RE: [topicmapmail] Re: [topicmaps-comment] Notions have existence .....

[Paul Stephen Prueitt <bcngroup@erols.com>]

Sam,

I agree that a key to topifying concepts is to seek a community agreement as
to what the scope conditions are.  In some cases this works well.  There is
a type of pragmaticism that results from this appraoch to topicification.
it is important and useful.

There is also a type of pragmatism that suggests an actual and real
limitation to what can be treated in the way most are treating XML and topic
maps.

The point is that Plato and the notion of archtype has a very real social
consenses.  This agreement within various communities is why the notion of a
Platonic form is still with us.

I have expressed this before in various forums and understand that in many
ways I represent a minority view within this forum.  However, other social
setting show a consensious that topic maps or Protoge ontologies or Cyc
ontologies have still to demonstrate that value propositions exists from
explicit topicification of "general" concepts without having fully addressed
the deep issue of scope and situatedness.

I developed an exposition of a linguist collegue Dr. Fiona Citkina in my
manuscript

http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/book.htm

the relevant material states the position that the problems in machine
translation (using ontologies or human skill) can be bring into three
categories.

I am interested in how you see these more difficult issues.

***

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.