Mystery Number Three - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 56

4.2.1 E XAMPLE OF A TOKEN LINE
member proplets now front owner proplet

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

noun: girl
fnc: walk
mdr: young
prn: 10

noun: girl
fnc: sleep
mdr: blond
prn: 12

noun: girl
fnc: eat
mdr: small
prn: 15

noun: girl
fnc: read
mdr: smart
prn: 19

core: girl

As indicated by the fnc and mdr values of the member proplets, the agent
happened to observe or hear about a young girl walking, a blonde girl sleeping,
a small girl eating, and a smart girl reading.
For retrieval, the member proplets of a token line may be checked system-
atically by using a pattern proplet as the query. The following example shows
the pattern proplet representing the query Which girl walked? as it applies to
the token line 4.2.1:

4.2.2 A PPLYING A QUERY PATTERN

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

noun: girl
fnc: walk
mdr: σ
prn: K

query pattern

matching (?)

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

⎡
⎣

⎤
⎦

noun: girl
fnc: walk
mdr: young
prn: 10

noun: girl
fnc: sleep
mdr: blonde
prn: 12

noun: girl
fnc: eat
mdr: small
prn: 15

noun: girl
fnc: read
mdr: smart
prn: 19

core: girl

The indicated attempt at matching (?) fails because the fnc values of the pat-
tern proplet (i.e., walk ) and of the member proplet (i.e., read ) are incompat-
ible. The same holds after moving the pattern proplet one member proplet to
the left. Only after reaching the leftmost member proplet is the matching suc-
cessful. Now the variable

is bound to the value young and the variable K
to the value 10 . Accordingly, the answer provided to the question Which girl
walked? is The young girl (walked) . 3 A powerful extension of this method
is combining pattern proplets into schemata (3.2.1-3.2.6, 6.5.1)

σ

4.3 Reference as a Purely Cognitive Procedure

In analytic philosophy of language and in linguistics, the notion of reference
is generally defined as a “relation between language and the world.” The cur-
rently most widely used reconstruction of reference is Model Theory, which
defines the world as a set-theoretic model (as in Montague grammar; cf.
FoCL'99, Sects. 19.3 and 20.4):