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From: jperry@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (John Perry)
Subject: Re: Books on Intro. natural language proces
Message-ID: <1994Sep23.195516.5264@cs.ucla.edu>
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Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 19:55:16 GMT
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ted@crl.nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) writes:
>
>   If syntax really didn't matter, "man bites dog" and "dog bites man" would
>   mean the same thing.
>
>and in fact, an enormous amount of the meaning of the two phrases is
>identical and is carried by the words irrespective of meaning.  don't
>be mislead by the fact that the difference is intuitively paramount
>when you are presented with both phrases.  humans are attuned to
>finding contrast.  much of the information conveyed by either phrase
>is the same in either case, i.e.
>
>1) a man was involved
>2) something bit
>3) something was bitten
>4) a dog was involved
>
>the amount of information conveyed by the distinction between the two
>orders is considerably less than one bit (since one case
>predominates).  so, in fact, the mere choice of words does convey the
>majority of the information in the phrase.
>

I see.  But when you create your vunder-robot, that does natural language
understanding with no parsing whatsoever, don't let your first instructions
to it be "tell the kids to come eat dinner", lest your creation decide that
you really meant for it to eat the kids for dinner, or to eat dinner with
the kids, or to tell the dinner to eat the kids, or to kid the dinner...

I think you see my point (I know, I should get a hat for it).  Though
text retrieval is a form of case based reasoning, it is not all there is
to understanding.  Following directions while ignoring word order is not 
possible.  What if you were sent to defuse a bomb, and I simply told
you this:

    and blue cut cut first red the the then wire wire .

I've sorted them in alpha order for you since word order is irrelevant.
See you when you get back from defusing the bomb... if you do.

					John


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