Sorry all. iPhone spell check made me sound like an illiterate drunken
lemur ( when in reality I am only a drunken lemur). (01)
Sent from my iPhone (02)
On 20-Apr-09, at 21:24, "Duane Nickull" <dnickull@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: (03)
> John.
>
> This is far more complicated than this.
>
> Every coffe table sold at Iowa has four legs. Every dog is born with
> four legs. Unless you can disambiguate that legs has a different
> meaning in those two np contexts, the logical conclusion would be
> innacurate.
>
> D
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 20-Apr-09, at 18:06, "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Bart, Dick, and Pat,
>>
>> BG> John, do you think the recent work on standardization,
>>> specifically on ontologies, has brought us any closer to
>>> the formalization step?
>>
>> Formalization is not some kind of ultimate goal that we're
>> striving to achieve. It is a very mundane, everyday process
>> that children learn in elementary arithmetic.
>>
>> The word 'formal' comes from the word 'form'. A definition
>> of some notation is formal when its meaning is totally
>> determined by its *form* (AKA syntax, grammar, or pattern).
>>
>> The first formally defined notation was Aristotle's syllogisms.
>> For example, the pattern named Barbara has the form
>>
>> Every A is a B.
>> Every B is a C.
>> Therefore, every A is a C.
>>
>> With patterns like these, Aristotle introduced the first recorded
>> examples of the use of variables. If you replace the letters
>> A, B, and C with any three nouns or noun phrases, you get a
>> valid inference pattern. For example,
>>
>> Every woozle is a slithy tove.
>> Every slithy tove is a one-eyed elephant.
>> Therefore, every woozle is a one-eyed elephant.
>>
>> If the first two premises are true, then the conclusion is
>> guaranteed to be true. If either one of the premises is
>> false, then the truth of the conclusion is undetermined.
>>
>> In summary, formalization means nothing more nor less than the
>> common practice of mathematicians and logicians for the past
>> two and a half millennia. It merely means that the meaning
>> of the notation and the transformations on it is defined by
>> operations on the explicit grammatical patterns.
>>
>> BG> Fields such as fuzzy logic and probability theory let us
>>> make statements about the world based on empirical data.
>>
>> Not quite. Those two systems, fuzzy logic and probability
>> theory, are defined formally by patterns. Although the kinds
>> of patterns are slightly different from Aristotle's patterns,
>> they are related to reality in the same way: the results of
>> processing a pattern are true of the world if and only if the
>> starting data happens to be true of the world.
>>
>> BG> Classification algorithms, specifically tree based ones
>>> like C4.5, are completely based on attributes and their values.
>>
>> Again, you have to recognize that the C4.5 procedure is purely
>> formal. It's a different kind of pattern than Aristotle's,
>> but its meaning is totally determined by the patterns and the
>> operations on those patterns. The C4.5 algorithms do *not*
>> process reality. The only things that they process are
>> patterns of character strings that represent somebody's best
>> guess about reality.
>>
>> The GIGO principle still holds: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
>>
>> BG> I'm wondering whether there is a point where statistical
>>> analysis can take over where we simply don't know enough
>>> about a topic to infer information using logic alone.
>>
>> There is no difference in principle. Logic and statistics
>> measure different aspects of the same things, and they are
>> completely compatible. Logic can be used to define what is
>> an A, what is a B, and what is a C. Statistics counts how
>> many As, how many Bs, and how many Cs. You use whichever
>> one is appropriate to the data and what you're looking for.
>>
>> As for the C4.5 algorithm, it is more closely related to
>> logic than it is to statistics. It's a kind of learning
>> algorithm, but what it learns is a *decision tree* that
>> can be expressed as a very large nest of if-then-else
>> statements. That tree can be mapped to a program in any
>> language that supports if-then-else statements, such as
>> C or Java. It can also be mapped to first-order logic.
>>
>> RHM> How about a language that uses synsets instead of words?
>>> Do you know if anyone has researched that?
>>>
>>> A synset is an equivalence class, similar to your
>>> definition of proposition.
>>
>> The fact that two different subjects happen to use equivalence
>> classes does not imply that they are similar in any real sense.
>>
>> In defining propositions as equivalence classes, I started with
>> formally defined statements in some version of logic, and I
>> defined a way of grouping them by logical equivalences.
>>
>> For WordNet, George Miller and his colleagues started with the
>> informally defined words of English and grouped them according
>> to their informal word senses, as determined by English speakers
>> who used their subjective judgments and background knowledge.
>>
>> If you start with words and their informal meanings and group
>> them according to somebody's informal judgments, the result
>> is definitely *not* formal. It may be a very useful grouping
>> for many purposes. (WordNet is a widely used resource, and we
>> use it for our language processors at VivoMind.) But those
>> synsets are much closer in principle to informal words and
>> word senses than they are to the formal entities of mathematics.
>>
>> PC> But WordNet still represents a tremendous and useful effort,
>>> and is useful for NL at a shallow semantic level.
>>
>> I agree with most of what you said about WordNet, including this
>> sentence. However, the following sentence is asking for something
>> totally different -- not just a revised WordNet.
>>
>> PC> It is a good start, but something similar with a more precise
>>> semantics is needed.
>>
>> The synsets of WordNet are at the same level as the word senses of
>> a typical English dictionary. The process of deriving a dictionary
>> such as the OED begins with dozens or even hundreds of highly
>> trained lexicographers who take millions of citations gathered by
>> thousands of people (many of them volunteers) who extract those
>> citations from a truly immense volume of English.
>>
>> The old shoe boxes full of paper slips have been computerized,
>> but the amount of human effort is measured in person-centuries.
>> What you find in the dictionary (or in WordNet) is a boiled-down
>> or *condensed* extract of the "average" meaning over many, many
>> different occurrences of each word sense.
>>
>> If you want precision, you won't get it by averaging from raw data.
>> You can only get precision by examining the precise *microsenses*
>> of each word as it is used in each and every citation in the total
>> mass of raw data.
>>
>> This implies that the precise semantics will be truly immense.
>> And instead of being listed in alphabetic order, the precise
>> meanings will be grouped in something like the microtheories
>> of Cyc. But there will be an enormous number of them. In 2004,
>> Lenat & Co. estimated that they had about 6000 microtheories,
>> and they may have many more by now. But every time they get
>> a new application, they need at least one new microtheory,
>> and often quite a few more microtheories.
>>
>> Remember the line that Amanda mentioned and I highlighted:
>>
>> Ontology is fractal.
>>
>> That means that the amount of detail that is necessary at each
>> level is the same at every level you examine. That implies that
>> we will need something of the size of WordNet for every topic
>> of every branch of human knowledge and activity. The completely
>> precise version you are asking for will dwarf the current WWW.
>>
>> Yet a child at the age of 3 has a command of language that is
>> far better than any computer system today. And that child
>> doesn't need Cyc or WordNet or formal logic. I believe we
>> should focus on what makes a child smart -- and it's not Cyc
>> or anything remotely like it.
>>
>> RHM> You [Pat C] consistently said mapping from WordNet to xxx.
>>> Do you realize that OpenCyc is mapping from its concepts to WordNet?
>>
>> Lots of people have been mapping their ontologies to and from
>> WordNet.
>> But no computer can understand language as well as a 3-year-old
>> child.
>>
>> John Sowa
>>
>>
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