--- Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hmmm. I think there's a problem with your use of the word semantics . . > > . . There is a huge difference between labelling an object, which young > children do quite early, and dealing with concepts (even fairly concrete > ones). There is an even larger difference between correlating > co-occurrences, which is all that information retrieval and text > classification systems do, and actually dealing with meaning.
What is "meaning" to a computer? Some people would say that no machine can know the meaning of text because only humans can understand language. The terms "meaning" and "understanding" are not well defined for machines. Humans are good at predicting text. For example, I think you could guess the next word in this _________. If I wanted to test if you know Chinese, I could ask you to predict successive ideographs in a Chinese newspaper. Obviously you would have to understand Chinese to pass the test. If a machine could predict text with the same accuracy rate as a 7 year old child, would you say the machine understood the text as well as the child? Most people would say "no, it's not human" and then think up other tests until it flunked. But let's be fair. This is not a Turing test. If I want to test if you understand numbers, I would give you arithmetic problems. Most people would agree this is a reasonable test. But by this test, a calculator also understands numbers. Humans understand words by associating them both with other words and with nonverbal sensorimotor experience. Some words like "blue" are grounded, but other abstract words like "abstract" are only associated with other words. But this is still understanding. If you ask a blind man if he understands "blue" he might say, "yes, in the same way you understand 'ultraviolet'". So I would say that an information retrieval system understands words in the abstract sense. -- 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
