Neural Logic Machines

This is an important paper in the development of neural reasoning capabilities which should reduce the brittleness of purely symbolic approaches:  Neural Logic Machine

The potential reasoning capabilities, such as with regard to multi-step inference, as in problem solving and theorem proving, are most interesting, but there are important contemporary applications in machine learning and question answering.  I’ll just provide a few hightlights from the paper on the latter and some more points and references on the former below.

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Is business logic too much for classical logic?

Business logic is not limited to mathematical logic, as in first-order predicate calculus.

Business logic commonly requires “aggregation” over sets of things, like summing the value of claims against a property to subtract it from the value of that property in order to determine the equity of the owner of that property.

  • The equity of the owner of a property in the property is the excess of the value of the property over the value of claims against it.

There are various ways of describing such extended forms of classical logic.  The most relevant to most enterprises is the relational algebra perspective, which is the base for relational databases and SQL.  Another is the notion of generalized quantifiers.

In either case, it is a practical matter to be able to capture such logic in a rigorous manner.  The example below shows how that can be accomplished using English, producing the following axiom in extended logic:

  • ∀(?x15)(property(?x15)→∀(?x10)(owner(of)(?x10,?x15)→∃(?x31)(value(of(?x15))(?x31)∧∑(?x44)(∀(?x49)(claim(against(?x15))(?x49)→value(of(?x49))(?x44))→∃(?x26)(excess(of(?x31))(over(?x44))(?x26)∧equity(in(?x15))(of(?x10))(?x26))))))

This logic can be realized in various ways, depending on the deployment platform, such as: Continue reading “Is business logic too much for classical logic?”

Simply Logical English

This is not all that simple of an article, but it walks you through, from start to finish, how we get from English to logic. In particular, it shows how English sentences can be directly translated into formal logic for use with in automated reasoning with theorem provers, logic programs as simple as Prolog, and even into production rule systems.

There is a section in the middle that is a bit technical about the relationship between full logic and more limited systems (e.g., Prolog or production rule systems). You don’t have to appreciate the details, but we include them to avoid the impression of hand-waving

The examples here are trivial. You can find many and more complex examples throughout Automata’s web site.

Consider the sentence, “A cell has a nucleus.”:

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Natural Intelligence

Deep natural language understanding (NLU) is different than deep learning, as is deep reasoning.  Deep learning facilities deep NLP and will facilitate deeper reasoning, but it’s deep NLP for knowledge acquisition and question answering that seems most critical for general AI.  If that’s the case, we might call such general AI, “natural intelligence”.

Deep learning on its own delivers only the most shallow reasoning and embarrasses itself due to its lack of “common sense” (or any knowledge at all, for that matter!).  DARPA, the Allen Institute, and deep learning experts have come to their senses about the limits of deep learning with regard to general AI.

General artificial intelligence requires all of it: deep natural language understanding[1], deep learning, and deep reasoning.  The deep aspects are critical but no more so than knowledge (including “common sense”).[2] Continue reading “Natural Intelligence”

“Only full page color ads can run on the back cover of the New York Times Magazine.”

A decade or so ago, we were debating how to educate Paul Allen’s artificial intelligence in a meeting at Vulcan headquarters in Seattle with researchers from IBM, Cycorp, SRI,  and other places.

We were talking about how to “engineer knowledge” from textbooks into formal systems like Cyc or Vulcan’s SILK inference engine (which we were developing at the time).   Although some progress had been made in prior years, the onus of acquiring knowledge using SRI’s Aura remained too high and the reasoning capabilities that resulted from Aura, which targeted University of Texas’ Knowledge Machine, were too limited to achieve Paul’s objective of a Digital Aristotle.  Unfortunately, this failure ultimately led to the end of Project Halo and the beginning of the Aristo project under Oren Etzioni’s leadership at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

At that meeting, I brought up the idea of simply translating English into logic, as my former product called “Authorete” did.  (We renamed it before Haley Systems was acquired by Oracle, prior to the meeting.)

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Are vitamins subject to sales tax in California?

What is the part of speech of “subject” in the sentence:

  • Are vitamins subject to sales tax in California?

Related questions might include:

  • Does California subject vitamins to sales tax?
  • Does California sales tax apply to vitamins?
  • Does California tax vitamins?

Vitamins is the direct object of the verb in each of these sentences, so, perhaps you would think “subject” is a verb in the subject sentence…

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