On 11/28/06, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
First order logic (FOL) is good for expressing simple facts like "all birds have wings" or "no bird has hair", but not for statements like "most birds can fly". To do that you have to at least extend it with fuzzy logic (probability and confidence).
Quantification is a logic problem. I am not talking about logic, but using predications for representation. I can represent "most birds can fly" as something like [S [NP (mod most) (head birds)] [VP (mod can) (head fly)]] No quantification involved.
A second problem is, how do you ground the terms? If you have "for all X, bird(X) => has(X, wings)", where does "bird", "wings", "has" get their meanings? The terms do not map 1-1 to English words, even though we may use the same notation.
They DO map 1-1 to English words, because I simply use the English words in my predicates. I don't care if "wing" has multiple meanings. It is the business of whatever process works with those predicates to sort that out. I've said this twice already: I am not talking about using logic, in which you assign semantics to the terms, and assume that every instance of a particular predicate has the same semantics. I am just talking about using predicates to organize the English terms in a sentence. Predicates are a nice representation, even if you are not going to use FOPL. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
