canonical ordering (Re: Converses?)

brayman@zuben.ca.boeing.com (Bill Brayman)
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 14:31:15 -0800
From: brayman@zuben.ca.boeing.com (Bill Brayman)
Message-id: <9603272231.AA12423@primus.ca.boeing.com>
To: cg@cs.umn.edu, interlingua@isi.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Subject: canonical ordering (Re: Converses?)
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> 
> >>From Pat Hayes:
> >>This raises another issue, however. Its all very well to say that only one
> >>ordering needs to be kept and not the converses, but how is it specified
> >>what the canonical ordering IS?

> >(MacGregor)
> >The system has to pick one.  It doesn't particularly matter which one;
> >then the other converses can be defined in terms of it.

> >(Pat again)
> Yes of course, but thats not the problem, which is how does it represent to
> itself which is the one it has picked. Heres this relation:
> CanTalkLongerThanInThePresenceOf(x,y,z,u)
> between four people (a speaker, an addresee and an audience of two). Which
> is which?

why do I feel like I am walking into a trap when I raise the typing issue again...but anyway
in ordinary language we often mark sentence components to indicate the role the element is playing such as(using Pat's example):

CanTalkLongerThanInThePresenceOf((speaker(x),addressee(y),audience(z),audience(u))

So, to suggest a line of reasoning for Pat's question, his relation C(x,y,z,u) really is a constellation of relations that serve to define argument position.  Then, a KR language must have a way to express the composite. I know this can be flattened into raw FOL syntax.  But, I believe there is some kind of inferencing shortcut involved when using "roles" to define argument positions related to the original issue of developing hierarchies on relations.  By the way, I don't mean to introduce foreign terminology, this is essentially the bipartite graphing approach (links between boxes and circles) of conceptual graphs.

Regards,

Bill

PS I assume that of 99.9% of audience is on one of the three mail lists, so I dropped the individual addresses.