Here
is an abstract from a paper:
In this paper we present an ontology-based utterance
interpretation in the context of intelligent assistance. Ontologies are used
for syntactic and semantic interpretation and for task representation. This
mechanism is embedded in a conversational interface applied to personal assistant
agents. The main goal of this approach is to offer a system capable of
performing tasks through an intuitive interface, allowing experienced and less
experienced users to interact with it in an easy and comfortable way.
The
paper's URL is:
http://www.nilc.icmc.usp.br/til/til2007_English/arq0185.pdf
And
the title is:
"An
Ontology-Based Utterance Interpretation in the Context of Intelligent
Assistance "
The
paper is not real deep, but it gives an overview of the authors' approach to
the conversational interfaces. So it's inspirational.
Products
like Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) have shown that speech to text
and text to speech are functional enough to treat as mostly reliable text I/O
for a conversational interface. Add a text based assistant to DNS text
I/O, and you get a hearing and speaking conversationalist. The paper
above is focused on the ontology of the agent as used to interpret the user's
side of the conversation.
Does
anyone have any references on conversational interfaces they would like to
share, or any comments on the subject?
Another
issue is the impersonality of the agent - that's bad. If you watched the
movie "Her", you know the depth of conversational
mutual understanding it demonstrated between the (supposedly inhuman) agent and
the user.
There
are lots of ways that people respond to simple stimuli - ways that are used by
salesman to get your attention swung toward the product or service they
sell. They work a certain small fraction of the time, so with large
volumes of conversation, they can be studied as case histories of
conversational actions. With a database of conversations to interpret,
some knowledge can be gleaned.
But
the Hollywood-like addition of art, and elegance, and plot, and interest, and
music and video, among other attention demanding tactics, give publishers more
ability to steer the conversation in ways that the user appreciates, and to
avoid topics or facts that the user finds cause him dissonance.
Is
anyone else on the list concerned with conversational interfaces and personal
agents? If so, please speak up and share references!
Sincerely,
Rich
Cooper,
Rich
Cooper,
Chief
Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics
Corporation
MetaSemantics
AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4
9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
Dear
Bruce,
You
wrote:
In USA politics, do the Republicans “sense the same world” as
the Democrats?
Many
republicans seem to view freedom and property rights very highly, and consider
that the way that the poor can grow with all of us is best expressed in the
free market, which has been getting less free with every change of
government. And republicans are well positioned to accept money from
wealthy political cause promoters. Nearly all are wealthy people, with a
few not so wealthy (yet).
Many
democrats appear to see poor people in vivid memories of their own, such as
Bernie Sanders' stories of growing up with inadequate resources. In every case
I am familiar with, the dems don't give much of their own money, but they want
to take money from other people, and give said others' money to the poor.
That is why dems work through government instead of private industry.
Surprisingly, the dems get rich giving your money to poor people. Al Gore
has billions, the Clintons are hundred millionaires, ...
Other
democrats seem to invent various *ways* to give other people's money to
the poor, and often the receiving poor seem to include the politicians
themselves, who get a whole lot more of the money than the poor get.
Does Supreme Court Justice Scalia see “the same world” as
Justice Sotomayor?
Clearly
not, as per the last supreme court decision and Scalia's indignant statements
about that decision.
Is [it] that people do not “see the (entire) world” – but only
selected parts of it?
IMHO,
we each see an amazingly tiny, small part of the world, and the part we each
see is as unique as our memories.
And those selected parts are of course different? Is it
values that causes them to see separate parts?
Values,
IMHO, result from our processing of those memories. We can be taught some
values, though we have to learn others experientially, but in the vast majority
of cases, it seems to me that our values are different also, if only in small
regions. We can agree on "similar" experiences we share with
each other. However, those small regions of divergence still cause a
whole lot of trouble.
Sincerely,
Rich
Cooper,
Rich
Cooper,
Chief
Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics
Corporation
MetaSemantics
AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4
9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich
wrote:
“What
I do believe is that we sense different worlds because of our diversity of
sensing and interpretation. I can only interpret things that I have some
past experience with. Any my past experience is very different from even
my neighbor's experience, or your experience, or JFS's experience. The
world is so frigging big, and so frigging complex, that we will probably never
focus so tightly each to see the others' sense of the world.
“That
is, whether I sense the same world as you sense (I think I most probably do)
doesn't really matter. The WAYs in which we sense the world are not
exact, not even approximately equivalent, so that it is less important than my
understanding your views and beliefs about the world, or than your
understanding my views and beliefs, because we have so much trouble aligning
along those axes. “
Yes. And seen
at the “macro-plane” – the big simple variables that actually impact our
collective social lives (unlike, for example, quarks) – this view would seem
obviously true. In USA politics, do the Republicans “sense the same
world” as the Democrats? Does Supreme Court Justice Scalia see “the same
world” as Justice Sotomayor? Is that people do not “see the (entire)
world” – but only selected parts of it? And those selected parts are of
course different? Is it values that causes them to see separate
parts? Does your choice of a television news channel or newspaper affect
your perception? Does a trained surgeon “see” something different
in an X-ray than a layman?
Is a political
issue (e.g. same-sex marriage) “part of the world” -- ? Certainly, we
cannot say that a political issue has no empirical reality. An issue,
too, is a kind of “thing” – albeit an abstraction or concept or shared factor
in collective decision-making.
I
am an avid psych lit reader, but not a psychologist. From my readings, I
think most of what we experience is a reactivation of our memories, comprising
a jambalaya of objects that are in some way linked either to the present
stimuli, or to other memories of other linked stimuli.
I
think of it as a DAG (directed acyclic graph) of AND and OR nodes with a
"~" prefix to calculate the complementary NOT. In total, an AND/OR
graph, with symbols and functions with parameter lists, all represented in the
DAG.
And something like
this structure organized in an individual human mind creates a “world view” – a
kind of interpretive lens through which we view the world
The
linkage, according to Chomsky, is a stored pattern with empty slots, or
variables, that we fill in with bits and pieces of the current situation.
We see this newly filled-in pattern, in many ways like the matching pattern
along with links, within links, ..
Yes – and the
choice of that structure – what “pattern” it is – is highly free-form and
adaptive. Not only “which bits and pieces” are selected to fit into it,
but how they are organized – and how they come together to form a “world view”
or interpretive lens.
So
do we inhabit a commonly shared world?
We
can never know that. We can share our knowledge and observations with
other agreeable agents, and they with us, and we can even run confirmatory
experiments to confirm or deny our own view of a theory, theirs or ours.
But we can't really know if it is the SAME experience we have, or an experience
of the SAME situation, because we are different observers, each with our own
vast library of biases.
Is this a problem
that evolution must inevitably confront? I’m involved with many deeply
holistic conversations around the world, and there seems to be a common
movement arising in different ways in many places towards an improved sense of
community, a sense that we are all in this together, that this issue of
interpretive fragmentation (and the inevitable confrontation) must be overcome
– that forces of evolutionary cultural psychology are pushing in this direction
– generally under the influence of globalization. In some sense, perhaps
naively utopian, this perspective supposes we must all somehow become “agreeable
agents”.
Mystical and
religious approaches often underlie this sense of broad inclusion in the
context of diversity. But these approaches are highly holistic and
perhaps somewhat “wordless”. What about very concrete specific
differences and collaboration/trust/cooperation around specific concerns – or
political issues?
“we
have so much trouble aligning along those axes.”
And we have no
shared or consensual model of those axes. My instinct is – the deep
holism of religion and mystical spirituality DOES begin to offer intuitive
guidance on this possible shared common structure or alignment. Many
“mystical symbols” point in this direction. If we wish, we can see the
Christian Cross in terms of X and Y axes – and in my world (check out “centering
prayer”), I often hear talk about the vertical and horizontal axes of spiritual
alignment – and how human beings can align shared understanding through some
emerging intuition that seems to be common to many or all traditions. One
term to explore is “Axis Mundi” – the “axis of the world”.
IS there such a
thing, in some empirical sense – or is this supposed “axis” a synthetic human
construct, an artifact of belief, a intentional stipulation? Are the
“tree” and “circle” and “mandala” and “hierarchy” images commonly encountered
in mystical spirituality a kind of “pre-mathematical holistic intuition” – an
intuitive conceptual stab at a primal ontological mathematics that can help
authentically guide or interconnect human beings? If we believe in an
innate wholeness of human thought, perhaps part of the broader task of semantic
ontology involves keeping the door open to holistic symbolism.
Approached in these
broad terms, what is the intuitive meaning of “directed” in these attached
images of DAG graphs? Is there any simple general mapping for any DAG to
a one-dimensional interpretation (i.e., every element of the graph can be
interpreted as organized in one linear order – ie “from” one point along a
single dimension “to” one point along a single dimension? If so, could
that “axis” be in some sense a common center or coordinate origin – despite the
high variance in the DAG patterns?
The definition of
“reachability” in the Wikipedia article seems to suggest the answer is yes.
Bruce Schuman,
Santa Barbara CA USA
http://networknation.net/vision.cfm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
“In
mathematics and computer science, a directed acyclic graph is a directed graph
with no directed cycles. That is, it is formed by a collection of vertices and
directed edges, each edge connecting one vertex to another, such that there is
no way to start at some vertex v and follow a sequence of edges that eventually
loops back to v again.
DAGs
may be used to model many different kinds of information. The reachability
relation in a DAG forms a partial order, and any finite partial order may be
represented by a DAG using reachability. A collection of tasks that must be
ordered into a sequence, subject to constraints that certain tasks must be
performed earlier than others, may be represented as a DAG with a vertex for
each task and an edge for each constraint; algorithms for topological ordering
may be used to generate a valid sequence. Additionally, DAGs may be used as a
space-efficient representation of a collection of sequences with overlapping
subsequences. DAGs are also used to represent systems of events or potential
events and the causal relationships between them. DAGs may also be used to
model processes in which data flows in a consistent direction through a network
of processors, or states of a repository in a version-control system.”
Dear Matthew,
You
wrote: Dear
Rich,
So
to summarise, you have no proof that we inhabit different worlds.
Yes, I have no
proof we inhabit different worlds, and I don't necessarily believe we do.
But I also have no evidence that we inhabit the same world.
What I do believe
is that we sense different worlds because of our diversity of sensing and
interpretation. I can only interpret things that I have some past
experience with. Any my past experience is very different from even my
neighbor's experience, or your experience, or JFS's experience. The world
is so frigging big, and so frigging complex, that we will probably never focus
so tightly each to see the others' sense of the world.
That is, whether I
sense the same world as you sense (I think I most probably do) doesn't really
matter. The WAYs in which we sense the world are not exact, not even
approximately equivalent, so that it is less important than my understanding
your views and beliefs about the world, or than your understanding my views and
beliefs, because we have so much trouble aligning along those axes.
Brian Greene has a
very thought provoking video on the 11 dimensions he believes comprise the
universe. Here is his video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M
Do you think we
sense quarks? I don't. Our ability to interact with the universe is
so extremely limited, and the universe is so vast, that we will likely never be
looking at the same part of it.
So why assume we do
see the same world? That assumption seems suspect to me.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology
Officer,
MetaSemantics
Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7
1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
Dear
Rich,
So to
summarise, you have no proof that we inhabit different worlds.
Regards
Matthew
West
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk
+44 750
338 5279
Dear Matthew,
You wrote:
In my view it is a really big thing to say that we do
not together inhabit some common world. We might experience it in different
ways, but to say that what we experience is different is quite another thing.
Regards
Matthew
West
Information
Junction
I am an avid psych
lit reader, but not a psychologist. >From my readings, I think most of
what we experience is a reactivation of our memories, comprising a jambalaya of
objects that are in some way linked either to the present stimuli, or to other
memories of other linked stimuli.
I think of it as a
DAG (directed acyclic graph) of AND and OR nodes with a "~" prefix to
calculate the complementary NOT. In total, an AND/OR graph, with symbols and
functions with parameter lists, all represented in the DAG.
The linkage,
according to Chomsky, is a stored pattern with empty slots, or variables, that
we fill in with bits and pieces of the current situation. We see this
newly filled-in pattern, in many ways like the matching pattern along with
links, within links, ..
So do we inhabit a
commonly shared world?
We can never know
that. We can share our knowledge and observations with other agreeable
agents, and they with us, and we can even run confirmatory experiments to
confirm or deny our own view of a theory, theirs or ours. But we can't
really know if it is the SAME experience we have, or an experience of the SAME
situation, because we are different observers, each with our own vast library
of biases.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology
Officer,
MetaSemantics
Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7
1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
Dear
Kingsley,
On
6/30/15 9:21 PM, Chris Partridge wrote:
Not sure
this is going to get us far, but I still cannot make much sense of "But
the point is that none of it is about objective reality or objective
truth. It is about the world as seen by the people and software that have
to communicate." Don't we see/sense the same world?
No we
don't.
[MW>]
That’s a big statement. Would you care to back it up with some evidence, rather
than just assume it is a self evident truth?
That's
Ed's fundamental point. The very same point made by John Sowa, Patrick Hayes
and others -- in a variety of posts over the years.
[MW>]
I’m not sure I’ve heard them say that either. Care to give specific quotes?
In my
view it is a really big thing to say that we do not together inhabit some
common world. We might experience it in different ways, but to say that what we
experience is different is quite another thing.
Regards
Matthew
West
Information
Junction
Mobile: +44 750 3385279
Skype:
dr.matthew.west
matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/
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We are individuals for a reason :)
Think of this as the cognition paradox .
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog 1: http://kidehen.blogspot.com
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