Re: [ RE:Re: Interoperability and Vagueness ]
Hi Cathy,
On Wednesday 19 January 2005 18:41, L, Cathy wrote:
> Rob Freeman wrote:
>
>
> Of course I believe syntax points the way. We specify meaning more
> precisely using syntax (by filtering and substituting its irreducible
> representation in words according to associations, essentially.)
>
>
> This sounds intriguingly right to me - but how are you going to implement
> it????? Sketch an example for us, if only a toy.
The filtering and substituting can be implemented using a "vector model"
semantic representation, c.f. Latent Semantic Indexing and all that.
Those are fairly venerable, with applications in text retrieval and so forth.
Anyway, we can implement syntax as "filtering and substituting" in terms of
these vectors by placing the vectors associated with two words (in a
syntactic sequence) side-by-side and allowing the two vectors to
"select" (filter) sub-meanings (i.e. sub-vectors) from each other.
E.g. if you had two vectors like:
place: (put, insert, location...)
nice: (good, pleasant, kind...)
Then the syntactic combination:
"Nice place."
...should select only the appropriate sub-meanings of the two (from existing
observed combinations in a text):
nice place: (good location, pleasant location...)
What you end up doing is building a new vector for a whole sentence, by
filtering and substituting anew for each new word which is added to the
sequence.
I've already done a "toy" implementation of sorts for this, and put a demo on
the Web (http://www.collectivelanguage.com/index.html). The focus of the demo
was to show that a vector implementation gives a (crude) phrase structure
from first principles (the best order for pairing the vectors turns out to
give you a pretty good parse tree.)
Apart from a first principles explanation for perceived phrase structure,
however, an interpretation in terms of meanings for the vectors is quite
possible, and shows many advantages.
As I say, it acts in many ways like a search engine, selecting combinations of
examples appropriate to the meaning of the whole sentence.
-Rob