Hi, > My point is not that grammar isn't important. My point is that parsing > should not be the first step. The first step is to identify the > semantic units (words and suffixes). The second step is to learn their > meanings (associations with words and possibly non-verbal grounding).
That is the sorta thing we're aiming to do with our game-world and robotic embodiment for OpenCog. Have the system ground words in what it perceives... That is indeed how humans proceed with language learning. But it's not necessarily the only way for an AGI system to do things. Humans also start with gesture before speech, and with speech before text, which is not the approach you're taking. So you are also willing to take a route differing from human development when you find it convenient!! You are making your own intuitive judgments about which parts of human language processing and development are important to emulate in your AI system... > Most of the meaning of a sentence is the sum of the meanings of its > words. That is what folks doing statistical language processing always say. I think it's a boring, and not very useful statement. I think you are creating a bogus theory of semantics in order to match the limitations of the algorithmic toolset you've found most useful for text compression. The simplest, one-year-old-child aspect of the meaning of a sentence is the sum of the meanings of its words.... Summing word meanings gets you a very, very small distance toward interpretation of complex sentences like the ones we typically use on this mailing list. >Word order and grammar plays a lesser role, but we can't ignore > it entirely. I realize that "Alice hit Bob" is not the same as "Bob > hit Alice". But I think the most important role of grammar is error > correction. This is a profound conceptual error on your part.... There is a huge body of linguistic theory contradicting this idea, see e.g. Jackendoff's book http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Language-Meaning-Grammar-Evolution/dp/0199264376 for some elementary education in cognitive linguistics ;p ... > How does the link grammar parse the following? > > "I saw the star with the telescope" > "I saw the star with the hat" > "I saw the star with Bob" It outputs multiple parses for each, corresponding to the various possible interpretations... The disambiguation between the various possibilities, is then left up to the next (semantic) stage in the pipeline This is what humans would do for a sentence like I saw the zplingf with the zooblatz ... we would keep both parses in our minds, till we could figure out the syntax... -- Ben ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
