--- Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Not really. Semantics is an easier problem. > > If so, then why "When you write a compiler, you develop it in this order: > lexical, syntax, semantics."
To point out the difference from the way children learn language: lexical, semantics, syntax. This is why the compiler approach doesn't work for natural language. An artificial language has a fixed and precise grammar and semantics. Such a language cannot be learnable, because language learning implies that the language changes over time, which implies that the meanings of sentences do also. This implies that the language must be ambiguous. In order for people to communicate successfully, they must share (almost) the same language. This happens because humans learn language in the course of normal communication, so that the listener's language evolves toward that of the speaker. If this did not happen, then the members of a social group would not evolve toward a common language. Language has a structure that allows both incremental learning and compensation for ambiguity using redundancy. Most of the meaning of a message is captured in single words, and to a lesser extent on groups or patterns of words over larger windows. The meanings are additive. In a pure text-based system, the meaning of word or phrase is the set of words or phrases that appeared near it in past communication. In a grounded system, words may also be associated with nonverbal patterns by the same learning mechanism. The developmental learning sequence is over increasingly large windows: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs. > > Information retrieval and text > > classification systems work pretty well by ignoring word order. > > Semantics is defined as the study of meaning. Information retrieval and > text classification systems do not understand the meaning of what they > return. They do work . . . . but their job isn't semantics. Yes it is, except that their semantics are not grounded. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- 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/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
