grandmasters" in our ability to digest our
> food.
> But that does not imply any ability to describe the process
> of digestion -- or to implement it in an artificial digester.
>
> JB> ... first rule of doing linguistic work: don't trust
>  > what native speakers claim about their own language!
>
> Example:  Many native Chinese speakers make two confused,
> misleading, and false statements about their own language:
>
>   1. Chinese has no grammar.
>
>   2. All words are just one syllable long.
>
> Point #1 merely means that Chinese does not have inflections
> for plurals, tenses, etc.  But it most definitely has a
> grammar that is as rich and complex as any other language.
>
> Point #2 merely means that each written character represents
> one syllable, and most of those syllables can be used as
> stand-alone words.  But there is a very large number of
> 2, 3, and 4-syllable combinations that correspond to single
> words in other languages.
>
> PC> I want an ontology that is useful for language
> *understanding*
>  > and reasoning, and as a basis for specifying meaning for
> more
>  > complex concepts.
>
> The question of how people understand language is very poorly
> understood, and there are only two certain claims about computer
> understanding:
>
>   1. None of the current systems do anything that could be
> called
>      "understanding".
>
>   2. There is no consensus whatever on how computers could be
>      designed to understand or what kinds of
> resources would
>      be needed to facilitate such
> understanding.
>
> Given these two points, however, there is a lot of useful
> language processing that can be done, some kinds of ontologies
> have proved to be useful for those purposes, but the question
> of what kind of ontology is a prerequisite for understanding
> (assuming anyone could define that term) is not at all
> clear.

Further to the above, last week I heard an interesting presentation at PARC by Barney Pell, who has a start-up company to develop a new Web search engine which, he claims, will surge past Google by being able to simply parse - not understand, notice - English queries. This alone represents the culmination of approximately 15 years focused research by several teams at PARC, a total effort of perhaps 75-100 man-years by some of the very best researchers in the field. Anyone who thinks they know how they (or anyone) understand language is, I'm afraid, simply in the grip of a delusion.

Pat Hayes

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