Re: VMs: New computer algorithm for language learning

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Greg Stachowski wrote:
> I wonder how this would work with the VMS - it's interesting, anyway.
> ...
>
> To quote:
>
> "Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a
> method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of
> languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without
> previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar."

While agreeing with the stipulations from Elmar and Heike, I think it
would be very interesting to see what this algorithm - called ADIOS or
Automatic Distillation of Structure - makes of both the text of the VMs,
and the set of VMs words.  Of course, assuming the material is encrypted,
not merely encoded, something which we usually do assume, that might well
have some influence on the applicability of the algorithm as well.

I don't think it's claimed that this approach makes sense of the input,
only that it produces a generative grammar of the input - a pattern
analysis.

Patented doesn't necessarily mean available only at high cost, and however
it is available, I suspect the authors would be as interested in seeing
what it made of the VMs as anyone else.  They're plainly interested in
wide applications, even non-linguistic ones, e.g.,

"In addition to child-directed language, the algorithm has been tested on
the full text of the Bible in several languages, on artificial
context-free languages with thousands of rules and on musical notation. It
also has been applied to biological data, such as nucleotide base pairs
and amino acid sequences. In analyzing proteins, for example, the
algorithm was able to extract from amino acid sequences patterns that were
highly correlated with the functional properties of the proteins."

Contacts:

http://www.tau.ac.il/~zsolan/
http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/~edelman/adios-nips-workshop.pdf

(Or search on adios horn ruppin.)

Perhaps one or more of the more notable members of the Voynich fraternity
would like to write to the ADIOS project?

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