Jason White wrote:
Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
I would be interested to hear about the thesis of your Ph D; and your ideas concerning the above problems My research is concerned with basic questions about how to construct a semantic theory of any given language. There are foundational disagreements in this area concerning the limits of semantic analysis, which I seek to address by investigating Robert Brandom's "inferentialist" theory of meaning.
So would this have implications for the problem of constructing 'the meaning of a sentence'; given the meaning of it's constituent words ?
I think modern formal logic and philosophy have made real progress in analyzing and specifying the semantics of natural language. Some of this insight has been applied to computational problems, but there is much progress remaining to be made on both the theoretical side and in computational applications.
Do you think that the search engine problem might be broken into two parts: 1/ A precise symbolic way of expressing a complex search pattern; say analogous to a 'regular expression' formula 2/ A 'short, simple sentence; natural language processing' algorithm; which then constructs sequences of such symbolic search formulas; equivalent to the disambiguated natural language sentence ?
Search engines use statistical techniques rather than logic-based semantics to process queries.
Do you see a place for neural-nets in this area ? regards Rohan McLeod