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From: ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: RE: UNIFIED MODEL FOR KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION? (IMPOSSIBLE
Message-ID: <9106110020.AA17886@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 91 00:16:36 GMT
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In article <1991Jun10.175110.22654@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley) writes:
>In article <1991Jun10.094754.3303@kingston.ac.uk> is_s425@kingston.ac.uk
>(Hutchison C S) writes:
>[...]
>>My hunch is to say that the physical circumstances under-
>>determine possible linguistic descriptions, enabling various ideological
>>interpretations of the events.  What then do readers 'know' about the events?
>>How is knowledge in this sense distinct from mere belief?
>>
>>Any thoughts?
>
>Eduard Hovy produced a text generation system "PAULINE" that generated
>different accounts of the same event (a student action at Yale) from
>different points of view.  You should consider reading about that system.
>
>The lesson to be learned from that system, is that there many ways of
>phrasing a single proposition, the choice of expression is then determined
>by what stylistic and political (read 'social') content you wish to
>place in the description.  The situation itself (the material state-of-
>affairs?) does not contain such information, but the people concerned
>with it do have such views.
>
>I guess that if you want to try and filter out how people's views affect
>their descriptions, then you'll have to come up with a model that
>systematically relates the two.  That's not so much a matter of 'truth'
>as socio-linguistics.
>
PAULINE was basically an exercise in rhetoric, demonstrating that an allegedly
objective propositional account could be realized in a wide variety of texts,
where that variety could be delimited according to some underlying rhetorical
structures.  I find it an excellent demonstration of the scope of rhetoric,
but I question the premise that one can start with that objective propositional
account.  This may sound solipsistic, but the only accounts we can give of
events of the world are based on perceptions, be they our own, those of
"credible sources," or interpretations of devices.  (Note that key word
"interpretations."  Sophisticated devices do not PERCEIVE the world.  WE
perceive the world through our ability to use those devices.  For example,
cloud chambers do not "perceive" subatomic particles but simply provide us
with evidence of their existence which we are then obliged to interpret.)

I think it is the lack of such an objective starting point that supports Cam's
position that the issue here is not "truth" (so, yes, Hutchison IS "barking up
the wrong tree") but sociology--specifically the role the inter-personal
behavior contributes to communication.  We cannot expect to run the rhetorical
mechanisms of PAULINE "in reverse" in order to "distill" an objective account
out of a given presentation.  The best we can hope for is to strip out the
rhetorical "interference" and get a more compact statement of what that
particular individual perceived;  but those perceptions are only "meaningful"
to the extent that we know how that individual interpreted his sensations.
Because this is asking a bit much for even HUMAN intelligence, I have been
arguing my position based on NEGOTIATION:  The only way I can figure out what
you are talking about is to engage in dialog.  In the course of that dialog,
I develop hypotheses about your perceptions which I can then test by "probing"
you with appropriate questions and remarks.  This process never really
"converges" to my having a "total" model of your perceptual interpretations;
but it tends to provide enough information for the two of us to share our
experiences of a common world.

Hutchinson's example of four separate newspaper accounts makes negotiation a
bit more tricky, since you cannot engage in a dialog with a newspaper.
Fortunately, there are some viable alternatives.  Newspapers tend to have
editorial policies.  Frequent exposure to the TIMES, supplemented by knowledge
of their editorial pieces, can also be used as a source of hypotheses about
their perceptions of world events.  Such hypotheses can often be tested by
the very basis of Hutchinson's experiment--comparing their account of a story
with those of other papers.  This is the sort of reading which is required in
order to extract the news from a newspaper (as anyone who has ever been the
subject of a newspaper articles knows);  and I would argue that it is the
"logical equivalent" (using those words VERY informally) of the way we use
dialog in normal discourse.

===============================================================================

Stephen W. Smoliar
Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore
Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Kent Ridge
SINGAPORE 0511

BITNET:  ISSSSM@NUSVM

"He was of Lord Essex's opinion, 'rather to go an hundred miles to speak with
one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town.'"--Boswell on Johnson