Thanks Pat,
Then how should I represent, for
relational DB update purposes, the sentence
“Mary was given (or received) a book
earlier.
which I encoded in a way you are not happy
with as:
Earlier( Give(nil, Mary, book) )
I want to refer to that specific act of
giving “Give (nil, Mary, book)” not to some other act of giving which may also
be in the RDB.
I also want to state that the action
happened when time was “earlier” than when the act happened. The act happened
just Now.
I also want to state the same without
giving any more specificity to the actual time at which the action happened, or
more detail to what the action was.
So (TheTime, (Give(nil, Mary, book) ),
< Now) is sorta what I’m after. Can you make it look more like standard FOL
without otherwise damaging the NLP meanings?
But please keep it still compatible with
RDB representations of natural language sentences.
Thank,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pat Hayes
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009
2:14 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] New
Book: "Narrative Information"
On Feb 10, 2009, at 2:25 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:
----------------------------
---------------------------- ----------------------------
Long before Strawson, linguists had
observed a distinction between
obligatory and optional (AKA inner and outer) participants in the
action or state expressed by a verb. For 'give', the number of
inner or obligatory participants is 3, and there is an open-ended
number of optional relationships for the time, place, manner, etc.
True, but this distinction is purely
grammatical. I have to say "XX gave YY to ZZ", with all three
grammatically required phrases in place (and Im not obliged similarly to say
where or when or how), but Im not obliged to actually provide the information.
I can say 'someone' or 'something' as a filler which satisfies the grammatical
constraint without actually providing information, when the information is
missing. Or I can use the passive voice and say "Mary was given a
book" without saying "by XX". When sentences like these are
converted to logic, the missing arguments are still missing. Its notable than
if one pushes this exercise to the limit, you find the English words naming the
case roles. To describe this event without mentioning John or the book, we have
to say "Mary received a
gift"
----------------- ------------------------
---------------------------- -------------------------
This multi-signatured form of the
statement still works with a 3-ary relation:
Mary was given a book”
Give( nil, Mary, book
)
^ Earlier( Give(nil,
Mary, book) )
This isn't legal logical syntax, for several reasons.
First, what does 'nil' mean? In logic, this has to be a name, and hence
a name of something. If 'nil' means here what it means in LISP, then this
says that the empty list gave a book to Mary, which I doubt is what was
intended. I presume you want to use 'nil' as a kind of blank pseudo-name which
can be used to indicate that no real name is available, but this isn't a
construct in any logic I've ever seen. The proper way to do this in logic is to
use a quantifier:
(exists (x)( Give(x, Mary, book) ... )
but this is getting closer to the case-role form. (BTW, I notice you
have permuted the order of the three arguments, thereby illustrating one of the
main problems with the n-ary argument form: keeping track of which argument is
supposed to be which, when there are no syntactic labels to help you remember.)
Second, more seriously, you can't make a sentence into an argument, as
you do here with "GIve(nil, Mary, Book)". And even if you
could, a sentence in logic denotes a truth-value (and asserting the sentence,
as your first conjunct here does, asserts that this value is true.) This means that predicating a
property of the sentence, as you do in the second conjunct, amounts to the
assertion about the truth-value. So here you are saying that true has the property called
"Earlier", which doesn't make sense.
(We developed an extended logic, IKL, in which there are expressions of
the form: (that (Give x Mary Book)) which contain embedded
sentences, but they denote propositions, not events: it still doesn't make
sense to say that a proposition is 'earlier'.)
Third, "Earlier" isn't a property. Consider: logical assertions
are timeless: they aren't made "at" a time, like assertions in a
tensed language. So "Earlier" doesn't make sense (earlier than
when?). To convey the "pastness" of a tensed assertion in a
nonindexical logic, one has to de-indexicalize it by putting times in
explicitly, and then "Earlier" is a relationship between the time of
assertion (the "now") and the time of the event or being
described.
Someone gave mary a
book Give( nil, Mary, book )
^ Earlier( Give(nil,
Mary, book) )
John gave Mary a
book
Give( John, Mary, book )
^ Earlier( Give(John,
Mary, book) )
When extra modifiers are present, the form
is still 3-adic with extra predicates recording the event of giving:
You miss the point. Those extra predicates have to be applied to
something, and what they then say is that that thing has a certain property. If
"Give" is a relation, then the form "Give(A, B, C)" has to
be a sentence. And a sentence does not denote an event. In order to say the
extra things, you must use a name of the event. Once you do this, the trinary
form has to itself be related to the event somehow. The simple use of the same
verb ("give") isnt enough to connect to a particular event.
Logic
isn't just a mathematical-looking notation. It comes with a clearly defined set
of semantic conditions, which have to be respected. WIthout these, it isn't
saying anything. One can't just write down some stuff and declare that it means
what you want it to mean. The meanings have to be built up from the meanings of
the syntactic parts in a uniform, principled way, in order for it all to work
as a coherent logic.
Herb gave Mary a book yesterday
^ Earlier( Give(Herb,
Mary, book) )
^ TimeOf( Give(Herb, Mary, book), Yesterday )
Pete gave Marsha a book in the library
Give( Pete, Marsha, book)
^ Earlier( Give(Pete,
Marsha, book) )
PlaceOf( Give(Pete, Marsha, book), Library)
The point is that the 3-adic
representations can be used for all the cases you’ve mentioned.
You aren't using 3-adic relations here. Im not sure what all this
means, formally, but it certainly isn't made up of 3-adic relations.
Other information is related to the action
of Give( x, y, z )
If this is an action, in what sense is Give a relation? And what does
it mean to assert an action?
to describe the conditions under which the
act took place, and the condition of x, y and z at the time of the act.
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