Re: SUO: RE: RE: Re: Missing Ingredients
Richard Cooper wrote:
> Tom Johnston wrote:
>
>>1. I'm afraid what I meant was this: if WordNet has
>>definitions for, say,
>>10,000 words that name types of which there can be tokens
>>(classes of which
>>there can be members, if you prefer), then we need 10,000 tables.
>
> You could do it that way. But I think a more elegant way
> would be to have one table for all individuals, and one row for
> each one in the stored discussion. Then there might also be
> 10,000 views, each identifying the individuals that belong
> to each of the 10,000 types. Properly constructed as sets
> of indexes into the main table, these would be 10,000 sets
> of integers, some of which refer to overlapping sets of
> individuals.
>
> So 'birds' would be the subset of individuals that are
> 'red robin on the front lawn', 'parakeet', 'parrot' and so
> forth.
>
> This approach should make anaphoric references somewhat
> straightforward to process.
>
> 'There was a red robin on my front lawn when I woke up this
> morning. The bird had a pretty song and cheered my starting
> the day.'
>
> The first sentence is declarative, and would cause a row in
> the object table to be created to represent 'the red robin
> on my front lawn. The second sentence would extract all
> known birds, of which 'the red robin on my front lawn' is
> the only instance, and therefore is designated by 'the bird'
> in the second sentence.
[...]
Are we talking about humans or computers making these inferences?
I hate to harp on about this, but you seem to be ignoring the fact
that this doesn't happen so easily. For example, can you demonstrate
that in the sentence above, "the bird" refers to the specific red
robin on the front lawn? Yes, you can. But can a computer? There's
no magic here -- everything has to happen via inferences that are
sound and reasonable (and I mean that in both senses), and the
leap from "red robin" to "the bird" is nigh impossible for a
computer to make without error. Things that seem straightforward
to us in anecdotal examples are by no means so in actual usage.
Just knowing what a demonstrative pronoun refers to is very tricky
business.
[and yes I'm being picky, because I think to some degree we need
to be very careful in how we describe these systems, to avoid
the "magic" creeping in.]
Murray
......................................................................
Murray Altheim http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK .
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