John,
Just a comment on one of your points -
>
> I have no objection to including that much in a basic language
> package. But I would emphasize the need for dynamic methods that
> could learn much more without requiring a linguist, logician, or
> knowledge engineer to spoon feed the internal formats.
>
Yes, even now information-extraction tools can help greatly to fill in
the actual knowledge in knowledge bases. But until such procedures become
as reliable as people, I would expect that automatically extracted
information that has not been verified by a domain expert would be marked as
'unverified' so as not to confuse potential users. And until that happy
day, I think that the most effective procedure for automatic information
extraction will be at the point of production of information, where the tool
will immediately analyze and present its interpretation to the creator of a
text, for verification or correction. The author is the only true authority
on the meaning of a text. For databases, the database creator(s) need to
verify the interpretation of their tables and fields and values.
The problem is, even that tactic will not serve to make information
generally useful unless some standard of meaning is adopted for information
thus extracted. That is why I think that getting some critical mass of
users to agree on a common foundation ontology is an urgent issue. We do
have information-extraction tools that could begin to populate very useful
knowledge bases, if only the extracted information could be automatically
interpretable. (01)
Pat (02)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (03)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 8:27 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] What is "understanding"
>
> Sergei and Pat,
>
> At the level of detail of these notes, I mostly agree with Sergei.
> There's much more to discuss, but this is enough for now.
>
> SN> Automating acquisition of knowledge of the kind we are talking
> > about (that is, not only knowledge about co-occurrences of
> > textual strings, however sophisticated) is a very interesting
> > problem.
>
> Yes, indeed. And I believe it's important to automate much
> more in order to achieve something close to real understanding.
> In fact, I believe that learning or acquisition is central to
> language understanding. Language is not a static system that
> can be handled by a fixed grammar, vocabulary, and ontology,
> except in artificially frozen special cases (although many of
> those frozen cases may be very useful for narrow problems.)
>
> PC> ... the pieces of code what I will now refer to as 'Lexical
> > Experts' can include and access any of those tactics that could
> > be useful - and do it in such a highly modular way that from one
> > LE (for one word, phrase, sentence, generic concept, or syntactic
> > construction) to another LE there may be little in common in the
> > methods that they use and no person in common among the individuals
> > who contribute to their construction.
>
> I prefer the term 'lexical expert' to 'word expert', primarily
> because it makes a break with the WEP approach. But the word 'code'
> bothers me because it sounds too procedural (and that was my major
> complaint about Small's version). The dictionaries used by people
> are primarily declarative, and I don't believe it is necessary or
> desirable to encode lexical information in a procedural form.
>
> PC> But I think that the language will have to include the basic
> > concept meanings associated with an ontology that contains
> > within it the meanings associated with at least the word
> > inventory of the Longman's defining vocabulary.
>
> I have no objection to including that much in a basic language
> package. But I would emphasize the need for dynamic methods that
> could learn much more without requiring a linguist, logician, or
> knowledge engineer to spoon feed the internal formats.
>
> John
>
>
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