Mystery Number Two - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 42

By using the same variables, ,and K , in the patterns for the current and the

next proplet, and by binding them to the values know , Julia ,and 625 of the
input proplet know , the pattern for the next proplet provides the information
required for visiting the successor proplet, here Julia .
Finally consider a rule of an LA-speak grammar (see 7.4.3 for a detailed
definition). It is like an LA-think rule, except that it is extended to produce
appropriate word form surfaces by using the core value as well as the mor-
phosyntactic information of the cat and sem attributes. The following exam-
ple shows the LA-speak rule application underlying transition 2 in 3.3.3, which
navigates from the noun Julia back to the verb know , mapping the core value
of the goal proplet into the appropriate surface know+s .

α , β

3.4.3 LA- SPEAK RULE APPLICATION
i. rule name ii. rule package

NVs {VNs}

iii. current proplet iv. next proplet output

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

noun: α
cat: γ
fnc: β
prn: K

verb: β
sem: δ
arg: α Y
prn: K

rule level know+s

⇑ ⇒

⇒ lex( βγδ )

matching and binding of variables ⇑

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

noun: Julia
cat: nm
fnc: know
prn: 625

verb: know
sem: pres
arg: Julia John
prn: 625

Word Bank level

As in an LA-think grammar, the next proplet (here know ) serves as input for
the next rule application(s). The difference between an LA-think and an LA-
speak rule is that the latter also produces a surface (here know+s ), using a
variant of the lex function defined in NLC'06, 14.3.4. The resulting agent-
internal, modality-free surface is used as a blueprint (template) for one of the
agent's language synthesis components.
At the most basic level, inter-agent communication in natural language is
based on the Second Mechanism of Communication (MoC-2):

3.4.4 T HE S ECOND M ECHANISM OF C OMMUNICATION (M O C-2)

The external time-linear surface order is used for coding grammatical
relations proplet-internally (hear mode), while the grammatical rela-
tions coded proplet-internally are used for coding a time-linear surface
order externally (speak mode).

Extensive linguistic research, beginning with NEWCAT'86, has shown that
the decoding of grammatical relations from nothing but a time-linear sequence