ORB Visualization
(soon)
National Knowledge
Project
Open question in knowledge representation
Paul:
There were two statements so provocative in the last
message I could not help but to comment.
The first of the statements was:
Language successfully communicates agreements
between individuals both of whom have already a shared understanding of the concept
description -- semantic meaning match ups. Language does not create these match
ups, which are completely dependent upon shared levels of education and
successful mutual assumptions of purpose and intent, things nowhere guaranteed
by any linguistic source document taken alone.
I happen to agree with this statement, yet I would add that though such conceptual things are not guaranteed by any source document does not mean that there is no source document or documents that defines or can define such "match ups" and "things" that lead us to (greater) agreement and understanding.
(Comment
(Prueitt): we believe that this is the position of many scholars in this area)
Whether statistical methods of co-occurrence will help us
identify or infer all these match-ups is doubtful, yet it cannot be said that
it is altogether unhelpful in analyzing words from texts. Also, there are in fact computational
methods that define these "match-ups" that are not dependent upon any
linguistic source document at all.
Here is the second statement:
If intelligent, but unprepared human scholars cannot divine clear
meaning from language representations, why assume that machines will manage the
task with far less experience and creative inspiration.
Computers,
software architecture and the programming arts are concrete products of
thousands of years of human experience and creative inspiration. One can presume that (someday) computing
machines will be more prepared (by more correct programs and data) and that
they will be unbiased and less encumbered by incongruent notions.
I am not so sure any individual can ever be unbiased or
unencumbered by a fair measure of both conscious and unconscious
ignorance. Ignoring potential
approaches or possible methods on the basis of misinformation or unwarranted
assumptions is a personally damming form of ignorance.
Ken Ewell