> BG> However, including the NLP aspects will make it a LOT harder, > because the > BG> app would require pretty sophisticated NLP understanding, or > it will be > BG> incredibly annoying to phrase things in ways the system understands. > > Yes, the NLP aspect is tricky. However, in thinking about this I had > in mind one of the earliest "impressive" pseudo-NLP systems, SHRDLU: > http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/ -- I'm sure you're familiar > with the demo conversation at the bottom of that page.
The problem is, this kind of system's *best* conversations look nifty to show off, but their *average* conversations really suck... > The rough analogy with SHRDLU would be that you're communicating about > a structured domain in which certain rules apply (paragraphs consist > of sentences, sentences consist of words and punctuation, ...) and the > concepts are, although more extensive than SHRDLU's, still extremely > limited compared to full human-level conversation. In the end you're > just manipulating serial text -- you can move, copy, delete, insert, > and format it...every operation should break down into combinations of > those at root. Yes, I understand, and I think you could make it work. It would involve a hell of a lot of NLP engineering, of a sort that has next to nothing to do with AGI. But this narrow-AI NLP component could be hooked up to an AGI-based component that learned what actions were desired in what contexts... I actually have some experience building NLP systems like this, and I know how much work it is, and how deep you get into the details of hand-engineering grammar rules and semantic mapping rules. It's fun but has little to do with AGI. One product that looks useful for doing this sort of work is the NLP++ development environment, available from www.textanalysis.com. I played around with it a bit, and it seemed cool for certain kinds of narrow-AI NLP development. -- Ben G ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/
