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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

causenet.org

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Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#21
post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Koller and Friedman write in "Probabilistic Graphical Models" about the "clarity test", so that state variables should be clear for an all seeing observer.

States like "human_activity" are not objectively measurable.

Fairly PGMs and causal models are not the same, but this way of thinking about state variables is an incredible good filter.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#22
post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Even more importantly, it's not even a simple probability of death, or a fraction of a cause, or any simple one-dimensional aspect. Even if you can simplify things down to an "arrow", the label isn't a scalar number. At a bare minimum, it's a vector, just like embeddings in LLMs are!

Even more importantly, the endpoints of each such causative arrow are also complex, fuzzy things, and are best represented as vectors. I.e.: diseases aren't just simple labels like "Influenza". There's thousands of ever-changing variants of just the Flu out there!

A proper representation of a "disease" would be a vector also, which would likely have interesting correlations with the specific genome of the causative agent. [1]

Next thing is that you want to consider the "vector product" between the disease and the thing it infected to cater for susceptibility, previous immunity, etc...

A hop, skip, and a small step and you have... Transformers, as seen in large language models. This is why they work so well, because they encode the complex nuances of reality in a high-dimensional probabilistic causal framework that they can use to process information, answer questions, etc...

Trying to manually encode a modern LLM's embeddings and weights (about a terabyte!) is futile beyond belief. But that's what it would take to make a useful "classical logic" model that could have practical applications.

Notably, expert systems, which use this kind of approach were worked on for decades and were almost total failures in the wider market because they were mostly useless.

[1] Not all diseases are caused by biological agents! That's a whole other rabbit hole to go down.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#23
post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Ontology, not ontologies, have been tried.

We have quite a good understanding that a system cannot be both sound a complete, regardless people went straight in to make a single model of the world.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#24
post #18

This reminds me of an article I read that was posted on HN only a few days ago: Uncertain [1]. I think that a causality graph like this necessarily needs a concept of uncertainty to preserve nuance. I don't know whether this would be practical in terms of compute, but I'd think combining traditional NLP techniques with LLM analysis may make it so? [1] https://github.com/mattt/Uncertain

Right. The first example on the site shows disease as a cause, and death as an effect. This is wrong on several levels: There is no such thing as healthy or sick. You’re always fighting off something, it just becomes obvious sometimes. Also, a disease doesn’t necessarily lead to death, obviously.

Since you're always going to die, the problem is solved - the implication is true by the right side always being true, and the left side doesn't matter.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#25

This reminds me of an article I read that was posted on HN only a few days ago: Uncertain [1]. I think that a causality graph like this necessarily needs a concept of uncertainty to preserve nuance. I don't know whether this would be practical in terms of compute, but I'd think combining traditional NLP techniques with LLM analysis may make it so? [1] https://github.com/mattt/Uncertain

I get some vibes of fuzzy logic from this project.

Currently a lot of people research goes in the direction that there is "data uncertainty" and "measurement uncertainty", or "aleatoric/epistemic" uncertainty.

I foumd this tutorial (but for computer vision ) to be very intuitive and gives a good understanding how to use those concepts in other fields: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04977

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#27
post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

[dead]

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#28
post #24
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The first example on the site shows disease as a cause, and death as an effect. This is wrong on several levels: There is no such thing as healthy or sick. You’re always fighting off something, it just becomes obvious sometimes. Also, a disease doesn’t necessarily lead to death, obviously.

Since you're always going to die, the problem is solved - the implication is true by the right side always being true, and the left side doesn't matter.

Then it’s correlation instead of causation and the entire premise of a causation graph is moot.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#29
post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

I totally agreed that in the past years of hammering out an ontology for a particular area just results in a common understanding between those who wrote the ontology and a large gulf between them and the people they want to use it ( everyone else ).

What's perhaps different is that the machine, via LLM's, can also have an 'opinion' on meaning or correctness.

Going fully circle I wonder what would happen if you got LLM's to define the ontology....

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