On 10/01/2008, Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 10, 2008 10:26 AM, William Pearson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 10/01/2008, Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > I'll be a lot more interested when people start creating NLP systems > > > > that are syntactically and semantically processing statements *about* > > > > words, sentences and other linguistic structures and adding syntactic > > > > and semantic rules based on those sentences. > > > > Note the new emphasis ;-) You example didn't have statements *about* > > words, but new rules were inferred from word usage. > > Well, here's the thing. > > Dictionary text and English-grammar-textbook text are highly ambiguous and > complex English... so you'll need a very sophisticated NLP system to be able > to grok them...
Firstly, so what? Why not allow for the fact that there will hopefully be a sophisticated NLP system in the system at some point? Give it the hooks to use dictionary style acquisition, even if it won't for the first x years of development. We are aiming for adult human-level in the end, right? Not just a 5 year old. It will make adding French or another language a whole lot quicker, when it comes to that level. Retrofitting the ability may or may not be easy at that stage. It would be better to figure out whether it is easy or not before settling on an architecture. My hunch, is that it is not easy. Secondly, I'm not buying that it is any more complex than dealing with other domains. You easily get equal complexity dealing with non-linguistic stuff such as This is a battery A battery can be part of a machine Putting a battery in the battery holder, gives the machine power Is as complex, if not more so, than un- is a prefix A prefix is the front part of a word Adding un- to a, "word," is equivalent to saying, "not word." What the system does after processing these different sets of sentences is vastly different. A difference worth exploring before settling on an architecture, IMO. Not building the potential to have a capability into a baby based AI, even if it is not initially used, means when the AI is grown up it still won't be able to have that capability. Unless you are relying on it getting to the self-modifying code phase before the asking-what-words-mean phase. Will ----- 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=84431135-87cfe7
