PEREIRA@SRI-AI.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (09/01/83)
Given the downhill trend of some contributions on natural language analysis in this group, this is my last comment on the topic, and is essentially an answer to Stan the leprechaun hacker (STLH for short). I didn't "admit" that grammars only reflect some aspects of language. (Using loaded verbs such as "admit" is not conducive to the best quality of discussion.) I just STATED THE OBVIOUS. The equations of motion only reflect SOME aspects of the material world, and yet no engineer goes without them. I presented this point at greater length in my earlier note, but the substantive presentation of method seems to have gone unanswered. Incidentally, I worked for several years in a civil engineering laboratory where ACTUAL dams and bridges were designed, and I never saw there the preference for alchemy over chemistry that STLH suggests is the necessary result of practical concerns. Elegance and reproduciblity do not seem to be enemies of generality in other scientific or engineering disciplines. Claiming for AI an immunity from normal scientific standards (however flawed ...) is excellent support for our many detractors, who may just now be on the deffensive because of media hype, but will surely come back to the fray, with that weapon plus a long list of unfulfilled promises and irreproducible "results." Lack of rigor follows from lack of method. STLH tries to bludgeon us with "generating *all* the possible meanings" of a sentence. Does he mean ALL of the INFINITY of meanings a sentence has in general? Even leaving aside model-theoretic considerations, we are all familiar with he wanted me to believe P so he said P he wanted me to believe not P so he said P because he thought that I would think that he said P just for me to believe P and not believe it and so on ... in spy stories. The observation that "we need something that models human cognition closely enough..." begs the question of what human cognition looks like. (Silly me, it looks like STLH's program, of course.) STLH also forgets that is often better for a conversation partner (whether man or machine) to say "I don't understand" than to go on saying "yes, yes, yes ..." and get it all wrong, as people (and machines) that are trying to disguise their ignorance do. It is indeed not surprising that "[his] problems are really concerned with the acquisition of linguistic knowledge." Once every grammatical framework is thrown out, it is extremely difficult to see how new linguistic knowledge can be assimilated, whether automatically or even by programming it in. As to the notion that "everyone is an expert on the native language", it is similar to the claim that everyone with working ears is an expert in acoustics. As to "pernicious behavior", it would be better if STLH would first put his own house in order: he seems to believe that to work at SRI one needs to swear eternal hate to the "Schank camp" (whatever that is); and useful criticism of other people's papers requires at least a mention of the title and of the objections. A bit of that old battered scientific protocol would help... Fernando Pereira