Pat and Rick, (01)
The procedural approach that Bill Woods advocated in
his Phd dissertation (late 1960s) and developed at BBN
in the 1970s can be interpreted as a variant of a
Tarski-style evaluation function. (02)
> In this theory the meaning of a noun is a procedure for
> recognizing or generating instances, the meaning of a
> proposition is a procedure for determining if it is true
> or false, and the meaning of an action is the ability to
> do the action or to tell if it has been done. (03)
In effect, the systems that Woods designed and implemented
determined the denotation of an expression in terms of a
particular model of the world. If that model were stored
on a relational DB, then his algorithms could be viewed
as a way of implementing a database query algorithm with
queries stated in a version of controlled English. (04)
Around the same time, Ted Codd was proposing similar methods
for querying a database. But there is an interesting parallel
to their achievements: (05)
1. Woods was talking about natural language understanding
and considered the issues of accessing a database to be
a relatively simple subproblem. (06)
2. Codd viewed the problem of efficient access to a DB in
a language that human beings could conveniently write
as a major practical problem. (07)
Although Woods and Codd developed similar methods (and Woods
was actually a couple of years ahead of Codd), Woods' system
was considered only a partial success because it processed
a subset of English. Codd, however, was considered the father
of a major new approach to organizing and accessing databases. (08)
Moral of the story: If you partially solve a difficult problem,
you won't get as much fame and fortune as if you completely solve
a more modest problem with important practical implications. (09)
John Sowa (010)
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