| How can software teach us anything? |
| Written by John Burch | |
| Tuesday, 06 March 2007 | |
|
Software and what it can do.
The plan is to write a software program that can be given to the public. The hope is that it will be capable of asking the right questions. Otherwise it will not lead the animal to a higher level of discourse. What makes me think that can be done? I agree that it is asking a lot. The software has to be programmed to handle a wide range of subject matter or else it has be be able to learn. At first I suspect it will be a matter of the program designer thinking of all the possible responses and hard coding them into the program. That is only possible if the questions are general and the user is able to work with the limitations of the program. I have a friend in Hawaii who has spent the last ten years writing a language parser. That is a piece of software that can read English sentences and store the meaning in a database. The quality is shown by the ability to regenerate the original sentence - or one functionally equivalent - from that stored meaning data. This is not the simple act of storing the sentence in some coded record and then reprinting it later. This is true meaning extraction into a form that can recreate the sentence. It can answer questions based on the meaning rather than on the existence of keywords. As long as the sentences are simple, it has no problems, but English can easily be so complex that humans have to slow down and reason it out. You can see his site and the theory behind the parser at Panlingua.net Panlingua is not open source but it shows what can be done if you know what you are doing. I hope that by combining software technology like Chaumont's panlingua with a logic engine we might produce a program that can understand simple English and draw conclusions from human statements. The idea is that software will be able to understand simple statements. In limited domains, software should be able to deal with subject matter, follow rules and lead the human animal to make clear declarative statements. At least we can hope. |
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