18. Representations Classes; Trajectories; Transitions Video Lecture -

PATRICK WINSTON: We might wonder
a little bit about the
nature of human intelligence,
and we might reflect a little
bit on the kind of intelligence
we've been
talking about in the
past few weeks.
It's been an intelligence
of sorts.
Those programs, support vector
machines, boosting, they can
do really smart things.
But the peculiar thing about
systems that use those methods
is that those systems don't
have any idea about what
they're doing.
They don't know anything.
So they don't give us very much
of an insight into the
nature of human intelligence.
And, after all, I'd like to
have a model of human
intelligence because, let's face
it, we're the smartest
things around.
So there are lots of ways to
approach that question.
And we'll approach that
question first from a
evolutionary point of view.
Some scientists believe, me for
instance, that we have a
family tree that looks
about like this.
Too small to see much of that,
but the main point is that we
haven't been around very long.
We humans have been around maybe
200,000 years, and the
dinosaurs died out 60
million years ago.
So in the blink of an eye, we
seem to have, more or less,
taken over.
When you look at that family
tree on a scale where you can
see it, one of the
characteristics is increasing
brain size.
There we are on the left,
chimpanzee on the right.
Clearly, mostly mouth, not
to much brain in there.
That one down below is a
reconstruction of one of those
pithecus type bipedal apes
from about 4 million
years ago or so.
So we became bipedal a
long time before we
had much of a brain.
So you might think, well, maybe
brain size has a lot to
do with it, and I
suppose it does.
So we can plot brain volume of
our ancestors versus time.
So the picture I just showed you
was from about 3 million
years ago, I guess.
And then on the upper right hand
corner, oh, that's not
just us, that's also
the Neanderthals.
Their brains might have been
slightly bigger than ours.
So it isn't just brain size.
Here's what that
guy looks like.
That's a Neanderthal, of
course, on the left.
And that's one of
us on the right.
Some conspicuous differences,
big heads, the rib cage is
kind of conical in shape,
a large pelvis.
People like to make a lot of
speculations about how they
must have moved around.
But one thing is plain, they
didn't amount to much.
They could make stone tools, but
those stone tools didn't
change much over tens of
thousands of years.
And that was pretty much the
story with us too, until
something happened, probably in
southern Africa, probably
in a group of individuals,
maybe less than 1,000.
And what's the evidence
for that?
The evidence for that
is mostly--
comes from DNA studies with
a lot of probabilistic
assumptions, and Monte Carlo
simulations, but it seems
among the competing hypothesis
for how we came to populate
the world, it seems that there
was a group of us, homo
sapiens, in Southern Africa that
got something that nobody
else had and the highest
probability scenario is that
we quickly took over.
That population of homo sapiens
dominated the rest,
went out of Africa, and within
the blink of an eye did that
sort of stuff.
What's that sort of stuff?
Those two paintings are
from Lascaux about
25,000 years ago.
Paleoanthropologists, like
Tattersall, take that as plain
evidence that there was symbolic
thought on the people
who were around at that
time, us homo sapiens.
The head is a carving of a
mastodon tusk of a woman
25,000 years ago.
Also, plainly symbolic, people
are making a lot of jewelry
and doing self adornment.
The Neanderthals never
seemed to do that.
That jewelry making seems to
have gone back to Southern
Africa, maybe 70,000
years ago.
People were puncturing seashells
and using them as
necklaces, apparently.
So something happened, and the
paleoanthropologists, who
write fascinating stuff, don't
quite know how to talk about
it other than to say
it looks like we
became somehow symbolic.
And somehow that has something
to do with language.
So if you talk to Noam
Chomsky he will say--
let me get this precise,
this is near his
quotation as I can get.
He thinks it was the ability to
take two concepts and put
them together to form a third
concept without disturbing the
original concepts and without
limit, and each
part of that's important.
The without limit part is what
separates us from species that
might be able to do that a
little bit, but we can do it
without any apparent limit.
So that's a linguist speaking.
He talks a lot about the
merge operation, and
combinators and language--
using terms foreign to us.
Better not use the term
"combinator," it's kind of a
computer science term.
But whatever it is, it seemed
to happen about that time.
It didn't happen slowly and
proportion to brain size, it
seemed to happen all of a sudden
in consequence of a
brain that had grown big enough
to be an enablement but
the capability was
not what pulled
evolution in that direction.
So, I believe, that whatever
that was, that capability,
enabled humans, us humans, to
tell and understand stories,
and that's what separates us
from the other primates.
That ability to--
The symbolic ability, whatever
it is, enabled storytelling
and understanding.
And that's what all education
is about and that's why our
species is special.
So what we're going to talk
about today is something you
might think of as an
instantiation of that
hypothesis, one way of
thinking about it.
And it's a way of thinking about
what the linguists would
call the inner language.
It's not the language with which
we communicate, it's the
language with which we think,
which is closely related to
the language with which we
communicate, but may not be
quite the same thing.
So many of you are bilingual.
Chris is bilingual.
Chris, have you ever had the
experience of remembering that
someone said something to you,
but not remembering what
language they used?
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE].
PATRICK WINSTON: How about
[? you, Sian, ?] have you had
that experience?
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE].
PATRICK WINSTON: What?
STUDENT: I always [INAUDIBLE].
PATRICK WINSTON: [INAUDIBLE]
experience of having--
David, have you ever had that
experience of remembering some
conversation but not remembering
the language in
which it was cast?
STUDENT: Well, you remember
something you usually don't
know which language
it was in anyway.
PATRICK WINSTON: You usually
don't remember.
That's a common view.
You remember something was
said, that there was a
conversation that had some
content, but if it's with a
speaker of your own language and
your embedded in another
place, you often don't remember
what language the
conversation was in.
Is that right, [? Wana, ?] you
remember things like that?
Not sure?
STUDENT: People who [INAUDIBLE]
speak in a certain
language, so--
PATRICK WINSTON: Sometimes you
don't have that confusion, she
says, because you always speak
to particular people in a
particular language.
But many people report that they
have that experience of
not remembering which language
something was said in.
Well, OK, so what are
we going to do?
We need an inner language, and
maybe we can start just by
saying, let's have something
that looks sort
of familiar to us.
We have an object and it's
supported by some other
objects, so those are
support relations.
That's one example of what we
might call a semantic net.
It's a network that's got nodes
and links, it's got--
it has some meaning.
That's where the word "semantic"
comes from.
Well, we might have another
example that looks like this.
There's Macbeth, there's Duncan,
and Macbeth murders
Duncan, then we also know,
somehow, there's a kill
involved as a consequence,
and then ultimately,
Duncan has a property.
And that property is the
property of being dead.
So there's another semantic net
recording something that
happens in Shakespeare's
Macbeth plot.
Now, we can decorate
that a little bit.
So as to get a couple of
other concepts in play.
First of all, the thing we've
got already is we've got
combinators.
Then combinators.
Well, a fancy name for those
links that connect the nodes.
Another thing we've got is an
opportunity for connecting the
links themselves.
So the murder sort of implies
the kill, and the kill leads
us to conclude that the
victim is dead.
So that is treating the links
themselves as objects that can
be the subject or object
of other links.
So we call that process
"reification."
Now, in artificial intelligence,
semantic nets
we're all over the early work,
but if you have a big network
that covers the wall you need
some way of putting a
spotlight on some
pieces of it.
So Marvin Minsky put a lot of
technical content into that
idea and created
the notion of--
a notion that deserves
another color here--
he suggested that we need a
localization process, so we
have frames, so-called
frames or templates.
And a frame for this murder
action might be that there's a
murder frame that has an agent
and has a victim, and the
agent is Macbeth, and the
victim is Duncan.
So that's a way of putting a
localization layer on top of
what we've got so far.
Later on, I'll add sequence
to that list.
So this is where it rested for
a long time, and in some
sense, still rests there because
as soon as you've got
combinators, you've
got something
that's pretty much universal.
You can do anything with it.
The trouble is it's sort of
down at the bit level.
It's like assembly code.
It doesn't have, as a concept,
enough organization to help
you go to the next level
of achievement.
There's also a little problem
here that deserves also, some
mention, and that is that we
have, over this whole thing,
the problem of parasitic
semantics.
Parasitic semantics.
A kind of ugliness that
surrounds this whole concept
because when we look at a
diagram like that, and we say,
oh, Macbeth murdered
Duncan, that means
Duncan's the victim.
We know there must have been a
motive, maybe Macbeth wanted
to be king.
Well, we know all that stuff,
and there's a tendency to
project that knowing
into the machine.
If you're going to play with
your telephone, please leave.
So if we project meaning into
that that's our understanding
that's not the machine's
understanding.
So much of the meaning can
be said to be parasitic.
We're the parasite, and
we're projecting
the into that thing.
Putting that diagram into some
machine form doesn't mean the
machine knows anything.
It might be able to conclude
some things, but it's
understanding is not grounded
in any kind of contact with
the physical world.
So we have to worry a lot
about that and where
philosophers would stop there
and go off and write a few
books on the subject.
But we're not philosophers so
we're going to just mention
the problem and go
barreling ahead.
So we need to use this notion
of semantic net, and we have
to ask ourselves some questions
about what elements
of the inner language are most
useful and yet it might be
very complicated, but here's
usefulness number one.
The notion of classification.
So we know about stuff,
and we know about,
for example, pianos.
And we know about tools.
And we know about maps.
But we know about those things
on different levels.
So say I'm thinking about a
tool, do you have a very good
image of what I'm
talking about?
The answer has to be no because
the notion of a tool
is very vague, so it's hard
to form a picture of
what that's all about.
On the other hand, if I said
I'm thinking about a mac.
Well, this is interesting
because there's lexical
ambiguity there.
You don't know if I'm talking
about the Apple type Mac or
the apple type Mac, or
should I say the
fruit or the computer?
So there's lexical ambiguity
there at two levels or more.
But let's fill this
in a little bit.
If I know I'm talking about a
piano, you can form a picture
of that so that seems to be on
a more detailed level where
you can do hallucination.
At a higher level you have just
a musical instrument.
And I can give you a tool to
think about by writing hammer.
And if I'm going to
have a mac, it's
going to be an apple.
And in this case, I want you
to think about a fruit.
And down here, I can be
more specific about
these things too.
I can add a slight refinement
of detail and say, I'm
thinking about one of these.
Do you know what this is?
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE].
PATRICK WINSTON: No, it's not
a mere hammer, it's a
ball-peen hammer.
In some circles, it's called
a ladies hammer.
I don't know why.
But it's--
What's it for?
Most people buy it mostly
because it's
small and light weight.
But, in fact, it's for
metal working.
It's for taking a piece of sheet
metal and pounding it
out into an ashtray
or something
or for seating rivets.
It's a metal worker's hammer.
So you might not have known
about that before but now, at
least, you have a word to
hang that knowledge on.
It's a ball peen hammer.
So we have various levels here,
going from very specific
to very general.
And we can even go to a level
of specificity for pianos by
saying we've got
a Bosendorfer.
Why is a Bosendorfer special?
I mean, is it like a Baldwin?
Something's [INAUDIBLE],
Yoka--
Lots of piano types,
what's special?
You see, you don't know because
unless you play the
piano, and probably unless
you're a serious piano player
you don't know that
a Bosendorfer--
Ariel, you know.
STUDENT: I think its supposed to
have an extra octave at the
bottom, black keys.
Pretty cool.
PATRICK WINSTON: It's got some
extra keys at the bottom.
And most people don't know that
unless they're serious
about the piano.
Some professional piano
players, when they're
confronted with a Bosendorfer
have to have someone cover
those keys because it screws
up their peripheral vision,
and hit the wrong key.
Because they're not used
to having those
extra keys at the bottom.
So that's a little detail
but the Bosendorfer.
So you can make a kind of graph,
and you can say, let's
go from low, very general,
to a basic level,
to a specific level.
So it is the case in human
knowledge that that graph has
a tendency to look sort
of like this.
So here's tool, here's hammer,
here's ball peen.
So that level, where you have a
big jump, that's the general
to basic level of transition.
So that basic level is probably
there because that's
the level on which we hang a
huge amount of our knowledge.
We know a lot about pianos, and
it all seems to be hanging
on that word piano,
which gives us
power with the concept.
So that's example number
one of an element
of our inner language.
The ability to assemble things
into hierarchies like that,
and hang knowledge about those
objects on the elements in
that hierarchy.
Well, given that you have
elements in the hierarchy, how
do you talk about them?
Well, I like to consider the
possibility, just for the sake
of illustration, that you're
thinking about a car crashing
into a wall.
So you've got things to think
about like the speed of the
car, the distance to the wall,
and the condition of the car.
And you've got the period before
the crash, during the
crash, and after the crash.
So you might want to think about
how to talk about those
objects in those three
time periods.
So we can do that with a
vocabulary of change and we do
that because we believe that
most of human thinking is
thinking about change
causing change.
And that flies in the face of
what we learned as engineers.
Because in engineering, we learn
about state, and once
you know the state of the
system, you know everything
you need to know in order
to predict the future.
The trouble is, in our heads,
thinking about everything
there is in the world, including
the current phase of
the moon, is too much stuff.
So mostly, our thinking, we
think, is hinging on the idea
that change leads to change.
So that's why we have a
vocabulary of change.
So in the period before the
crash, the speed of the car is
not changing.
There's a little notation for
not change, no delta.
The distance to the wall,
that's decreasing.
The condition of the car,
that's not changing.
Then, the car hits the wall.
So the speed of the car
disappears, the distance to
the wall disappears, and the
condition of the car will
change dramatically.
Finally, after the crash is
over, the speed of the car
does not appear.
The distance to the wall does
not change, and the condition
of the car also does
not change.
So that's hinting at a
vocabulary of change, and its
use, which will be the second
element in our development of
a vocabulary of ways in which we
might have constructed are
inner language.
So this a particular idea,
that's classification.
This is transition, and a
system that purports to
understand stories with a heavy
emphasis on this notion
of transition and we believe,
that is to say, I think, that
that vocabulary has to have
decrease, increase, change,
appear, and disappear.
So there are 10 things you can
have in such diagrams.
I've done five.
That's because, for each
of those, there's a not
variation on that.
So with a vocabulary of 10
things can go a long way
toward helping to describe
things that are in process of
change and making transition.
And we have a lot of those
words in our vocabulary.
We use those words a lot
in our vocabulary.
They seem heavily connected
with vision.
Our friend appeared.
The cat disappeared.
The speed increased.
So this is a description
of a crash.
In terms of those kinds of
elements, now, I say to you,
how does a camera work?
Well, I could say the camera
works because a photon crashes
into a photo receptor.
So when I say a photon crashes
into a photo receptors, why am
I saying that, and
how does it help?
I'm saying that and it helps
because it's the same pattern
of change you already know about
when you talk about a
car crashing into a wall.
How does that work?
The speed of the photon, the
distance of the photon to the
receptor, and the condition
of the receptor.
So analogies like that are very
much of the core of what
we think about all the time.
Really then, there is
representation number two.
Number one is class, number two
is transition, and now,
you're ready for number three,
which is trajectory.
Linguists, who study sentences,
often talk in terms
of fundamental patterns that
seemed to be in a lot of what
we say, and a lot of what we
say is about objects moving
along trajectories.
So we can talk about
a trajectory frame.
And a trajectory frame will
have elements like this.
It has an object moving on a
trajectory that ends up at a
destination.
You might start out
at a source.
It's probably been arranged by
some kind of agent, and the
agent may assist himself making
the motion happen with
some kind of instrument.
There might be somebody
helping out
over here, a co-agent.
Well, what else can we have?
A beneficiary, someone is helped
out by the action.
Sometimes, the motion is
arranged by a conveyance.
So these are a lot of slots,
finite slots, and descriptions
of actions, many of which
involve motion on a
trajectory.
We have a tendency in language
to decorate these things in
one way or another, depending
on the language.
And so in many languages, the
decoration is by way of
position in the sentence.
In English, it's often by
way of a preposition.
It's used to help zero in on a
particular role of an object
in the trajectory scenario.
So if I say, I baked a cake with
a friend, there's a with
preposition.
If I baked a cake for a friend,
the friend is the
beneficiary.
If I baked a cake with an oven,
that's an instrument.
The object may be moving to a
destination from a source, and
if I'm going to New York
by train, I put a
by on top of that.
If the agent isn't in subject
position, I would say
something like, oh,
I see all the work
was done by a student.
So those prepositions have a
tendency to help us zoom in on
the actual role of particular
objects in this whole package,
the whole frame.
So this is number three.
There's a variation on this
in which there's no actual
trajectory in which case we'll
just call that a role frame.
Because if there's no
trajectory, we can still have
things such as an instrument, a
co-agent, and a beneficiary.
So now, we've got three
representations.
You might say, well,
what good are they?
And you can determine what
good they are these days
because it's easier to go over
established corpuses, and say,
what fraction of those, of the
sentences, in such a corpus
involve classification or a
transition or a trajectory.
The most well known of these is
the so-called Wall Street
Journal Corpus.
It has 50,000 sentences in it,
drawn from some period of
time, all the syntactical
language types work with that
corpus a great deal.
And we worked with it a little
bit too, to see what fraction
of the sentences or what the
density of trajectories and
transitions are in
those sentences.
So I have to say that a little
more carefully, because the
finding is that in 100 sentences
you'll find about 25
transitions or trajectories.
So they're very densely
represented.
They're often very abstract.
Prices rose, the economy went
to someplace, but there are
still words that denote
transition or trajectory.
Of course, once you have all
this stuff, that you have then
have a desire to put
it together.
So the next thing we need to
talk about is story sequences.
So a story sequence can be a
single sentence, and I want to
illustrate that with one
of my favorites.
Here's the sentences.
I think I've chosen a gender
neutral name so as not getting
in any trouble.
So Pat, but I don't call myself
Pat because I decided
when I was 18 years old
that pat is a unit
of measure for butter.
In any case, with Pat comforted,
Mary, do you have
an image of what happened?
Probably not a very
firm image.
You know that Pat did something,
but you don't know
exactly what.
Nevertheless, when Pat comforted
Chris, you can
construct something that looks
like a role frame.
Because the role frame for that
would have an agent, and
that would be Pat.
There's an action.
We're going to put a question
mark in there because we don't
have a very firm image of
what the action is.
Then again, we're building
a wall frame, like so.
The object is Chris.
Oh, you know that
is the object.
Is there anything
else we can say?
Oh, yes, we can probably
say something more.
Something else comes to
mind when you see
Pat comforted Chris.
There's a sort of result,
and the result is
a transition frame.
And the transition frame
involves an object, which is
Chris, and Chris has a mood,
which presumably, is improved.
It goes up.
Did you have something,
Elliott?
STUDENT: Could you, I guess,
analogize the Pat comforted
Chris to something like Pat gave
comfort to Chris as Chris
is the destination?
And couldn't this
be [INAUDIBLE]?
PATRICK WINSTON: Elliott is
wandering into a very
interesting area having to do
with, couldn't you think about
this in another way and think
of it as something moving
along a trajectory.
Comfort is moving, if not from
Pat, at least to Chris.
And that's a very important kind
of observation because
what it would suggest is there
can be a utility in thinking
of things in multiple ways,
multiple representations.
Marvin Minsky has a wonderful
aphoristic phrase, which is,
if you can only think about
something in one way, you have
no recourse when
you get stuck.
So multiple representations mean
you have multiple ways of
gathering regularity from the
world, and collecting it and
therefore that'll make
you smarter.
So yes, you could do that, and
that would be a compliment to
what I'm doing now.
Let me continue what
I'm doing now.
So what have I done?
I've got a role frame and a
tradition frame, and the
transition frame is the
target of the result
slot in the role frame.
Now, we can modify this
a little bit.
And maybe want to say, instead
of comforted, terrorized.
And how would that
change things?
We don't know exactly
what Pat did so the
action remains unknown.
The agent and the object
are the same.
But the result here
is presumably that
the mood went down.
With just what we've got so far,
we can answer a lot of
questions, by the way.
Once we've got the sentence
understood in these terms, we
can say who did the thing?
What's this all about?
And the answer is Pat.
What did Pat do?
Comfort, terrorized.
Who do they do it too?
Who was the object?
It's Chris.
What was the result?
Chris felt better.
Chris felt worse.
So these representations already
give us a question and
answering capability that makes
for an understanding of
the sentence.
But still, we haven't been very
specific, so our next
step takes this same sentence in
a more specific direction.
So here's a way that goes.
Kissed Chris.
Now, you begin to get a sense of
what's going on, you form a
mental image, so you could
have a hallucination.
And that hallucinations will
also be a kind of frame, but,
in this case, it'll be
a trajectory frame.
And the object would be, I
don't know, Pat's lips.
And the destination will
be Chris' lips.
I don't know, is that right?
It depends.
It depends.
Have you all formed a picture
of what's going on here?
So it will be different
depending on whether Chris is
Pat's girlfriend or if Chris is
Pat's daughter or if Chris
is a frog and Pat is a prince
-ess, I guess, the way the
story usually goes.
So somehow we have, in our
heads, all kinds of libraries
that help us to form mental
pictures of things when we see
things like kissed.
So one final one just
to show the variety.
We could say that Pat
stabbed Chris.
What changes?
Let's see, in the case of
kissed, the mood is going up.
In the case of stabbed, the
mood is going down.
You can also probably say that
the health is going down.
And the destination
is Chris' body.
And the object that's moving
is Pat's knife.
We get the same pattern with
both of those sentences.
So both of them involve a
sequence that starts off with
the action, moves to a
transition and a trajectory
and those are all arranged
in a line.
And that line is something that
gives us a lot of power
over the situation relative
to a semantic net.
So I'm going to decorate that
one more time, and say that
another element we
get out of our
internal language is sequence.
An element we need in order to
have anything that looks like
an account of an inner
language is sequence.
Because if you think about
things being arrayed in a vast
spreading network, it's hard
to deal with them.
But if you thing about things
being arrayed along a line, in
a sequence of actions or events,
like so, then that
imposes enough constraint
to get a handle on
what's going on.
So what we're going to call this
is the representation,
and I guess I'm up to one,
two, three, four.
This is a representation
of story sequence.
so even though that's a kind of
micro-story, it's still an
example of a story sequence
because we get the power out
of it by arranging everything
in a line.
You have a sense, I think,
especially if you play a
musical instrument, on how
dependent we are on sequence.
So if you play a musical
instrument, you probably know
how difficult it is to start
replaying a piece of music
from the middle of a measure.
You have to go back to at least
the beginning of the
measure, and probably to the
beginning of the phrase, if
not the beginning
of the piece.
So our memory seems to be, at
least in music, very rooted in
the idea of sequences.
And that's often true
of storytelling too.
We have to go back to the
beginning of at least a scene,
because somehow these things are
arranged in sequences that
form, somehow, usefulness out
of their sequentialness.
So there's one more thing we can
talk about and that is the
idea of not just the idea of
how these sequences are
constructed and what they're
constructed out of, but we can
also talk a little bit in terms
of libraries of stories.
And when we talk about libraries
of stories, we can
think about kind of the sort
of standard stories that we
have and how they're arranged,
and how we can know a lot
about something by what
it's super class is.
So it's a variation on the theme
of learning stuff from
the super classes.
So here's an event frame.
And then, in addition
to event frames,
there's disaster frames.
And then there are
party frames.
And parties and disasters
are both events.
And when we talk about
disasters, we know, in turn,
they break up in a variety
of things.
We have earthquake disasters,
and maybe we have hurricanes.
And in the party world we have,
I don't know, birthday
parties, and we have weddings.
And each of these types of
frames invites us to fill in
particular slots.
So if we're reading a newspaper
story about a
wedding, we know that we're
going to be learning the same
sorts of things we will learn
about any party except there
is the additional information
that we expect that says
something about the bride
and the groom.
If we have a raw event and we
don't know anything more about
it than that, there's
a time and place.
If it's a disaster frame, it
gets a grizzly over here, but
if there's a disaster frame, we
might have the fatalities,
and how much it cost.
If it's an earthquake frame, we
need to know the magnitude
of the quake, and the
name of the fault.
If it's a hurricane, we have
the category and the name.
So each of these things up there
can be viewed, not just
an example of something, but as
a new frame all by itself.
As we mature, we have these
first four things as building
blocks, and then, we educate
ourselves, and we get all
those kinds of frames
that help us to
understand the world.
But how to fill those in from
a newspaper story can be
sometimes, quite a challenge.
Actually the worst thing to
understand is children's
stories because, and this was
determined experimentally when
people tried to understand
children's stories, because it
turns out that children's
stories are not simpler than
the stories we write
for adults.
In many cases, they're harder.
If you read about Shakespearean
plots, it's all
about intrigue, murder,
jealousy, greed, but when
you're trying to write a
children's story it can be
about anything.
And worse yet, the children's
story often raises problems
that you don't see in
newspaper stories.
Let me illustrate
that for you.
You want to read that story?
You have no trouble figuring it
out, of course, but think
about a poor machine.
It's struggling to understand
anything.
What's going to be
the problem?
It's going to have trouble
figuring out those pronoun
antecedents.
Look at them.
They're complicated.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
PATRICK WINSTON: Shut
[INAUDIBLE].
Oh, that's the way.
[INAUDIBLE].
Here are the pronouns.
One of them wanted
to buy a kite.
He has one, he said.
He will make you take it back.
So that's pretty hard.
Actually, the principal here
that I'm driving at is, when
you have a new story or any
story, if you have an old
story but you want to read
it-- when you want to
understand it quickly, the
instantiation of it quickly,
you need to be sure that, if
you're the storyteller, you
don't add to the burden of the
understanding any syntactic
difficulty.
So that's an example of
telling a story with
additional syntactic
difficulty.
No newspaper journalist
would ever write
the story like that.
Here's how they would
write it.
They would even give you a
clue that there's certain
information you're never
going to get, like
who told the story.
It's that reliable
sources business.
So this brings us to the final
bit that I want to deal with
today, and what I'm going to do
is, if you came into this
class today as a 97 pound
writing weakling, you're about
to emerge as a 250 pound
mountain of a writer.
Because I want to tell you a few
tricks that will make you
usually better as a writer,
especially if
you're Russian or German.
And here's how it works.
Rule one.
Because they place additional
syntactic burden on the
understanding of the story
by the reader.
So if you're telling somebody
about some difficult new
technical idea, the last thing
you want them to do is to
burden their syntactic processor
with figuring out
pronoun antecedents.
So don't use pronouns in you're
writing, technical
writing, at least, will
be much clearer.
By the way, why does this
especially apply to Germans
and Russians?
Is it because--
is this an ethnic origin
slur or is this a
fact about their language?
It's a fact about
their language.
Where is the fact?
Why can they get away with
pronoun usages that we cannot
get away with in English?
Yes, Andrew?
STUDENT: Gender and also--
PATRICK WINSTON: Gender, because
if you have all of
your nouns decorated with
gender, that reduces by three,
the potential for ambiguity
in the pronoun antecedent.
So you'll frequently find that
German and Russian writers
will have pronouns all over the
place that are perfectly
clear to them because
of gender.
They are interpretable by
English speakers when
translated because we don't
have the gender to
help us zero in.
So these things all have to
do with minimizing extra,
superfluous, gratuitous,
unnecessary
burden on the reader.
Number two is don't use
former or latter.
You see those words used
frequently in technical
writing, and guess what?
No human being ever encounters
those words without having to
stop and go back to figure out
what they refer to it.
So that's another example of
not placing any unnecessary
syntactic burden
on the reader.
And finally, don't call
a shovel a spade.
There's a habit, probably
instilled by well-meaning but
misadvised high school teachers,
that you shouldn't
repeat words, and so people go
to great lengths to use some
different word.
The problem is that the reader
doesn't know if the shift in
the word is deliberate and
attached to some subtle
meaning shift, or if it's just
adhering to some high school
teacher's admonition against
using the same word again.
So you don't want to say, oh,
the right way to dig this
particular hole is with a spade
and then switch to a
shovel because the reader can't
tell if it's deliberate,
accidental, or a consequence of
just the desire not to use
the same word.
So this is how you, with some
very simple mechanisms
grounded in AI, you can actually
make yourself into a
better writer by avoiding those
kinds of things that put
an unnecessary syntactic burden
on the people who are
reading your stuff.