Re: [ontolog-forum] CNL's and ConLangs

["Rich Cooper" <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Math would have to be considered a language.  People write in it, read it, learn from it, and teach others with it.  So it fits all the socialization needs we have for communicating among ourselves. 

 

But regarding ontologies, math in itself is not much more than symbols plus operators composed to arbitrary nestings.  Math isn’t speakable like English or German, but that doesn’t seem to limit it from being a language.  I don’t see the grist for an ontology in math.  You raised a good point,

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Whitten
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 7:26 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] CNL's and ConLangs

 

I was taught that the formal definition of language in discrete math is a set of strings that can be matched according to a pattern or procedure.

 

So any picture that can be represented (perhaps in SVG ?) as a string can be an instance in the set of strings of a language.

 

The real question in my mind, is whether it is useful to do this. It seems that we want pictures to be their own representation. And that begs the question how you will recognize sub-pictures.  Which is an entire branch of 

AI research, as I recall. 

 

David Whitten

713-870-3834

 

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:06 PM, John Bottoms <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 10/28/2014 7:03 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:

John, you raised some interesting questions, but I can’t read the labeled arcs in your imagery, even after expanding it in Paint:

Rich,
This should be more readable. But, no, I am not a physicist so I can't come up with the labels beyond the caption on the image:

  "The Feynman diagram for the Coulomb interaction (electric force), along with the parts of the Feynman integral they correspond too. Every part of this is really nasty. For example, that "g" is actually 16 numbers."

An explanation of the diagram can be found at:

http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/10/q-what-are-feynman-diagrams-how-are-they-used-theoreticallypractically-and-are-there-alternativecompeting-diagrams-to-feynman%E2%80%99s/

  The diagram was meant to be an illustration of a "shorthand" physics symbol, similar to what we do in math. Perhaps I should have used something more universal such as the quadratic equation:

Now it becomes easier to discuss what is needed. One of the difficulties with this type of notation is that it is first introduced orally and then drawn on a blackboard and we intuit the use of the symbols. The professor says, "Let 'X' be the set of sales of rutabagas on each Thursday'". We know we need to create a symbol table entry for X. This quadratic equation needs a small symbol table in order to be useful. All this, we learn to do mentally.

If, and when we want to publish it we must use another form to translate the symbols to the typography of choice. Today, the preferred typography is MathML developed by the AAP and borrowed by the W3C.

So, in the math "domain" we work with this notation and a large community benefits from that use. Now, along come the ontologists and decide to squirrel it away in a data set. Should we discuss this with the mathematician SME's or do we, of our own expertise, already have a notion of how to catalog it? Are their social or cultural issues that need to be aired?

My main concern is that while we know how to markup equation, we have little understanding of the KR for math. We understand that the symbols need to be defined in a NL, but what else? Is an "info" field needed? Is a meta-definition required? Is this part of a language. Either way, how is it integrated into speech?

I am not asking to resolve the implementation questions just now. I am solely looking at the issue of whether these things we have been discussing, (CNL's) and representational shorthands, are languages, or should they be handled as special cases (labeled sets). My hope is that away, in some dusty tome, there is a treatise by Aristotle in which he explains how this is done.

-John

 

It would help answer your question if your identified the labels (I see a lot of blurs where text should be), and defined Feynman’s reference to each of those labels, then a paragraph about the Feynman diagram and what physicists use it for, perhaps we could begin to identify some elements of the ontology you propose for the imagery. 

 

 

But it’s an interesting idea; thanks,

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Bottoms
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 11:03 AM
To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontolog-forum] CNL's and ConLangs

 

There have been a few discussions on www.reddit.com about "Constructed Languages". It surprised me that there are such graduate programs. There is also a reference to The Language Creation Society (www.conlang.org) Mostly, these studies apply to artificial natural languages such as Esperanto and Klingon.

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2evjri/graduate_programs_for_constructed_languages/

Most of the Reddit discussions pertain to whether Constructed Languages are really languages. Some seem to believe that a language must have an evolved history and been in use by a community before it is meat for a linguistics discussion.

The linguistics community has no consensus on an appropriate criteria for acceptance as a language. However, for me, the overall discussion of Constructed Languages seems to touch on Controlled/Constrained Natural Languages. This is important, I believe, because we are in for an extended era of many CNL's as people partition core and technical vocabularies in various ways, trying to satisfy needs for particular disciplines and markets.

Chomsky defines a set of sets of languages that have formal grammars are a hierarchy.

Chomsky Formal Grammar Language Hierarchy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

It seems to me that there should be a taxonomy that includes all languages and what I call "language shorthands" such as chemical, math, Feynman diagrams, etc. My question is whether ConLangs, shorthands and CNL's are entities of Chomsky's hierarchy of languages? He seems to say that there must be start and end symbols and these are not represented in mathematics notation. The difficulty with this is that in many shallow/deep constructions, the start and terminal symbols are understood according to some protocol. SGML allows <cr> as a terminal in some cases and  speech is terminated when someone stops talking, or it can be semantically terminated when someone says, "That's all I have to say."

Is there a more complete grammar in existance that includes additional forms of sentences? Should we define a super-set of all languages that is more inclusive such as might be found in semiotics? Finally, would we segregate the taxonomy and its elements in an ontology?

A Feynman Diagram

-John Bottoms
 FirstStar Systems
 Concord, MA USA

 

 

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