text:
Foundations and Trends
Web Science
Vol.1,Nos.3–4 (2006) 199–327
2009 Y.Wilks and C.Brewster
Natural Language Processing as a Foundation of
the Semantic Web
By Yorick Wilks and Christopher Brewster
1 Introduction 201
2 The Semantic Web as Good Old Fashioned
Artificial Intelligence 206
2.1 The SWBlurs the Text-Program Distinction 208
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of
the SW 211
3 The SWas Trusted Databases 248
3.1 A Second View of the SW 248
3.2 The SWand the Representation of Tractable Scientific
Knowledge 250
3.3 The Need for a Third View of the SW 254
4 The SWUnderpinned by Natural Language
Processing 256
4.1 Natural Language and the SW:Annotation and the
Lower End of the SWDiagram 257
4.2 The Whole Web as a Corpus and a Move to Much Larger
Language Models 260
4.3 The SWand Point-of-View Phenomena 263
4.4 Using NLP to Build Ontologies 266
5 Conclusion 310
Acknowledgments 314
References 315
Foundations and Trends
Web Science
Vol.1,Nos.3–4 (2006) 199–327
2009 Y.Wilks and C.Brewster
Natural Language Processing as a
Foundation of the Semantic Web
Yorick Wilks
and Christopher Brewster
University of Oxford,UK
Aston University,UK,email@example.com
The main argument of this paper is that Natural Language Processing
(NLP) does,and will continue to,underlie the Semantic Web (SW),
including its initial construction from unstructured sources like the
World Wide Web (WWW),whether its advocates realise this or not.
Chiefly,we argue,such NLP activity is the only way up to a defensible
notion of meaning at conceptual levels (in the original SW diagram)
based on lower level empirical computations over usage.Our aim is
definitely not to claim logic-bad,NLP-good in any simple-minded way,
but to argue that the SW will be a fascinating interaction of these
two methodologies,again like the WWW (which has been basically
a field for statistical NLP research) but with deeper content.Only
NLP technologies (and chiefly information extraction) will be able to
provide the requisite RDF knowledge stores for the SW from existing
unstructured text databases in the WWW,and in the vast quantities
needed.There is no alternative at this point,since a wholly or mostly
hand-crafted SW is also unthinkable,as is a SW built from scratch
and without reference to the WWW.We also assume that,whatever
the limitations on current SW representational power we have drawn
attention to here,the SWwill continue to grow in a distributed manner
so as to serve the needs of scientists,even if it is not perfect.The WWW
has already shown how an imperfect artefact can become indispensable.
In the middle of a cloudy thing is another cloudy thing,
and within that another cloudy thing,inside which is
yet another cloudy thing...and in that is yet another
cloudy thing,inside which is something perfectly clear
and definite."
—Ancient Sufi saying
The newly developing field of Web Science has been defined as "the
science of decentralised information systems" [10] which clearly covers
a very broad area.Nonetheless the core focus of Web Science is the
Semantic Web (SW) conceived of as a more powerful,more functional
and more capable version of our current document and language centric
World Wide Web (WWW).This paper focusses on the question of
what kind of object this SW is to be.Our particular focus will be its
semantics and the relationship between knowledge representations and
natural language,a relationship concerning which this paper wishes to
express a definite perspective.This is a vast,and possibly ill-formed
issue,but the SW is no longer simply an aspiration in a magazine
article [11] but a serious research subject on both sides of the Atlantic
and beyond,with its own conferences and journals.So,even though
it may be beginning to exist in a demonstrable form,in the way the
WWW itself plainly does exist,it is a topic for research and about
which fundamental questions can be asked,as to its representations,
their meanings and their groundings,if any.
The position adopted here is that the concept of the SWhas two dis-
tinct origins,and this persists now in two differing lines of SWresearch:
one,closely allied to notions of documents and natural language (NL)
and one not.These differences of emphasis or content in the SWcarry
with them quite different commitments on what it is to interpret a
knowledge representation and what the method of interpretation has
to do with meaning in natural language.
We shall attempt to explore both these strands here,but our sym-
pathies will be with the NL branch of the bifurcation above,a view
that assumes that NL is,in some clear sense,our primary method of
conveying meaning and that other methods of conveying meaning (for-
malisms,science,mathematics,codes,etc.) are parasitic upon it.This
is not a novel view:it was once associated firmly with the philosophy of
Wittgenstein [197],who we shall claimis slightly more relevant to these
issues than is implied by Hirst's immortal,and satirical,line that "The
solution to any problem in artificial intelligence (AI) may be found in
the writings of Wittgenstein,though the details of the implementation
are sometimes rather sketchy [79]."
Later parts of the paper will explore the general issue of language
processing and its relevance to current,and possibly future,techniques
of web searching,and we shall do this by means of an examination of the
influential claims of Karen Sp¨arck Jones that there cannot be "meaning
codings" in the SW or Internet search.Having,we believe,countered
her arguments,we go on to examine in particular the meaning codings
expressed in ontologies,as they play so crucial a role in the SW.Our
core argument is that such representations can be sound as long as they
are empirically based.Finally,we turn to a methodology for giving such
an empirical base to ontologies and discuss how far that program has
yet succeeded.
There are a number of NLP technologies which will not be discussed
here;some have relationships to the Internet but they are not yet basic
technologies in the way those of content representation and search are
that we will discuss in the body of this paper.These include automatic
summarisation,text mining,and machine translation (MT).
MT is the oldest of these technologies and we will touch on its
role as a driver behind the introduction of statistical and data-based
methods into NLP in the late eighties.MT has a history almost fifty
years long,and basic descriptions and histories of its methods can be
found in Nirenburg et al.[130].The oldest functioning MT system
SYSTRAN is still alive and well and is believed to the basis of many
of the language translations offered on the Internet such as Babelfish
MT.This is a service that translates a webpage on demand for a user
with a fair degree of accuracy.The technology is currently shifting with
older language pairs being translated by SYSTRAN and newer ones by
empirical application of statistical methods to text corpora.
Text mining (TM) [90] is a technique that shares with Information
Retrieval (IR) a statistical methodology but,being linked directly to
the structure of databases,does not have the ability to develop in the
way IR has in recent decades by developing hybrid techniques with
NLP aspects.TM can be seen as a fusion of two techniques:first,the
gathering of information from text by some form of statistical pattern
learning and,secondly,the insertion of such structured data into a
database so as to carry out a search for patterns within the structured
data,hopefully novel patterns not intuitively observable.
Another well-defined NLP task is automatic summarisation,
described in detail in [110] and which takes an information source,
extracts content from it,and presents the most important content to
the user in a condensed form and in a manner sensitive to the user's or
application's needs.Computers have been producing summaries since
the original work of [108].Since then several methods and theories have
been applied including the use of tf ∗ idf measures,sentence position,
cue and title words;partial understanding using conceptual structures;
cohesive properties of texts (such as lexical chains) or rhetorical struc-
ture theory (RST).Most summarisation solutions today rely on a 'sen-
tence extraction' strategy where sentences are selected from a source
document according to some criterion and presented to the user by con-
catenating them in their original document order.This is a robust and
sometimes useful approach,but it does not guarantee the production of
a coherent and cohesive summary.Recent research has addressed the
problems of sentence extracts by incorporating some NL generation
techniques,but this is still in the research agenda.
We will give prominence to one particular NLP technology,in our
discussion of language,the SW and the Internet itself:namely,the
automatic induction of ontology structures.This is a deliberate choice,
because that technology seeks to link the distributional properties of
words in texts directly to the organising role of word-like terms in
knowledge bases,such as ontologies.If this can be done,or even par-
tially done,then it provides an empirical,procedural,way of linking
real words to abstract terms,whose meanings in logic formulas and
semantic representations has always been a focus of critical attention:
how,people have always asked,can these things that look like words
function as special abstract bearers of meaning in science and outside
normal contexts?Empirical derivation of such ontologies fromtexts can
give an answer to that question by grounding abstract use in concrete
use,which is close to what Wittgenstein meant when he wrote of the
need to "bring back words from their metaphysical to their everyday
uses" [197,Section 116].
As noted above,Web Science has been defined as "the science of
decentralised information systems" [10] and has been largely envisaged
as the SWwhich is " a vision of extending and adding value to the Web,
...intended to exploit the possibilities of logical assertion over linked
relational data to allow the automation of much information process-
ing." Such a view makes a number of key assumptions,assumptions
which logically underlie such a statement.They include the following:
that a suitable logical representational language will be found;
that there will be large quantities of formally structured rela-
tional data;
that it is possible to make logical assertions i.e.,inferences
over this data consistently;
that a sufficient body of knowledge can be represented in the
representational language to make the effort worthwhile.
We will seek to directly and indirectly challenge some of these
assumptions.We would argue that the fundamental decentralised infor-
mation on the web is text (unstructured data,as it is sometimes referred
to) and this ever growing body of text needs to be a fundamental source
of information for the SW if it is to succeed.This perspective places
NLP and its associated techniques like Information Extraction at the
core of the Semantic Web/Web Science enterprise.A number of con-
clusions follow from this which we will be exploring in part in this
Of fundamental relevance to our perspective is that the SW as a
programme of research and technology development has taken on the
mantel of artificial intelligence.When Berners-Lee stated that the SW
"will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages,creating
an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can
readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users" [11],this implied knowl-
edge representation,logic and ontologies,and as such is a programme
almost identical to which AI set itself from the early days (as a number
of authors have pointed out e.g.,Halpin [70]).This consequently makes
the question of how NLP interacts with AI all the more vital,especially
as the reality is that the World Wide Web consists largely of human
readable documents.
The structure of this paper is as follows:In Section 2,we look at the
SWas an inheritor of the objectives,ideals and challenges of traditional
AI.Section 3 considers the competing claim that in fact the SW will
consist exclusively of "trusted databases." In Section 4,we turn to the
viewthat the SWmust have its foundation on NL artefacts,documents,
and we introduce the notion of ontology learning from text in this
section as well.This is followed by a brief conclusion.
The SW as Good Old Fashioned AI
The relation between philosophies of meaning,such as Wittgenstein's,
and classic AI (or GOFAI as it is often known:Good Old Fashioned
AI [73]) is not an easy one,as the Hirst quotation cited above implies.
GOFAI remains committed to some form of logical representation for
the expression of meanings and inferences,even if not the standard
forms of the predicate calculus.Most issues of the AI journal consist of
papers within this genre.
Some have taken the initial presentation of the SWby Berners-Lee
et al.to be a restatement of the GOFAI agenda in new and fashionable
WWW terms [11].In that article,the authors described a system of
services,such as fixing up a doctor's appointment for an elderly rela-
tive,which would require planning and access to the databases of both
the doctor's and relative's diaries and synchronising them.This kind of
planning behaviour was at the heart of GOFAI,and there has been a
direct transition (quite outside the discussion of the SW) from decades
of work on formal knowledge representation in AI to the modern dis-
cussion of ontologies.This is clearest in work on formal ontologies rep-
resenting the content of science e.g.,[82,138],where many of the same
individuals have transferred discussion and research fromone paradigm
to the other.All this has been done within what one could call the
standard Knowledge Representation assumption within AI.This work
goes back to the earliest work on systematic Knowledge Representa-
tion by McCarthy and Hayes [116],which we could take as defining core
GOFAI.A key assumption of all such work was that the predicates in
such representations merely look like English words but are in fact for-
mal objects,loosely related to the corresponding English,but without
its ambiguity,vagueness and ability to acquire new senses with use.
The SW incorporates aspects of the formal ontologies movement,
which now can be taken to mean virtually all the content of classical
AI Knowledge Representation,rather than any system of merely hier-
archical relations,which is what the word "ontology" used to convey.
More particularly,the SWmovement envisages the (automatic) anno-
tation of the texts of the WWWwith a hierarchy of annotations up to
the semantic and logical,which is a claim virtually indistinguishable
from the old GOFAI assumption that the true structure of language
was its underlying logical form.Fortunately,SW comes in more than
one form,some of which envisage statistical techniques,as the basis
of the assignment of semantic and logical annotations,but the under-
lying similarity to GOFAI is clear.One could also say that semantic
annotation,so conceived,is the inverse of Information Extraction (IE),
done not at analysis time but,ultimately,at generation time without
the writer being aware of this (since one cannot write and annotate at
the same time).SWis as,it were,producer,rather than consumer,IE.
It must also be noted that very few of the complex theories of
knowledge representation in GOFAI actually appear within SW con-
tributions so far.These include McCarthy and Hayes fluents,[116],
McCarthy's [117] later autoepistemic logic,Hayes' Na¨ıve Physics [74],
Bobrow and Winograd's KRL [13],to name but a few prominent exam-
ples.A continuity of goals between GOFAI and the SWhas not meant
continuity of research traditions and this is both a gain and a loss:
the gain of simpler schemes of representation which are probably com-
putable;a loss because of the lack of sophistication in current schemes of
the DAML/OIL/OWL (http://www.w3.org/TR/daml+oil-reference)
family,and the problem of whether they now have the representational
power for the complexity of the world,common sense or scientific.
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
Two other aspects of the SW link it back directly to the goals of
GOFAI:one is the rediscovery of a formal semantics to "justify" the
SW.This is now taken to be expressed in terms of URIs (Universal
Resource Indicator:basic objects on the web),which are usually illus-
trated by means of entities like lists of zip codes,with much discussion
of how such a notion will generalise to produce objects into which
all web expressions can "bottom out." This concern,for non-linguistic
objects as the ultimate reality,is of course classic GOFAI.
Secondly,one can see this from the point of view of Karen Sp¨arck
Jones's emphasis on the "primacy of words" and words standing for
themselves,as it were:this aspect of the SW is exactly what Sp¨arck
Jones meant by her "AI doesn't work in a world without semantic
objects" [167].In the SW,with its notion of universal annotation of web
texts into both semantic primitives of undefined status and the ultimate
URIs,one can see the new form of opposition to that view,which we
shall explore in more detail later in this section.The WWWwas basi-
cally words if we ignore pictures,tables and diagrams for the moment
but the vision of the SW is that of the words backed up by,or even
replaced by,their underlying meanings expressed in some other way,
including annotations and URIs.Indeed,the current SWformalism for
underlying content,usually called RDF triples (for Resource Descrip-
tion Formalism),is one very familiar indeed to those with memories
of the history of AI:namely,John-LOVES-Mary,a form reminiscent
at once of semantic nets (of arcs and nodes [198]),semantic templates
[183],or,after a movement of LOVES to the left,standard first-order
predicate logic.Only the last of these was full GOFAI,but all sought
to escape the notion of words standing simply for themselves.
There have been at least two other traditions of input to what we
now call the SW,and we shall discuss one in some detail:namely,
the way in which the SW concept has grown from the traditions of
document annotation.
2.1 The SW Blurs the Text-Program Distinction
The view of the SWsketched above has been that the IE technologies
at its base (i.e.,on the classic 2001 diagram) are technologies that add
2.1 The SWBlurs the Text-Program Distinction
"the meaning of a text" to web content in varying degrees and forms.
These also constitute a blurring of the distinction between language
and knowledge representation,because the annotations are themselves
forms of language,sometimes very close indeed to the language they
annotate.This process at the same time blurs the distinction between
programs and language itself,a distinction that has already been
blurred historically from both directions,by two contrary assertions:
(1) Texts are really programs (one form of GOFAI).
(2) Programs are really texts.
As to the first,there is Hewitt's [78] claim that "language is essen-
tially a side effect" in AI programming and knowledge manipulation.
Longuet–Higgins [105] also devoted a paper to the claim that English
was essentially a high-level programming language.Dijkstra's view of
natural language (personal communication) was essentially that natu-
ral languages were really not up to the job they had to do,and would
be better replaced by precise programs,which is close to being a form
of the first view.
Opposing this is a smaller group,what one might termthe Wittgen-
steinian opposition (2005),which is the view that natural language is
and always must be the primary knowledge representation device,and
all other representations,no matter what their purported precision,
are in fact parasitic upon language —in the sense that they could not
exist if language did not.The reverse is not true,of course,and was not
for most of human history.Such representations can never be wholly
divorced from language,in terms of their interpretation and use.This
section is intended as a modest contribution to that tradition:but a
great deal more can be found in [131].
On such a view,systematic annotations are just the most recent
bridge from language to programs and logic,and it is important to
remember that,not long ago,it was perfectly acceptable to assume that
a knowledge representation must be derivable from an unstructured
form,i.e.natural language.Thus,Woods [199] in 1975:
"A KR language must unambiguously represent any
interpretation of a sentence (logical adequacy),have a
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
method for translating from natural language to that
representation,and must be usable for reasoning."
The emphasis there is a method of going from the less to the more
formal,a process which inevitably imposes a relation of dependency
between the two representational forms (language and logic).This gap
has opened and closed in different research periods:in the original
McCarthy and Hayes [116] writings on KR in AI,it is clear,as with
Hewitt and Dijkstra's views (mentioned earlier),that language was
thought vague and dispensable.The annotation movement associated
with the SWcan be seen as closing the gap in the way in which Woods
The separation of the annotations into metadata (as opposed to
leaving them within a text,as in Latex or SGML style annotations)
has strengthened the view that the original language from which the
annotation was derived is dispensable,whereas the infixing of annota-
tions in a text suggests that the whole (original plus annotations) still
forms some kind of object.Notice here that the "dispensability of the
text" view is not dependent on the type of representation derived,in
particular to logical or quasi-logical representations.Schank [160] cer-
tainly considered the text dispensable after his conceptual dependency
representations had been derived,because he believed them to contain
the whole meaning of the text,implicit and explicit,even though his
representations would not be considered any kind of formal KR.This
is a key issue that divides opinion here:can we know that any repre-
sentation whatsoever contains all and only the meaning content of a
text,and what would it be like to know that?
Standard philosophical problems,like this one,may or may not
vanish as we push ahead with annotations to bridge the gap from text
to meaning representations,whether or not we then throw away the
original text.Lewis [102] in his critique of Fodor and Katz,and of any
similar non-formal semantics,would have castigated all such annota-
tions as "markerese":his name for any mark up coding with objects
still recognisably within NL,and thus not reaching to any meaning out-
side language.The SWmovement,at least as described in this section,
takes this criticism head on and continues onward,hoping URIs will
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
solve semantic problems because they are supposed to be dereferenced
sometimes by pointing to the actual entity rather than a representation
(for example to an actual telephone number).
That is to say,it accepts that a SW even if based on language via
annotations,will provide sufficient "inferential traction" with which to
run web-services.But is this plausible?Can all you want to know be
put in RDF triples,and can they then support the subsequent reason-
ing required?Even when agents thus based seem to work in practice,
nothing will satisfy a critic like Lewis except a web based on a firm
(i.e.,formal and extra-symbolic) semantics and effectively unrelated to
language at all.But a century of experience with computational logic
has by now shown us that this cannot be had outside narrow and com-
plete domains,and so the SW may be the best way of showing that a
non-formal semantics can work effectively,just as language itself does,
and in some of the same ways.
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the
Semantics of the SW
Karen Sp¨arck Jones in her critique of the SWcharacterised it much as
we have above [170].She used a theme she had deployed before against
much non-empirical NLP stating that "words stand for themselves"
and not for anything else.This claim has been the basis for successful
information retrieval (IR) in the WWW and elsewhere.Content,for
her,cannot be recoded in any general way,especially if it is general
content as opposed to that from some very specific domain,such as
medicine,where she seemed to believe technical ontologies may be pos-
sible as representations of content.As she put it mischievously:IR has
gained from "decreasing ontological expressiveness".
Her position is a restatement of the traditional problem of "recod-
ing content" by means of other words (or symbols closely related
to words,such as thesauri,semantic categories,features,primitives,
etc.).This task is what automated annotation attempts to do on an
industrial scale.Sp¨arck Jones' key example is (in part):"A Charles II
parcel-gilt cagework cup,circa 1670." What,she asks,can be recoded
there,into any other formalism,beyond the relatively trivial form:
{object type:CUP}?
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
What,she asks,of the rest of that (perfectly real and useful)
description of an artefact in an auction catalogue,can be rendered
other than in the exact words of the catalogue (and of course their
associated positional information in the phrase)?This is a powerful
argument,even though the persuasiveness of this example may rest
more than she would admit on it being one of a special class of
cases.But the fact remains that content can,in general,be expressed
in other words:it is what dictionaries,translations and summaries
routinely do.Where she is right is that GOFAI researchers are wrong
to ignore the continuity of their predicates and classifiers with the
language words they clearly resemble,and often differ from only by
being written in upper case (an issue discussed at length in [131]).
What can be done to ameliorate this impasse?
One method is that of empirical ontology construction from cor-
pora [19,21],now a well-established technology,even if not yet capable
of creating complete ontologies.This is a version of the Woods quote
above,according to which a knowledge representation (an ontologi-
cal one in this case) must be linked to some NL text to be justifi-
ably derived.The derivation process itself can then be considered to
give meaning to the conceptual classifier terms in the ontology,in a
way that just writing them down a priori does not.An analogy here
would be with grammars:when linguists wrote these down "out of
their heads" they were never much use as input to programs to parse
language into structures.Now that grammar rules can be effectively
derived from corpora,parsers can,in their turn,produce better struc-
tures from sentences by making use of such rules in parsers.
A second method for dealing with the impasse is to return to the
observation that we must take "words as they stand" (Sp¨arck Jones).
But perhaps,to adapt Orwell,not all words are equal;perhaps some are
aristocrats,not democrats.On that view,what were traditionally called
"semantic primitives" remain just words but are also special words:a
set that form a special language for translation or coding,albeit one
whose members remain ambiguous,like all language words.If there are
such "privileged" words,perhaps we can have explanations,innateness
(even definitions) alongside an empiricism of use.It has been known
since Olney et al.[135] that counts over the words used in definitions
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
in actual dictionaries (Webster's Third,in his case) reveal a very clear
set of primitives on which all the dictionary's definitions rest.
By the term "empiricism of use," we mean the approach that has
been standard in NLP since the work of Jelinek [89] and which has
effectively driven GOFAI-style approaches based on logic to the periph-
ery of NLP.It will be remembered that Jelinek attempted to build a
machine translation system at IBM based entirely on machine learn-
ing from bilingual corpora.He was not ultimately successful — in the
sense that his results never beat those from the leading hand-crafted
system,SYSTRAN —but he changed the direction of the field of NLP
as researchers tried to reconstruct,by empirical methods,the linguis-
tic objects on which NLP had traditionally rested:lexicons,grammars,
etc.The barrier to further advances in NLP by these methods seems to
be the "data sparsity" problem to which Jelinek originally drew atten-
tion,namely that language is "a system of rare events" and a complete
model,at say the trigram level,for a language seems impossibly diffi-
cult to derive,and so much of any new,unseen,text corpus will always
remain uncovered by such a model.
In this section,we will provide a response to Sp¨arck Jones' views on
the relationship of NLP in particular,and AI in general,to IR.In the
spirit of exploring the potential identification of the SW with GOFAI
(the theme of this section),we will investigate her forceful argument
that AI had much to learn from that other,more statistical,discipline
which has,after all,provided the basis for web search as we have it now.
We first question her arguments for that claim and try to expose
the real points of difference,pointing out that certain recent develop-
ments in IR have pointed in the other direction:to the importation of
a metaphor recently into IR from machine translation,which one could
consider part of AI,if taken broadly,and in the sense of symbol-based
reasoning that Sp¨arck Jones intends.We go on to argue that the core
of Sp¨arck Jones' case against AI (and therefore,by extension,the SW
conceived as GOFAI) is not so much the use of statistical methods,
which some parts of AI (e.g.,machine vision) have always shared with
IR,but with the attitude to symbols,and her version of the AI claim
that words are themselves and nothing else,and no other symbols can
replace or code themwith equivalent meanings.This claim,if true,cuts
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
at the heart of symbolic AI and knowledge representation in general.
We present a case against her view,and also make the historical point
that the importation of statistical and word-based methods into lan-
guage processing,came not from IR at all,but from speech processing.
IR's influence is not what Sp¨arck Jones believes it to be,even if its
claims are true.
Next,we reverse the question and look at the traditional arguments
that IR needs some of what AI has to offer.We agree with Sp¨arck
Jones that many of those arguments are false but point out some areas
where that need may come to be felt in the future,particularly in
the use of structures queries,rather than mere strings of key words,
and also because the classic IR paradigm using very long queries is
being replaced by the Google paradigm of search based on two or three
highly ambiguous key terms.In this new IR-lite world,it is not at all
clear that IR is not in need of NLP techniques.None of this should
be misconstrued as any kind of attack on Sp¨arck Jones:we take for
granted the power and cogency of her views on this subject over the
years.Our aim is to see if there is any way out,and we shall argue that
one such is to provide a role for NLP in web-search and by analogy in
the SWin general.
2.2.1 AI and NLP in Need of IR?
Speaking of AI in the past,one sometimes refers to "classical" or
"traditional" AI,and the intended contrast with the present refers to
the series of shocks that paradigm suffered from connectionism and
neural nets to adaptive behaviour theories.The shock was not of the
new,of course,because those theories were mostly improved versions of
cybernetics which had preceded classical AI and been almost entirely
obliterated by it.The classical AI period was logic or symbol-based
but not entirely devoid of numbers,of course,for AI theories of vision
flourished in close proximity to pattern-recognition research.Although,
representational theories in computer vision sometimes achieved promi-
nence [111],nonetheless it was always,at bottom,an engineering sub-
discipline with all that that entailed.But when faced with any attempt
to introduce quantitative methods into classical core AI in the 1970s,
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
John McCarthy would always respond "But where do all these numbers
come from?"
Now we know better where they come from,and nowhere have
numbers been more prominent than in the field of IR,one of similar
antiquity to AI,but with which it has until now rarely tangled
intellectually,although on any broad definition of AI as "modelling
intelligent human capacities",one might imagine that IR,like MT,
would be covered;yet neither has traditionally been seen as part of
AI.On second thoughts perhaps,modern IR does not fall there under
that definition simply because,before computers,humans were not
in practice able to carry out the kinds of large-scale searches and
comparisons operations on which IR rests.And even though IR often
cohabits with Library Science,which grew out of card indexing in
libraries,there is perhaps no true continuity between those sub-fields,
in that IR consists of operations of indexing and retrieval that humans
could not carry out in normal lifetimes.
18.104.22.168 Sp¨arck Jones' Case Against AI
If any reader is beginning to wonder why we have even raised the
question of the relationship of AI to IR,it is because Sp¨arck Jones
[168],in a remarkable paper,has already done so and argued that AI has
much to learn fromIR.In this section,our aimis to redress that balance
a little and answer her general lines of argument.Her main target is
AI researchers seen as what she calls "The Guardians of content".We
shall set out her views and then contest them,arguing both in her
own terms,and by analogy with the case of MT in particular,that the
influence is perhaps in the other direction,and that is shown both by
limitations on statistical methods that MT developments have shown
in the last 15 years,and by a curious reversal of terminology in IR that
has taken place in the same period.However,the general purpose of
this section will not be to redraw boundaries between these sub-fields,
but will argue that sub-fields of NLP/AI are now increasingly hard to
distinguish:not just MT,but IE and Question Answering (QA) are now
beginning to form a general information processing functionality that
is making many of these arguments moot.The important questions in
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
Sp¨arck Jones resolve to one crucial question:what is the primitive level
of language data?Her position on this is shown by the initial quotation
below,after which come a set of statements based on two sources [167,
168] that capture the essence of her views on the central issues:
(1) "One of these [simple,revolutionary IR] ideas is taking
words as they stand" (1990).
(2) "The argument that AI is required to support the integrated
information management system of the future is the heady
vision of the individual user at his workstation in a whole
range of activities calling on,and also creating,informa-
tion objects of different sorts" (1990).
(3) "What might be called the intelligent library" (1990).
(4) "What therefore is needed to give effect to the vision is
the internal provision of (hypertext) objects and links,and
specifically in the strong formof an AI-type knowledge base
and inference system" (1990).
(5) "The AI claim in its strongest form means that the knowl-
edge base completely replaces the text base of the docu-
ments" (1990).
(6) "It is natural,therefore,if the system cannot be guaranteed
to be able to use the knowledge base to answer questions on
the documents of the form 'Does X do Y?' as opposed to
questions of the form 'Are there documents about X doing
Y?' to ask why we need a knowledge base" (1990).
(7) "The AI approach is fundamentally misconceived because
it is based on the wrong general model,of IR as QA"
(8) "What reason can one have for supposing that the differ-
ent [multimodal,our interpolation] objects involved could
be systematically related via a common knowledge base,
and characterised in a manner independent of ordinary
language" (1990).
(9) "We should think therefore of having an access structure
in the form of a network thrown over the underlying infor-
mation objects" (1990).
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
(10) "A far more powerful AI system than any we can realisti-
cally foresee will not be able to ensure that answers it could
give to questions extracted from the user's request would
be appropriate" (1999).
(11) "Classical document retrieval thus falls in the class of AI
tasks that assist the human user but cannot,by definition,
replace them" (1999).
(12) "This [IR] style of representation is the opposite of the
classical AI type and has more in common with connec-
tionist ones" (1999).
(13) "The paper's case is that important tasks that can be
labelled information management are fundamentally inex-
act" (1999).
(14) "Providing access to information could cover much more
of AI than might be supposed" (1999).
These quotations suffice to establish a complex position,and one
should note in passing the prescience of quotations (2,3,4,10) in their
vision of a system of information access something like the WWW we
now have.The quotations indicate four major claims in the papers from
which they come,which we shall summarise as follows:
A Words are self-representing and cannot be replaced by any
more primitive representation;all we,as technicians with
computers,can add are sophisticated associations (including
ontologies) between them (quotations 1,10,14).
B Core AI–KR (and hence the SWconceived as GOFAI) seeks
to replace words,with their inevitable inexactness,with exact
logical or at least non-word-based representations (quota-
tions 5,6,9).
C Human information needs are vague:we want relevant infor-
mation,not answers to questions.In any case,AI–KR (and
SW-as-GOFAI) cannot answer questions (quotations 7,8,11,
D The relationship between human reader and human author
is the fundamental relationship and is mediated by relevant
documents (which in SW terms refers to the level of trust).
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
Anyway,systems based on association can do some kinds of
(inexact) reasoning and could be used to retrieve relevant
axioms in a KR system (quotations 5,13,14).
We should not see the issues here as simply ones of Sp¨arck Jones's
critique (based on IR) of "core," traditional or symbolic AI,for her
views connect directly to an internal interface within AI itself,one
about which the subject has held an internal dialogue for many years,
and in many of its subareas.The issue is that of the nature of and
necessity for structured symbolic representations,and their relationship
to the data they claim to represent.
So,to take an example from NLP,Schank [160] always held that
Conceptual Dependency (CD) representations not only represented lan-
guage strings but made the original dispensable,so that,for example,
there need be no access to the source string in the process of machine
translation after it had been represented by CD primitives;Charniak
[28] and Wilks [186] in their different ways denied this and claimed that
the surface string retained essential information not present in any rep-
resentation.Schank's position here can be seen as exactly the type that
Sp¨arck Jones is attacking,but it was not,of course,the only AI view.
But,more generally,the kind of AI view that Sp¨arck Jones had in
her sights proclaimed the centrality and adequacy of knowledge repre-
sentations,and their independence of whatever language would be used
to describe what it is in the world they represent (that is the essence of
her claims A and B).The key reference for the view she rejects would
be McCarthy and Hayes [116].Its extreme opposite,in machine vision
at least,would be any view that insists on the primacy of data over any
representation [56].The spirit of Chomsky,of course,hovers over the
position,in language modelling at least,that asserts the primacy of a
(correct) representation over any amount of data.Indeed,he produced
a range of ingenious arguments as to why no amount of data could
possibly produce the representations the brain has for language struc-
ture [31],and those arguments continued to echo through the dispute.
For example,in the dispute between Fodor and Pollack [50,142] as to
whether or not nested representations could be derived by any form of
machine learning from language data:Fodor denied this was possible
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
but lost the argument when Pollack [142] produced his Recursive Auto-
Associative Networks that could do exactly that.
Again,and now somewhat further from core AI,one can see the
issue in Schvaneveldt's Pathfinder networks [161] which he showed,
in psychological experiments,could represent the expertise of fighter
pilots in associationist networks of terms,a form very close to the data
from which it was derived.This work was a direct challenge to the con-
temporary expert-systems movement for representing such expertise by
means of high-level rules.
18.104.22.168 Some Countervailing Considerations from AI
It should be clear from the last paragraphs that Sp¨arck Jones is not
targeting all of AI,which might well be taken to include IR on a broad
definition,but a core of AI,basically the strong representationalist tra-
dition,one usually (but not always,as in the case of Schank above)
associated with the use of first-order predicate calculus.And when one
writes of a broad definition,it could only be one that does not restrict
AI to the modelling of basic human functionalities,the notion behind
Papert's original observation that AI could not and should not model
superhuman faculties,ones that no person could have.In some sense,
of course,classic IR is superhuman:there was no pre-existing human
skill,as there was with seeing,talking or even chess playing that cor-
responded to the search through millions of words of text on the basis
of indices.But if one took the view,by contrast,that theologians,
lawyers and,later,literary scholars were able,albeit slowly,to search
vast libraries of sources for relevant material,then on that view IR is
just the optimisation of a human skill and not a superhuman activ-
ity.If one takes that view,IR is a proper part of AI,as traditionally
However,that being said,it may be too much a claim (D above)
in the opposite direction to suggest,as Sp¨arck Jones does in a remark
at the end of one of the papers cited,that core AI may need IR to
search among the axioms of a formalised theory [168] in order to locate
relevant axioms to compose a proof.It is certain that resolution,or
any related proof program,draws in potential axioms based on the
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
appearance of identical predicates in them (i.e.,to those in the theo-
rem to be proved).But it would be absurd to see that as a technique
borrowed from or in any way indebted to IR;it is simply the obvious
and only way to select those axioms that might plausibly take part in
A key claim of Sp¨arck Jones's (in (A) and especially (B) above) is
the issue one might call primitives,where one can take that to be either
the predicates of a logical representation,as in McCarthy and Hayes
and most AI reasoning work,or the more linguistic primitives,present
in Schank's CD work and in preference semantics [49,193].Her argu-
ment is that words remain their own best interpretation,and cannot
be replaced by some other artificial coding that adequately represents
their meaning.Sp¨arck Jones's relationship to this tradition is complex:
her own thesis [166,194] although containing what now are seen as IR
clustering algorithms applied to a thesaurus,was intended,in her own
words,to be a search for semantic primitives for MT.Moreover,she
contributed to the definition and development of Cambridge Language
Research Unit's own semantic interlingua NUDE (for "naked ideas").
That tradition has been retained in AI and computational linguistics,
both as a basis for coding lexical systems (e.g.,the work of Puste-
jovsky [145]) and as another form of information to be established on
an empirical basis from corpora and can be seen in early work on the
derivation of preferences from corpora by Resnik [151],Grishman and
Sterling [65],Riloff and Lehnert [152] and others.Work of this type
certainly involves the exploitation of semantic redundancy,both qual-
itatively,in the early preference work cited above,and quantitatively,
in the recent tradition of work on systematic Word Sense Disambigua-
tion which makes use of statistical methods exploiting the redundancy
already coded in thesauri and dictionaries.Unless Sp¨arck Jones really
intends to claimthat any method of language analysis exploiting statis-
tics and redundancy (like those just cited) is really IR,then there is
little basis to her claim that AI has a lot to learn from IR in this area,
since it has its own traditions by now of statistical methodology and
evaluation and,as we shall show below,these came into AI/NLP from
speech research pioneered by Jelinek,and indigenous work on machine
learning,and not at all from IR.
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
Let us now turn to another of Sp¨arck Jones's major claims,
(C above) that QA is not a real task meeting a real human need,but
that the real task is the location of relevant information,presumably in
the form of documents,which is IR's classic function.First,one must
be clear that there has never been any suggestion in mainstream AI
that its techniques could perform the core IR task.To find relevant
documents,as opposed to their content,one would have to invent IR,
had it not existed;there simply is no choice.IE,on the other hand,
[52] is a content searching technique,usually with a representational
non-statistical component,designed to access factual content directly,
and that process usually assumes a prior application of IR to find rele-
vant material to search.The application of an IR phase prior to IE in
a sense confirms Sp¨arck Jones's "primacy of relevance," but also con-
firms the independence and viability of QA,which is nowadays seen
as an extension of IE.IE,by seeking facts of specific forms,is always
implicitly asking a question (i.e.,What facts are there matching the
following general form?).
However,Saggion and Gaizauskas [157] has questioned this conven-
tional temporal primacy of IR in an IE application,and has done so by
pointing out that the real answers to IE/QA questions are frequently to
be found very far down the (relevance based) percentiles of returns from
this prior IR phase.The reason for this is that if one asks,say,"What
colour is the sky?" then,in the IR phase,the term "colour/color" is
a very poor index term for relevant documents likely to contain the
answer.In other words,"relevance" in the IR sense (and unboosted
by augmentation with actual colour names in this case) is actually a
poor guide to where answers to this question are to be found,and
Gaizauskas uses this point to question the conventional relationship of
IR and IE/QA.
One could,at this point,perhaps reverse Sp¨arck Jones's jibe at
AI as the self-appointed "Guardians of Content" and suggest that IR
may not be as much the "Guardian of relevance" as she assumes.But
whatever is the case there,it seems pretty clear that wanting answers
to questions is sometimes a real human need,even outside the world
of TV quiz shows.The website Ask Jeeves seemed to meet some real
need,even if it was not always successful,and QA has been seen as a
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
traditional AI task,back to the classic book by Lehnert [98].Sp¨arck
Jones is,of course,correct that those traditional methods were not
wholly successful and did not,as much early NLP did not,lead to
regimes of evaluation and comparison.But that in no way reflects on
the need for QA as a task.
In fact,of course,QA has now been revived as an evaluable
technique (see below),as part of the general revival of empirical linguis-
tics,and has been,as we noted already,a development of existing IE
techniques,combined in some implementations with more traditional
abductive reasoning [71].The fact of its being an evaluable technique
would have made it very hard for Sp¨arck Jones later to dismiss QA
as a task in the way she did earlier,since she went so far elsewhere in
identifying real NLP with evaluable techniques [171].
Over a 20- year period,computational QA has moved froma wholly
knowledge-based technique (as in Lehnert's work) to where it now is,
as fusion of statistical and knowledge-based techniques.Most,if not all,
parts of NLP have made the same transition over that period,starting
with apparently straightforward tasks like part-of-speech tagging [55]
and rising up to semantic and conceptual areas like word-sense dis-
ambiguation [174] and dialogue management [32] in addition to QA.
We shall now return to the origin of this empirical wave in NLP and
re-examine its sources,in order to support the claim that new and
interesting evidence can be found there for the current relationship
of AI and IR.In her paper,Sp¨arck Jones acknowledges the empirical
movement in NLP and its closeness in many ways to IR techniques,but
she does not actually claim the movement as an influence from IR.We
shall argue that,on the contrary,the influence on NLP that brought
in the empirical revolution was principally from speech research,and
in part from traditional statistical AI (i.e.,machine learning) but in no
way from IR.On the contrary,the influences detectable are all on IR
from outside.
220.127.116.11 Jelinek's Revolution in MT and Its Relevance
A piece of NLP history that may not be familiar to AI researchers is,
we believe,highly relevant here.Jelinek,Brown and others at IBM
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
New York began to implement around 1988 a plan of research to
import the statistical techniques that had been successful in Auto-
matic Speech Processing (ASR) into NLP and into MT in particular.
DARPA supported Jelinek's system CANDIDE [24,25] at the same
time as rival symbolic systems (such as PANGLOSS [128,129]) using
more traditional methods.
The originality of CANDIDE was to employ none of the normal
translation resources within an MT system (e.g.,grammars,lexicons,
etc.) but only statistical functions trained on a very large bilingual
corpus:200 million words of the French–English parallel text from
Hansard,the Canadian parliamentary proceedings.CANDIDE made
use of a battery of statistical techniques that had loose relations to those
used in ASR:alignment of the parallel text sentences,then of words
between aligned French and English sentences,and n-gram models (or
language models as they would now be called) of the two language
separately,one of which was used to smooth the output.Perhaps the
most remarkable achievement was that given 12 French output words
so found (output sentences could not be longer than that) the genera-
tion algorithm could determine the unique best order (out of billions)
for an output translation with a high degree of success.The CAN-
DIDE teamdid not describe their work this way,but rather as machine
learning from a corpus that,given what they called an "equation of
MT" produced the most likely source sentence for any putative output
The CANDIDE results were at roughly the 50% level,of sentences
translated correctly or acceptably in a test set held back from training.
Given that the team had no access to what one might call "knowledge
of French",this was a remarkable achievement and far higher than most
MT experts would have predicted,although CANDIDE never actually
beat SYSTRAN,the standard and traditional symbolic MT system
that is the world's most used system.At this point (about 1990) there
was a very lively debate between what was then called the rationalist
and empiricist approaches to MT,and Jelinek began a new program
of trying to remedy what he saw as the main fault of his system by
what would now be called a "hybrid" approach,one that was never
fully developed because the IBM team dispersed.
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
The problem Jelinek saw is best called "data sparseness":his sys-
tem's methods could not improve even applied to larger corpora of
any reasonable size because language events are so rare.Word trigrams
tend to be 80% novel in corpora of any conceivable size,an extraordi-
nary figure.Jelinek therefore began a hybrid programto overcome this,
which was to try to develop from scratch the standard NLP resources
used in MT,such as grammars and lexicons,in the hope of using them
to generalise across word or structure classes,so as to combat data
sparseness.So,if the system knew elephants and dogs were in a class,
then it could predict a trigram [X Y ELEPHANT] from having seen
the trigram [X Y DOG] or vice versa.
It was this second,unfulfilled,program of Jelinek that,more than
anything else,began the empiricist wave in NLP that still continues,
even though the statistical work on learning part-of-speech tags actu-
ally began earlier at Lancaster under Leech [55].IBMbought the rights
to this work and Jelinek then moved forward fromalignment algorithms
to grammar learning,and the rest is the historical movement we are
still part of.
But it is vital to note consequences of this:first,that the influences
brought to bear to create modern empirical,data-driven,NLP came
from the ASR experience and machine learning algorithms,a tradi-
tional part of AI by then.They certainly did not come from IR,as
Sp¨arck Jones might have expected given what she wrote.Moreover,
and this has only recently been noticed,the research metaphors have
now reversed,and techniques derived from Jelinek's work have been
introduced into IR under names like "MT approaches to IR" ([8],and
see below) which is precisely a reversal of the direction of influence that
Sp¨arck Jones argued for.
We shall mention some of this work in the next section,but we
must draw a second moral here from Jelinek's experience with CAN-
DIDE and one that bears directly on Sp¨arck Jones's claim that words
are their own best representations (Claim A above).The empiricist
program of recreating lexicons and grammars from corpora,begun
by Jelinek and the topic of much NLP in the last 15 years,was
started precisely because working with self-representations of words
(e.g.,n-grams) was inadequate because of their rarity in any possible
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
data:80% of word trigrams are novel,as we noted earlier under the
term "data sparseness." Higher-level representations are designed to
ameliorate this effect,and that remains the case whether those repre-
sentations are a priori (like Wordnet,LDOCE
or Roget's Thesaurus)
or themselves derived from corpora.
Sp¨arck Jones could reply here that she did not intend to target such
work in her critique of AI,but only core AI (logic or semantics based)
that eliminates words as part of a representation,rather than adds
higher-level representation to the words.There can be no doubt that
even very low-level representations,however obtained,when added to
words can produce results that would be hard to imagine without them.
A striking case is the use of part-of-speech tags (like PROPERNOUN)
where,given a word sense resource structured in the way the LDOCE
is,Stevenson and Wilks [174] were able to show that those part of
speech tags alone can resolve large-scale word sense ambiguity (called
homographs in LDOCE) at the 92% level.Given such a simple tag-
ging,almost all word sense ambiguity is trivially resolved against that
particular structured resource,a result that could not conceivably be
obtained without those low-level additional representations,which are
not merely the words themselves,as Sp¨arck Jones expects.
22.214.171.124 Developments in IR
In this section,we draw attention to some developments in IR that
suggest that Sp¨arck Jones's characterisation of the relationship of IR
to AI may not be altogether correct and may in some ways be the
reverse of what is the case.
That reverse claimmay also seemsomewhat hyperbolic,in response
to Sp¨arck Jones's original paper,and in truth there may be some more
general movement at work in this whole area,one more general than
either the influence of AI on IR or its opposite,namely that traditional
functionalities in information processing are now harder to distinguish.
This degree of interpenetration of techniques is such that it may be
just as plausible (as claiming directional influence,as above) to say
that MT,QA,IE,IR as well as summarisation and,perhaps a range
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
of technologies associated with ontologies,lexicons,inference,the SW
and aspects of Knowledge Management,are all becoming conflated in
a science of information access.Without going into much detail,where
might one look for immediate anecdotal evidence for that view?
Salton [158] initiated CLIR (Cross-language Information Retrieval)
using a thesaurus and a bilingual dictionary between languages,and
other forms of the technique have used Machine-Readable Bilingual
Dictionaries to bridge the language gap [5],and Eurowordnet,a major
NLP tool [180],was designed explicitly for CLIR.CLIR is a task rather
like MT but recall is more important and it is still useful at low rates
of precision,which MT is not because people tend not to accept trans-
lations with alternatives on a large scale like "They decided to have
{PITCH,TAR,FISH,FISHFOOD} for dinner."
Gaizauskas and Wilks [52] describe a system of multilingual IE
based on treating the templates themselves as a form of interlingua
between the languages,and this is clearly a limited formof MT.Gollins
and Sanderson [58] have described a formof CLIR that brings back the
old MT notion of a "pivot language" to bridge between one language
and another,and where pivots can be chained in a parallel or sequential
manner.Latvian-English and Latvian-Russian CLIR could probably
reach any EU language fromLatvian via multiple CLIR pivot retrievals
(of sequential CLIR based on Russian-X or English-X).This IR usage
differs from MT use,where a pivot was an interlingua,not a language
and was used once,never iteratively.Oh et al.[133] report using a
Japanese–Korean MT system to determine terminology in unknown
language.Gachot et al.[51] report using an established,possibly the
most established,MT system SYSTRAN as a basis for CLIR.Wilks
et al.[193] report using Machine Readable Bilingual Dictionaries to
construct ontological hierarchies (for IR or IE) in one language from
an existing hierarchy in another language,using redundancy to can-
cel noise between the languages in a manner rather like Gollins and
All these developments indicate some forms of influence and
interaction between traditionally separate techniques,but are more
suggestive of a loss of borderlines between traditional functionalities.
More recently,however,usage has grown in IR of referring to any
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
technique related to Jelinek's IBM work as being a use of an "MT
algorithm":this usage extends from the use of n-gram models under
the name of "language models" [39,143],a usage that comes from
speech research,to any use in IR of a technique like sentence alignment
that was pioneered by the IBM MT work.An extended metaphor is
at work here,one where IR is described as MT since it involves the
retrieval of one string by means of another [8].IR classically meant
the retrieval of documents by queries,but the string-to-string version
notion has now been extended by IR researchers who have moved on to
QA work where they describe an answer as a "translation" of its ques-
tion [8].On this view,QA are like two "languages." In practice,this
approach meant taking FAQquestions and their corresponding answers
as training pairs.
The theoretical underpinning of all this research is the matching of
language models i.e.what is the most likely query given this answer,a
question posed by analogy with Jelinek's "basic function of MT" that
yielded the most probable source text given the translation.This can
sound improbable,but is actually the same directionality as scientific
inference,namely that of proving the data from the theory [16].This
is true even though in the phase where the theory is "discovered" one
infers the theory from the data by a form of abduction.
126.96.36.199 Pessimism Vs Pragmatism About the Prospects of
What point have we reached so far in our discussion?We have not
detected influence of IR on AI/NLP,as Sp¨arck Jones predicted,but
rather an intermingling of methodologies and the dissolution of border-
lines between long-treasured application areas,like MT,IR,IE,QA,
etc.One can also discern a reverse move of MT/AI metaphors into IR
itself,which is the opposite direction of influence to that advocated
by Sp¨arck Jones in her paper.Moreover,the statistical methodology
of Jelinek's CANDIDE did revolutionise NLP,but that was an influ-
ence on NLP from speech research and its undoubted successes,not
IR.The pure statistical methodology of CANDIDE was not in the end
successful in its own terms,because it always failed to beat symbolic
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
systems like SYSTRAN in open competition.What CANDIDE did,
though,was to suggest a methodology by which data sparseness might
be reduced by the recapitulation of symbolic entities (e.g.,grammars,
lexicons,semantic annotations,etc.) in statistical,or rather machine
learning,terms,a story not yet at an end.But that methodology did
not come from IR,which had always tended to reject the need for such
symbolic structures,however obtained —or,as one might put this,IR
people expect such structures to help but rarely find evidence that they
do —e.g.,in the ongoing,but basically negative,debate on whether or
not Wordnet or any similar thesaurus,can improve IR.
Even if we continue to place the SWin the GOFAI tradition,it is not
obvious that it needs any of the systematic justifications on offer,from
formal logic to URIs,to annotations to URIs:it may all turn out to be
a practical matter of this huge structure providing a range of practical
benefits to people wanting information.Critics like Nelson [127] still
claim that the WWW is ill-founded and cannot benefit users,but all
the practical evidence shows the reverse.Semantic annotation efforts
are widespread,even outside the SW,and one might even cite work by
Jelinek and Chelba [29],who are investigating systematic annotation
to reduce the data sparseness that limited the effectiveness of his orig-
inal statistical efforts at MT.One could generalise here by saying that
symbolic investigations are intended to mitigate the sparseness of data
(but see also Section 4.2 on another approach to data sparseness).
Sp¨arck Jones's position has been that words are just themselves,and
we should not become confused (in seeking contentful information with
the aid of computers) by notions like semantic objects,no matter what
formthey come in,formal,capitalised primitives or whatever.However,
this does draw a firm line where there is not one:we have argued in
many places — most recently against Nirenburg in [131] — that the
symbols used in knowledge representations,ontologies,etc.,through-
out the history of AI,have always appeared to be English words,often
capitalised,and indeed are,in spite of the protests of their users,no
more or less than English words.If anything else,they are slightly priv-
ileged English words,in that they are not drawn randomly from the
whole vocabulary of the language.Knowledge representations,annota-
tions,etc.work as well as they do and they do with such privileged
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
words,and the history of machine translation using such notions as
interlinguas is the clearest proof of that (e.g.,the Japanese Fujitsu sys-
tem in 1990).It is possible to treat some words as more primitive than
others and to obtain some benefits of data compression thereby,but
these privileged entities do not thereby cease to be words,and are thus
at risk,like all words of ambiguity and extension of sense.In Niren-
burg and Wilks [131] that was Wilks's key point of disagreement with
his co-author Nirenburg who holds the same position as Carnap who
began this line of constructivism in 1936 with Der Logische Aufbau der
Welt,namely that words can have their meanings in formal systems
controlled by fiat.We believe this is profoundly untrue and one of the
major fissures below the structure of formal AI.
This observation bears on Sp¨arck Jones's viewof words in the follow-
ing way:her position could be characterised as a democracy of words,
all words are words from the point of view of their information status,
however else they may differ.To this we would oppose the view above,
that there is a natural aristocracy of words,those that are natural can-
didates for primitives in virtually all annotation systems e.g.animate,
human,exist and cause.The position of this paper is not as far from
Sp¨arck Jones's as appeared at the outset,thanks to a shared opposition
to those in AI who believe that things-like-words-in-formal-codings are
no longer words.
Sp¨arck Jones's position in the sources quoted remains basically pes-
simistic about any fully automated information process;this is seen
most clearly in her belief that humans cannot be removed from the
information process.There is a striking similarity between that and her
former colleague Martin Kay's famous paper on human-aided machine
translation and its inevitability,given the poor prospects for pure MT.
We believe his pessimism was premature and that history has shown
that simple MT has a clear and useful role if users adapt their expec-
tations to what is available,and we hope the same will prove true in
the topics covered so far in this paper.
2.2.2 Can Representations Improve Statistical Techniques?
We now turn to the hard question as to whether or not the represen-
tational techniques,familiar in AI and NLP as both resources and the
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
objects of algorithms,can improve the performance of classical statis-
tical IR.The aim is go beyond the minimal satisfaction given by the
immortal phrase about IR usually attributed to Croft "For any tech-
nique there is a collection where it will help." This is a complex issue
and one quite independent of the theme that IR methods should play
a larger role than they do in NLP and AI.Sp¨arck Jones has taken
a number of positions on this issue,from the agnostic to the mildly
AI,or at least non-Connectionist non-statistical AI,remains wedded
to representations,their computational tractability and their explana-
tory power;and that normally means the representation of propositions
in some more or less logical form.Classical IR,on the other hand,
often characterised as a "bag of words" approach to text,consists of
methods for locating document content independent of any particular
explicit structure in the data.Mainstream IR is,if not dogmatically
anti-representational (as are some statistical and neural net-related
areas of AI and language processing),is at least not committed to any
notion of representation beyond what is given by a set of index terms,or
strings of index terms along with numbers themselves computed from
text that may specify clusters,vectors or other derived structures.
This intellectual divide over representations and their function goes
back at least to the Chomsky versus Skinner debate,which was always
presented by Chomsky in terms of representationalists versus barbar-
ians,but was in fact about simple and numerically based structures
versus slightly more complex ones.
Bizarre changes of allegiance took place during later struggles over
the same issue,as when IBM created the MT system (CANDIDE,
see [25]),discussed earlier,based purely on text statistics and without
any linguistic representations,which caused those on the representa-
tional side of the divide to cheer for the old-fashioned symbolic MT
system SYSTRAN in its DARPA sponsored contests with CANDIDE,
although those same researchers had spent whole careers dismissing
the primitive representations that SYSTRAN contained.Nonetheless,
it was symbolic and representational and therefore on their side in this
more fundamental debate!In those contests SYSTRAN always pre-
vailed over CANDIDE for texts over which neither system had been
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
trained,which may or may not have indirect implications for the issues
under discussion here.
Winograd [195] is often credited in AI with the first NLP sys-
tem firmly grounded in representations of world knowledge yet after
his thesis,he effectively abandoned that assumption and embraced
a form of Maturana's autopoesis doctrine [196],a biologically based
anti-representationalist position that holds,roughly,that evolved crea-
tures like us are unlikely to contain or manipulate representations.On
such a view the Genetic Code is misnamed,which is a position with
links back to the philosophy of Heidegger (whose philosophy Winograd
began to teach at that period at Stanford in his NLP classes) as well
as Wittgenstein's view that messages,representations and codes neces-
sarily require intentionality,which is to say a sender,and the Genetic
Code cannot have a sender.This insight spawned the speech act move-
ment in linguistics and NLP,and also remains the basis of Searle's
position that there cannot therefore be AI at all,as computers cannot
have intentionality.
The debate within AI itself over representations,as within its philo-
sophical and linguistic outstations,is complex and unresolved.The
Connectionist/neural net movement of the 1980's brought some clar-
ification of the issue into AI,partly because it came in both repre-
sentationalist (localist) and non-representationalist (distributed) forms,
which divided on precisely this issue.Matters were sometimes settled
not by argument or experiment but by declarations of faith,as when
Charniak said that whatever the successes of Connectionism,he did
not like it because it did not give him any perspicuous representations
with which to understand the phenomena of which AI treats.
Within psychology,or rather computational psychology,there have
been a number of assaults on the symbolic reasoning paradigm of
AI-influenced Cognitive Science,including areas such as rule-driven
expertise which was an area where AI,in the form of Expert Sys-
tems,was thought to have had some practical success.In an interesting
revival of classic associationist methods,Schvaneveldt [161] developed
an associative network methodology —called Pathfinder networks —-
for the representation of expertise,producing a network whose content
is extracted directly from subjects' responses,and whose predictive
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
power in classic expert systems environments is therefore a direct chal-
lenge to propositional-AI notions of human expertise and reasoning.
Within the main AI symbolic tradition,as we are defining it,it
was simply inconceivable that a complex cognitive task,like controlling
a fighter plane in real time,on the basis of input from a range of
discrete sources of information from instruments,could be other than
a matter for constraints and rules over coded expertise.There was
no place there for a purely associative component based on numerical
strengths of association or (importantly for Pathfinder networks) on an
overall statistical measure of clustering that establishes the Pathfinder
network from the subject-derived data in the first place.
The Pathfinder example is highly relevant here,not only for its
direct challenge to a core area of classic AI,where it felt safe,as it
were,but because the clustering behind Pathfinder networks was in
fact very close,formally,to the clump theory behind the early IR work
such as Sp¨arck Jones [166] and others.Schvaneveldt and his associates
later applied Pathfinder networks to commercial IRafter applying them
to lexical resources like the LDOCE.There is thus a direct algorithmic
link here between the associative methodology in IR and its application
in an area that challenged AI directly in a core area.It is Schvaneveldt's
results on knowledge elicitation by associative methods fromgroups like
pilots,and the practical difference such structures make in training,
that constitute their threat to propositionality here.
This is no unique example,of course:even in more classical AI
one thinks of Pearl's [139] long-held advocacy of weighted networks to
model beliefs,which captured (as did fuzzy logic and assorted forms of
Connectionismsince) the universal intuition that beliefs have strengths,
and that these seem continuous in nature and not merely one of a set
of discrete strengths,and that it has proved very difficult indeed to
combine elegantly any system expressing those intuitions with central
AI notions of logic-based machine reasoning.
2.2.3 IE as a Task and the Adaptivity Problem
We are taking IE as a paradigm of an information processing technol-
ogy separate from IR;formally separate,at least,in that one returns
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
documents or document parts,and the other linguistic or data-base
structures.IE is a technique which,although still dependent on super-
ficial linguistic methods of text analysis,is beginning to incorporate
more of the inventory of AI techniques,particularly knowledge rep-
resentation and reasoning,as well as,at the same time,finding that
its hand-crafted rule-driven successes can be matched by machine
learning techniques using only statistical methods (see below on named
IE is an automatic method for locating facts for users in electronic
documents (e.g.,newspaper articles,news feeds,web pages,transcripts
of broadcasts,etc.) and storing them in a database for processing with
techniques like data mining,or with off-the-shelf products like spread-
sheets,summarisers and report generators.The historic application
scenario for IE is a company that wants,say,the extraction of all ship
sinkings,from public news wires in any language world-wide,and put
into a single data base showing ship name,tonnage,date and place
of loss,etc.Lloyds of London had performed this particular task with
human readers of the world's newspapers for a hundred years before
the advent of successful IE.
The key notion in IE is that of a "template":a linguistic pattern,
usually a set of attribute-value pairs,with the values being text strings.
The templates are normally created manually by experts to capture the
structure of the facts sought in a given domain,which IE systems then
apply to text corpora with the aid of extraction rules that seek fillers
in the corpus,given a set of syntactic,semantic and pragmatic con-
straints.IE has already reached the level of success at which IR and
MT (on differing measures,of course) proved commercially viable.By
general agreement,the main barrier to wider use and commercialisation
of IE is the relative inflexibility of its basic template concept:classic
IE relies on the user having an already developed set of templates,as
was the case with intelligence analysts in US Defense agencies from
whose support the technology was largely developed.The intellectual
and practical issue now is how to develop templates,their filler sub-
parts (such as named entities or NEs),the rules for filling them,and
associated knowledge structures,as rapidly as possible for new domains
and genres.
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
IE as a modern language processing technology was developed
largely in the US,but with strong development centres elsewhere
[38,52,64,80].Over 25 systems,world wide,have participated in
the DARPA-sponsored MUC and TIPSTER IE competitions,most of
which have the same generic structure as shown by Hobbs [80].Previ-
ously,unreliable tasks of identifying template fillers such as names,
dates,organisations,countries,and currencies automatically often
referred to as TE,or Template Element,tasks have become extremely
accurate (over 95% accuracy for the best systems).These core TE
tasks were initially carried out with very large numbers of hand-crafted
linguistic rules.
Adaptivity in the MUC development context has meant beating the
one-month period in which competing centres adapted their system to
new training data sets provided by DARPA;this period therefore pro-
vides a benchmark for human-only adaptivity of IE systems.Automat-
ing this phase for new domains and genres now constitutes the central
problem for the extension and acceptability of IE in the commercial
world beyond the needs of the military and government sponsors who
created it.
The problem is of interest in the context of this paper,because
attempts to reduce the problemhave almost all taken the formof intro-
ducing another area of AI techniques into IE,namely that of machine
learning,and which is statistical in nature,like IRbut unlike traditional
core AI.
126.96.36.199 Previous Work on ML and Adaptive Methods for IE
The application of ML methods to aid the IE task goes back to work
on the learning of verb preferences in the eighties by Grishman and
Sterling [65] and Lehnert et al.[96],as well as early work at BBN (Bolt,
Beranek and Newman,in the US) on learning to find named expressions
(NEs) [12].Many of the developments since then have been a series of
extensions to the work of Lehnert and Riloff on Autoslog [152],the
automatic induction of a lexicon for IE.
This tradition of work goes back to an AI notion that might be
described as lexical tuning,that of adapting a lexicon automatically to
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
new senses in texts,a notion discussed in [191] and going back to work
like Wilks [187] and Granger [60] on detecting new preferences of words
in texts and interpreting novel lexical items from context and stored
knowledge.These notions are important,not only for IE in general but,
in particular,as it adapts to traditional AI tasks like QA.
The Autoslog lexicon development work is also described as a
method of learning extraction rules from <document,filled template>
pairs,that is to say the rules (and associated type constraints) that
assign the fillers to template slots from text.These rules are then suf-
ficient to fill further templates from new documents.No conventional
learning algorithm was used by Riloff and Lehnert but,since then,
Soderland has extended this work by using a form of Muggleton's ILP
(Inductive Logic Programming) system for the task,and Cardie [26]
has sought to extend it to areas like learning the determination of
coreference links.
Grishman at NYU [15] and Morgan [125] at Durham have done
pioneering work using user interaction and definition to define usable
templates,and Riloff and Shoen [153] have attempted to use some
version of user-feedback methods of IR,including user-judgements of
negative and positive <document,filled template> pairings.Related
methods (e.g.,[104,176],etc.) used bootstrapping to expand extrac-
tion rules from a set of seed rules,first for NEs and then for entire
184.108.40.206 Supervised Template Learning
Brill-style transformation-based learning methods are one of the many
ML methods in NLP to have been applied above and beyond the part-
of-speech tagging origins of ML in NLP.Brill's [23] original application
triggered only on POS tags;later he added the possibility of lexical
triggers.Since then the method has been extended successfully to e.g.
speech act determination [159] and a Brill-style template learning appli-
cation was designed by Vilain [179].
A fast implementation based on the compilation of Brill-style rules
to deterministic automata was developed at Mitsubishi labs [40,154].
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
The quality of the transformation rules learned depends on factors
such as:
The accuracy and quantity of the training data.
The types of pattern available in the transformation rules.
The feature set available used in the pattern side of the trans-
formation rules.
The accepted wisdom of the ML community is that it is very hard
to predict which learning algorithm will produce optimal performance,
so it is advisable to experiment with a range of algorithms running
on real data.There have as yet been no systematic comparisons between
these initial efforts and other conventional ML algorithms applied to
learning extraction rules for IE data structures (e.g.,example-based
systems such as TiMBL [42] and ILP [126].A quite separate approach
has been that of Ciravegna and Wilks [36] which has concentrated on
the development of interfaces (ARMADILLO and MELITA) at which
a user can indicate what taggings and fact structures he wishes to
learn,and then have the underlying (but unseen) system itself take
over the tagging and structuring from the user,who only withdraws
from the interface when the success rate has reached an acceptable
126.96.36.199 Unsupervised Template Learning
We should also remember the possibility of unsupervised notion of tem-
plate learning:a Sheffield PhD thesis by Collier [37] developed such a
notion,one that can be thought of as yet another application of the
early technique of Luhn [107] to locate statistically significant words
in a corpus and then use those to locate the sentences in which they
occur as key sentences.This has been the basis of a range of sum-
marisation algorithms and Collier proposed a form of it as a basis for
unsupervised template induction,namely that those sentences,with
corpus-significant verbs,would also contain sentences corresponding to
templates,whether or not yet known as such to the user.Collier cannot
be considered to have proved that such learning is effective,only that
some prototype results can be obtained.This method is related,again
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
via Luhn's original idea,to methods of text summarisation (e.g.,the
British Telecom web summariser entered in DARPA summarisation
competitions) which are based on locating and linking text sentences
containing the most significant words in a text,a very different notion
of summarisation from that discussed below,which is derived from a
template rather than giving rise to it.
2.2.4 Linguistic Considerations in IR
Let us now quickly review the standard questions,some unsettled after
30 years,in the debate about the relevance of symbolic or linguis-
tic (or AI taken broadly) considerations in the task of information
Note too that,even in the form in which we shall discuss it,the
issue is not one between high-level AI and linguistic techniques on the
one hand,and IR statistical methods on the other.As we have shown,
the linguistic techniques normally used in areas like IE have in gen-
eral been low-level,surface orientated,pattern-matching techniques,as
opposed to more traditional concerns of AI and linguistics with logi-
cal and semantic representations.So much has this been the case that
linguists have in general taken no notice at all of IE,deeming it a set
of heuristics almost beneath notice,and contrary to all long held prin-
ciples about the necessity for general rules of wide coverage.Most IE
has come from a study of special cases and rules for particular words
of a language,such as those involved in template elements (countries,
dates,company names,etc.).
Again,since IE has also made extensive use of statistical methods,
directly and as applications of ML techniques,one cannot simply con-
trast statistical (in IR) with linguistic methods used in IE as Sp¨ark
Jones [169] does when discussing IR.That said,one should note that
some IE systems that have performed well in MUC/TIPSTER —
Sheffield's old LaSIE systemwould be an example [52] —did also make
use of complex domain ontologies,and general rule-based parsers.Yet,
in the data-driven computational linguistics movement in vogue at the
moment,one much wider than IE proper,there is a goal of seeing how
far complex and "intensional" phenomena of semantics and pragmatics
The SWas Good Old Fashioned AI
(e.g.,dialogue pragmatics as initiated in Samuel et al.[159]) can be
treated by statistical methods.
A key high-level module within IE has been co-reference,a topic
that linguists might doubt could ever fully succumb to purely data-
driven methods since the data is so sparse and the need for inference
methods seems so clear.One can cite classic examples like:
{A Spanish priest} was charged here today with attempt-
ing to murder the Pope.{Juan Fernandez Krohn},aged
32,was arrested after {a man armed with a bayonet}
approached the Pope while he was saying prayers at
Fatima on Wednesday night.According to the police,
{Fernandez} told the investigators today that he trained
for the past six months for the assault.He was alleged
to have claimed the Pope "looked furious" on hearing
{the priest's} criticism of his handling of the church's
affairs.If found guilty,{the Spaniard} faces a prison
sentence of 15–20 years.(The London Times 15 May
1982,example due to Sergei Nirenburg)
This passage contains six different phrases {enclosed in curly brack-
ets} referring to the same person,as any reader can see,but whose
identity seems a priori to require much knowledge and inference about
the ways in which individuals can be described;it is not obvious that
even buying all the Google ngrams (currently for $150) from one tril-
lion words would solve such an example (see http://googleresearch.
There are three standard techniques in terms of which this infusion
(of possible NLP techniques into IR) have been discussed,and we will
mention them and then add a fourth.
(i) Prior WSD (automatic word sense disambiguation) of doc-
uments by NLP techniques i.e.so that text words,or some
designated subset of them,are tagged to particular senses.
(ii) The use of thesauri in IR and NLP and the major intellectual
and historical link between them.
2.2 An Information Retrieval Critique of the Semantics of the SW
(iii) The prior analysis of queries and document indices so that
their standard forms for retrieval reflect syntactic dependen-
cies that could resolve classic ambiguities not of type (i)
Topic (i) is now mostly regarded as a diversion as regards our main
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text:
Start Time: 8:00 p.m. ET
Series: tied 2-2
Starting pitchers: James Shields (1-1, 7.11 ERA) vs. Madison Bumgarner (3-1, 1.40 ERA)
Status: The winner of Game 5 went on to win 39 of the 56 previous best-of-seven series in major league postseason history to be tied after four games. That's 70 percent, an encouraging figure for Game 5 winners, but not one all that much higher than the 65 percent of Game 1 winners who went on to win a best-of-seven series, a figure itself derived entirely from the advantage of needing one fewer win than one's opponent to win the series. Given that a tie-breaking Game 5 win puts the victor just one win away from the series win, that 70 percent actually seems rather low, suggesting that a Game 5 win is no more indicative of which team is truly the better team than the split first four games. Indeed, 61 percent of the best-of-seven series to be tied after four games wound up going the full seven games, meaning the team that won Game 5 lost Game 6, resulting in yet another tie. Given that, it would seem only the artificial seven-game limit prevented those series from continuing to revert to ties ad infinitum. The flip side of that last statistic is that just 39 percent of the best-of-seven tied after four games saw the eventual victor sweep to victory in Games 5 and 6.
Fifty-one of those best-of-seven series to be tied after four games used the standard 2/4/2 home/road structure, and from those 51 series we can find something that's a bit more informative. You see, while just 17 of the 30 teams to go up 3-2 via a Game 5 win at home managed to get that fourth win on the road (a mere 57 percent), 17 of the 21 teams to win Game 5 on the road, 81 percent, won the series after it returned to their home ballpark. For that reason, a Royals win Sunday night would seem to be a stronger indicator of the eventual outcome of this Series than a Giants win would be.
The Giants are heavy favorites to win this game for one very obvious reason: Madison Bumgarner is starting it. If you skimmed past them at the top, take a moment to check out the 2014 postseason ERAs of the two Game 5 starters. The Giants are 4-1 in Bumgarner's five starts this postseason, with Bumgarner averaging more than 7 2/3 innings pitched in those games while not allowing more than three runs in any of them.
In his only loss, he allowed just two earned runs in seven innings, but was out-pitched (by the Nationals' Doug Fister) and undermined by his own throwing error. At this point, James Shields seems about as likely to out-pitch Bumgarner as Kelvin Herrera is to out-hit Pablo Sandoval.
VERDUCCI: Giants' formula making for fun World Series
If there's anything for the Royals to cling to in this game with regard to Bumgarner's potential performance it is that he has been better on the road than at home both during the regular and postseasons, and that the 25-year-old lefty has now thrown 256 innings between the regular and posteasons combined compared to his previous career high of 223 1/3 set during the Giants' championship run of 2012 and the mere 201 1/3 innings he threw last year, when the Giants missed the postseason.
With regard to the home/road splits, Bumgarner had a 4.03 ERA at home during the regular season and six of the seven runs he has allowed this postseason have come at home (with the seventh coming against the Royals in Kansas City in Game 1 of this series). That said, in his final four home starts of the regular season, Bumgarner allowed just two runs in 29 innings, and if you add in his postseason work, he has a 1.43 ERA in his last six home starts.
As for Shields, his Game 1 start against the Giants was a disaster as he gave up three runs in the top of the first, failed to get an out in the fourth, and was ultimately charged with five runs in mere three official innings of work. Hunter Pence did the most damage against Shields in that game with a two-run home run in the top of the first and a leadoff double to start the fourth that turned into the run that drove Shields from the game. Pence had made 12 outs in 11 career plate appearances against Shields prior to that, going 0-for-11 with a double play. Curiously, when these two teams met in Kansas City in August, the results were very different. The Royals managed to eke out a 4-2 win against Bumgarner thanks to a pair of Giants errors and Kansas City's unyielding bullpen, while the Giants fell victim to a four-hit shutout by Shields the next day.
Like Bumgarner, Shields has been better on the road than at home this season (going 10-2 with a 2.97 ERA outside of Kansas City), but he allowed four runs in five innings in his lone road start this postseason and hasn't looked sharp in any of his four starts thus far this postseason, only one of which was quality. Shields' start Sunday night could prove to be his last for Kansas City, as he will be a free agent in November.
The Giants won Game 4 by scoring eight runs on the Royals middle relievers, which will make how Ned Yost manages the middle innings of this game even more interesting than usual. Lefties Tim Collins, who threw 40 pitches in Game 4, and Brandon Finnegan, who threw 32 and was roughed up for five runs in a single inning, are likely unavailable, leaving repurposed starter Danny Duffy, who retired just two of the four men he faced in Game 4, as the both only lefty in the Royals bullpen and the long man.
Indeed, it was Duffy who was called upon to eat three innings after Shields' poor outing in Game 1. However, with Yost not having to use any of his Big Three in Game 4 and an off day on Monday, Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland are all fully available, and it would not be shocking to see at least two of them used for more than three outs in this game. If Yost is willing to use both Herrera and Davis for two innings, which he did in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, he could go to his Big Three as early as the fifth inning, making Shields' leash extremely short and the importance of an early lead in this game even more important than it has been to this point in the Series.
As for the Giants, Yusmeiro Petit needed just 33 pitches to get through his three scoreless innings in Game 4, but he will likely be unavailable anyway, in part because Bruce Bochy is going to want to have him available for either Game 6 or 7 in Kansas City. The Giants will still have Tim Lincecum available for long relief and a full six-man pen behind him, however, as no other Giant threw more than Hunter Strickand's 17 pitches in Game 4 while lefty Javier Lopez and closer Santago Casilla went unused entirely.
Stolen steals: I noted this in my reaction to Game 4, but it bears repeating here. The Royals have stopped stealing bases. Over their last nine games, the Royals, the team that led the majors with 153 stolen bases during the regular season (nearly a steal per game) and which set postseason records by swiping seven bags against the A's in the Wild Card Game, have attempted just five stolen bases in their last nine games and been successful in just two of those attempts with Billy Butler being one of the two successful thieves over that span. This was most noticeable in the sixth inning of Game 4, when Jarrod Dyson, one of the team's fastest players, led off the inning with a single with the game tied at 4-4 but did not attempt a steal and was promptly erased by a double play. In this Series, the Royals have attempted just one steal and that attempting runner, Alcides Escobar in Game 2, was thrown out by Giants catcher Buster Posey.
REITER: Brandon Finnegan still living the dream despite Game 4 wake-up call
Hitters to watch: Royals catcher Salvador Perez's walk-off hit in the Wild Card Game was one of just four hits he picked up through the end of the ALCS, all of them singles, giving him a .118 postseason average coming into this Series. However, he homered off Bumgarner in Game 1, delivered a huge two-run double off Strickland in Game 2, and went 3-for-4 in Game 4, making him Kansas City's leading hitter in this series to this point at 5-for-14 (.357) with a .643 slugging percentage. The only Royal with more hits in this Series is Alcides Escobar, who is 6-for-17 (.353) with a pair of doubles. It's worth noting both Perez and Escobar are right-handed hitters with the left-handed Bumgarner starting for San Francisco in this game. Omar Infante, the only other Royal to homer in this series, is also right-handed and has faced Bumgarner more than any other Royals batter, sporting a .316 average (6-for-19) against the Giants' ace in his career.
Update: Perez has been moved up to fifth in the lineup for Game 5. He had hit seventh in the first two games in San Francisco. Moving him up breaks up lefties Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas, who had hit fourth and fifth in the last two games.
The Giants' top hitter thus far in this Series has been Pence, who is 7-for-15 (.467) with three walks (.556 on-base percentage), two doubles and a home run (.800 slugging). As noted above, two of those three extra-base hits came in his only two at-bats against Shields in this series. Leadoff man Gregor Blanco, who is second on the team in on-base percentage in this series having gone 4-for-15 with five walks (.450 OBP) is 5-for-9 (.556) in his career against Shields.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Clarke was in London on Wednesday to collect a £2 million bonus cheque from sponsors Dunlop, following the £900,000 winner's prize he collected at Sandwich.
Chubby Chandler, his manager at International Sports Management (ISM), has indicated that the total could run much higher.
Clarke, with ISM stablemate Lee Westwood, had been on a no-win, no-pay deal with Dunlop, which dictated that neither could claim a penny until they won a major. The contract was struck six years ago with company owner Mike Ashley.
Clarke (above), also sponsored by Audemar Piquet watches, Stuburt shoes and TaylorMade golf equipment, is ready to reap a windfall.
Receiving his cheque at Lillywhite's in Piccadilly, Clarke — worth an estimated £21 million even before his Open victory — said: "To have sneaked into the Open and now to have the trophy and a huge bonus from Dunlop is just wonderful."
Asked how he would spend the money, he replied: "I've been there and done it. All the things I've ever wanted to buy, I have done. I've lived like a major champion without having a major."


text:
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Buy Electric Blankets at idealshop.com.auFind Electric Blankets on Sale at Ideal Shop. We have some really great branded Electric Blankets at Discounted Prices. Shop at Ideal Shop we have some great branded Electric Blankets including Heller, Sunbeam and Kambrook Electric Blankets. We have different styles including quilted, fitted, double, single, king, queen, kids waterproof electric blankets, fleecy and antibacterial.
Shop with confidence with trackable and insured delivery on eparcel orders. We deliver Electric Blankets Australia wide to Sydney, Gold Coast, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Hobart and Melbourne. If you are looking for a great deal or a massive discount off retail for well known Electric Blanket Brands. Buy a quality Electric Blanket that will last and provide you with years of comfort. Leading Brands Stocked Ideal Shop stocks Electric Blankets from leading brands such as Sunbeam and Kambrook.
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