Saturday, November 21, 2009

Forms of semantic reasoning

So what does semantic programming get us?

The normal process of programming is to specify high-level syntactic structures that are interpreted and ramified, either into simpler or more detailed representations (e.g. macro systems or compilers) or into actual actions (e.g. interpreters or of course the CPU running machine code). A semantic structure can be used in the same way, of course: if I state that we'll be using a "file", then the Lexicon can be consulted for the definition of "file", and details can be filled in. This mode is more or less a very flexible macro system. I'll call this lookup, and it's pretty basic.

A macro system also includes lookup of syntactic structures (symbolic units) and the expression of semantic units. Clearly, this is already part of any macro system to the point that it might not even be seen as a separate mode of operation, but we make a distinction in semantic programming between the semantic and syntactic domains.

But it's the third mode that gets interesting. In recognition, the system searches through semantic configurations to find a matching unit. As a simple example, let's say we need to store some data in a permanent way. Part of the definition of a file is that it stores data permanently - recognition would find "file" as at least a partial solution for our problem.

So as far as I can tell, the different modes of semantic reasoning are:

1. Interpretation or lookup
2. Expression
3. Recognition

As time goes on, this notion will probably get a little firmer.

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