John, many thanks. I have a few questions below. (01)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Rick,
>
> Although I have a strong interest in philosophical issues as an
> inspiration for doing research, I believe that a computational
> method must be evaluated on its results. (02)
I believe this too. In my post I take the opportunity to differentiate
the capabilities of the computational methods used by the semantic web
community from those used by other communities. I differentiate the four
standard reasoning services of description logic reasoners from the
reasoning services offered by theorem provers and I call for the
semantic web community to develop new reasoning services. (03)
As your narrative describes below the selection of techniques used by
heterogeneous agents to execute a computational method is significant to
results. In addition to inspiring research topics, I believe
philosophical issues like truth and meaning are useful selection
criteria and relevant to the techniques used by agents. (04)
> Evaluating methods on
> the basis of terminology derived from realism or idealism is
> as meaningful as deciding among algorithms because they were
> invented by a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist. (05)
I agree here as well and note the criteria implied by my post for
selecting among heterogeneous agents to achieve a desired result is much
stronger than terminological. I believe the post carefully and
accurately describes the model theory for the semantic web as one of
truth, not meaning. And its important to understand the claims of a "web
of meaning" in the context of RDF model theory. So, differentiating
philosophical issues like truth and meaning would be valid selection
criteria for agents extending well beyond terminology. (06)
> Following is a note I sent to Corpora list. (07)
Many thanks for the reference to the Corpora list and your thoughtful
insights ! (08)
> John
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics
> withR'--re Louw's endorsement
> Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:06:35 -0400
> From: John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Wolfgang Teubert <w.teubert@xxxxxxxxxx>
> CC: corpora@xxxxxx
>
> Wolfgang,
>
> The fact that some approach has been inspired by cognitive theories
> does not disqualify it from being applied to corpora. And there's
> no reason why you can't mix and match multiple methods of various
> kinds -- logical, analogical, statistical, heuristic, or whatever.
>
> > A number of responses I have received via the list or in private
> > suggest that the future will see the integration of corpus
> > linguistics with cognitive approaches. I disagree.
>
> I have no idea what you mean by "integration" or why you assume that
> a cognitive approach must be based on introspection:
>
> > The problem is that the mind does not allow introspection. No one
> > has ever presented evidence for a single mental concept.
>
> I have been working with some colleagues who have been using
> conceptual graphs to represent data from multiple sources, either
> unstructured, untagged documents or structured data from any source,
> such as relational DBs or tags of any kind on any sources. As an
> example of a query stated in several English sentences, which was
> answered from a collection of 79 untagged English documents, see
> slides 26 to 37 of the following talk:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/pursuing.pdf
> Pursuing the Goal of Language Understanding
>
> The approach uses multiple heterogeneous agents, which can use
> different techniques to interpret a text. If an ontology is
> available, some agent will use it to interpret a sentence as it
> is being parsed. If multiple ontologies are available, multiple
> agents, each one using a different ontology will attempt to
> interpret a sentence or part of a sentence. If no ontology is
> available, some agents will use statistical methods. It's even
> possible for different agents to use different techniques with
> different ontologies on the *same* sentence. Some agents use
> logic, but most don't.
>
> In case of conflicts (which are the norm, not the exception),
> higher level agents or a committee of higher level agents
> will choose what they consider the best interpretation for
> each phrase. Individually, the agents don't have to be very
> intelligent. (Imagine them as judges at the Olympic Games.)
>
> If a sentence happens to be about a single unified topic, it is
> likely that all the phrases will be interpreted by agents working
> with the same ontology. But if it mixes or relates different
> topics, different parts might be interpreted by different agents
> working with radically different methods.
>
> Then the CGs are indexed (with pointers back to the original
> documents), and the analogy engine is used to find the best
> match (or matches) to a given query (which may be one sentence,
> multiple sentences, or an arbitrary document). The time to
> index the graphs grows as (N log N), and the time to find
> a graph that is similar to a given graph grows as (log N).
>
> John Sowa
>
>
>
> (09)
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