Re: Some references about ontology and analogy: SUO redux
John,
As usual, I agree with everything you said in your latest note, and regret
that I have been unable to make clear that, though I keep asserting that a
widely acceptable SUO is possible, I do not think it will be simple to build, or
will solve all the problems of AI by itself.
I did take the trouble to reread your notes on "Knowledge Soup" before
sending my previous note, and didn't think there was anything incompatible. The
thrust of the quote from Kant seems to be that all representations are
incomplete. I agree. I didn't understand that abstract from Whitehead, beyond
the first sentence. The reference to your Grand Challenge note was unavailable
when I tried it.
One thing that we need to keep clear in our discussions is that the upper
ontology is a mathematical and precisely specified object, though it is intended
to represent (some portion of) reality. The SUO gets it grounding in reality
when specific instances of objects or events are asserted to be instances of the
ontological classes. That allows one to test and falsify the theory. Mapping
from linguistic expression to the logical structures is the province of Natural
Language Understanding and has its own separate problems. NLU is (I think) one
of the most important applications of an SUO, and development of the SUO should
keep the needs of NLU in mind, but -- they are separate problems, and I think
that Wittgenstein's language games are more relevant to NLU than to building the
upper ontology. Where an ontology is intended to be useful for NLU, one can
take instances of linguistic expressions and test the relevant logical
assertions in the ontology against those instances to see if the theory properly
represents the reality.
I also agree that visual/spatial representation and reasoning is an
important element in intelligence that is poorly captured by the existing
ontologies, and needs careful attention. I have asked before, and I ask again:
is anyone aware of any public freely available open-source CAD/CAM or virtual
reality software that could be aligned with or have portions of it included in a
standard ontology?
I just want to get on with the task of building the best upper ontology that
the best minds can devise in the present state of our art, keep modifying it as
experience reveals its inadequacies, and in the interim use it as a tool that
will help us make progress on the other issues that you have eloquently pointed
out, by improving the reusability of the results of our investigations.
Pat
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John F. Sowa wrote:
> Pat,
>
> As one who has invested a lot of effort in AI and related
> subjects, I really do hope that projects like SUO, Cyc,
> Project Halo, and the Semantic Web will succeed -- at least
> to the extent that the produce a positive ROI, even if
> they don't satisfy all the hopes and claims of their
> original proponents.
>
> PC> ... we are still missing a standard upper ontology.
>
> But at the same time, the evidence suggests that many
> of the currently proposed directions are overoptimistic.
> As examples look at slides #17 and #18 of the knowledge
> soup talks:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/challenge.htm
>
> What Kant said in 1800 was repeated in different words and
> from different perspectives by Wittgenstein, Waismann, and
> Whitehead in the early 20th century. There's no evidence
> from anything being done today that would suggest any other
> conclusions. From Kant:
>
> "Since the synthesis of empirical concepts is not arbitrary
> but based on experience, and as such can never be complete
> (for in experience ever new characteristics of the concept
> can be discovered), empirical concepts cannot be defined."
>
> From Whitehead:
>
> "The topic of every science is an abstraction from the full
> concrete happenings of nature.... But there can be no
> logical test for the possibility that deductive procedure...
> may introduce into relevance considerations from which the
> primitive notions of the topic have been abstracted."
>
> As for Project Halo, I think that something useful can be done
> to make knowledge acquisition somewhat easier. It's worth
> exploring, but as I said in the challenge talks, the methods
> of deduction are already fairly good. The areas with the
> greatest need for improvement are induction and abduction.
> That's where the greatest opportunities lie.
>
> Noah used the term "document centered". I like the emphasis
> on natural language texts as the starting point for knowledge
> acquisition, and that fits with my long-term belief that all
> knowledge representation languages -- and, in fact, all notations
> for mathematics or any other subject -- are supplements to natural
> languages. Every one of them is defined directly or indirectly
> in terms of some NL, and every one them is taught and explained
> in a NL. In Wittgenstein's terms, they are just language games
> that supplement some NL.
>
> One point about the Project Halo discussion is the argument for
> chemistry instead of physics: chemistry problems can be stated
> entirely in terms of formulas, but physics problems nearly always
> involve diagrams. But that leads into another issue: I don't
> believe that natural language understanding is possible without
> relating the terms to the geometry of the visual, tactile, and
> motor mechanisms. In fact, that is my recommendation for a
> "Grand Challenge" proposal:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/ai/gcprop.htm
> Integrating geometrical pattern recognition
> with natural language question answering
>
> I believe that this is one of the most critical problems that
> must be solved before true AI is possible.
>
> John Sowa
>
--
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Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc. || (908) 561-3416
735 Belvidere Ave. || (908) 668-5252 (if no answer above)
Plainfield, NJ 07062-2054
internet: cassidy@micra.com
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