--- On Sun, 9/28/08, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>FYI, Cyc has a natural language front end and a lot of folks have been 
>>working on it for the last 5+ years...

It still needs work. I found this undated (2004 or later) white paper which is 
apparently not linked from cyc.com.
http://www.cyc.com/doc/white_papers/KRAQ2005.pdf

And also this overview.
http://www.cyc.com/cyc/cycrandd/areasofrandd_dir/nlu

The overview claims to be able to convert natural language sentences into Cycl 
assertions, and to convert questions to Cycl queries. So I wonder why the 
knowledge base is still not being built this way. And I wonder why there is no 
public demo of the interface, and no papers giving verifiable experimental 
results.

It seems to me the main limitation is that the language model has to be 
described formally in Cycl, as a lexicon and rules for parsing and 
disambiguation. There seems to be no mechanism for learning natural language by 
example. For example, if Cyc receives a sentence it cannot parse, or is 
ambiguous, or has a word not in its vocabulary or used in a different way, then 
there is no mechanism to update the model, which is something humans easily do. 
Given the complexity of English, I think this is a serious limitation with no 
easy solution.

-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]




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agi
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