Matt, I agree with Ben. Tomassello's book Constructing a Language, A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition argues that young children develop the skill to discern the intentional actions of others. Construction Grammar (CxG) is a simple pairing of form and meaning. According to this theory, implemented in my Incremental Fluid Construction Grammar, children learn the pairings of what their parents say and what their parents' intentions are. Children generalize (i.e. induce) patterns among the instance pairings they experience. CxG names these patterns Constructions. In my Incremental Fluid Construction Grammar these constructions are assembled from the input utterance word by word by the application of production rules against a growing feature structure in working memory. To get my bootstrap dialog system going I will explicitly code as few of these rules as are necessary. However I do not believe that my system should learn these rules from percepts alone.
Let's see if it works. I hope that in some months we can debate its actual behavior. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 9:14:43 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Incremental Fluid Construction Grammar released On Jan 10, 2008 10:03 PM, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > All this discussion of building a grammar seems to ignore the obvious fact > that in humans, language learning is a continuous process that does not > require any explicit encoding of rules. I think either your model should > learn this way, or you need to explain why your model would be more > successful > by taking a different route. Explicit encoding of grammars has a long > history > of failure, so your explanation should be good. At a minimum, the > explanation > should describe how humans actually learn language and why your method is > better. Matt, If you read the paper at the top of this list http://www.novamente.net/papers/ you will see a brief summary of the reasoning behind the approach I am taking. It is only 8 pages long so it should be quick to read, though it obviously does not explain all details in that length. The abstract is as follows: ***** Abstract— Current work is described wherein simplified versions of the Novamente Cognition Engine (NCE) are being used to control virtual agents in virtual worlds such as game engines and Second Life. In this context, an IRC (imitation- reinforcement-correction) methodology is being used to teach the agents various behaviors, including simple tricks and communicative acts. Here we describe how this work may potentially be exploited and extended to yield a pathway toward giving the NCE robust, ultimately human-level natural language conversation capability. The pathway starts via using the current system to instruct NCE-controlled agents in semiosis and gestural communication; and then continues via integration of a particular sort of hybrid rule-based/statistical NLP system (which is currently partially complete) into the NCE-based virtual agent system, in such a way as to allow experiential adaptation of the rules underlying the NLP system, ***** I do not think that a viable design for an AGI needs to include a description of human learning (of language or anything else). No one understands exactly how the human brain works yet, but that doesn't mean we can't potentially have success with non-brain-emulating AGI approaches. My favorite theorists of human language are Richard Hudson (see his 2007 book Language Networks) and Tomassello (see his book Constructing a Language). I actually believe my approach to language in AGI is quite close to their ideas. But I don't have time/space to justify this statement in an email. -- Ben ----- 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/?&; ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping ----- 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=84580699-2a67a1
