Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

meaningness.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 62 posts

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#11

Post by schoen »

nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

As you may know, the AI test based on these ambiguities is called the Winograd Schema Challenge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#12

Post by thelazydogsback »

I just saw this sign yesterday and was thinking how many ways it could be parsed:

"Big golf factory sale opening"

Seems like at least 8:

"Big (golf factory)" vs "(Big golf) factory"

"(factory sale) opening" vs. "factory (sale opening)"

"... opening:V(PresentProgressive)" vs "... opening:N"

Only two of which are semantically likely, and one of which is pragmatically likely - unless you're really rich and in the market for golf factories.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#13

Post by avindroth »

One of the most influential philosophical concepts for me from the last decade was from this very blog called “Nebulosity”. It just speaks to the nature of reality that is misinterpreted with overlays of meaning.

-

‘Nebulosity’ refers to the insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous nature of meaningness.

From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin it becomes invisible when you enter it.

Clouds often have vague boundaries and no particular shape.

It can be impossible to say where one cloud ends and another begins; whether two bits of cloud are connected or not; or to count the number of clouds in a section of the sky.

If you watch a cloud for a few minutes, it may change shape and size, or evaporate into nothing. But it is impossible to find an exact moment at which it ceases to exist.

It can be impossible to say even whether there is a cloud in a particular place, or not.

[from] https://meaningness.com/nebulosity

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#14

Post by eindiran »

schoen wrote: post #11
nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

As you may know, the AI test based on these ambiguities is called the Winograd Schema Challenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge

There is also the GLUE benchmark, which includes ambiguity handling but also includes other NLU tasks: https://gluebenchmark.com/

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#15

Post by terravion »

clairity wrote: post #2

bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…

I would say it is more than the world, we use language to discuss our intentions, desires, beliefs, willingness, etc. All of which there is value to speakers to being ambiguous. Some languages are even better than English at giving speakers the ability to dial up or down ambiguity when expressing ostensibly the same intention, in ways that a careful listener would find signal in.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#16

Post by aidenn0 »

avindroth wrote: post #13

One of the most influential philosophical concepts for me from the last decade was from this very blog called “Nebulosity”. It just speaks to the nature of reality that is misinterpreted with overlays of meaning. - ‘Nebulosity’ refers to the insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous nature of meaningness. From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin…

Maybe I'm missing a subtlety of your meaning here (how appropriate) but I know that philosophers have discussed such things for centuries; e.g. 2 grains of sand is not a pile, 1000 grains is, but where is the transition?

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#17

Post by baddox »

nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

And I wonder how you parse, let's say, "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed."

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#18

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #17
nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

And I wonder how you parse, let's say, "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed."

[deleted]

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#19

Post by baddox »

eindiran wrote: post #10
foldr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but because the world is ambiguous and language reflects that. This doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation. Take one particular example of a structurally ambiguous sentence of English: "The company couldn't make the car fast enough". The two meanings are completely distinct (speed of production vs. speed of the car). There's no fuzziness about this distinction out there in the world. The speed at which a ca…

That is an interesting example because it looks like semantic ambiguity rather than syntactic ambiguity. But actually it is about structure as you commented -- something like this: [S [DP [D The [N company]]] [VP [AuxP [Aux couldn't] [V make]] [DP [D the] [NP [N car] [AdjP [Adv fast] [A enough]]]] vs [S [DP [D The [N company]]] [V' [VP [AuxP [Aux couldn't] [V make]] [DP [D the] [N car]]] [AdjP [Adv fast] [A enough]]]…

I'm confused about your sentence parse notation. Isn't "fast" an adjective in one of the interpretations (namely the one parsed the same as "The company couldn't make the car safe enough")?

Doesn't that "safe" example point out something else? The example with "fast" is only ambiguous because it's common to use "fast" as both an adjective and an adverb? The sentence with "safe" doesn't sound to me like an acceptable way to say that the company's manufacturing process was too dangerous.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#20

Post by paranoidrobot »

baddox wrote: post #17
nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

And I wonder how you parse, let's say, "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed."

Interesting, but I think that it's unlikely someone would say that an ordinary wooden pencil was smashed, short of some more catastrophic action. A pencil might have broken, but not smashed.

"We fired the pencil at a brick wall and it smashed" ... okay, it's probably the pencil that smashed.

Perhaps a mechanical pencil, but again, that seems odd and unlikely.

All of this requires a whole lot of knowledge about the world:

- Pencils are generally made from wood, wood is a material that's more likely to deform or break rather than shatter

- Tables can have tops that are made from materials that are more likely to shatter than deform/absorb the shock.

Post reply on HN