[topicmapmail] Conceptual Graphs are Step 6

[Dan Corwin]

Jack Park wrote:

> Brief comment on framenet. I just did a quick scan of the site; it 
> looked terribly familiar. I think it's the work of Charles Fillmore, 
> who's early papers on case frames were referenced by Marvin Minsky in 
> his original paper about Frame representation systems. I'd have to 
> suspect that Fillmore's work predates most everything we presently know 
> about AI representation schemes.

Yep, he's the same guy.  Influential and well respected.

> My partner in the program The 
> Scholar's Companion, Dan Wood, took Fillmore's class and even 
> implemented a case frame parser for constrained natural languages, early 
> in 1989 when we were working on an SBIR project. There may be a lot to 
> be learned from looking at the framenet papers.

One key thing I learned from it: Fillmore no longer focuses on
any fixed set of case frame role types - such as in [1].  So
the roles - in [3] - remains pretty ad hoc for ovcer all the frames.

I sense he is not just being lazy or sloppy, but feels the role types
of [3] are actually sub-types of base types such as [1] (or his version
of it), which with modest effort could each be added by overriding (in the
O-O sense) some primative's rules or data for constraints, etc.  WORDS hopes
to support that, so roles in [3] can be derived from those in [1].

> There may also be tons of merit in just writing de novo software that 
> behaves like CGs. That's what I did with qualitative process theory, and 
> now I'm pretty sure that QP theory can be made to behave very much like 
> CGs as well.

I know nothing more of QP and TSC than what I was recently
able to find from Google and your website, but I'm interested.
Could you elaborate, and are they active as tools and/or R&D?

Independently, please comment on my related reply to Murray
below, which addresses a "logic" ontology for CGs.  Could it
be used to feed TSC or QP with clause-like "facts" to evaluate?

Regards,
Dan Corwin


* Murray Altheim wrote:

>> Does [a wiki] sound like a reasonable plan of attack? The mailing list
>> works okay, but ideas tend to get lost into the archives to easily.

Wiki space would indeed be nice, but ontologies A and B seem to me
well documented, if not always in PSIs yet, at least with subject
indicators like [1-3].

The real need I see for more doc and dialog is on ontology C,
and related topics like Jack started above:

To wit: how can CGs - *or any other CLAUSE-like assertions* -
best be packaged in XTM for processing by a remote logic engine?

Being naive about such things, I'd guess from [2] that one really
only needs to define these 9 types:

   a "C-GRAPH" type, with ontology B's CLAUSE as one sub-type

   the six other C-GRAPH sub-types defined in [2], including

      AND, NOT -------------------- the *only* primatives
      OR, IF-THEN ----------------- derived from AND & NOT
      PROPOSITION, SITUATION ------ sets of nested C-GRAPHS

   a type of Part-Whole association for nesting C-GRAPH sub-types

   a C-GRAPH attribute for TRUTH - something TMs normally ignore

This ontology is tiny - way smaller than [1].  For each C-GRAPH
sub-type, it needs only a PSI, plus constraints on what other
types might become its role players.

TRUTH may be harder to define in XTM, but note: we don't have
to *compute* TRUTH values for a typical C-GRAPH instance - some
FOL software could do that.  Ontology C only must define a C-GRAPH
network it evaluates, and set enough TRUTH values to get it going.

Is this model on the right track for feeding inference engines?