Semantic networks

AbstractA semantic network is a graph of the structure of meaning. This article introduces semantic network systems and their importance in Artificial Intelligence, followed by I. the early background; II. a summary of the basic ideas and issues including link types, frame systems, case relations, link valence, abstraction, inheritance hierarchies and logic extensions; and III. a survey of ‘world-structuring’ systems including ontologies, causal link models, continuous models, relevance, formal dictionaries, semantic primitives and intersecting inference hierarchies. Speed and practical implementation are briefly discussed. The conclusion argues for a synthesis of relational graph theory, graph-grammar theory and order theory based on semantic primitives and multiple intersecting inference hierarchies

Learning, using examples, to translate phrases and sentences to meanings

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-91).Before we can create intelligent systems that exhibit the versatility of the human intellect, we must understand how our command of language enables the uniquely broad scope of our reasoning ability. To pursue such an understanding, we must discover the ways by which language gives rise to representations which, in turn, serve as the building blocks of models that capture constraints and regularities of our environment. The work described in this thesis constitutes a step toward this goal. I have combined aspects of Winston's Arch learning methodology with implementations of three powerful representations: Lexical Conceptual Semantics[Jackendoff 1983], Transition Spaces[Borchardt 1993], and Thread Memory[Vaina, Greenblatt 1979], in a system that learns to instantiate semantic descriptions from language based on a sequence of examples. My program, Lance, builds models of the correspondences between parse trees and semantic descriptions by generalizing from a sequence of pairs of sentence fragments and descriptions. Additionally, counterexamples of one type of correspondence model may be generated from examples of similar models in order to facilitate learning by near miss. The result is that my system can learn such constraints as in order for a sentence to convey a transition, it must contain a verb that means either "change," "appear, " or "disappear."(cont.) In this work I developed an approach based on presentation of parse trees paired with instantiated representations and the Arch-Learning paradigm, and implemented Lance, a 12,000 line Java program. I demonstrated that from a training sequence of 95 examples, Lance learned 27 models of THINGS PARTS, PLACES, PATHELEMENTS, TRAJECTORY-SPACES, TRANSITION-SPACES, CAUSES, and IS-A relations.by Adam Davis Kraft.M.Eng

Representing the Semantics of Natural Language as Constraint Expressions

Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N00014-70-A-0362-0003.The issue of how to represent the "meaning" of an utterance is central to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. Rather than relying on ad-hoc structures or forcing the complexities of natural language into mathematically elegant but computationally cumbersome representations (such as first-order logic), this paper presents a novel representation which has many desirable computational and logical properties. It is proposed to use this representation to structure the "world knowledge" of a natural-language understanding system.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION

We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively. Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness, speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city

A fluctuating, intermediate warp: a micro-ethnography and synthetic philosophy of fibre mathematics

This project explores the inventive worlds of artists who engage with weaving technologies in the production of their work. It aims to understand the mathematical practices of these textile practitioners, without reifying or subsuming their work within a closed teleology. Side-lining approaches to both mathematics and artistic production that fetishize individual genius or the imposition of form on passive matter, I approach both artistic and mathematical activities as making practices. The project draws on the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to (re)theorise the role of technique and technology in artistic and mathematical creation. This focus foregrounds fibres and looms, diagrams and models as participants in material modes of reasoning. Exploring how the practices of both novice and expert weavers exceed the sovereign subject in ways that open up mathematical and weaverly tools as experimental forms, the project uses a micro-ethnographic analysis to examine how materials, machines, and humans improvise “algorhythmically” – a concept developed to describe both the regulation and excess of creative processes. Three case studies explore how the loom serves as a generative form/ground for engagement with mathematico-weaverly problems. Placing these material experimentations in the context of historical encounters between disciplines, the dissertation attempts to give contours to an emergent field of fibre mathematics

Your window-on-the-world: interactive television, the BBC and the second shift aesthetics of public service broadcasting

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one