Hyperon-Era Approaches

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NL-to-MeTTa via LLMs

The current strategy replaces hand-built pipeline stages with LLM-assisted conversion, validated against formal reasoning:

  • nl2pln_demo: Converts NL sentences to PLN/MeTTa representations via LLMs (Anthropic API), stores in a knowledge base, enables backward-chaining queries with proof traces. Operational demo with interactive KB shell.
  • metta-nl-corpus: Dagster pipeline generating and validating NL-to-MeTTa expression pairs from the SNLI dataset. Uses LLMs for generation, MeTTa inference engine for validation. Three validation paths: entailment (transitive reasoning), contradiction (logical bottom), neutral. Target: 20k silver + 10k gold labeled pairs. Under active development.

SENF (Semantic Elegant Normal Form)

Proposed canonical representation that collapses idiomatic NL variations into a single graph structure by combining LLM semantic intuition with formal rewrite rules. A direct architectural successor to an earlier (2017) proposal to use Lojban as a "logical normal form" intermediate layer ("RelEx2Lojban"). Ben Goertzel argued Lojban maps directly to predicate logic (hence PLN-friendly Atomese), covers all everyday semantics, and could enable automatic mapping rule generation via parallel English/Lojban corpora. The approach was not adopted — Linas was "virulently anti-lojban" — but the core insight (needing a canonical semantic normal form between NL surface forms and logical representations) directly prefigures SENF. (mailing-list-backed: Replacing-Relex2Logic-with-Relex2Lojban, 2017)

Dependent Types for NL Semantics

Recent architectural direction: using dependent type theory for knowledge representation, where quantifier dependencies are localized and directly grounded in observations via the Curry-Howard correspondence. This aligns with MeTTa's native gradual type system.

Unified Parsing and Reasoning (Unrealized Vision)

Ben Goertzel proposed implementing Word Grammar parsing directly in PLN, where learning language would simply mean "learning PLN rules," and the pattern miner would replace a separate grammar learner. Each word would be a ConceptNode, syntactic relationships InheritanceLinks to CategoryNodes, and parsing would mean finding the most likely network of links satisfying WG constraints. The practical concern: LG is sub-millisecond while PLN-based parsing might take seconds. The compromise: use LG as a heuristic to guide PLN-based WG refinement. This vision remains conceptually relevant to the Hyperon era as an ultimate convergence target. (mailing-list-backed: Link-grammar-word-grammar-and-CCG, 2014)