[net.ai] AIList Digest V3 #68

LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (05/22/85)

From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI>


AIList Digest           Wednesday, 22 May 1985     Volume 3 : Issue 68

Today's Topics:
  Conference - 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming,
  Tutorials - Computational Linguistics

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Date: 17 May 1985 12:03:27-PDT
From: conery%uoregon.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Subject: Conference - 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming

                        -- Preliminary Schedule --

                -- 1985 Symposium on Logic Programming --

For more information, contact:
        John Conery  (jc@uoregon.csnet)    503-686-4408
        Jacques Cohen (jc@brandeis.csnet)  617-647-3370

MONDAY, July 15

Tutorials  (Two parallel sessions, 9:00 - 4:30) (Two more tutorials on Friday)

"Expert Systems Using Prolog", Bob Kowalski, Imperial College
"Parallel Logic Programming", Gary Lindstrom, Univerity of Utah

8:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.  Early Registration and Reception

TUESDAY, July 16, 1985

  8:00 a.m. -  9:00 a.m.  Registration

  9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.  KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Robert Kowalski, Imperial College
                          London, England

 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.  PARALLELISM
                          Semi-intelligent Backtracking of Prolog Based on a
                          Static Data Dependency Analysis, Jung-Herng Chang
                          and Alvin M. Despain, University of California,
                          Berkeley

                          User-defined Parallel Control Strategies, J. I.
                          Glasgow, M. A. Jenkins, and C. D. McCrosky,
                          Queen's University, Canada

                          AND-parallelism with Intelligent Backtracking for
                          Annotated Logic Programs, J. Maluszynski, Linkoping
                          University and P. Dembinski, Chalmbers University of
                          Technology, Sweden

 2:00 p.m. -   3:30 p.m.  EXTENSIONS
                          An experiment in Programming with Full First-Order
                          Logic, Zerkis D. Umrigar and Vijay Pitchumani,
                          Syracuse University

                          A Meta-Level Extension of Prolog, Kenneth A. Bowen,
                          Syracuse University, and Tobias Weinberg, Digital
                          Equipment Corporation

                          Logic Programming Cum Applicative Programming, Nachum
                          Dershowitz and David Plaisted, University of
                          Illinois at Urbana Champaign

  4:00 p.m. -  5:30 p.m.  LANGUAGE ISSUES
                          On the Treatment of Cuts in Prolog Source-Level
                          Tools, R. A. O'Keefe, University of Edinburgh,
                          United Kingdom

                          All Solutions Predicates in Prolog, Lee Naish,
                          University of Melbourne, Australia

                          Unification-free Execution of Logic Programs,
                          Jan Komorowski, Aiken Computation Laboratory,
                          Harvard University and Jan Maluszynski,
                          Linkoping University, Sweden


Wednesday, July 17, 1985

 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.  INVITED SPEAKER
                         Dr. Herve Gallaire, European Computer Research
                         Center, Munich, West Germany

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.  CONCURRENT PROLOG
                         Concurrent Prolog in a Multi-process Environment,
                         Rosanna Lee and Randy Goebel, University of
                         Waterloo, Canada

                         A sequential Implementation of Concurrent Prolog
                         Based on the Shallow Binding Scheme, Toshihiko
                         Miyazaki, Akikazu Takeuchi and Takashi Chikayama,
                         ICOT, Japan

 2:00 p.m. -  3:30 p.m.  SEMANTICS
                         The Declarative Semantics of Logical Read-only
                         Variables, G. Levi and C. Palamidessi,
                         Universita'di Pisa, Italy

                         Narrowing as the Operational Semantics of Functional
                         Languages, Uday Reddy, University of Utah

                         Towards an Algebra for Constructing Logic Programs,
                         R.A. O'Keefe, University of Edinburgh, United
                         Kingdom

 4:00 p.m. -  5:30 p.m.  IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES
                         A Microcoded Unifier for Lisp Machine Prolog, Mats
                         Carlssn, Uppsala University, Sweden

                         SLOG: A Logic Programming Language Interpreter Based
                         on Clausal Superposition and Rewriting, Laurent
                         Fribourg, Laboratoires de Marcoussis, France

                         A Real Time Garbage Collector for Prolog, Edwin
                         Pittombils and Maurice Bruynooghe, K.U. Leuven,
                         Belgium


Evening Banquet
Speaker                  Dr. Maurice Wilkes, Digital Equipment Corporation

Thursday, July 19, 1985

 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.  THEORY
                         Recursive Unsolvability of Determinacy, Solvable
                         Cases of Determinacy, and Their Applications to
                         Prolog Optimization, Jajime Sawamura and Taku
                         Takeshima, International Institute for Advanced
                         Study of Social Information Science, Japan

                         Graph-based Logic Programming Interpreters, Jean
                         Gallier and Stan Raatz, University of Pennsylvania

                         Surface Deduction: A Uniform Mechanism for Logic
                         Programming, P. T. Cox and T. Pietrzykowski,
                         Technical University of Nova Scotia, Canada

11:00 a.m. -  1:00 p.m.  SPECIAL TOPICS
                         Towards a Programming Environment for Large
                         Prolog Programs, Jan Chomicki and Naftaly H.
                         Minsky, Rutgers University

                         Modular Logic Programming of Compilers, Harald
                         Ganzinger and Michael Hanus, University Dortmund,
                         West Germany

                         An(other) Integration of Logic and Functional
                         Programming, Amitabh Srivastava, Don Oxley and
                         Aditya Srivastava, Central Research Laboratories,
                         Texas Instruments, Inc.

                         A Technique for Doing Lazy Evaluation in Logic,
                         Sanjai Narain, Rand Corp.

FRIDAY July 19

Tutorials:  (Two concurrent sessions, 9:00 - 4:30)

"Concurrent Logic Programming Techniques", Ehud Shapiro, Weizmann Institute
"Prolog and Software Engineering", Susan Gerhart, Wang Institute.

------------------------------

Date: 17 May 1985 17:39:24 PDT
From: Bill Mann <MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA>
Subject: Tutorials on Computational Linguistics: July 8


TUTORIALS ON TOPICS IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

The conference schedule for the 1985 Association for Computational
Linguistics is now available.  The conference will be held July 8-12 at
the University of Chicago, with the first day devoted to Tutorials in
Computational Linguistics, described below.

Each tutorial is a presentation of the state of the art in an important
area of computational linguistics--not just the speakers' work on the
subject--the whole range of approaches being actively pursued.



PARSER CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES
Jonathan Slocum,
MCC Corporation

The tutorial on Parser Construction Techniques will cover, briefly,
the various approaches to parsing (algorithms) and implementation
methodologies; included will be discussion of matters relating to
runtime (CPU) performance.  Focus will then shift to matters
concerning the user interface: what tools ought to be provided to the
linguist/developer, and how those tools can be tied to the central
parsing program.  Several different parsers employing the same user
interface will be introduced (and their source code distributed in
the handout).


It will be assumed that participants are somewhat familiar with LISP,
that they know enough about formal linguistics to understand such
concepts as "context free," context sensitive," and "phrase structure
grammar," and that they know what is meant by "parsing" and related
technical terms from the computational perspective.




PROLOG WITH NATURAL-LANGUAGE EXAMPLES
Dr. Fernando C.N. Pereira, SRI International

The logic programming language Prolog is becoming an important tool in
artificial intelligence and, in particular, in computational
linguistics.  This tutorial is intended as an introduction to Prolog and
its programming methodology.  Rather than making an abstract
presentation of the language, we will build up a vocabulary of Prolog
programming concepts and techniques by examining a progression of
examples that show how Prolog can be used in simple
natural-language-analysis tasks.  Topics covered include facts and
queries; rules; the logical variable; terms as structured information;
unification; axiomatization of phrase-structure grammars;
definite-clause grammars; the Prolog execution model; control mechanisms
(sequencing and cut); metalogical operators and alternative execution
models; program transformation and embedded formalisms; the relation
between Prolog and logic programming.

Although there are no formal prerequisites of this course, some
familiarity with elementary concepts of logic and traditional syntax
would be useful.



UNIFICATION APPROACHES TO GRAMMAR
Stuart M. Shieber, SRI International

Current trends in syntactic theory and computational syntax seem to be
converging toward a type of grammatical formalism based on complex
feature systems and an operation called "unification."  This tutorial
presents this approach to the syntax and semantics of natural language.
Beginning with a characterization of the principles that underlie
grammar formalisms in general, a particular simple formalism based on
these ideas will be derived.  Its relation to many of the currently
prevalent unification-based grammar formalisms--including functional
unification grammar, lexical-functional grammar, head grammar,
generalized phrase-structure grammar, and definite-clause grammar--will
be explicated as more general or more particular variants motivated by
linguistic or computational considerations.  Finally, the manner in
which these approaches may be applied to the modelling of a number of
linguistic constructs will be described, and the implementation of such
formalisms discussed briefly.

A very rudimentary knowledge of traditional syntax is recommended as a
prerequisite of the course.  Familiarity with Prolog, definite-clause
grammar, or elementary logic would be helpful, but is not essential.
Although intended as a sequel to Fernando Pereira's "Prolog with
Natural Language Examples," this tutorial can be taken independently.



NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES
Norman K. Sondheimer, USC/ISI and
Madeleine Bates, BBN

This tutorial will outline the role of natural language interfaces
in man-machine interaction: their uses, limits, and technology.  These
systems allow a user to communicate with a computer in much the same way as
he communicates with other humans.  To date, english language interfaces to
databases have achieved the greatest commercial success, but interfaces for
other languages and applications, such as spreadsheet packages, are emerging.

There are at least as many implementation technologies as systems: syntactic
grammars, semantic grammars, conceptual parsers, pattern matchers, etc.
Each has its strengthens and weaknesses.  The greatest variability is found
in language coverage, ease of developing new applications, and, of course,
cost.  Current research promises to improve the integration of natural
language with other types of interfaces and support extended human-machine
conversations.  Nevertheless, they will not be appropriate for every
application.  The purpose of this tutorial will be to introduce the
technology and allow the attendee to evaluate the alternatives.



WHO SHOULD ATTEND: designers, managers, and users of human-machine
interfaces.  This tutorial is aimed primarily at the individual who requires
the information to understand or evaluate natural language interfaces, but
who is not now a natural language processing professional.  It should also
be of use to more experienced individuals seeking a survey current applied
state-of-the-art.

About the instructors: Dr. Norman Sondheimer is a computer scientist at the
University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and past
President of the Association for Computational Linguistics.  His research has
been into natural language understanding.  Dr. Madeleine Bates is one of the
primary architects of BBN'S IRUS, a highly advanced nl system, and has
developed other systems in speech understanding, text generation, intelligent
computer assisted instruction, interfaces to databases and human factors
studies.  She is currently President of the ACL.  Both instructors have more
than a decade of research and development experience in AI and have authored
numerous publications.


SPEECH RECOGNITION AND SYNTHESIS
Dr. Jared Bernstein
SRI International

Dr. Beatrice T. Oshika
System Development Corporation

The tutorial will include a review of commercial speech recognition and
synthesis products, metrics for evaluation, and research issues crucial
to continued development.  The synthesis section will discuss the
linguistic and phonetic problems to be solved in designing
text-to-speech systems, including letter-to-sound conversion, prosodic
assignment and spectral composition.  The recognition section will cover
the problems associated with modelling continuous speech, including
discussion of phonological variation, lexical retrieval and matching,
and control structures required to handle multiple sources of knowledge.
Familiarity with phonology and data structures is helpful but not
required.


Dr. Jared Bernstein is a Senior Computer Scientist at SRI International
working on applied speech recognition projects, and has ten years
experience in speech synthesis and speech processing.  At Telesensory
Systems he led the effort that resulted in the Prose 2000 text-to-speech
converter.  Prior to that he was with the MIT Speech Communication Group
working on speech perception, phonetics and the analysis of deaf speech.

Dr. Beatrice T. Oshika is manager of the Research and Development
program at System Development Corporation and has seventeen years
experience in linguistics and speech processing.  At Speech
Communications Research Laboratory she was responsible for formulation
and testing of phonological rules in conversational speech as part of the
DARPA Speech Understanding Research program in the 1970s.


Each tutorial is a half-day in length.  They cost only $50 each,
including handouts.  The conference brochure and registration form for
both the tutorials and the paper presentations are available from

Don Walker
Bell Communications Research
445 South Street, MRE 2A379
Morristown, NJ 07960 USA

on the ARPANET: bellcore!walker@berkeley.arpa

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