Tag Archives: cybernetics
05 May Learning from Errors
If at first you don’t succeed, try – try again. Humans are pretty good at learning from our mistakes. In fact, some suggest that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Today I’d like to riff on that theme a bit, and talk about ways in which machines can implement learning from errors. Error Minimization […]
05 May A Slice of Language
A Different Approach The previous section explained why we need the ground-up formulation of a new grammar for Natural Language (NL) understanding: none of the existing ones can accommodate the high demands of modern technology and approximate the paradigm of artificial intelligence as a model for human linguistic competence and performance across all linguistic phenomena. In […]
03 May Up from Words to Sentences
Words and Sentences The game of Scrabble is completely about words. Crossword puzzles go from sentence or phrase to word. Our analytical approach begins with the word, but doesn’t stop there. From both the cognitive and computational perspectives, the sentence exhibits far more complexity and changeability than the word. At any given moment, the structure of […]
02 May Linguistic Building Blocks
Linguistic Building Blocks While languages are infinite, each has a finite number of structures, functions and attributes. Functions and attributes are the building blocks of a grammar. Grammars or languages are categorized as regular, context-free (CF), context-sensitive (CS), recursive, and recursively enumerable. A context-sensitive grammar is a powerful formalism that describes the language in terms of […]
01 May Traditional Grammar from the Top Down
What is Traditional Grammar Grammars provide the knowledge and rules necessary to understand or disambiguate the often ambiguous strings of words that constitute language. People disambiguate by searching available knowledge (Nirenburg, 1987). Because a traditional grammar specifies a finite set of rules or patterns which attempt to capture the regularities of a language (Grosz, 1986), it […]
29 Apr The Multiple Meanings of Polysemy
Polysemy and Constraints Perhaps the most difficult task in Natural Language (NL) understanding is the resolution of polysemy or multiple meanings. Many words in every language do not exhibit polysemy and require no disambiguation. Most words, however, can be interpreted in at least a few different ways. This makes disambiguating NL text a non-trivial task. Each different meaning and shade […]
28 Apr Mosaic of Concepts
KR Mosaic On our way to knowledge representation (KR), we’ve looked at concepts and logical propositions and words and taxonomies. I know this can all be a bit confusing, but please bear with me a little longer. Word relations are more than a two-dimensional mosaic of related concepts – they form a deep hierarchy with multiple […]
26 Apr Continuity of Learning
Production and Comprehension We know that comprehension and language production occur in different areas of the brain and occupy opposite ends of the continuum in the communicative model. The relative independence of the production and comprehension centers suggests one of three possibilities: Syntactic and lexical data are replicated in both the production and comprehension centers of […]
22 Apr Breaking Down Language Structure and Function
Grammar Acquisition Some experts suggest that a correctly formulated adult grammar is acquired by children on the basis of sentences they hear in their first few years (Pinker, 1984, p. 5). The proponents of this theory assume that a young child perceives sentence structure or is able to detect elements of grammatical structure – a […]
18 Apr Irrational Language Rules
Language and Utterances Now let’s narrow the focus from communication to language. To avoid confusion, let it be clear from the outset that this discussion is not concerned with computer-programming languages, but “natural languages.” Computer languages have built-in or “prescriptive” regularity called a formal syntax. They are easy to describe, and they are obedient to […]