On 9/7/05, Jim Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Holloway, Thomas wrote: > >Unfortunately our GW is not that original: > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously > > Wikipedia has become a marvelous resource :) > > It's been quite a long time since I have read Chomsky. It is good to be > reminded. > I hope to shift my work in the not too distant future more in the direction > of natural > language processing.
I also have been interested in natural language processing. There is something about it that makes one think that it should be easy to create a parser etc, and from there make a step towards understanding. I played with the code for a language parser called "Link Grammar". http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/link/construct-page-4.cgi#submit I created an interface for it and was quite happy with it at first. It could take almost any sentence and isolate the verbs, nouns etc. I even extended it slightly by converting all verbs into their infinite form, and adding a tag indicating their tense (past, present, present perfect progressive etc.) Then realized the emptiness of words to a computer. There is no link between the word "dog" and something with a wagging tail to a computer. So if I were to pass to my computer a command "give me a cookie", the computer needs more information about "giving" and "cookies" So then I looked into ontology software, which is a heirarchy of concepts. The best I found then was http://www.opencyc.org/ But even this seemed lacking of real world connection to me. And ontology could verify the truth that a "cookie" is type of food, and object, something round etc etc. But this is just defining words in terms of other words. I bit of circular reasoning. About this time, by children were young and rapidly acquiring language skills. By watching them, I realized that a child knows what a bottle of milk is all about long before they get their mouths working enough to call it a name, or even to recognize the word "bottle" when mommy says it. So there has to be a lower level of understaning, and the words of a sentences are just window-dressing. So I decided to try to model 3d world and see if I could get a simple AI agent to wander around, bump into things and notice (i.e. setup associations) what things satisfied low-level drives (pleasure, pain-avoidance). And then perhaps later I could layer a parsed sentence on top of this and finally create some connection between words and reality. Well, all the above was the result of about 2 yrs. of experimentation. I basically got in over my head and couldn't get neural nets working properly etc. I hit the wall and decided to take a break from it. But it is still a fascinating area of study that I wish I could have done more in. Hmmm. Its hard to have too many irons in the fire (aka Jack of all, master of none.) :-) Kevin > > The attempt to construct an inherently meaningless expression like the one > below, > immediately confronts our drive to find meaning in virtually everything. One > thing left > out of the discussion on wikipedia is data loss and error correction. For > instance, it is > extremely common in email to find that words have been left out of phrases > (like NOT) or > that inappropriate words have been substituted or that words have been > written out of > order. Rather than treating such messages as meaningless, we generally find > ways to > transform them into something reasonable. > > Thus the phrase below reforms in my mind to "Colorless notions of green ideas > filled her > sleep as she lay there furiously dreaming." Perhaps a reference to Chomsky > himself as he > searched for the canonical nonsense phrase. > > ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
