John,
Thanks for the reference to PEP, I hadn't seen that.
Of course, when I said I would like to 'revisit' WEP with an ontology as
a component I did not expect people to think of this as being close in
method to the original. Other groups have used the 'Word Expert' term for
various methods, and I wasn't aware that it would be confusing in this
context. But I can certainly find another term to express the notion of a
sophisticated program used for interpretation of specific words - working
with other components of an NLU system. (01)
[JS] > I would also suggest that you qualify the following statement:
>
[PC] > > All language-independent knowledge should be in the ontology.
>
OK, I didn't mean the *foundation ontology*, which is small, but meant the
set of ontologies used for any given domain. There is still an ambiguity -
I usually use the term 'an ontology' to include the set of assertions
(facts) that are expressed using the types and relations of the ontology.
If you think that the terminological component of the ontology should be
distinguished from the factual assertions, perhaps you would suggest how you
would prefer to express that distinction. (02)
Pat (03)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (04)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 10:16 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What is "understanding" - was: Building on
> common ground
>
> Pat,
>
> That is the source of the confusion:
>
> JFS>> A static combination in "word experts" would imply that
> >> domain knowledge encoded in an English word expert would
> >> have to be rewritten for Russian or French.
>
> PC> That is not the way I would view the structure or purpose
> > of a Word Expert. All language-independent knowledge should
> > be in the ontology.
>
> The term 'word expert' was originally used by Steven Small for
> an incredibly non-modular approach that died for two reasons
> (1) very large time and space requirements in the computer,
> (2) a very large investment in human space and time in writing
> the word experts.
>
> Following is a paper by Small that describes the approach:
>
> http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P79/P79-1003.pdf
> Word Expert Parsing
>
> Note the example on p. 12 for the word 'heavy'. That is a very
> "heavy handed" method of representing information that most
> current parsers handle in a much simpler and more general way.
>
> Following is an abstract of an article on the Parallel Expert
> Parser (PEP) as a replacement for (WEP):
>
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=991635.991665
> The Parallel Expert Parser (PEP)
>
> Abstract: In this paper we present PEP (the Parallel Expert
> Parser, Devos 1987), a radically revised descendant of WEP
> (the word Expert Parser, Small 1980). WEP's idea of linguistic
> entities as interacting processes has been retained, but its
> adherence to the word as the only entity has been rejected.
> Experts exist at different levels, communicate through rigidly
> defined protocols and are now fully designed to run in parallel.
> A prototype of PEP is implemented in Flat Concurrent Prolog
> and runs in a Logix environment.
>
> When you used the term 'topic expert', I said that was a much
> better term. PEP is even better. But I would take the next
> step of dropping the second letter P for parser, since I believe
> that a system of parallel agents (somewhat along the lines of
> Minsky's _Society of Mind_) is appropriate for modeling *all*
> mental activities, not just parsing. See the following paper:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/arch.htm
> Architectures for Intelligent Systems
>
> Suggestion: Please drop the term 'word expert' because it is
> extremely misleading. It suggests Steven Small's original method,
> which was an interesting idea in 1980, but not an approach that
> should be followed today. The terms 'topic expert' or 'parallel
> expert' are much better. But I would suggest that the best idea
> would be to develop ontologies without recommending *any* method
> for integrating them into an intelligent system, for one very
> important reason:
>
> There is an open-ended number of promising methods today, none
> of which are fully successful in doing language understanding.
> So the jury is still out in which, if any, of today's methods
> should be recommended for the future.
>
> I would also suggest that you qualify the following statement:
>
> > All language-independent knowledge should be in the ontology.
>
> Episodic knowledge about specific people, places, things, and
> events certainly does not belong in the ontology, but it may
> be significant for disambiguating sentences. And there are
> many kinds of theories, hypotheses, and guesses that are not
> yet established or may even have been discredited. Yet they
> may be important for understanding a particular text.
>
> For such reasons, I prefer a very lightweight ontology, which
> is more like a system of cross-references between language
> dependent knowledge of grammar and vocabulary and language
> independent knowledge (or beliefs) of any kind. The really
> detailed axiomatization for deep reasoning belongs in those
> domain-specific modules, which may contain a great deal of
> encyclopedic information that does not belong in the ontology.
> (Just look at the size of Wikipedia, for example. We certainly
> don't want all of that in the ontology -- or in "word experts".)
>
> And I would recommend that the ontology be designed in a way
> that it could be incorporated into any kind of system for
> language processing or reasoning. We certainly do not yet
> have systems that are truly intelligent, and it is essential
> to keep all options (or at least as many as possible) open.
>
> John
>
>
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