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From: fugue@cicero.spc.uchicago.edu (The Right Reverend <name withheld by request>)
Subject: Re: NEW THEORY: Complexity, representation, and indexing
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Date: Wed, 14 Jun 1995 04:51:41 GMT
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In article <3rgbkq$5vp@Venus.mcs.com>, Jorn Barger <jorn@MCS.COM> wrote:
   [...deletia...]
>
>As I understand semantic nets, the starting point is normally an
>abstraction hierarchy, with its nodes linked in various other ways
>(besides abst-spec links).
>
>So a representation of a story will be a complex topology with
>N labelled nodes and M labelled links between them.
>

  You made this comment in passing, but one should stop to
consider the implications.  The most important is, of course,
exactly WHAT is linked, and in what manner.  Given the cross-
posting to both comp.ai and the hypertext groups, this may or
may not make much sense, but...
  When a story is read and comprehended, one is building some
representation of the story.  This representation will contain
not only story elements, but links to associated concepts,
images, and other, previously constructed representations.


>And I'm not sure how the representations of several stories are
>supposed to be kept apart (and not merge into one confused mess
>of overlapping links), but what I propose is that each such
>'story complex' be kept distinct, sorted into an indexing
>hierarchy that sorts according to:

  [...indexing scheme deleted...]

An abstraction hierarchy is not necessarily a bad thing, if the
correct items are being abstracted.  For example, multiple stories
could be categorized by genre (e.g., fairy tales), time period
(e.g., medieval), themes (e.g., hero rescuing damsel), characters
(e.g., dragon), etc. etc.  
  Link traversal may occur via parallel constraint satisfaction, in
which multiply active nodes tend to share fewer and fewer nodes as
common.

(Since I'm writing this on a flaky old laptop with a bad power supply
while my other machine's in the shop, I'll cut this short here, but
there is a point to this, which I'll try to follow up on in the next
day or so...)



-- 
  Mark C. Langston    | "History is a pile of debris.  And the angel wants to
 Dept. of Psychology  |  repair the things that have been broken.  But there's 
University of Chicago |  a storm blowing from paradise.  And the storm keeps
 Chicago, IL  60615   |  blowing the angel backwards into the future.  And this
