JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Bertram Raphael's SIR: a Computer Program for Semantic Information Retrieval made a surprise appearance tonight. It was published/printed by the Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information, Defense Documentation Center, Defense Supply Agency, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, June 1964. (156PP+12PP, plus one page of biographical information on Raphael with a bibliography including his work on LISP, the last entry dated May 1964). It is an oversized some-sort-of-photomechanical production, and may or may not be a very early and influential paper in artificial intelligence--it seems as though there are several approaches to that determination, none of which I can pass judgment on.
This is the Ph.D. dissertation by Raphael (b. 1936), who had the great Marvin Minsky as thesis supervisor.
Here's the abstract from an MIT publication Semantic Information Processing (1967) in which a form of this earlier paper appeared:
"SIR is a computer system, programmed in the LISP language, which accepts information and answers questions expressed in a restricted form of English. This system demonstrates what can reasonably be called an ability to "understand" semantic information. SIR's semantic and deductive ability is based on the construction of an internal model, which uses word associations and property lists, for the relational information normally conveyed in conversational statements. A format-matching procedure extracts semantic content from English sentences. If an input sentence is declarative, the system adds appropriate information to the model. If an input sentence is a question, the system searches the model until it either finds the answer or determines why it cannot find the answer. In all cases SIR reports its conclusions. The system has some capacity to recognize exceptions to general rules, resolve certain semantic ambiguities, and modify its model structure in order to save computer memory space. Judging from its conversational ability, SIR, is a first step toward intelligent man-machine communication. The author proposes a next step by describing how to construct a more general system which is less complex and yet more powerful than SIR. This proposed system contains a generalized version of the SIR model, a formal logical system called SIR1, and a computer program for testing the truth of SIR1 statements with respect to the generalized model by using partial proof procedures in the predicate calculus. The thesis also describes the formal properties of SIR1 and how they relate to the logical structure of SIR."-- Dspace http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6904
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