Ben gave the following examples that demonstrate the ambiguity of the
preposition "with":
People eat food with forks
People eat food with friend[s]
People eat food with ketchup
The Texai bootstrap English dialog system, whose grammar rule engine I'm
currently rewriting, uses elaboration and spreading activation to perform
disambiguation and pruning of alternative interpretations. Let's step through
how Texai would process Ben's examples. According to Wiktionary, "with" has
among its word senses the following:
* as an instrument; by means of
* in the company of; alongside; along side of; close to; near to
* in addition to, as an accessory to
Its clear when I make these substitutions which word sense is to be selected:
People eat food by means of forks
People eat food in the company of friends
People eat ketchup as an accessory to food
Elaboration of the Texai discourse context provides additional entailed
propositions with respect to the objects actually referenced in the utterance.
The elaboration process is efficiently performed by spreading activation over
the KB from the focal terms with respect to context. The links explored by
this process can be formed by offline deductive inference, or learned from
heuristic search and reinforcement learning, or simply taught by a mentor.
Relevant elaborations I would expect Texai to make for the example utterances
are:
a fork is an instrument
there are activities that a person performs as a member of a group of friends;
to eat is such an activity
ketchup is a condiment; a condiment is an accessory with regard to food
Texai considers all interpretations simultaneously, in a transient spreading
activation network whose nodes are the semantic propositions contained within
the elaborated discourse context and whose links are formed when propositions
share an argument concept. Negative links are formed between propositions from
alternative interpretations. At AGI-09 I hope to demonstrate this technique
in which the correct word sense of "with" can be determined from the highest
activated nodes in the elaborated discourse context after spreading activation
has quiesced.
-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: Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008 8:18:30 AM
Subject: Re: [agi] universal logical form for natural language
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:23 AM, YKY (Yan King Yin) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:10 AM, Abram Demski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> How much will you focus on natural language? It sounds like you want
> that to be fairly minimal at first. My opinion is that chatbot-type
> programs are not such a bad place to start-- if only because it is
> good publicity.
I plan to make use of Steven Reed's Texai -- he's writing a dialog
system that can translate NL to logical form. If it turns out to be
unfeasible, I can borrow a simple NL interface from somewhere else.
Whether using an NL interface like Stephen's is feasible or not, really
depends on your expectations for it.
Parsing English sentences into sets of formal-logic relationships is not
extremely hard given current technology.
But the only feasible way to do it, without making AGI breakthroughs
first, is to accept that these formal-logic relationships will then embody
significant ambiguity.
Pasting some text from a PPT I've given...
***
Syntax parsing, using the NM/OpenCog narrow-AI RelEx system, transforms
Guard my treasure with your life
into
_poss(life,your)
_poss(treasure,my)
_obj(Guard,treasure)
with(Guard,life)
_imperative(Guard)
Semantic normalization, using the RelEx rule engine and the FrameNet database,
transforms this into
Protection:Protection(Guard, you)
Protection:Asset(Guard, treasure)
Possession:Owner(treasure, me)
Protection:Means(Guard, life)
Possession:Owner(life,you)
_imperative(Guard)
But, we also get
Guard my treasure with your sword.
Protection:Protection(Guard, you)
Protection:Asset(Guard, treasure)
Possession:Owner(treasure, me)
Protection:Means(Guard, sword)
Possession:Owner(sword,you)
_imperative(Guard)
Guard my treasure with your uncle.
Protection:Protection(Guard, you)
Protection:Protection(Guard, uncle) Protection:Asset(Guard, treasure)
Possession:Owner(treasure, me)
Protection:Means(Guard, sword)
Possession:Owner(uncle,you)
*****
The different senses of the word "with" are not currently captured by the RelEx
NLP
system, and that's a hard problem for current computational linguistics
technology
to grapple with.
I think it can be handled via embodiment, i.e. via having an AI system observe
the usage of various senses of "with" in various embodied contexts.
Potentially it could also be handled via statistical-linguistics methods (where
the
contexts are then various documents the senses of "with" have occurred in,
rather
than embodied situations), though I'm more skeptical of this method.
In a knowledge entry context, this means that current best-of-breed NL
interpretation systems will parse
People eat food with forks
People eat food with friend
People eat food with ketchup
into similarly-structured logical relationships.
This is just fine, but what it tells you is that **reformulating English into
logical
formalism does not, in itself, solve the disambiguation problem**.
The disambiguation problem remains, just on the level of disambiguating
formal-logic structures into less ambiguous ones.
Using a formal language like CycL to enter knowledge is one way of largely
circumventing this problem ... using Lojban would be another ...
(Again I stress that having humans encode knowledge is NOT my favored
approach to AGI, but I'm just commenting on some of the issues involved
anyway...)
-- Ben G
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