Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Walid S. Saba
Every thing in nature, in the
inanimate as well as in the animate
world, happens according to some
rules, though we do not always
know them
IMMANUEL KANT
RICHARD MONTAGUE
JERRY HOBBS
a spectre is haunting NLP
Early efforts to find theoretically elegant formal models for
various linguistic phenomena did not result in any noticeable
progress, despite nearly three decades of intensive research (late
1950s through the late 1980s ). As the various formal (and in
most cases mere symbol manipulation) systems seemed to reach
a deadlock, disillusionment in the brittle logical approach to
language processing grew larger, and a number of researchers
and practitioners in natural language processing (NLP) started to
abandon theoretical elegance in favor of attaining some quick
results using empirical (data-driven) approaches.
1
are not learnable from data because (i) in most situations
what is to be learned is not even observable in the data
(or is not explicitly stated but is implicitly assumed as
shared knowledge by a language community); or (ii) in
many situations theres no statistical significance in the
data as the relevant probabilities are all equal
2
extensional models that ignore intensionality,
compositionality and inferential capacities in
natural language are inappropriate, even when
the relevant data is available, since higher-level
reasoning (the kind thats needed in NLU) requires
intensional reasoning beyond simple data values.
3
explanation for a number of phenomena in natural
language is rooted in logical semantics, ontology, and
the computational notions of polymorphism, type
unification, and type casting; and we will do this by
proposing solutions to a number of challenging and
well-known problems in language understanding.
(4) a. Dr. Spok told Jon he should soon be done with writing the thesis
b. Dr. Spok told Jon he should soon be done with reading the thesis
link
An updated version of this study will constantly be placed here