Jan Niklas Bingemann, From Pocket-Inferer to SemanticWebBrowser: Incremental development of a user-friendly, deterministic, language-interface-based, web-paradigm-agnostic, IDE-like, energy-efficient Web-Browser - PhilPapers
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Why do official clerks not have the equivalent of a calculator like engineers do but for inference? The fundamental idea of this paper is for ChatGPT-like apps to lose natural language ...

Why do official clerks not have the equivalent of a calculator like engineers do but for inference? The fundamental idea of this paper is for ChatGPT-like apps to lose natural language for less energy consumption and more determinism in their answers based on controlled natural languages like ACE; and to capture this new paradigm in a new type of browser that has natural language as its primary interface, here called a semantic web-first browser. The idea is proposed in several design steps, beginning with a simple to use calculator-like program to do inference with natural language (pocket-inferer), for which, when a programmer-mode is turned on, transforms into an IDE-like ACE-editor. The idea is then further developed into a semantic web browser, which can also reference data and queries from the semantic web and later, it is philosphised how a web-paradigm agnostic SemanticWebBrowser could be realized.

This poses a fundamental anthesis to ChatGPT-like apps and LLM-centered visions for the WWW with the biggest merit being to tradeoff natural language for more precision and less energy-consumption through controlled natural language. The five main points this paper makes are:

    1. AI browsers with their high energy consumption are not suitable for daily usage (not in the near future, if ever).
    1. There has not yet been found a sufficient interface for the semantic web to be appealing to end-users and reach wider adoption
    1. Controlled natural language like ACE could serve well as a main interface for semantic data, because they manage to capture the potential of semantic web data better than any visualization ever could
    1. The best application for this approach would be a new kind of browser, which realizes “language as an interface” for the semantic web
    1. Derived from language as the main interface, the browser needs to center around the interaction with language and therefore look like a text editor or IDE.
    1. While showing the merits of the semantic web, the browser should also be “backwards compatible” with the traditional world wide web.

It is largely based on the following work: Kaarel Kaljurand. “Attempto Controlled English as a Semantic Web Language” (2007).