[lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal

["Ben Goertzel" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Hi,

As an example of the algorithms I described in my prior mail, suppose
someone says

"Ben murder chicken pliers quu weapon"

This means that "Ben murders chickens using pliers as a weapon"

Now, suppose there is no Loglish dictionary entry for "murder."  Then the
Loglish parser needs to find the closest semantic match in the Loglish
dictionary, using WordNet-based semantic distance.  Suppose this match is
"kill", with the dictionary

kill
arg1: agent
arg2: patient
arg3: instrument

Then the algorithm must use WordNet similarity to figure out that "weapon"
matches to "instrument" not "agent" or "patient" (a particularly easy
problem since "Ben" and "chicken" are filling the "agent" and "patient"
slots anyway, but it won't always be this easy)

Note that the person making the sentence was being fuzzy in a
natural-language-ish way, via using "method" instead of "instrument."  But
inside the Loglish parser, this fuzziness is processed out via using WordNet
semantic distance calculations, resulting in the semantic parse (expressed
as a series of predicate logic relationships)

murder_1(Ben_1, chicken_1, pliers_1)
Inheritance(murder_1, murder)
Inheritance(Ben_1, Ben)
Inheritance(chicken_1, chicken)
Inheritance(pliers_1, pliers)
Agent(murder_1, Ben_1_
Patient(murder_1, chicken_1)
Instrument(murder_1, pliers_1_

Of course the sentence "Ben kills chickens with a pliers" is parseable
unproblematically by a host of existing English parsers, so Loglish adds
little value here.  But note that even here it does add some value because
an ordinary English parser would produce two parses corresponding to

[Ben kills chickens] with a pliers

vs.

Ben kills [chickens with a pliers]

Common sense tells us to choose the first of these two options but an
automated parser may lack this common sense.  The Loglish version eliminates
the syntactic ambiguity of the English version, which is exactly what it's
supposed to do.

-- Ben G

p.s. I'm considering changing the name of Loglish to "quul"  ;-)


> In nearly all cases it will be possible to achieve successful results via
> simple algorithms such as
>
> "Resolve 'X qui Y' to the sense of X whose WordNet definition has the
> smallest semantic distance to Y."
>
> "Given 'X quu Y' , assign Y to the argument position of X whose
> description
> in the Loglish dictionary has the smallest semantic distance to Y."
>
> I'm quite confident these algorithms would work with 97%+
> accuracy, and 99%+
> accuracy after some training and fiddling.
>
> Of course, this quu algorithm requires a Loglish dictionary to be written,
> but this dictionary doesn't have to be complete because one can
> use another
> algorithm:
>
> "Given 'X quu Y' , if X is not in the Loglish dictionary, find the
> semantically closest Z to X so that Z is in the Loglish dictionary, and
> assign Y to the argument position of Z whose description in the Loglish
> dictionary has the smallest semantic distance to Y, and then assign Y to a
> corresponding argument position for X"
>
> I bet this will work with 90%+ accuracy.
>
> Obviously this is more complex and funkier than Lojban parsing, but OTOH
> having the full English vocabulary to use is a big thing...




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