4 ms·

What do you mean?

by hcs 9y ago

What do you mean?

aisofteng 9y ago
It doesn't matter what he meant, all that matters is how he said it; your question is meaningless, for after all there is no meaning but usage. (If it isn't clear, this comment is snide to GP.)
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  It's also a very strawman version of what I said, to the point of being wildly inaccurate.
  - aisofteng 9y ago
    Oh, you used the religiously verified word of "strawman"! What you said made little to no sense and had no backing. Yours was a perfect example of layman speculation without any basis. Nothing you said made any coherent sense, nor had any backing. They don't even deserve a response.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - dang 9y ago
      Your comments have repeatedly been violating the HN guidelines by being uncivil and/or unsubstantive and generally nasty. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing this, and instead post civilly and substantively (or not at all). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
      - aisofteng 9y ago
        You're completely right and I apologize. I'll reign it in. Thank you for all the work you do moderating this community.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
That we artificially decompose the process of accepting a sentence as, eg, proper English into two phases: syntactic correctness and semantic correctness. However, that distinction is arbitrary -- there is only the question of if the sentence is accepted by an agent (eg, person) as a well-formed sentence. Any full accounting of the class of well-formed sentences must embed the semantic concerns; violating semantics is a syntax error (albeit, not usually a "first order" one). Similarly, even base syntax, such as the subject/verb/object distinction and ordering is carrying semantic information about word usage. The distinction between the two is non-existent: a full accounting of either must embed the other. So semantics is syntax -- if you write a system of rules that only accepts valid sentences, then the rules will end up carrying the semantic structure of the language in them. Ed: I suppose I left out why this might matter -- In the quest to build an AI that understands semantics (ie, that "understands meaning"), we can bypass attacking that problem directly by training it (eg, a NN) on the full acceptance task (joined syntax and semantics -- classifying a sentence as proper English or not), and then truncate the network away from "low level" features (and perhaps at the other side, focused on 'yes' or 'no') to extract a network that has (most of) the (abstract) semantic structure embedded. We could then utilize these "middle level" features as a sort of rosetta stone, to train low level networks to embed content for them to understand, and high level networks to utilize their output on decisions to repurpose "understanding" across tasks. I would argue that using things like Word2Vec (or the resulting vector space of words) is a similar idea.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. 2) Me gizmo. One of the above sentences is valid English, the other one is meaningful. That is the syntax/semantics distinction. The distinction is a bit fuzzy in places (for instance, inflectional morphology), but does exist.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    I actually disagree with your assessment. You contend that the top sentence is valid English; I disagree with that. It subscribes to the "first order" rules (or an overly simplistic model), but isn't a sentence that an English speaker would use. Not being one that an English speaker would use makes it invalid English -- it's just a case where the first order approximation is wrong. Similarly, if your syntax rules reject the second sentence, they're wrong -- since it's a sentence that English speakers can parse: the conclusion can only be that your syntax rules don't actually match the language you're trying to model. I get the distinction that you're trying to point out with syntax/semantics, but you're ignoring my point: that divide is artificial and 'semantics' as you mean it is merely higher order syntax. You haven't shown there's an inherent meaning to the difference (ie, that you haven't just drawn an arbitrary line in the sand), just that you can find examples that (naively) fall on different sides of it.

What do you mean?

by hcs 9y ago

What do you mean?

It doesn't matter what he meant, all that matters is how he said it; your question is meaningless, for after all there is no meaning but usage. (If it isn't clear, this comment is snide to GP.)

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
It's also a very strawman version of what I said, to the point of being wildly inaccurate.
- aisofteng 9y ago
  Oh, you used the religiously verified word of "strawman"! What you said made little to no sense and had no backing. Yours was a perfect example of layman speculation without any basis. Nothing you said made any coherent sense, nor had any backing. They don't even deserve a response.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dang 9y ago
    Your comments have repeatedly been violating the HN guidelines by being uncivil and/or unsubstantive and generally nasty. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing this, and instead post civilly and substantively (or not at all). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
    - aisofteng 9y ago
      You're completely right and I apologize. I'll reign it in. Thank you for all the work you do moderating this community.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

That we artificially decompose the process of accepting a sentence as, eg, proper English into two phases: syntactic correctness and semantic correctness. However, that distinction is arbitrary -- there is only the question of if the sentence is accepted by an agent (eg, person) as a well-formed sentence. Any full accounting of the class of well-formed sentences must embed the semantic concerns; violating semantics is a syntax error (albeit, not usually a "first order" one). Similarly, even base syntax, such as the subject/verb/object distinction and ordering is carrying semantic information about word usage. The distinction between the two is non-existent: a full accounting of either must embed the other. So semantics is syntax -- if you write a system of rules that only accepts valid sentences, then the rules will end up carrying the semantic structure of the language in them. Ed: I suppose I left out why this might matter -- In the quest to build an AI that understands semantics (ie, that "understands meaning"), we can bypass attacking that problem directly by training it (eg, a NN) on the full acceptance task (joined syntax and semantics -- classifying a sentence as proper English or not), and then truncate the network away from "low level" features (and perhaps at the other side, focused on 'yes' or 'no') to extract a network that has (most of) the (abstract) semantic structure embedded. We could then utilize these "middle level" features as a sort of rosetta stone, to train low level networks to embed content for them to understand, and high level networks to utilize their output on decisions to repurpose "understanding" across tasks. I would argue that using things like Word2Vec (or the resulting vector space of words) is a similar idea.

gizmo686 9y ago
1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. 2) Me gizmo. One of the above sentences is valid English, the other one is meaningful. That is the syntax/semantics distinction. The distinction is a bit fuzzy in places (for instance, inflectional morphology), but does exist.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I actually disagree with your assessment. You contend that the top sentence is valid English; I disagree with that. It subscribes to the "first order" rules (or an overly simplistic model), but isn't a sentence that an English speaker would use. Not being one that an English speaker would use makes it invalid English -- it's just a case where the first order approximation is wrong. Similarly, if your syntax rules reject the second sentence, they're wrong -- since it's a sentence that English speakers can parse: the conclusion can only be that your syntax rules don't actually match the language you're trying to model. I get the distinction that you're trying to point out with syntax/semantics, but you're ignoring my point: that divide is artificial and 'semantics' as you mean it is merely higher order syntax. You haven't shown there's an inherent meaning to the difference (ie, that you haven't just drawn an arbitrary line in the sand), just that you can find examples that (naively) fall on different sides of it.