[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Reductionist vs Holistic Semantics
--- "Roger L. Costello" <costello@m...> wrote: > > I believe that Didier and Mike Champion made mention > of Google as tool > which provides semantics in a holistic fashion. You've definitely captured what I have been trying to say in this thread better than I have said it. Sure, there's plenty of scope for "18th Century" reductionist approaches to semantics, especially in areas such as medical terminology that have been rigorously studied since, uhh, the 18th century. I'm not at all sure that the Web is susceptible to this treatment (e.g., someone tell me where the xml-dev mailing list might fit in a taxonomy of websites ... I feel great sympathy for the people who come here looking for straightforward answers to their XML development questions!). > The critical problem is how > to create a tool > which provides semantics in a holistic fashion *for > computers*. Would > someone care to take a stab at characterizing the > nature of such a tool? Well, I basically dropped out of a Political Science Ph.D program 20-some years ago because I couldn't begin to figure out how to address real problems that traditionally have been addressed in a holistic manner with the analytic / computational approaches favored by the social science cognoscenti. I figured that maybe in 20 years or so the AI people would have made lots of progress on the technology side, and I would have made my fortune in the computer biz, and then I'd return to the subject. Alas, neither scenario has played out like I hoped, so here I am :-) All social scientists meet the same fate, someday; cynically boring folks in an internet cafe. [1] But seriously .... Nicolas Toper's response mentioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I greatly enjoy [2]. The author spends a lot of time ruminating on the synthetic and analytic approaches to understanding, in this case, diagnosing mechanical problems with motorcycles. I recall him talking about the analytic/reductionist "scientific method" as sortof a heavyweight tool that one brings in as a last resort when a synthetic/holistic approach fails to solve the problem. I think that Google may be playing with this kind of thing (considering that they are buying companies with ontology technologies) -- use the holistic approach to sweep up a manageable set of possible matches to a query, and then crank up the reasoning agents to winnow them down to the ones that really address the question. In my other favorite example, a spam filter might use Bayesian statistics to throw out the most obvious spams, and then an inference engine might use semantic/ontological tools to handle the ambiguous cases in the "MaybeSpam" folder. Another approach (that Google may also be playing with) might be to look for higher-dimensional clustering of links across websites and use them in the ranking of sites. The obvious example here are the webloggers; there may be topics on which [insert your favorite popular blogger here] really *is* an expert and his/her utterances should be taken seriously, and topics on which he/she is just blathering and the "me too!" links should be discounted. It might take a bit of logic to make these categorizations! So, maybe one can make rigorous reductionist approaches more feasible by using wholistic means to do the "obvious" winnowing down, and conversely improve the holistic side with a bit of "reductionistic" logic. [1] obscure reference to Joni Mitchell's "The Last Time I Saw Richard", with the line "All romantics meet the same fate, someday; cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe." [2] The protagonist/author goes insane in grad school wrestling with the question of defining "quality", a question which I believe came up on this list recently!
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