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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: mod.comp-soc
Subject: Re: More thoughts on Computers and Common Sense
Message-ID: <501@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 27-Jul-86 13:04:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.501
Posted: Sun Jul 27 13:04:19 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Jul-86 21:11:39 EDT
Reply-To: seismo!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
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Approved: taylor@hplabs
Reference: <429@hplabsc.UUCP>


This article is from seismo!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka (Frank Adams)
 and was received on Sat Jul 26 18:04:29 1986
 

>Nope to the statement claiming the domain expansion, of course. [...]
>Consider a pretty wide field, natural language understanding (where MOST
>of the claims came from); is there a decent expert system for
>understanding even a decent subset of English? The knowledge is there
>(i.e. syntactic and grammatic rules, meanings, etc), but not the programs
>for general-purpose understanding.

The knowledge is not there.  Natural language understanding involves more
than understanding the language -- one must understand the domain of
discourse.

Personally, I am dubious that an expert system, using anything like the
current conception thereof, can be scaled up to deal with really large
domains of discourse (e.g., the domain covered by common sense).  But this
hasn't been proven yet; no one has really tried.

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Multimate International    52 Oakland Ave North    E. Hartford, CT 06108