Hi,
If you want to use LinkGrammar in **any** language a very simple way to go
is: refactor it as a single class in C++ and use swig to wrap it to any
language.
class LinkGrammar {
public:
LinkGrammar (char *dict_name, char *pp_name, char *cons_name, char *
affix_name, int a_verbosity = -1);
LinkGrammar (int a_verbosity = -1) : LinkGrammar("4.0.dict", "4.0.knowledge",
"4.0.constituent-knowledge", "4.0.affix", a_verbosity) {}
~LinkGrammar ();
// Includes the dictionary load, check .dict == NULL for error.
Dictionary dict;
// Native API (uses Link Grammar types)
Sentence sentence_create (char *input_string);
int sentence_parse (Sentence sent);
Linkage linkage_create (int k, Sentence sent);
char *linkage_sprint_diagram (Linkage linkage);
void string_delete (char *p);
char *linkage_sprint_constituents (Linkage linkage);
void sentence_delete (Sentence sent);
Then, use this http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Python.html to build a Python
wrapper and there you are. Note that anything that works well in Python
(including its own core library, numpy, scipy, pytorch, etc.) is written in
C.
I think that was done at some time in LG, but possibly abandoned.
Personally, I am very interested in the dictionary itself and not so much
in the solver that comes with LinkGrammar.
The reason why is: I do not like forcing the sentence to be such an
important part of the language. It's like a self contained whole, but it is
still unrelated with the previous or the next sentence. If the sentence is
"ungrammatical" we throw it out completely.
I consider language much more of a flow and I am interested in how words
fit together at a smaller scale and possibly that becomes even larger than
a sentence. It is like a tree search. Avoiding the idea that there is just
one correct solution.
See how beautifully described the links are:
https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/dict/section-CC.html (The index is here
https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/dict/index.html)
I say this to just throw in my idea:
Why not make it open ended? Make the dictionary a well documented,
exportable as a single file, resource that explains all the possible
relations in the English language in text form. There are just around 100
links in all of English and let the user imagine how to use that to "crack
language" in an explainable way. I am a huge fan since I first saw it (in
this mailing list), and I find understanding the dictionary very hard and
when it is used, it is full of hacks to fit special cases rather than just
letting the dictionary
be the reference and let the AI figure out from the context what applies
best where.
Just my 2 cents.
Jacques.
On Sat, Oct 2, 2021 at 10:48 PM Linas Vepstas <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi Calvin,
>
> On Sat, Oct 2, 2021 at 9:31 AM Calvin Irby <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hello Link Grammar Community,
> >
> > I was just wondering about how the way that Link Grammar is written. I
> know over time it has changed a lot and various support for other languages
> have been added. But why was Link Grammar written in C?
>
> Because neither Python nor Java existed when link Grammar was created
> -- version 1.0 came out in 1991, so it's celebrating it's 30th
> anniversary, now.
>
> > Is it because C is fast and so natural language processing requires the
> C language so that calculations are done as fast as possible. If that's the
> case, where would that leave other high level languages? Could Link Grammar
> ever be rewritten in a language like Python?
>
> Yes it could be. Any system can be rewritten in any (Turing complete)
> language whatsoever. Most programming languages are Turing complete,
> the few exceptions are explicitly not: regex's are for finite state
> machines, only.
>
> For the link parser, Python would be a low-quality choice. For two
> reasons. (1) good god, why? The code already exists, it's debugged, it
> works. (2) it would be 10x or 20x slower. Many of the structures
> inside of LG are hand-tuned to fit inside the cache-line of a typical
> modern CPU, and a fair chunk of it's performance comes from this kind
> of tuning. This tuning is (literally) impossible in Python and java.
> (3) If you do want to create something new, well -- I'm developing a
> theory and an infrastructure that is Link-Grammar-like, but is more
> general: I believe it will work for audio and video (and other things,
> too) but the parser will remain very link-grammar-like. See the
> README's in https://github.com/opencog/learn and the documentation in
> https://github.com/opencog/atomspace/sheaf for more details.
>
> > It just seems like High Level Languages like Java and Python make it
> difficult because developers never seem to learn all of the language and
> are always fighting an uphill battle just trying to understand all of a
> language's ecosystem.
>
> Python is the Visual Basic of the 21st century. A lot of people who
> don't know how to program, who are terrible programmers, write code in
> Python. It's OK to keep them at arm's length.
>
> The Java infrastructure is daunting. There are practical issues:
> requiring 16GB of RAM for infrastructure just to write and run "hello
> world" is more than I can handle. I spent years coding in java, and
> came to dislike it. It's very verbose -- you have to write 5-10 lines
> of code to do just the simplest things.
>
> Much much more important is the theory: It is very difficult to write
> abstract, recursive algorithms in Java. The entire idea of
> object-orientation fights against the idea of recursive data
> structures. Things like Link Grammar, and the AtomSpace are all about
> recursive data structures. It would be miserable to have to work with
> these in Java. It's like .. I dunno, wearing pants for a shirt.
> Wearing a shirt for pants. Shirts and pants are great, but you have to
> wear them on the correct part of your body. The shape of recursive
> data structures simply does not fit conventional OO languages - not
> just Java, but also javascript, (although that is for a very different
> reason, having to do with named data structure locations, as opposed
> to anonymous ones.)
>
> This is why most of my code is in Scheme, these days. It's not because
> Scheme is a great language. Actually, it kind of sucks - it's hard to
> use, hard to understand, difficult to read, difficult to modify. But
> it fits the data structures much much better. ***For this particular
> project*** (and not other projects!) one line of Scheme does more than
> 20 lines of contorted, complexticated Java or Python boilerplate.
> It's all about the data structure.
>
> > Not only that, but my predictions is that the C language is a safe bet
> now for most projects as AI and ML techniques will soon be taking over the
> development world. We are already seeing a movement for "No code" and Tim
> O' Reilly even commented recently that "The Golden Age of the Programmer is
> over". Is C going to be the surviving dinosaur language that will continue
> to thrive in the future while all the other various high level languages
> die out to the technologies that big corporations are developing? Google
> and Microsoft seem to be on a race to develop AI that helps out developers.
>
> You're talking about developers who are inexperienced -- the "Visual
> Basic" kind of thinkers -- the "Power Users". The people who were
> crappy programmers to begin with. Sure, AI will allow them to evolve
> into better crappy programmers, or not be programmers at all.
>
> -- Linas
>
> --
> Patrick: Are they laughing at us?
> Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.
>
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