Re: Doug Lenat's THE BIG PICTURE
hovy@isi.edu (Eduard Hovy)
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 15:04:31 -0700
X-Sender: hovy@quark.isi.edu
Message-id: <abfa1e8844021004f000@[128.9.208.191]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: srkb@cs.umbc.edu, Doug Lenat <lenat@cyc.com>
From: hovy@isi.edu (Eduard Hovy)
Subject: Re: Doug Lenat's THE BIG PICTURE
Cc: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu, doug@csi.uottawa.ca, cg@cs.umn.edu
Sender: owner-srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk
I don't often agree with Doug (I don't for example buy his reason
for why Cyc people don't/shouldn't participate in Ontology/KR efforts)
but I certainly agree with his last paragraph!
>
>In certain specific cases of problem solving, having a good repr. can
>make a big difference (cf. Saul Amarel's classic work on the
>Missionaries and Cannibals problem); but most of the time we as human
>beings share knowledge using much less specialized reprs. such as
>english. Believe me, FOL -- with a few second-order extensions -- is
>adequate. CycL is adequate. By now KIF is surely fine, too. So my
>advice to all of you is: stop tinkering with KIF, start sharing your
>ontologies, and you will get hit in the face with what's really
>important, namely sharing most but not all of the meaning of most but
>not all of the terms most but not all of the time. To those of you
>who've already gone far along that path, I apologize for being so
>patronizing, but for the rest of you: get over your physics envy,
>or philosophy envy, or whatever, and get down to the real work!
>
>--Doug Lenat
The main problem is not what the rep. language looks like, it's what's
*in* it, and how you *get* it there...
E
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eduard Hovy
email: hovy@isi.edu USC Information Sciences Institute
tel: 310-822-1511 ext 731 4676 Admiralty Way
fax: 310-823-6714 Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
project homepage: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html