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Subject: RE: [humanmarkup-comment] Re: Economics Conference Example
Classification of issues
regarding computational document understanding
This section discusses a core set of
problems that are faced by document understanding and knowledge management. We return to the aspect of the problem
that is both linguistic and requiring a temporal logic.
Computational document understanding
may be possible if a second order system selects the proper context for
disambiguation of the text. This is the hardest problem faced by machine
translation systems. Linguist Faina Citkin communicated to the author a
categorization schema for treating issues of translatability. Dr. Citkin
provided the primary translations for several U. S. Army funded conferences
(1994 – 2000) on Applied Russian Semiotics.
For us, her categorization of the
translation issues into these three classes provided essential insight about the
critical communication problems encountered by the Russian logicians at these
U.S. Army sponsored conferences, and by their Western counterparts (such as the
Rosen school). The insights were, and still remain of a rather personal nature,
since the complexity of the relationship between these scientific groups are
extreme and involve a political dimension.
However, the difficulties, though really quite sever, are not a great
deal different, qualitatively, from the difficulties in many of the corporation
reordering process that take place, or fail to take place. Thus we will discuss
this categorization here, in order to bring in some proper linguistics into the
picture of next generation knowledge management that we are building.
In Citkin’s categorization schema,
there are three types of terminological relativity; referential, pragmatic and
interlingual. These will be discussed only briefly.
Special texts, like product manuals,
often have one to one correspondences to devices or processes. The issue of
their understanding, and thus their translatability, is included in the first
class. The class of interlingual type terminological relativity, is implicated
when there is a clear external object for each concept expressed. Technical
jargon has this distinction, at least on the surface. A poem might have less
clear reference to external objects and minimalist art would have even less
correspondence to a finite and specific set of things in the world.
The first class of issues can be
resolved if a knowledge domain has been encoded to allow automated checking
procedures between the source text and the target text. One way of visualizing
this is to imagine that the world consists of sequences of ordered pairs,
{ (state, gesture)i
}
and that both the state and the
gesture are elements of a finite space of entities. The first class of
translation issues is resolved when we know this finite state space completely,
and have a means of knowing exactly what a state of a gesture is, in either
language. Now the problem of translation is merely one of substitution. The
temporal aspect moves us from one state / gesture pair to the next (Scott &
Prueitt, in progress).
Process modeling methodologies, such as IDEF0, develop a flow diagram
where state transitions are made clear.
In certain circumstances the use of IDEF0 methodology reduces a business
activity to a simple set of flow and relational diagrams. Three additional steps can be made once
this reduction has been completed.
An AS-IS model can be develop based on the diagrams. This model is taken to management and
then to various stake holders for refinement. Following the AS-IS validation a TO-BE
model is developed and validated.
The last step is generally the most difficult and involves implementing
changes via specific business process re-engineering practices and tool
sets.
The knowledge domain, in this case,
can be something like an expert system or object database, but these knowledge
sources are not open systems and thus will fail unpredictably if the context
changes. Since telling us about the failure may also not occur, the system will,
as it were, lie to us on a fairly regular basis. This is the current problem
with machine intelligence systems.
Agile manufacturing methodology is being developed to address this
problem in the context of business re-engineering.
Two near term solutions can be
brought to bear with agile manufacturing methodology. The first involves knowledge
representation using concept tokenization.
The knowledge domain is represented as a semantic net or ontology like a
semiotic table, in which case the possibility for automated document
understanding and thus translation of meaning is enhanced. The second involves the development of
the tri-level architecture.
The second class, the class of
pragmatic issues, is also related to a theory of interlingua where the
situation addressed is dynamic. The tri-level architecture assumes the existence
of a table where the system states that a process compartment can assume are all
specified and related, via a composition function, to a database of subfeatures.
The properties of this table is represented in the form of a database plus a
specific situational language and contextual logic. In the case of Finn’s system
for structural pharmacology and several other Russian systems, this work has
been done and can be demonstrated. The Pospelov-Finn systems have the ability to
produce an "emergent" ontology for situations where pragmatic and interlingua
issues characterize the hard tasks. In this case, when the tools are available,
the emergent ontology is computable in context. But the year is 2000, and the Russian
science community is working in day labor jobs. The voting procedure and tri-level
architecture simplifies the Russian logic in a way that is consistent with
neuropsychology. The implementation
of this simplification has been prototyped and we hope that the publication of
this book will signal that the prototype is being widely implemented in Agile
Business Process Re-engineering (ABPR) projects.
Consider the problem from a
linguistic point of view. In
underlying ontology, as expressed in a semantic net or table, can assume
different system states and thus the sense of the terms may drift. This is done with a composition
function, called the voting procedure. The voting procedure orders a set
of category artifacts and effects either a routing of information or a decision
to retrieval information. Both of
these effects are virtual, in that the routing or decision is not about either
the categories or the semantic-net / table. The effects are middle level events
within a tri-level architecture.
The substructure and ultrastructure is “encapsulated” away form the
perception of the user, and thus appears as state or gestures in the same form,
e.g. finite state space elements, as when we knowing exactly all states or
gestures priori to use. However, in
this case the states and gestures are newly created and given unique meaning by
the user in the context of use. The
tri-level architecture is thus an agile architecture working with a virtual
state space.
This would imply that the rules that
govern an adaptive ontology allow a modification of the sense of the target term
so that the text would be understood in a sense that is consistent with the
source term. Again, from a
linguistic point of view, a translation process must import some of the
knowledge that tracks this drift in sense.
This commonality is held by the natural language as understood by
participants in the language use.
In the tri-level the commonality is held by the substructural and
ultrastructural artifacts and then entangled through the composition
function.
The target representation would be
(almost) semantically invariant to the source representation. The representation would not be of an
early Wittgensteinian sense, where all of the tokens of language have a one to
one correspondence to realities and facts in the natural world. This case is the Citkin class of
interlingual type terminological relativity (first class covered above.) The second class, the class of
pragmatic issues, is addressed in the later Wittgensteinian view that
language points to reality and must have an interpretant. In this sense Wittgenstein comes to the
same position as developed by American pragmatist C. S. Peirce.
Thus pragmatics is, as it should be,
related only to a specific situation at a specific time (or state of the
ontology). Interlingua type relativism is a condition of equality, i.e., this
word in the source language is that word in the target language. Pragmatic type
relativism is a condition of system transitions from one state into another, but
under a uniform set of rules. As demonstrated by Pospelov and Finn, this set of
rules can be captured in the special semiotic logics of applied
semiotics.
The third class, the class of
referential type, include issues arising where a term’s meaning in the
source language has an ontology that does not exist in the target language. Here
the process compartment that shapes the source term’s meaning, in the world of
someone’s experience, does not correspond to any possible neural processing
compartment, responsible for generating signs in the target language. As can be
said about the appreciation of poetry, overcoming issues of referential type
involves creativity and a perceptual measurement of new observables. This class is treated extensively in the
works of linguist Benjamin Whorf.
An example of a referential issue
would be found in the translation of a world view created by Russian scientific
deference to Marx and Pavlov’s scientific materialism in post World War II USSR.
In the West there was no such deference, or at least the deferences were of a
different type. A second example is the deference given to two valued logic by
Western philosophers and scientists. This deference is deeply grounded in our
culture. In the West, the notion that non Boolean logic would be of
"ontological" value is ridiculed. A third example would be the structure and
form of Hopi sand (medicine) drawings. Most people unaware of Indian "Old Way"
would never imagine that a relationship could be made between colored sand
designs on a dirt floor and the healing process. In each of these examples, the problem
with translatability is that there are no containers to place meaning in target
languages, unless that language has a similar referential type.
The quality of any automated
reasoning system is a function of its power to reveal the basic signature of a
situation under investigation (see Ritz and Huber, 1996). To do this, it is
often necessary to resolve paradox.
A system that resolves paradoxes will produce information
complementarity. An entanglement of
the viewpoint’s substructure and ultrastructure can accommodate multiple
viewpoints. Accommodation produces
the emergence of a new system for understanding both ontologies and their
natural inter-relationships.
Thus the requirement for agile
knowledge engineering and process re-engineering in the commercial world is
similar to the problem of having a common "scientific’ methodology in physics,
neuroscience and psychology. In
chapter 2 we also imagined what is involved in the fusion of two separate
thought processes. Here we used the
model of weakly linked physical oscillators. The formation of a marriage or
friendship between individuals is another illustration of a system where an
entanglement process is occuring.
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