I've been wondering for a while about how to deal with the meaning of plural nouns. In my last post I treated them as referring to all things of a type, as in "The rm program deletes files". But they can also refer to a set of things of a type, as in "Bob deleted files." There's an implied "some" in that second sentence; we know that Bob didn't delete all files everywhere. The tense of the sentence or passage helps quite a bit for determining which interpretation is more probable, but that approach is not ironclad. Contrast "Bob deleted files," with "Bob deleted his files." "His files" is a smaller set of things, one that Bob could conceivably delete all of. Unfortunately, the knowledge of files, the act of deleting, and Bob that we can use to differentiate the two situations come from prior knowledge. I'm hoping to use logical inference for disambiguation like this, but at the moment, I'm not optimistic about the size of the knowledge base that will be necessary.

In other news, I've been working on this long enough now that I'm going to start reading the literature. I'm probably way overdue on this step, having so far only read through what Russell and Norvig had to say about this in their book.

I met both of my goals for last week, though my recognition of plurality is a bit crude. I'm intending to revisit how I'm representing my dictionary soon, so I'll make it less crude then.

For this week, my goals are:

• Build a simple logical inference framework
• Read two papers on AI
• Continue the NLP series with interpretation of verb phrases.

Labels: adam, nlp