Prof. Ray C. Dougherty's Research

A few weeks ago I attended a Wolfram Research event called Mathematica Publishers Day. The goal of the event was to highlight the capabilities of Mathematica 6 as a platform for technical publishing. I really enjoyed this event but was also pleasantly surprised by a talk that did not quite fit into the overall theme of the event but nevertheless was quite fascinating to me.

The presenter was Prof. Ray C. Dougherty, NYU Linguistics researcher. He used Mathematica to model all possible sine wave based communications systems. The presentation is available via Wolfram. Unfortunately, as with many interesting presentations, you needed to hear the talk to get the most out of it. Here are some interesting excerpts that I remember:

• The Cochlea is computing the second derivative of the auditory input.
• The most mathematically complex communication system is one where the transmitter and receiver have the same anatomy (e.g., wings of insects).
• Bats can hear phase changes because they can rotate their ears. A human can not hear a change in the rotation of a tuning fork but a bat can.
• Prof Dougherty believes he has a Chomsky generative grammar that enumerates all possible animal communication systems.
• He also believes he can map each possible system onto the integers in a natural way.
• From this he concludes that evolution must proceed in jumps.
• He relates this idea to the evolution of all possible Tic Tac Toe Games to illustrate the notion that all such games are not unique and similarly the space of all possible communication systems contains many redundant systems as well.
• He goes on to visualising distributions of the primes to illustrate that there are systems that are not random but whose patterns are too complex for us to model in a simple fashion. Explains how this is related to the ideas in Stephen Wolfram's NKS.

Professor Victor Raskin's Talk

This past Friday (8/24/07) Professor Raskin of Purdue University and Hakia gave a talk at the New York Semantic Web Meetup What follows is a summary of Raskin's points and my own thoughts on the topic.

Summary Of Key Points

• Conceptually, the Semantic Web (SW) is a good and noble vision.
• The present proposal for the SW by Tim Berners-Lee (et. al.) will fail.
• Formalisms like OWL don't capture meaning. Tagging is not representation of meaning (shallow semantics = no semantics).
• The average web author (or even above average) is not skilled enough to tag properly. Semantics requires well-trained ontologists.
• Manually tagging can be used to deceive search engines.
• Formalisms, in and of themselves, are useless. The meaning of the formalism is what counts.
• Ontology (like steal-making) is something that requires highly skilled practitioners. Ontology is not for the masses.
• Most computer scientists know next to nothing about language or semantics.
• Statistical and syntactic techniques are useless if one is after meaning.
• Native speakers are experts in using their language but are highly ignorant about their language (i.e., how language works).
• Meaning is language independent, so even though ontologies use symbols that look like words, they are really tokens for language-independent concepts.
• Raskin's Ontologic formalism is called Text Meaning Representation (TMR).
• TMR uses a frame like construct where the slots store case roles, constraints and other information like style modality, references, etc. (See http://ontologicalsemantics.com/tmr-new.pdf).
• The Semantic Web does not need OWL or any other tagged based system because web authors will not need to tag once a full Ontological Model (and other related tools, like lexicons, semantic parsers, etc.) are available.
• Ontological Search Engine will be able to index pages by meaning without the help of web authors.
• This is what Hakia is working on.

My Impressions of the Presentation

Professor Raskin is a very good presenter with a unique and humorous style (think of a cross between Jackie Mason, David Letterman and Albert Einstein). His points resonated well with my own impressions of the present architecture and direction of the Semantic Web. However, I thought that his presentation was too unbalanced. There were far too many slides critical of the SW and Tim Berners-Lee, in particular and far too little on Ontological Semantics.

My Thoughts on Raskin's Points

• I could not agree more with Raskin on the inadequacy of the present architecture of the SW.
• I also believe it is primarily the job of automated software tools to extract semantic information. However, I think web authors could help these tools be more efficient. My earlier post speaks to this point somewhat but after hearing Raskin's presentation, I plan to refine these thoughts in a future post.
• Raskin's point on the difficulty of "the masses" creating ontologies does not bode well for my vision of a Wisdi. However I am not the least bit discouraged by his bias toward expertly trained ontologists.
• Pre-Linux, experts in operating systems would have claimed that a commercial grade operating system could never be constructed by a loose band of programmer-enthusiasts.
• Pre-Wikipedia, intellectuals would have thumbed their nose at the idea of a competitive encyclopedia being authored by "the masses".
• The success of these projects stem from three major ingredients:
1. The involvement of some expert individuals
2. The involvement of many many enthusiastic but not necessarily expert participants.
3. Unending rounds of testing and refinement (ala Agile Methods and Extreme Programming).
• So I believe that a Wisdi model can ultimately kill an elitist approach because the elitist-expert approach can get too expensive. Information, knowledge and meaning do not remain static so ontologies must change and grow to remain relevant. I think an open collaborative approach is a good model for this endeavor. If you agree, I'd love to hear from you (flames equally welcome!).

References

http://ontologicalsemantics.com/

Ontological Semantics Book

The Whys and Hows of Ontological Semantics