I think we would all agree that context is crucial to understanding.
"Kill them!" means something quite different if you're at a soccer game,
in a military battle, or playing a FPS video game.
But in a pragmatic, let's implement it, sense, I'm not as clear what
context means. Let me try to enumerate some options and see if anyone
has any dramatic insights (or pointers to existing work).
1) Context = the immediate container. This is the simplest to implement,
where the context is simply whatever the object (or action) is directly
within. There are times when the relevant context seems to be at a
higher level, such as the reality/fantasy distinction between the battle
and FPS above. That could be resolved by variants on the lower level
containers that inherit from /their/ containers -- not a "fight" but a
"fantasy fight." But this proliferation of container variants seems
inefficient and over-complex.
2) Context = the highest level container. Clearly sometimes context is
not at the highest level only, but it's all a part of the top level. But
this, in a sense, doesn't solve anything. It just says that everything
is the context.
3) Context = a middle container. This is similar to nouns, in that for
any given object, there is usually a middle level is-a noun that we
prefer to use (e.q., "dog" rather than "mammal"). Maybe there is
similarly a middle level container that's the preferred context. But
this has many of the same problems as both 1 and 2.
4) Context = a search up the container hierarchy. You just look upwards
until you find the relevant context. But this pushes a lot of the
semantic complexity into "find the relevant context," without answering
what that really means.
5) Context = depends on the thing. Each distinct object may have a
different context. There's no one-size-fits-all context. But this gives
very little guidance on how to implement context.
6) Context = multiple items. A given object may have multiple contexts.
For example, I may be a father in the context of my daughter, but a
husband in the context of my wife. But this option is not mutually
exclusive with the others, so you still have to pick on of them as well.
Thoughts?
-------------------------------------------
agi
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