From: Andrei Alexandrescu (andrei_at_metalanguage.com)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 13:35:06 PST
* Summary
PROVERB is a crossword puzzle integrating in a veritable tour de force
many AI techniques, such as searching, contstraint satisfaction,
knowledge representation, and probabilistic decision making.
* Cool ideas
The idea of having various expert modules chime in with an opinion and
merge the results is pretty neat, and I believe conditioned the
successfulness of the approach. Reminds one of the "Terminator" movie
robot. In a scene, when the hotel owner knocks at Terminator's door,
the Terminator has on his internal screen several suggested spoken
answers to fend people away, to choose from (in the end he chose one
that can't be reproduced here).
Another interesting thing is the probabilistic scheme of generating
candidates.
* Not-so-cool stuff
The system seems to be a heavy answer to a question that few care
about. It does orchestrate together a lot of cool AI techniques, but
aside from improving their authors' experience in AI, there is little
generalization that naturally oozes from the paper. So there's a lot
of input, but not a lot of output. The authors' "duty" as scientists
would be to point out how their work is relevant and sparks ideas for
future research. Hey, how about creating a Terminator.
* Open Research Questions
Yeah, the fundamental question is, how can we apply this work to other
domains, such as probabilistic natural language processing.
Cheers,
Andrei
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