Another week - another success

Finally got Cyc to work just like I wanted it to!
I contacted Larry from Cyc and he was able to give me a version which did actually work the way I wanted it to.
Now I am back on track.
Did lots of jobs for the "Searching for Sense" blog which is private, so you won't be able to see those results.

Matter of fact I will now check my reasoning ideas in the live environment of my Cyc-world.
The game of Ludo will serve as template for eventual problems.

But first I will have to look into yet some other papers to get this straight.

For those who've been following my blog:
Annotation of text is necessary to "transfer" text into something the computer can process. This process does not work that well fully automated. Parsers cannot cope with semantics and therefore make many mistakes.
My goal is to minimize those mistakes by using knowledge/reasoning on the texts that are processes. So far the average detection rate is close to 30%.
If my reasoning can lift this rate up to 50% or higher - my goal would be reached.

Human beings tend to regularly hit the 99-100% mark, by the way.
But then they don't precisely evaluate a 200 pages document in 15mins, but more 5 weeks.

Have a great weekend.

Damn I was busy ...

Hey folks,

sorry for not having posted in almost 2 weeks.
I was busy doing stuff which does not directly concern AutoModel.

I finally managed to get Cyc back on track, but my machine is going to kill me. It just takes forever to process. I do need more RAM. And now comes the fun part: My 10months old machine can only handle 2GB of RAM. Well, that is everything but not sufficient for what ResearchCyc demands form my main memory. Too bad.
The 8 core servers in our institute are not useful since Cyc is not running properly under win2k3 or Ubuntu. It does need Win2k/XP or Suse9.x
Again - too bad.

I have updated my mindmap and added some words to my diss.


As for what I am working on in the next few days, that would be:

• gaining deeper insight in handling inferences with Cyc
• using the Cyc Java API to handle requests and publish those in a very rudimentary way
• find out which queries/request would be most helpful while annotating the text.

That should be it for today.

Ontologies - don't always work the way you want them to

I talked to the guys from Cyc today since there Cyc-System would not let me rebuild "my world". I already tried compiling the world in serveral systems, as were:

• Ubuntu 7.1
• Debian 4.0
• Windows XP SP2
• Windows Vista

Most of the times the unpacking of the zips didn't work and I got a CRC-error. Therefore I contacted Cyc and they said they would like into the issue and tell me what was going on.

Let's see what the folks have to say tomorrow. So far I was able to resurrect an old backup of my Cyc-Database which seems to work just fine.
Working with this all day long I found out that I might need a server for running Cyc on. Having the whole system in a virtual machine on my desktop just isn't what I would call "fast".

Cyc just released a new Version of their "world" (V.1.1.2) which I already downloaded but could not get to work either. It's kind of frustrating.
Last time I dealt with it, it worked like charm. I'll give you an update.

Stability issues with ResearchCyc

The next weeks will all be in the name of ResearchCyc.
Unfortunately I crashed my Cyc-installation last week and couldn't get it back up and running till today. Therefore I planned to switch to a Unix-based server system for Cyc.
Well - damn me, but I should have read the instructions carefully. My favourite Linux (debian, that is) wouldn't be able to run ResearchCyc - it's only meant for RedHat and Suse.
Those guys are using some very specific binaries which couldn't be launched on debian etch. Too bad.
Well, I guess I am going back to another virtual Windows machine. Preferable Windows XP - that did work without any problems so far. Well, I still got a couple of hours left here ... that should suffice to get the system up and running.

Slides are online

The slides are online now.
You can get them here.