> BenG: > > As I said in a recent post, I prefer to stay away from natural language > > processing at this stage, until the system has acquired a rudimentary > > understanding of natural language thru its own experience. > We're not quite > > there yet ;) > > > That's where the Mentifex AI and Novamente differ (and probably also > where A.T. Murray the linguist and Ben Goertzel the mathematician differ). > > If you're not aiming for language, you're aiming for a smart animal. > > A.T. Murray
Arthur, We *are* aiming for language, and some parts of the Novamente design have been significantly influenced by (our understanding of) the requirements of natural language understanding/production. We have a pretty precise idea of how Novamente will ultimately process language, based on mathematical relationships btw Novamente's structures/processes and linguistic concepts like unification parsing and grammatical transformation rules. However, we consider language comprehension/understanding as something that the system should *learn* based on experience, having been provided with structures/processes that are appropriate for language learning. And we do think the system needs to learn "smart animal" type behaviors and thought patterns before it can meaningfully learn language. There may well be a role for integrating existing linguistic databases into the system. But if so, I believe, this will be a role of accelerating experiential language learning that's already in progress, rather than a role of artificially kick-starting language understanding before the system is experientially & cognitively ready for it. I note that not all members of the Novamente team agree on this. In our work on Webmind, we integrated linguistic DB's at an earlier stage, and wanted to use this artificially built-in knowledge to "kick-start" experiential language learning. I now think this approach was a mistake, but some team members think that if we'd kept going in that direction we would have found success. (We stopped because the whole Webmind project was stopped.) -- Ben ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/
