[Corpora-List] ANC, FROWN, Fuzzy Logic

[Rob Freeman]

Hi Linda,

Re. your third point. As far as I know fuzzy logic is just a way of keeping 
track of uncertain qualities, it does not explain the underlying uncertainty. 
I don't see it being of much use for a fundamental understanding.

For a better hint at a fundamental understanding I would look at this article 
by Greg Chaitin on limits of uncertainty in all logical systems:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/cmu.html

I think Chaitin's article provides a better idea of the underlying problem 
with language (for which the solution is to understand language to be 
fundamentally a corpus and not a logical system of rules and classes over 
that corpus.)

Of course this perspective of language (as fundamentally a corpus and not a 
logical system of rules and classes over that corpus) is highly controversial 
and not fully understood even on this list, which is why most of the debate 
here is still about how to find or impose underlying systems of rules or 
classes (annotation schemes, disambiguation or categorization of 
"word-senses"), which we then face dealing with as "fuzzy" qualities.

-Rob Freeman

On Saturday 22 July 2006 05:10, Linda Bawcom wrote:
> Dear all,
> I'm resending the following because I have received no response, which is
> unusual for our friendly group. My apologies if it was, in fact, received.
> Kindest regards,
> Linda
>
> Dear Friends, Colleagues and List Members,
>
> I need to impose upon you once again.  I have three questions:
>
> 1) Can the ANC be used with Wordsmith? Only a program called "Gate" is
> listed on the web site and I don't understand enough about XML, filenames, 
> or markups to know if the information given means it can be used with it.
> The ANC publisher has not gotten back to me (just so you know I've done my
> homework!).
>
> My problem is that my small corpus is from American newspapers, but  I used
> the BNC as a monitor corpus and I can just hear a question arise regarding
> that as I  sit down to defend my doctoral thesis. So I  figure I had best
> compare my findings to an American corpus.
>
> 2) Try as I may on the ICAME site, I can not seem to get myself to a link
> that would allow me to download (purchase?) FROWN (with the exception of
> the manual). Can someone who is probably more patient send me that link?
>
> 3) This is a fun (?) one  for the comp. linguists and math whizzes.  Is
> fuzzy logic ever used to measure semantic similarity, perhaps, for example,
> with regard to color spectrum categorization? I am thinking in particular
> of this in relation to  Vantage Theory, but would be curious about any
> other broader use, albeit the algorithm is tweaked a bit.  If you do have
> an answer and it needs some explanation, try to pretend you have to explain
> it to a five year old :-).  You'll probably notice my ignorance just from
> the question. Unfortunately, my tutorial regarding fuzzy logic with a math
> teacher at UHD where I teach won't begin until October ( but if you don't
> feel like making the explanation so simple, just pretend I know everything
> and I'll have the math teacher [attempt to] explain it to me. He does
> projects for NASA here in Houston, so I imagine he'll understand!).
>
> In the end, it (fuzzy logic) may be too far afield from my  doctoral
> research regarding  (lexical) priming, lexical choice, and how we
> categorize synonyms, but I would like to see if I should rule it out with
> regard to empirical support.
>
> Kindest regards,
> Linda Bawcom