Understanding English with lattice-learning

A computer program that can understand the meaning of written English must be tremendously complex. It would break the spirit of any programmer to try to code such a program by hand; the range of meaning we can express in natural language is far too broad, too nuanced, too filled with exception. So I present UNDERSTAND, a program you can teach by example. Learning by example is an engineering expedient: it is much easier for us to come up with specific examples of a concept than some sort of perfect Platonic model. UNDERSTAND uses a technique I call Lattice-Learning to generalize accurately from just a few examples: "Robins, bees and helicopters can fly, but cats, worms and boats cannot," is enough for UNDERSTAND to narrow in on our concept of flying things: birds, insects and aircraft. It takes only 8 positive and 4 negative examples to teach UNDERSTAND how to interpret sentences as complicated as "The cat ran from the yard because a dog appeared." UNDERSTAND is implemented in 2300 lines of Java.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Klein, Michael Tully, Jr

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Patrick Henry Winston.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46037

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/46037