Is AKC for real? I don't know. COULD it be a computer program using
various aliases? I am 99% sure it could be; and that the
17th. Machine-Learning Conference to be held in a few days will COVER IT
UP. Indeed they won't even ask the question as I have done. If Internet
discussion becomes the medium for the best minds in the citizenry of our
democracies, what happens when even better artificial minds are pitted
against them? We become slaves without even knowing it.
FWP
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 17:02:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [BCPolitics] [EDTV-Robotics-State-Of-The-Art] [ML] A Challenge for
ICML-2000
But AKC, Jones-Jose-Catweasle-Barry-et-al is way ahead of us! Now what
does that do to the "body politic" of the near future when the
Constitution of Canada is written and rewritten on blank computer screens?
Who can compete in an Internet political debate with a state-of-the-art
computer?
FWP
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 14:40:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [EDTV-Robotics-State-Of-The-Art] [ML] A Challenge for ICML-2000
(fwd)
James Gluck
IBM
Dear Mr. Gluck:
If the Human Genome Project can decipher 3.2 billion pieces
of code, I have to think that it is reasonable to undertake a similar
scale mega-project to decipher the English vernacular. That is what I had
called IBM about a couple of years ago when I first completed a draft of
"Machine Psychology". I think it would take a company as large as IBM to
even get the project started by declaring that it can be done and that an
estimate of the time/funding required would be ?
Sincerely-FWP
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Machine Psychology: http://www.atoma.f2s.com/atomareport.html (file #10)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 14:12:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [ML] A Challenge for ICML-2000
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 16:19:52 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Kiri Wagstaff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [ML] NLP 1/2
>
> > Actually, Tom, what drives my questions is not understanding = getting it
> > but contemplating that all those experts in natural language out there
> > (educators, psychologists, linguists etc.) might already "have it". They
> > might already KNOW all the rules for first rate conversational ability (if
> > they pool their knowledge)...and frankly my opinion right now is that they
> > probably already DO 'have it'. I will hold to that opinion until I see a
> > detailed example of a situation/scenario/set of circumstances where the
> > author is saying...we can't figure out the rules here.
>
> I have been following this conversation with interest. Frank, your
> question (as you explain it) implies the assumption that the NLP
> (Natural Language Processing, which often includes NLU and NLG)
> problem *can* be solved by a set of rules.
Yes it does. (BTW, what is NLG? I take it NLU is natural language
understanding). My training and experience tell me language is orderly,
not chaotic. I think those are the only two choices we have: orderly or
chaotic; and a probabilistic/statistical model is not chaotic as
statistics has rules too. I repeat what I posted earlier which is that I
would like to see the detailed presentation of a circumstance in which
humans use words yet the word usage has no rules, ie it is chaotic. I
would like to see it presented well enough that it would be accepted in a
peer reviewed journal (eg one of the phil/psych journals now online). I
think it would be an excellent challenge to the educators, philosophers,
psychologists and linguists who spend life long careers trying to find the
orderliness, ie rules, in word usage. Until I see such a presentation I
will assume that all word usage has rules and I will go one further and
say I assume that the global community of experts could pool its talents
now and SET OUT ALL THE RULES FOR WORD USAGE IN HUMANS.
This is unlikely to be the
> case. You can get pretty far with a set of rules (see the Eliza
> program for a very simple example), but it would appear that there is
> a point beyond which rules aren't going to be sufficient. This is
> where the need for knowledge about the topic of the conversation comes
> in, but the problem goes beyond having a database to access: in order
> to have "human equivalent" language abilities, the computer needs some
> way to comprehend human common sense, emotion, and humor (among other
> things) - all of which are big challenges to any system currently
> available and almost certainly not solvable using a set of hand-coded
> rules. In addition, there is a need for non-monotonic reasoning and
> the ability to maintain multiple (possibly contradictory) working
> interpretations of what other people are saying (in order to
> participate in a conversation).
Most of the many psychologists I studied with and worked with over almost
4 decades would agree with Watson in his 1913 Psych Review paper when he
said, "The time seems to have come when psychology must now discard all
reference to consciousness; when it need no longer delude itself into
thinking it is making mental states the object of observation." Some would
agree wholly; some with qualification. Some will agree but not call
themselves "behaviorists". But these issues are best left to
psychologists. The main point for now is that many thousands of
psychologists and psychology-trained professionals are available to
ferret out the rules of "common sense". We take confused and bewildering
situations in which words are used and we find out what the rules are.
Let me give just one example. When I worked in the mental hospital I
had a patient who engaged in what is called "ritualistic behavior". He
would walk up to hot air registers and similar devices, bob and weave and
utter some incantations (words). The layman might just say, "That guy is
crazy" and let it go at that. The layman doesn't even ask if it is orderly
or has rules. The psychologist discovers that there are rules for this
ritual. And they could be programmed into a robot with bipedal locomotion
if one had any reason for doing so. There were only so many words and word
combinations used in the incantation. And the stimulus conditions were
known re when the incantation would be given, ie hot air registers etc. A
robot could be programmed to emit the words at the correct time and place.
This robot would meet the criterion of "human equivalency" for this
particular human patient for a limited part of the patient's repertoire of
behavior.
> Essentially, human language would appear to be so tightly integrated
> with our cognition that to properly simulate it, you would also need
> to simulate the cognition itself. In other words, language isn't a
> skill you can divorce from thought.
Again, I think we can have faith or belief that a mentalistic notion like
"thought" (or common sense) exists. But that does not detract from the
ability of that huge army of professionals who deal with the rules for
word usage to set out a COMPREHENSIVE RULE BOOK FOR HUMAN WORD USAGE.
The hard-line behaviorist (which I am not) would say there is no such
thing as "thought" as separable from the word strings which use the word
"thought". While I personally subscribe to subjectivity as real, I have
been very impressed by the ability of all those psychologists to ferret
out the rules whenever words are used so I think they should be given a
chance to work on a mega-project which would TEACH MACHINES TO TALK WITH
HUMAN PROFICIENCY. The teaching component of this might be nothing more
than the immediate learning of having the program installed after it is
written. Like Johnny Mnenomic, the robot just says "Hit me" and rapidly
the knowledge is installed or downloaded. Some might object to calling
this "learning" but that is another issue.
I appreciate the effort of those who have contributed to this thread
on Machine-Learning. But I think some computer people are going over
territory which psychologists went over thoroughly almost a century ago.
I see two fallacies in the arguments presented so far against the prospect
of drafting such a comprehensive rule book for human word usage now.
(1) Let's call it the "fallacy of assuming no discoverable rules". IMO all
cases of word usage have discoverable rules because I have seen so many
instances in which these rules are discovered after some
effort. Conversely I have never seen a well presented scenario (presented
well enough to be published in a peer-reviewed journal) in which word
usage is chaotic and has no rules.
(2) Let's call it the "fallacy of the ghost in the machine". It is assumed
that there are mentalistic entities like "common sense" which ineffably
guide human word usage and will forever prevent us from discovering the
rules of word usage. Once again, I have never seen an example in a peer
reviewed journal which would give the experts a "go at" finding a set of
rules. Behavioristic psychology is said by some to have "exorcised the
ghost in the machine". At one time it was widely believed that
"demons" were the cause of unusual or aberrant word usage. I think the
AI/machine learning field still has too many believers in demons.
For this reason, NLP is sometimes
> referred to as "AI-complete", meaning that if you could solve the
> natural language problem, you would also be able to solve any other
> problem in AI.
That is a nice turn of a phrase. At first I was inclined to say, "It is
AI-complete, depending on what you call AI". Why? Because the first thing
that came to mind was the problem of a general vision system or general
sensory system in machines. If such a system is outside NLP, how can NLP
be AI-complete? But the example of the patient with his rituals says
otherwise. In simulating his behavior, a robot with NLP would also have to
have simulated sensory abilities integrated with the NLP. Thus it would be
able to respond with the correct words to the correct stimuli (in at least
two modalities; ie respond to heat and visual stimuli). So I would agree
that NLP which meets the criteria of the best of the human babblers would
also be "AI-complete". All the more reason I would hope that ICML-2000
would focus on this issue:
What kind of mega-project would it take to have the appropriate experts
set out all the rules for human word usage in one human language, like
English, convert them to code and run the program in a computer? In
particular, how many worker hours would this take and what would the costs
be?
Sincerely-FWP
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