On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 05:53:48PM -0700, Matt Mahoney wrote: > --- Linas Vepstas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Aside from Novamente and CYC, who else has attempted to staple > > NLP to a reasoning engine? > > Many have tried, such as BASEBALL in 1961 [1] and SHRDLU in 1968-70 [2]. But
Thanks, read about shrdlu in college. > you might as well try stapling jello. Heh. Maybe. > A natural language model requires the > parallel evaluation of hundreds of thousands of weak constraints learned from > years of experience. Sure. Easy words to say. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. I've written some code, so as to get some hands-on experience, as opposed to theorizing and reading. It might be said that what I've done is fundamentally wrong for AGI, but it is an attempt. What I've done is this: -- Created a small, simple reasoning engine that can reason from the OpenCYC knowledgebase. Nothing fancy here. -- Downloaded a high-powered english language parser, and created a pattern matcher that calls a callback for certain sentence types. -- The callback does some ad-hoc processing, and returns an english-lanuage reply. So far, the thing supports 4 or 5 sentence types, and replies to them. The pattern matcher is robust enough that I could expand this to hundreds of sentence types with little effort, so that area is not a problem. The sentences that are currently supported are: Who is X? What is X? Is X Y? X is Y! It can sort of deal with is/are, a/an/the, singular/plural, massnouns. It "remembers" the current topic of conversation, and could even answer questions about that, a few days ago, before I broke it again. I'm planning on adding more sentance structures "any day now". Here is what I've discovered: -- Although there are a number of english language parsers obtainable free on the net, I wasn't able to find any "english language output" systems. That is, I want to take the concept (#copper #isa #mineral) and say it in gramatical english, e.g. avoid saying things like "The Copper is the Mineral." Bonus points for something that has some personality: "Like duude, I said, copper is a mineral, ok?". Right now, english output doesn't seem that hard, but is certainly a pain in the neck to make it gramatical. More importantly, I've started struggling with representing conversational state. i.e. "what are we talking about?" "what has been said so far?" I've got some inkling on how to expand conversational state, but its ad hoc so far. Thus, I find that my interests are now turning to representing conversational state. How does novamente deal with it? What about Pei Wang's NARS? It seems that NARS is a reasoning system; great; but what is holding me back right now is not an ability to reason per-se, but the ability to maintain a conversational state. Right now, my notion of "conversational state" is vague ... I'm proceeding in an ad-hoc manner. I was curious about what sort of theorizing and practical experience might be known about it. --linas p.s. You can play with it by joining the IRC channel #opencyc on freenode.net. To talk to "lillybot", prefix your sentences with "lb:". If it doesn't crash, it'll respond. Caution: if it can't parse a sentence, then it falls back to alicebot, which is a snarky chatbot. -- so don't be fooled by alice. ----- 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=8660244&id_secret=59957155-e0ef70
