The original WSD code is no longer used as such. However, I think it contains a very important -- fundamental, even -- idea within it that has been long ignored, and needs to be revived and modernized. And this is why those subdirectories have not been nuked into oblivion -- they are kind-of a reminder to "modernize this stuff".
Let me briefly explain the original idea. It was to associate every word with a vector of word-senses (exactly like Webster's dictionary or any natural language dictionary). Given the words in a sentence, get the associated vector. The claim is that the correct meaning for the sentence involves only those word-senses that are the most similar. The canonical example is "The church bells rang on Sunday" -- the "ring" could be "the ring on your finger" or "the sound" but since there are no hands or fingers or other body-parts in that sentence, we conclude it's the sound. The "bell" could be the "bell curve" or "the doorbell" or something else. But bell-curves do not make sounds; door-bells and other bells do (oddly enough, the kind of sound they make is called "ringing"... Hmm .. interesting...). A "church" could be the abstract political structure in Rome, or it could be a reference to a physical, architectural building. Now, abstract political structures do not contain any "bells" (they do contain "dog-whistles", but that's something else), so, here, "church" probably means "the building". Sunday, well, Sunday could be the 7th day of the week, it could be the radio advertisement "SUNDAY AT THE US31 SPEEDWAY THE TOP NITRO-FUELED MUNSTERS DRAG-U-LA WILL BE TAKING ON RAY FARHNER'S BOOTHILL EXPRESS..." ( https://www.museumofamericanspeed.com/boothillexpress.html) but it's probably more about the religious holiday that comes around once a week. We conclude this because "churches" have something to do with religion... The desired generalization of WSD would be the creation of a "vector of factoids" for each word, and then one of more algorithms to compare factoids, to discover the most likely ones. Comparison could be as trivial as counting the words-in-common in the definitions (e.g. the definition of "bell" probably has the word "ring" in it) but you could also do more complex reasoning (e.g. ringing is-a kind-of sound and bells perform sounds, therefore ...) Now, natural-language neural-nets do something like the above, but the actual "reasoning" that they perform is tightly mashed up and compressed into opaque weight-vectors of floats. We don't know what those weight-vectors are doing. (it's kind-of like trying to figure out what a compressed file is, without uncompressing it. It looks like random bytes. Neural nets are like "homomorphic computing" - they work directly with the compressed form.) So here, instead, the goal is to "uncompress" those weight-vectors, and work with a sparse representation, where we have "human-readable" access to the factoids attached to each word. The sparse representation should be more accurate (as, famously, compression loses image quality/audio quality ....) I will cut-n-paste this email into the README ... --Linas On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 1:27 PM [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I was wondering how much of this Howto still applies. > https://github.com/opencog/opencog/blob/master/opencog/nlp/wsd/README-howto > Is nlp/wsd still part of nlp-parse or anything? > > Thank you > Mani > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "opencog" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/01e159a2-6325-4154-b063-e0869900fcffn%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/01e159a2-6325-4154-b063-e0869900fcffn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer. --Peter da Silva -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CAHrUA35OmVZBp7P7uUSs_3Z_JKiAAUVxrgBDAhaDZZ-EaPeCyA%40mail.gmail.com.
