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| "paper_id": "T75-2009", | |
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| "date_generated": "2023-01-19T07:43:07.163666Z" | |
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| "title": "PRIMITIVES AND WORDS", | |
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| { | |
| "first": "Yorick", | |
| "middle": [], | |
| "last": "Wilks", | |
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| "abstract": "", | |
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| "paper_id": "T75-2009", | |
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| "text": "We may usefully distinguish between internal and external questions when discussing the use of primitives for representing natural language content and doing related semantic computations.", | |
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| "text": "Here I shall give a few examples of internal questions; go on to explain why I shall turn immediately to external questions; and finally discuss two of the latter: the justification of primitives in general, and the distinction, if any, between primitives and words.", | |
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| "text": "What I mean by \"internal questions\" about primitives are detailed considerations about what semantic primitives to choose, or how to insert them into larger structures in particular cases so as to represent some complex concept or conceptual relation, etc. These are questions that can only arise when the general notion of semantic primitive has already been accepted.", | |
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| "text": "It is not possible to discuss such internal questions while one is at the same time answering external questions, such as the justification of semantic primitives i__Dn general. with human bodily actions such as moving, expelling, ingesting, etc., we might well wonder how such a system would cope with the expression of general actions such as \"divide\", \"separate\", \"specify\", \"undertake\", \"delay\", etc. it is my contention that, if we follow certain external questions through, we can see that other workers in natural language understanding are also using primitives, though they may not be aware of the fact. One issue bridges the gap between internal and external questions in an What I now propose to do is to insert English words into the formula: in particular the words \"gun\" and \"bullet\", as follows (in list form):", | |
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| "text": "it is my contention that, if we follow certain external questions through, we can see that other workers in natural language understanding are also using primitives, though they may not be aware of the fact. One issue bridges the gap between internal and external questions in an", | |
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| "text": "((*HUM SUBJ) ((*ANI OBJE) ((STRIK GOAL) ((gun INST) ((bullet MOVE) CAUSE))))) but to do this if and only if there are also formulas elsewhere in the system defining the meanings of \"gun\" and \"bullet\" Thus, in the decomposition of a formula, two kinds of entities may be encountered, primitives and \"words\", and if an atom is found that is not a primitive then it must be a word and so a formula must exist elsewhere for it. Now, there is a danger of circularity in all this: in that, looking for the formula defining \"gun\" as that atom appearing in the formula for \"fire at\", we might find a formula that told us (in primitives) that a gun was an object used by human beings for firing at something.", | |
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| "text": "True, but since the head (rightmost element) of the formula for \"gun\" will be THING, this re-entrant method of formula construction cannot give less information than formulas consisting only of primitives, as mine have until now. Now, does this method of re-entrant formulas --re-entrant in the sense of mentioning formulas inside each other (as that for \"fire at\" now mentions that for \"gun\" and \"bullet\") --force me to withdraw the \"mixed-type\" criticism I made in the past of Schank's descriptions.", | |
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| "text": "Well, yes and no. No, in that Schank's use of, say, the word \"gun\" in the conceptual dependency representation for \"shoot\" was not re-entrant in the sense I have defined it. There was, if I understand him, no formula elsewhere for \"gun\" in his example: there was the English lexeme and no more. Hence, if a program parsing his system searched in a text for \"gun\" as the instrument of \"shoot\", and found \"bow and arrow\", it would be helpless because it did not find exactly what it was looking for --it would have no descriptive formula for the sense of \"gun\" to help it know when it had found roughly the same sort of thing. Just as in \"John shot her with a colt\", it would have no information with which to separate the horse and gun senses of \"colt\": it would either find the sought English lexeme or, as in these cases, not.", | |
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| "text": "But then again, on the other hand, the criticism i__ss changed because the claim that there should not i__nn princiDle be mixed type (word and primitive) semantic descriptions is implicitly withdrawn by the above proposal for re-entrant formulas. Now there need be no serious \"theoretical\" considerations involved in such a proposal. It can be seen as simply a notational convenience:", | |
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| "text": "in that \"gun\" in a formula for \"shoot\" is now just a shorthand form for the formula for \"gun\" existing elsewhere in the system. The low level fallacy, still alive and well, is that the meanings of words are physical objects.", | |
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| "text": "\"Chair\", the story goes, signifies by referring to things like the one I am sitting on, and so therefore do \"mind\", \"action\", \"friendship\" and \"cunning\", though perhaps in a slightly more roundabout way. Wilks, Y., \"Natural Language Systems within the AI Paradigm\", Stanford Univ. AI Lab, Memo No. 337, 1975b. ", | |
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| "text": "AI Lab, Memo No. 337, 1975b.", | |
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| "title": "Series on Systems for the Intellectual Organization of Information", | |
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| "first": "J", | |
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| "last": "Gardin", | |
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| "raw_text": "Gardin, J., SYNTOL, in Artandi (ed) Rutgers Series on Systems for the Intellectual Organization of Information, New Jersey,", | |
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| "BIBREF1": { | |
| "ref_id": "b1", | |
| "title": "Memory for Words", | |
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| { | |
| "first": "P", | |
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| "last": "Johnson-Laird", | |
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| "year": 1974, | |
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| "raw_text": "Johnson-Laird, P., \"Memory for Words\", Nature, 1974.", | |
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| "text": "question, and I have done no more here than raise a few small doubts that it might, after all, turn out to be the other way round.", | |
| "content": "<table><tr><td colspan=\"2\">to this case) at the same rate as research that attempts the sentences covered. I am not trying to to justify it adds to smuggle back any of the distinction between</td><td>true of a language It may turn</td><td>of out</td><td colspan=\"2\">primitives, that it</td><td colspan=\"2\">and is</td><td>no more</td><td>I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">particular sets of some way, and these days that usually means primitives directly in psychologically*. But what I am arguing is that, if formulas, templates, conceptual dependency structures, etc. are simply usages of a language of primitives, then no direct .justification of the vocabulary makes sense, and certainly not any justifications of a correct vocabulary, any more than it would make sense to try to establish the correct vocabulary of English or any other natural language. It follows from this bhat there can be a variety of primitive languages for semantic descriptions, no one necessarily better or worse than any other, any more than my vocabulary is better or worse than yours if I know 100 English words you don't, and you know 101 that I don't. In the case of each primitive vocabulary, the only ultimate test will be the success or failure of linguistic computations that make use of it. primitives and non-primitive words that I have abjured, but am only pointing out that, if one chooses surface words as one s primitives, there is nothing theoretically wrong, but just the practical (and in view insuperable) difficulties of (I) inability to state significant semantic generalizations, and (2) the inability to extend one s coverage of the language in anything other than a mile-to-mile manner. It is for this reason that it still seems possible, to me, to give up believing in any difference in principle between primitives and other words but still advocate strongly the use of a sensible selection of words as a reduced, or primitive, sublanguage for semantic expression. One final point, which is not argument but merely the drawing of a bead on a more distant target. It is the case that the use of a PLANNER, or Predicate Calculus, type of</td><td colspan=\"6\">amount going to change that fact. of writing in upper case letters is Now, if I take this to heart, that there is no difference at bottom between primitives and other words, then I find that another criticism I have made implicitly or explicitly in the past must also be completely recast. This concerns the initial representation of sentences in PLANNER-type formalisms, where it seems not unnatural to represent \"John is at the station\" as (AT JOHN STATION). I have been tempted to criticise such representations, to myself at least, on the grounds that they were simply the English words of the sentence (or something very like them) rearranged in some plausible way, and that therefore nothing had been shown or structured. But, as I said, if I take to heart the point that primitive vocabularies sensible to say that language understanding depends on reasoning, rather than vice-versa. Everyone in A.I. seems to believe it without Sandewali, E., \"PCF-2, A first-order calculus for expressing conceptual</td><td>I I I I I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">representation in \"semi-English\" that I have</td><td colspan=\"5\">are not information\", essentially Dept. different Computer from</td><td>those Science,</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">Now there are limits to parallel between primitive languages. Clearly, and as earlier, a primitive vocabulary should not this sweeping and natural I mentioned just discussed is intimately associated with the view that the study of reasoning is dissociable, or decouplable, from the study of the semantic structure of natural</td><td colspan=\"6\">comprising then I cannot maintain that criticism in the more obviously surface words, same way. Why shouldn't \"John\", \"at\" and \"station\" be somebody's primitive Uppsala Univ., 1972. Schank, R., \"The Fourteen Primitive Actions and their Inferences\", Stanford Univ., AI</td><td>I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">have synonymous natural language aesthetic pride to have as large a range primitives, whereas in it is often a point of a of semi-synonyms as possible: \"cemetery\" and language, and can be pursued in isolation. In (Wilks 1975b) I have raised a number of doubts about that view, but here I want to add another which follows directly from the</td><td colspan=\"6\">vocabulary? Now the structural method of coding up sentences is unaffected. criticism of this Lab. Memo No. 183, 1973a. Schank, R., \"Identification of Conceptualizations underlying Natural</td><td>I</td></tr><tr><td>\"graveyard\" in English, for example. argument of this paper.</td><td>Again,</td><td colspan=\"6\">That is to say, little is revealed by such a Language\", in Schank and Colby (eds),</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">there indirect is vocabulary, Development Corporation that put at least one interesting piece of justification of a primitive namely the project at Systems the If it is true, as I have argued here, that there is no escape from a natural language into some other realm, and that a whole of Webster's Third International Dictionary onto tape and counted the rank frequency list of words used in the definition of other words. That was, ignoring language of representation is just another natural language whether of primitives or of \"semi-English\", then it follows that there is no special extra-terrestrial sphere for very frequent words the examination of reasoning*, but only like \"a\" and \"the\", down to the 80th rank order, pretty close to my own list of primitives, and naturally I was pleased. That is what I, like anyone else, would have in fact used to define the senses of other words, we should be happy to be close to the list used unconsciously by the makers of a large and efficient dictionary. over which we prefer to compute. Thus, to compress things somewhat, we have the choice between computing about reasoning in a which we prefer to model the reasoning and hoped for; since primitives are translations into another natural language. Hence there is no reasoning about natural all we can do is to choose the language in language separate from natural language, and</td><td colspan=\"6\">method systematic manner*, and it of expression, unless done in a very normally relies over much on our intuitive appreciation of the structure of the original sentence, in ComPuter Models of Thought and Language, San Francisco, 1973b. Wilks, Y., Grammar, Meanin~ and the Machine such a way as to be not really the structuring of an example but a mere reprojection of the example itself. To see this, one only has to think of what it would Analysis of Language, London, 1972. Wilks, Y., \"One Small Head\", Foundations of Language, 1974. be like to express the first sentence of However, the point at issue here is not this structural one but that of the status Of the items in the description: as I raised the question, but did not answer it, why this paragraph by such a method, the one beginning \"Now the structural criticism...etc.\". Wilks, Y., \"An intelligent analyser and understander for English\", Comm. ACM, 1975a.</td><td>I I I I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">primitive-like language, or one reducible to</td><td colspan=\"3\">should those English words not</td><td>be</td><td colspan=\"2\">declared</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">Nevertheless, and in spite of these two caveats, it seems to me that a primitive vocabulary is nothing other than a small natural language, and therefore not open to it by the \"re-entrant\" method I described, or in one like PLANNER semi-English in which little is made explicit, and which would require another system to make its internal</td><td colspan=\"6\">to be part of the primitive vocabulary? For, if as I have just argued no serious distinction of type can be maintained between words and other primitives, what</td><td>I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">methods of justification unavailable to other natural language, and that it is a any mistake to pretend otherwise. To sum up, if relationships explicit for any but the most trivial examples. **One way out I have not discussed here is words of a natural language like English are for someone to argue that, for the not justified nor gain significance by their direct reference to things, but only by their function within the overall language, then we may expect precisely the same to be representation of language, the mile-to-a-mile scale is not a fallacy, because no significant linguistic generalizations are possible.</td><td colspan=\"6\">I this view here, but only to point do not want to discuss out that could be wrong with that? Well, it is easy to see what is wrong, given that one accepts one other principle: namely, that one s system, whatever it is, should be extensible in a non-trivial manner. What weare now discussing is the fallacy of the map, to adapt a philosophical cliche. We have a system claiming to</td><td>1 I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">*I \"psychological cannot see makes sense, though I would be happy that the notion justification of primitives\" of the to be shown. I do not *I am not denying here that some non-linguistic forms may explicate our reasoning about, say, position in space or of course refer here to work like (Johnson-Laird 1974) showing numerical relationships; nor am I denying that humans seem that there is reasoning in the sphere of not to store surface language. Such results are quite consistent with vision, which is also possessed by dogs, and a \"primitive hypothesis\", cannot therefore be linguistic. Granted all but do not support it, since they are also consistent with that, I am arguing that the sort of the hypothesis that human semantic representation is not linguistic at all, but consists of, say, binary numbers! reasoning required to understand the argument of this paper, or of a standard newspaper editorial, must (a) be linguistic</td><td colspan=\"6\">the holds their of way, but in their cases by view of primitives under that primitives, like meaning/significance in the same sort discussion words, have referring to certain ill-defined mental entities. I have argued in detail elsewhere (Wilks 1974) that this could not conceivably be so, or be known even if it were so. But this comic-strip philosophy is not the heart of the matter: what this view of primitives does, in real terms, is to lead represent the structure of natural language but which in fact represents it in the way a map would if its scale was one-mile-to-one-mile. There would be something wrong** with such a map, that much is clear, and similarly there is something wrong with a system which is only extensible on the same scale as what it represents: it adds to its primitives (ordinary words in *The only attempt I know to do this sort of thing systematically is (Sandewall 1972).</td><td>I I</td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">in nature, but (b) will not be explicated in an interesting and non-circular manner by a system using ony semi-English.</td><td>40</td><td/><td/><td/><td/><td>I</td></tr></table>", | |
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