systems that know and understand and think and learn
In preparing for some natural language generation[1], I came across some work on natural logic[2][3] and reasoning by textual entailment[4] (RTE) by Richard Bergmair in his PhD at Cambridge:
The work he describes overlaps our approach to robust inference from the deep, variable-precision semantics that result from linguistic analysis and disambiguation using the English Resource Grammar (ERG) and the Linguist™.
As I discussed in Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web, Radar Networks’ Twine is one of the more interesting semantic web startups. Their founder, Nova Spivak, is funded by Vulcan and others to provide “interest-driven [social] networking”. I’ve been participating in the beta program at modest bandwidth for a while. Generally, Nova’s statements about where they are and where they are going are fully supported by what I have experienced. There are obvious weaknesses that they are improving. Overall, the strategy of gradually bootstrapping functionality and content by controlling the ramp up in users from a clearly alpha stage implementation to what is still not quite beta (in my view) seems perfect.
Recently, Nova recorded a few minute video in which he makes three short-term predictions: Continue reading “The Semantic Arms Race: Facebook vs. Google”