[plt-scheme] Natural Language parsing in CS1

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 10:50:12AM +0100, Noel Welsh wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Todd O'Bryan <toddobryan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One of my computational linguistics professors said that the
> > statistical revolution of the 1990s was incredibly important, but he
> > worried that it was the result of competitive systems that encouraged
> > people to create something that worked, not necessarily something that
> > was based in good research. His view was that people had kind of hit a
> > wall and the field needed to go back to doing some basic research to
> > figure out how to get past the limitations people had hit.
> 
> My opinion:
> 
> Logic is very expressive but doesn't handle uncertainty
> Stats handles uncertainty but is not expressive (the most commonly
> used formalism is equivalent to propositional logic).
> 
> The stats guys are slowly building more expressive representations.
> For example, various people are looking at first-order logic +
> probability. There are issues here that relate to PL. Current machine
> learning systems are built in matrix oriented languages like Matlab,
> with speed being a motivation. These languages make it hard to build
> complex systems (e.g. a type system doesn't help when, for example,
> every function is matrix -> matrix). Work like the Church system at
> MIT and Neil Toronto's work at BYU may provide the tools needed to
> build more expressive systems that have reasonable performance.
> 
> N.

Lamba calculus gives a Scott domain for its interpretation. With 
structure imposed on it, we get an interpretation for typed lambda 
calculus.  Would the same kind of type-imposition work on some of the 
Scott domains modelling nondeterminism?  Would that suggest a 
higher-level language that these matrices could be considered the 
assembly-language for?

-- hendrik

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