Re: [ontolog-forum] Toward Human-Level Artificial Intelligence

[John Bottoms <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 4/24/2014 1:19 AM, John F Sowa wrote:

David, Gary, and Kingsley,

JFS

The intro [of Phil J's thesis] summarizes the arguments for the
controversial claim that human-level AI is possible with a knowledge
representation based on natural language.

DE

And what about the issue that a goodly slice of human communications
is decidedly NOT natural language?  Acronyms, local jargon, industry
slang, puns, etc.

GBC

Sure we invent acronyms, but that seems  a natural part of our
communication (and cognition), just simplifying  the signs to convey
our intentions and understanding.

I agree with Gary.  Every acronym, abbreviation, slang, jargon, pun,
etc., is a normal application of the resources of our everyday language.
In fact, all the symbols and notations of mathematics evolved from and
are still explained in terms of ordinary language.

The plus sign '+' is a simplified ampersand '&', which is an
old Latin way of writing 'et'.  So 2+2=4 is an abbreviation for
"Two and two is 4."  All the mathematical symbols evolved as
abbreviations for ordinary words.  Mathematicians can still read
any equation over the phone to another mathematician as a sentence
in whatever NL they share.

Not just mathematicians, this is true in every profession. I am not not sure how to prove that; perhaps reductio ad absurdum. Two professionals discussing their fields seem to do just fine while waiting in an airport lounge. Sure, one of them may say, "you'll need to draw me a picture". That seems to be a call to use a shorthand notation in the interests of time.

Given enough time we humans can and must be able to conjure up an appropriate image to get an idea across if both are professionals in the same discipline. It is when the details become too exhaustive to keep in working memory that we resort to the detailed clauses of contracts.

The exception to this is when the existing shorthand does not keep up with new developments in the field. The shorthand that comes to mind is Feynman Diagrams which aid in understanding complex atomic level interactions across time.

If you can think of a case where a professional "shorthand" notation is not sufficient to communicate an idea, or when the communication of an idea can only be done in the shorthand, I'll be interested in hearing about it.

-John Bottoms
 FirstStar Systems
 Concord, MA USA

For more detail, see http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/rolelog.pdf

JFS

It is *impossible* for anyone -- human or computer -- to relate a term
from an NL text to a URI that adequately represents that term until
*after* they have analyzed and understood the NL text.

KI

That's also true...

I agree with your points, and I'm glad that you agree with me.

But there have been some people who claimed that you need a distinct
URI for every sense of every word.  Unfortunately. no annotators
(human or computer) can agree on which URIs to assign.

To achieve a 90% agreement among annotators is unusually high.
That means that a typical page with 300 words would have at least
30 errors -- even if you had professional annotators.

John
 
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