Hi Doug, Ferenc,
This is an interesting thread. My comments are below:
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of doug foxvog
Sent: Saturday, September 18, 2010 10:26 PM
To: [ontolog-forum] ct
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] language vs logic - ambiguity and
startingwithdefinitions
On Sat, September 18, 2010 6:16, FERENC KOVACS said:
> I believe that core ontology concepts are
objects, properties and
> relations.
I suppose you mean classes of objects. Is the
distinction between
properties and relations that properties relate
objects to datatypes
while relations relate multiple objects or have more
than two arguments?
There are two ways to go. You can believe
you ALREADY know truth and start with classes to build instantiated objects, or
you can start with objects, and group them into classes so that the objects and
classes can be validated. IMHO, the second way is far superior, and certainly
more realistic in most practical applications. Assuming you know everything
about the classes to begin with is very misleading and causes you to find
exactly what you imagined instead of exactly what is there. That is the way
human infants seem to learn. Why should a set of axioms, though usually small
enough in number to conveniently support a theory, be expected to correctly
enumerate the details unless the topic is some abstruse, but utterly simle
mathematical theory. I prefer a realistic appraisal of reality that ends up in
a math model, as compared to starting with a math model that ends up missing
reality and being unable to prove or disprove the objects' memberships.
This sounds fine to me, so long as the concept of
object needs not be
physical and can include events and situations.
Personally, i don't see the need for distinguishing
properties and
relations in an ontology, although many ontology
languages do make
that distinction. This seems a language-dependent
distinction to me.
Agreed, but that is the way convention has
proceeded in math logic. Is there a compelling reason to not distinguish
between properties and relations? The arity is, as you suggest, the only
difference between properties and relations by established convention.
> In fact, the intitial state
Are you referring to the initial state of an ontology
in the process
of creation? Or are you referring to the state of a
reference ontology whose terms are used to make statements in a knowledge base
with no additional definitional statements?
Consider the initial state of the self
generating explosion Ferenc is referring to. The initial state is whatever is
needed to hold the axioms, and the added state is the automatically generated
(unrealistic in many cases) set of objects generated from the theory.
Again, predefining terms seems like putting
the cart before the horse. Why assume a Poisson distribution (or pick another
one) instead of using the actual empirical data that we get so much of with
current technology?
> is an object which is a unity of them and it is
> exploded through a number of mental operations.
(Examles wanted?)
I'm not sure what you mean by an ontology exploding.
Do you mean
deriving all statements which are derivable from the
initial statements
in the ontology?
If so, i would suggest that this "explosion"
could be carried out by
formal logical operations -- they wouldn't need to be
mental operations.
So long as the formal logical operations
are not confused with the reality of objects actually experienced. Yet again,
the theory is only approximate, and was chosen by someone with limited personal
experience in most cases. With the learning curve (see the book
"Bionomics"), every doubling of experience leads to about a twenty
percent improvement in efficacy.
> With the help
> of these categories I can semantically analyze
natural langauges and
> create an ontology that integrates the currently
different domains.
> In this approach
> axioms and the concept of events are not of
primary interest, because
> verbs are seen as the representations of
relations
This is not necessarily the best way to model verbs.
In languages which use verbs like English does, a verb indicates the occurrence
of either a situation or an event, with subject, direct object, indirect
object, and prepositional phrases indicating relations between the event and
event participants.
Features of the events/situations can certainly be
modeled by relations that ignore the events themselves, but this would require
multiple relations to be defined for each verb depending upon what other
phrases happen to be in the sentence. Using this technique makes it difficult to
add more information about the same event and requires multiple rules to
inter-relate the multiple relations that represent the same verb.
Jill threw the chair.
Jill threw me the chair.
Jill threw the chair through the window.
Jill threw the chair yesterday.
Jill threw the chair to kill the toad.
Jill probably threw the chair at the toad.
Jill threw a fit and jumped up on the lawn
chair when she saw the toad cross the road toward her. Examples abound in
common corpora, so why axiomatize everything at the beginning when you can take
into account the actual usage of the language, which is dependent on so many
factors - the speaker, her cultural background, her experiences, goals, values,
perceptions, and all those things that are NOT axiomatizable in realistic practice.
IMHO, the verb "threw" represents a
different relation in each of these, but each use can unambiguously represent a
throwing event, with multiple relations to generate depending upon the other
parts of the sentence.
> (hence not limited to Boolean operators).
Why wouldn't the relations have Boolean truth values?
Is the point to
allow for probability descriptors?
Probabilities, fuzziness, certainty,
value, cost, goals, suppositions, there are a never ending set of value types
associated with common statements. Why limit them to Booleans? Math logic has
always done so, but even the Boolean case results in true theorems that can't
be proved and false theorems that can't be disproved (Godel again).
> Therefore the issuse of disambiguation as for
dictionaries is a
> futile exercise, as the defintions used are
sometimes incomplete and
Many dictionary definitions are certainly incomplete,
but that does not mean that they do not may (MAKE?) true statements
constraining the meaning of the thing they define.
But are the constraints VALID?
> irrelevant in semantic terms,
I have not seen this.
> this is why you cannot "merge" them
(should try to integrate
> them instead) as they are not in compatible forms
(content)
If you are referring to multiple definitions from the
same source,
they shouldn't be merged because they are describing
different
denotations of the word. Each definition should
denote a different
concept.
It’s a rare occurrence when a concept has
only one definition or a definition designates only one concept. Consider the
many-to-many mapping of words to synsets in WN+VN.
If you are referring to multiple definitions from
different sources,
integrating multiple definitions of the same meaning
of a word is
certainly appropriate. However, sometimes such
integration can be
handled by merging.
> and they are not modular either.
> You must accept that such a new ontology should
be dynamic as
> many of you already suspect.
If the ontology is used to interpret NL text in an
open area, the
ontology would be incomplete and should dynamically be
expanded.
If the ontology is to be used to express the
information in a data
base that has been in constant use for years,
dynamaticity is not
so crucial.
Databases in constant use constantly
uncover situations which cannot be handled within the database without
expanding it.
>> In math logic domain there is a kind of
definition - an abbreviation when
>> they introduce new symbol saying for example:
>> definition
>> t≤s denotes t<s or t=s
> In my "semantic analysis" this is
formalization, a mental operation of the
> relation between two objects as indicated.
This formalization/definition is a logical operation
between two
expressions (one of which is a disjunction, I suppose
the expressions
could be called objects.
Expressions are not objects - the
interpreters we build postulate imaginary objects to fit the theories, but they
often miss the valid realities especially in language use.
> The commonsense transcript is that an
> object (to be specified, otherwise it does not
make sense) is smaller than
> another object after comparison and a few other
operations also required
> to arrive at that result in formalization.
You are stepping beyond the definition as given, to
interpret what the
definition means. This is intentionally moving beyond
logic.
I think that is Ferenc's point - logic is
not enough to explain language use. More is needed. (Ferenc, correct me if my
assumption is not what you meant.)
> In doing this I used the mental
> operation called interpretation, the reverse of
formalization.
> For any message (statement) to make sense it is
necessary to be complete,
Why can't a message tell merely a portion of a fact,
instead of being
complete?
I have to agree with Doug on this one. Many
statements only make partial sense, and some make no sense at all. So
interpretation is a very subjective process that, IMHO, may not even be
possible to formulate without great loss of information compared to the
glorious ambiguity of language.
> which means that if it has (as it should have) a
verb in it,
> then it should have person,
Here, i assume you mean grammatical person, not
requiring the message
to relate to a person. Person, in this sense, is a
linguistic feature
of sentences of many languages, not necessarily
relating to a feature
of the meaning being discussed.
Disagree - I think he means the
interpretER, not the declension and conjugation sort of person. The syntactic
parts are for convenience of information transfer to a DIFFERENT interpretER
who may have a totally different view of the same sentence in her own
interpretation.
> number and tense specified among others to make
sense.
Similarly number, tense, gender and other linguistic
features are
allowed or required by different languages "to
make sense". Such
features may or may not relate to a feature of the
meaning being
discussed and might or might not be expressed in the
knowledge base
using the ontology.
"Do you want fries with that?"
"No."
There are no verbs in the second "sentence",
no person, number, tense, gender or "other linguistic features", but
it makes perfect sense to customers who drive through a fast food window lane
millions of times per day.
> Or in other words "Media is the
message" is interpreted as
> The message is instruction - in my translation.
I find this interpretation curious and don't
understand how it
relates to your above statements.
I think the difference is in acknowledging
the subjectivity and inherent limits on formalizing language. John Sowa has
explained a lot about how language and logic are not fully integratable in the
distant past on this list. Now might be a time to bring this information out
again, so we can look at the Peircean view of logic and language in more depth.
> Regards, Ferenc
=============================================================
doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx
http://ProgressiveAustin.org
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own
nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop
it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
=============================================================
I was at college in Atlanta
when King was killed in Tennessee.
We would listen to his sermons from Ebenezer
Baptist Church
whenever they were broadcast locally. He was a very, very subjective person
and the world is a better place for it. He didn't subscribe the logic of his
day, and he made some amazing changes in society by clearly convincing people
that he was correct in his moral interpretation of events.
HTH,
-Rich
=============================================================
doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx
http://ProgressiveAustin.org
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own
nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop
it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
=============================================================
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