Leo, Pat, and Phil, (01)
Leo
> What we try to do is impossible, no? And so, let's just give up, eh? (02)
PH
> I already did, Leo. (03)
That's a rational decision. Many AI people, Terry W. for example,
adopted it years ago. Others did because they needed a job. (04)
Another rational decision is to redefine the problem. Some redefined
NLP as statistical data mining of NL corpora -- and made more money
than we did. (05)
PJ
> I suggest that natural language syntax is often the best way of
> (at least initially) representing natural language semantics. (06)
I'd go one step further: if any formal language could do better,
evolution would have discovered it many millennia ago. (07)
That's one reason (among many) why I agree with the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio: "images [are] the main currency of our minds."
See slides 37 to 47 of http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/goal2.pdf . (08)
That redefines the problem as one of mapping languages (natural
and/or artificial) to and from images. That doesn't make it simpler,
but I believe that it gets us on the right track. (09)
PJ
> Rather than redefine the term CNL, I'd propose using Fred Thompson's
> term "sublanguage", to refer to a subset of a natural language used
> for a specific semantic domain. (010)
Chomsky's teacher, Zellig Harris, coined that term. He used it in a way
that's close to Wittgenstein's 'Sprachspiel' (language game). If you
look at the various CNLs that have been developed, they are basically
sublanguages or language games with a syntax and vocabulary tailored
to a particular domain. (011)
Given that definition, I would say that a natural language is the
totality of all sublanguages or language games that can be played
with a given syntax and vocabulary. For any particular text, the
challenge is to discover what game(s) is/are being played. (012)
PJ
> Perhaps by the time the Semantic Web was proposed in 1998, most people
> had forgotten about Thompson's proposal, if they were ever aware of it. (013)
I doubt that many (any?) of the W3C had heard of it. I knew Fred T.
since the 1970s, but I didn't see that article until I was looking
for a reference for the slides I prepared in 2009. I sent him a note
with a pointer to my slides, and he was pleased that somebody had
noticed his article. (014)
John (015)
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