Re: [URW3 public] Re: [URW3] ... three questions based on the last telecon

>>What the sentence is about is important for our decision about 
>>uncertainty assignment - e.g. if I know a contradicting 
>>information, or a consequence from a trusted site, it will 
>>influence my uncertainty assignment.
>>Uncertainty about the weather is no more uncertain when the tome is gone
>
>So it appears that I may need to convey information on what 
>influenced my uncertainty assignment.  Note, this is not saying I 
>need to represent what the sentence is about but rather I may need 
>to point to the mechanisms that were developed by "other 
>communities" and that I am using as the (or a) basis of my 
>assessment.

I note here that probability is not truth-functional.  That is, if I 
know the probability of A and the probability of B, I don't 
necessarily know the probability of A-and-B.  This is a very 
important characteristic of probability. It is a source of great 
power, and it is also the reason straightforward attempts to do 
uncertainty propagation by attaching "certainty factors" to 
propositions and rules works only in very constrained problems.  This 
is important for us, because annotating sentences with uncertainty 
values isn't going to work for many interesting problems.

Kathy

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 03:31:42 UTC