Re: Directions for future research
John,
OK. Where would you start? If you think that the VAE could be expanded to
include other capabilities, would it be possible to make some version of that
public (source code and all), with an indication of what you think should be
added first?
Pat
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Since I have made some critical comments about current
> R & D projects that address ontology, the Semantic Web,
> and related topics, somebody sent me an offline note
> to ask what kind of research I would recommend.
>
> Following is my response:
>
> 1. I believe that the most difficult and important
> problem for any database system, knowledge-based
> system, learning system, AI system, or the entire
> Semantic Web, is to address what I call the challenge
> of knowledge soup:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/challenge.pdf
>
> 2. The collection of problems that I lump under the
> name of knowledge soup have been addressed repeatedly
> by various partial solutions: nonmonotonic reasoning,
> standardized terminologies, nomenclatures, ontologies,
> information extraction, data mining, knowledge discovery,
> genetic algorithms, etc.
>
> 3. But all the attempts break down when they get to one
> fundamental problem: the world is far more complex
> than any discrete notation, language, representation,
> or whatever is capable of dealing with.
>
> 4. The problems of dealing with natural languages are
> so well known that many people have given up. Since
> they recognize that they're too difficult to solve
> with current methods, they look for a "quick fix" by
> some other means. That was the solution that Frege,
> Russell, and Carnap attempted with symbolic logic as
> a more perfect, ideal language. But it failed.
>
> 5. The failure of symbolic logic as a replacement for NL
> does not mean that any system of logic is bad for what
> it is capable of doing well. It just means that no
> version of logic (which includes every language or
> notation for knowledge or data representation) can,
> by itself, solve the problems that make NLP difficult.
>
> 6. At best, any system of logic or knowledge representation
> addresses some useful special cases. One example is SQL,
> which runs the databases that support the world economy.
> That is certainly an important special case, and there
> are many other important special cases.
>
> 7. But just lumping all the solvable special cases in one
> big package is not going to address the fundamental issue:
> The world is so complex that any representation that is
> adequate to handle the full range of problems must be as
> general and flexible as natural languages. Nothing less
> will do.
>
> As one example of the kind of research that I believe should be
> done in order to get some handle on the complexity, I would cite
> the proposal that I and a couple of colleagues submitted as a
> "Grand Challenge"; this was our response to a solicitation by
> DARPA in December. I don't know whether they will adopt our
> suggestion as one of their challenge problems, but I believe
> it is one way of forcing people to address the issues:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/ai/gcprop.pdf
>
> Following is a brief description from the opening paragraph:
>
> The task we suggested is one that nearly every two-year-old
> child solves: the problem of learning to integrate visual,
> tactile, and motor information with language. To evaluate
> progress on this task, we proposed that any AI research group
> that wished to respond to the challenge be given a collection
> of binocular pictures, still or moving, together with some
> natural-language questions about those pictures. Any AI
> system they develop would be asked to determine which pictures
> could answer any of the questions and to state those answers.
>
> This is a problem that has been solved for some simple cases with
> current technology, but a general solution would be, as DARPA
> requested, a challenge and motivation for research over the
> next 10 to 20 years.
>
> Although this problem is not going to be solved soon, I believe
> it helps to put current work into perspective. There are many
> good special cases that are very nicely handled with current
> technology, but it is essential to recognize that they are special
> cases. That means that proposed solutions should be sufficiently
> flexible that they could be extended to fit into more general
> solutions to the Grand Challenge that might be developed over
> the next 10 to 20 years (or perhaps more).
>
> John Sowa
>
--
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Patrick Cassidy
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