Hi Jacques, I'm glad to hear from you ... I wrote a long reply ... it may seem stringent but there has been a lot happening in the last 10 years of the link-grammar project that you are not aware of ... much of what you mention is in the process of being addressed.
-- linas On Sun, Oct 3, 2021 at 3:28 AM Jacques Basaldúa <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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. That is exactly how it is done for 3 or 4 of the current language bindings, including python. > Personally, I am very interested in the dictionary itself and not so much in > the solver that comes with LinkGrammar. In case you aren't aware of this, I'm working very hard on automatically creating dictionaries for any language. This includes the language of shapes and sounds! The project is at https://github.com/opencog/learn -- and now to be realistic: so far, I've been able to put together some demos for English, only. Even those are a bit shaky, I'm currently redesigning internals. Work on sound/vision has not begun; basic DSP/GPU libraries need to be wrapped first. > 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. Yes, this is a short-coming with the current design. Although -- be aware that the current design can correctly parse 2-3-4 sentences at a time. After that, I think it gets a bit slow (? maybe?), since it needs to explore the locations of sentence boundaries. After that, the printed output is hard to read, so most people don't do this. There is a need for an incremental parser, and there's some work on this that has been done. > 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. Sure, except one of the interesting possibilities is anaphora resolution... > It is like a tree search. Avoiding the idea that there is just one correct > solution. Link grammar does not assume "one correct solution" -- it gives you a ranked list of possibilities, from most likely to less-likely. > 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) HEY PAY ATTENTION! That documentation is 15 years out of date! The current documentation is located at https://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/dict/ In particular, the CC link is obsolete, and was removed five years ago! If you are using the CMU dictionaries, you are missing fifteen years of changes, updates, improvements. The current dictionaries cover a far far larger subset of English. The current parser is literally 100x faster. > > Why not make it open ended? Yes, there is extensive work in OpenCog to do exactly that. > Make the dictionary a well documented, exportable as a single file, One of the additions, made about 7 years ago, allows you store the dictionary in an sqlite3 database. This is, in fact, not ideal, but ... it does give you a "single file" Note also we have dictionaries for Russian, and partial dictionaries for Farsi, Arabic, German, and demos of another half-dozen languages. > 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. Yes. I will be giving a talk in two weeks on "explainable patterns" which uses LG as a central inspiration for how one can learn new things in an unsupervised setting, and, unlike neural nets, have access to the symbolic internals so that you can actually understand what was learned. Again, the goal of the https://github.com/opencog/learn project is to do this not just for English, but for any language, modern or extinct, and also for sound and vision, or, more generally, anything in the noosphere for which you have a perception interface. -- linas > > 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. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "link-grammar" 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/link-grammar/CAHrUA36Pa39%3D-56sjqPdD2OxoP7R800rxrz%3DwK_%3DuDEtMYV%3DWQ%40mail.gmail.com. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "link-grammar" 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/link-grammar/CA%2B_pmb78MrDeBEnJ80YfXgPQXLf-gECCbAYtGWwQMGBhp6HD9Q%40mail.gmail.com. -- Patrick: Are they laughing at us? Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us. -- 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/CAHrUA34%3DKS7M%2Bohg5EqHvx595DjSyJL3SiPtinVFr3kxiQ7q6A%40mail.gmail.com.
