[om-list] On the Analytical Semantics of Natural Languages

[Luke Call]

I don't understand all of this at the moment but I'd like it if OM could 
do #'s 1 & 2 for you--because it could represent any noun as an entity 
with behavior and properties, and other parts of speech as the behavior 
and/or properties. OM would let us map any word to those entities, 
behavior, or properties, so it's not tied to a single language (unlike 
what I understand Cyc etc to do).

I don't know when or if this will all work, but I'm working on it, slowly.

Human language is so darned inconsistent. A self-consistent interlinked 
object model that lets you define taxonomies on the fly that represent 
your understanding, seems useful. Such activity wouldn't be for the 
purpose of a taxonomy for its own sake, but just a side-effect of 
recording your knowledge in OM like you'd record words in a word-processor.

BTW I'm studying the language scheme again. I looked hard at Python as a 
scripting & testing language, & as a way to write code w/ less typing 
(at least for tests) and really liked it, but Scheme is so powerful in 
its ability to represent and manipulate ideas that I may go that 
direction; we'll see.

All this is such a learning experience.

Luke

Thomas L. Packer at home wrote:
> Mark
>  
>     Sounds very compatible with my three-year goal, which may be a 
> subset of what you are talking about (since I can't do everything).  
>  ....
 >
>     I agree that we need a much more thoroughly defined and complete 
> theory of the meaning of language, which I see as a mapping function 
> between a statement in natural language and a corresponding statement in 
> a very well defined idea-language, i.e. a semantic-explicating language, 
> that is, an interlingua.
>  
>     My plan has four pieces:
>  
>     (1)  Develop my currently vague and ill-defined ideas of Mathesis 
> into an interlingua, or as Mark calls, a megalingua.  That is, make a 
> notation (kind of like a programming language, like scheme, lisp, 
> prolog, etc.) that is capable of representing any idea in a logically 
> usable way.  (Potentially, this Mathesis will be able to represent the 
> meaning of a statement written or spoken in any language, English, 
> German, Swahili, mathematical notation, first-order predicate calculus, 
> C++, etc.)
>  
>     (2)  Write a long list of translation-pairs by hand: each pair would 
> consist of a statement in the target language (probably English) and its 
> representation in Mathesis.
>  
>     (3)  Develop or adapt a general-purpose inference/learning system 
> that is able to learn a mapping function from the target language to 
> Mathesis in the form of productions/rules or some other format.  For 
> this part I might use some existing cognitive modelling architecture 
> like Soar, Act-R, ICMAUS, etc., if I can find a way to make it 
> fit.  Otherwise, I'll have to make something of my own.
>  
>     (4)  Give the translation pairs to the learning system as a training 
> set and a testing set and see if it can translate the testing set.
>  
>     If the mapping function is in a suitable format, then we can learn a 
> lot about semantics, assuming this system actually works.  Even if we 
> can't understand the mapping function, if Mathesis is actually able to 
> perform well as both an idea-language and as a logical system (something 
> akin to lambda calculus), then we will still learn a lot about 
> semantics, and have something very useful whether we learn from it or not. 
>  
>     To make it useful, we could write a query capability (like in 
> prolog) or write a natural language generator to another target 
> language, and have the best MT (machine translation) available.  :-)
>  
>     Big dreams, as always.
>  
>     ciao,
> tomp

> ...

>     ----- Original Message -----
>     *From:* Mark Butler <mailto:butlerm at middle.net>
>     *To:* One Model List <mailto:om-list at onemodel.org>
>     *Sent:* Thursday, 02 October, 2003 17:53
>     *Subject:* [om-list] On the Analytical Semantics of Natural Languages
> 
> 
>     I have lately discovered that although analytical linguistics is a
 > ....