LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (12/14/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA> AIList Digest Thursday, 13 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 176 Today's Topics: AI Companies - Survey, Machine Translation - Folklore & Aymara', Linguistics - Language Deficiencies, Humor - Nondeficient Christmas Tidings, Conferences - Machine Translation & JASIS Call for Papers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thursday, 13 December 1984 00:24:23 EST From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa Subject: Information about AI companies I am trying to put together a survey of various tools available in the market for AI work. In particular I am interested in an assessment of the tools (user experiences). Also would appreciate any information about the kind of systems that AI companies are building. sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa ------------------------------ Date: 10 Dec 84 11:37 EST From: Gocek.henr@XEROX.ARPA Subject: Re: Automatic Chinese translation I remember the story about "Out of sight, out of mind" differently. The phrase was translated into Chinese and then retranslated into English. The result was "invisible idiot". Again, the person requesting the translation was a government official. Gary Gocek (Gocek.Henr@Xerox.ARPA) [I first heard it as "blind idiot". -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 9 Dec 1984 16:14 EST From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Translation Folklore V2 #174 I'm getting sick of hearing those two stories: "Blind and Stupid," and "The drinks were good but the meat was rotten." It is time for you computer-people to start being serious! Those stories are only folklore, and did not come from the machine-translation milieu at all; they circulated long before computers, and were invented by cynic to make fun of bad human translators! If you think about it for a minute, you will realize that none of the old translating machines were even nearly subtle enough to make such coherent mistakes! Modern ones are only a little better, and probably not quite up to that standard yet. Has anyone heard of a genuine translation blunder by a working translation machine -- that is, one which is bad enough to be considered really funny? I consider a few of the paraphrases produced by FRUMP to be in that class. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 11 Dec 84 09:46:43-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Aymara' I just ran across an article in the S.F. Sunday Examiner and Chronicle by Peter McFarren, Associated Press, Sept. 23, 1984, p. A17. Most of the content has been published in AIList already, but the following may be new. "Atamiri [Guzman de Rojas' program] is 10 times faster than any of the others," said Bill Page, a computer specialist at the International Research Center in Ottawa, Canada. The center published Guzman de Rojas' first study of Atamiri's potential in 1980, and Wang has just offered him a $50,000 grant and a $100,000 computer to refine his system. The creator of Atamiri hopes to expand its vocabulary from the current 3,000 to 8,000 words per language [English, French, German, Portugese, and Spanish] to about 30,000. Then, he says, it will be possible to translate prosaic texts such as newspaper articles with about 90 percent accuracy. Literary translations would come later, but human translators will always have to be around to make corrections. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 16:21:58 pst From: ucdavis!lakhota@Berkeley (Lakhota) Subject: Language deficiencies (AI List Digest 2:167,168,172) The interesting discussion of possible language deficiencies was triggered by two anecdotes, one involving Australian Aborigines and the other American Indians. It would be useful in this context to look at some empirical facts relating to these languages. Australian languages are perfectly capable of forming conditional and hypothetical expressions. Examples of languages with references follow below: Dyirbal - Dixon, THE DYIRBAL LANGUAGE OF NORTH QUEENSLAND. CUP, 1972. Tiwi - Osborne, THE TIWI LANGUAGE. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies [AIAS], Australian Aboriginal Studies no. 55, Linguistic Series no. 21, 1974. Walmatjari - Hudson, THE CORE OF WALMATJARI GRAMMAR. AIAS, 1978. Guugu Yimidhirr - Haviland, Guugu Yimidhirr. In Dixon & Blake (eds.), HANDBOOK OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES [HAL], v. 1. John Benjamins, 1979. Djapu - Morphy, Djapu, a Yolngu dialect. HAL, v. 3. John Benjamins, 1983. Yukulta - Keen, Yukulta. HAL, v. 3. Nunggubuyu - Heath, A FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR OF NUNGGUBUYU. Humanities Press, 1984. The same holds true for American Indian languages. It is worth mentioning that there is now more on Hopi than Whorf's papers. E. Malotki has written two 700 page books on Hopi concepts of space and time: HOPI TIME, Mouton, 1983, and HOPI RAUM (not yet translated into English). These volumes should lay to rest speculation about what Hopi does and doesn't have. Examples of American Indian languages and references follow: Nootka - Sapir & Swadesh, NOOTKA TEXTS. LSA, 1939. Yokuts - Newman, YOKUTS LANGUAGE OF CALIFORNIA. VFPA 2, 1944. Cree - Wolfart, PLAINS CREE: A GRAMMATICAL SKETCH. Trans. APS, 1973. Takelma - Sapir, The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon. HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES [HAIL], v. 2 (BBAE 40, 2), 1922. Tunica - Haas, TUNICA. HAIL, v. 4. J.J. Augustin, 1940. Uto-Aztecan - Langacker, AN OVERVIEW OF UTO-AZTECAN LANGUAGES. STUDIES IN UTO-AZTECAN GRAMMAR, v. 1. SIL Publ. in Ling. 56, 1977. There are hundreds of Aboriginal and American Indian languages, and these are only a handful of examples. Nevertheless, they illustrate the point that these languages do have the capacity for forming conditional, counterfactual, and hypothetical expressions. If anyone desires any further references, I'd be happy to supply them. Robert Van Valin (ucdavis!lakhota@BERKELEY) Linguistics, UC Davis ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 12 Dec 84 10:40:02 pst From: Peter Karp <karp@diablo> Subject: Christmas Tidings [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS ------------------------- Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual yuletide celebration, and throughout our place of residence, kinnetic activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential, including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus. Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the wood burning caloric apparatus, pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure regarding an immiment visitation from an eccentric philanthropist among whose folkloric appellations is the honorific title of St. Nicholas. The prepubescent siblings, comfortably ensconced in their respective accommodations of repose, were experiencing subconscious visual hallucinations of variegated fruit confections moving rhythmically through their cerebrums. My conjugal partner and I, attired in our nocturnal head coverings, were about to take slumbrous avantage of the hibernal darkness when upon the avenaceous exterior portion of the grounds there ascended such a cacaphony of dissonance that I felt compelled to arise with alacrity from my place of repose for the purpose of ascertaining the precise source thereof. Hastening to the casement, I forthwith opened the barriers sealing this fenestration, noting thereupon that the lunar brilliance without, reflected as it was on the surface of a recent crystalline precipitation, might be said to rival that of the solar meridian itself-- thus permitting my incredulous optical sensory organs to behold a miniature airborne runnered conveyance drawn by eight diminutive specimens of the genus Rangifer, piloted by a minuscule, aged chauffeur so ebullient and numble that it became instantly apparent to me that he was indeed our anticipated caller. With his ungulate motive power travelling at what may possibly have been more vertiginous velocity than patriotic alar predators, he vociferated loudly, expelled breath musically through contracted labia, and addressed each of the octet by his or her respective cognomen - "Now Dasher, now Dancer..." et al. - guiding them to the uppermost exterior level of our abode, through which structure I could readily distinguish the concatenations of each of the 32 cloven pedal extremities. As I retracted my cranium from its erstwhile location, and was performing a 180-degree pivot, our distinguished visitant achieved - with utmost celerity and via a downward leap - entry by way of the smoke passage. He was clad entirely in animal pelts soiled by the ebon residue from oxidations of carboniferous fuels which had accumulated on the walls thereof. His resemblance to a street vendor I attributed largely to the plethora of assorted playthings which he bore dorsally in a commodious cloth receptacle. His orbs were scintillant with reflected luminosity, while his submaxillary dermal indentations gave every evidence of engaging amiability. The capillaries of his malar regions and nasal appurtenance were engorged with blood which suffused the subcutaneous layers, the former approximating the coloration of Albion's floral emblem, the latter that of the Prunus avium, or sweet cherry. His amusing sub- and supralabials resembled nothing so much as a common loop knot, and their ambient hirsute facial adornment appeared like small, tabular and columnar crystals of frozen water. Clenched firmly between his incisors was a smoking piece whose gray fumes, forming a tenuous ellipse about his occiput, were suggestive of a decorative seasonal circlet of holly. His visage was wider than it was high, and when he waxed audibly mirthful, his corpulent abdominal region undulated in the manner of impectinated fruit syrup in a hemispherical container. He was, in short, neither more nor less than an obese, jocun, multigenarian gnome, the optical perception of whom rendered me risibly frolicsome despite every effort to refrain from so being. By rapidly lowering and then elevating one eyelid and rotating his head slightly to one side, he indicted that trepidation on my part was groundless. Without utterance and with dispatch, he commenced filling the aforementioned appended hosiery with various of the aforementioned articles of merchandise extracted from his aforementioned previously dorsally transported cloth receptacle. Upon completion of this task, he executed an abrupt about-face, placed a single manual digit in lateral juxtaposition to his olfactory organ, inclined his cranium forward in a gesture of leave-taking, and forthwith effected his egress by renegotiating (in reverse) the smoke passage. He then propelled himself in a short vector onto his conveyance, directed a musical expulsion of air through his contracted oral sphincter to the antlered quadrupeds of burden, and proceeded to soar aloft in a movement hitherto observable chiefly among the seed-bearing portions of a common weed. But I overheard his parting exclamation, audible immediately prior to his vehiculation beyond the limits of visibility: "Ecstatic yuletide to the planetary constituency, and to that selfsame assemblage, my sincerest wishes for a salubriously beneficial and gratifyingly pleasurable period between sunset and dawn." -- From Eleonore Johnson at Teknowledge ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 00:06 EST From: Sergei Nirenburg <nirenburg%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Conference - Machine Translation CALL FOR PAPERS CONFERENCE ON THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN MACHINE TRANSLATION OF NATURAL LANGUAGES Colgate University Hamilton NY 13346 August 14-16, 1985 The program of the conference will be biased toward invited lectures and panel discussions. However, a restricted number of excellent submitted papers will be also included. The major topics of the conference are as follows : -- Machine Translation (MT) as an application area for Theoretical Linguistics (including stylistics and discourse analysis) -- MT as an application area for Artificial Intelligence (including the choice of the representation schemata for MT) -- Theory and methodology of translation and machine translation -- Sublanguages, restricted domains and MT -- MT as a case study in software system development -- Computational tools for MT, human engineering aspects, management and evaluation of MT projects. The papers should not exceed 3,000 words, should contain a 250-word abstract and a list of index terms. Send them (and address all inquiries) to Sergei Nirenburg MT Conference Program Chair Department of COmputer Science Colgate University Hamilton NY 13346 (315) 824-1000 x586 Every paper will be read by two members of the program committee whose members are: Christian Boitet, University of Grenoble Jaime Carbonell, Carnegie-Mellon University David MacDonald, University of Massachusetts James Pustejovsky, University of Massachusetts Allen Tucker, Colgate University Don Walker, AT&T Laboratories The emphasis of the conference is on the theoretical and methodological issues. Therefore, the papers that do not address such issues will not be considered. Dates: Submission deadline -- March 11, 1985 Notification of acceptance -- May 15, 1985 Final version due -- June 17, 1985 >>>>> the above will provide a good opportunity to conduct more lively >>>>> discussions of Aymara, Sastric Sanskrit, Esperanto, etc., the >>>>> problem of translatability, theory of translation (even not >>>>> necessarily automatic), interlinguae and their structure... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 11:20:41 cst From: Don Kraft <kraft%lsu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: JASIS Call for Papers As the new editor of the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE (JASIS), I am sending out a call for papers. We are a refereed professional journal seeking scholarly, relevant articles in the area of information sci- ence. To submit an article, please send three copies of the manuscript to me at Donald H. Kraft Department of Computer Science Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, LA 70803. If you have any questions, I can also be reached at (504) 388-1495 or kraft%lsu@csnet-relay . I have attached below a list of topics considered relevant. Please note the presence of artificial intelligence, which has become of interest, especially in the area of informa- tion retrieval (intelligent front ends, expert systems, and the use of natural language processing seem especially relevant to my readers at the moment). You may wish to check out the September, 1984 (v. 35, n. 5) issue, which featured a series of articles on AI. CALL FOR PAPERS -- JASIS 1. Theory of Information Science 4. Applied Information Science Foundations of Information Science Informations systems design -- Information theory tools, principles, applications Bibliometrics Case histories Information retrieval -- Information system operations models and principles Standards Evaluation and measurement Information technology -- hardware Representation, organization, and and software classification of information Automation of information systems ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and natural Online retrieval systems language processing Office automation and records management 2. Communication 5. Social and Legal Aspects of Information Theory of communication Non-print media Impact of information systems and Man-machine interaction technology upon society Network design, operation, and Ethics and information management Legislative and regulatory aspects Models and empirical findings about History of information science information transfer Information science education User and usage studies International issues 3. Management, Economics, and Marketing Economics of information Management of information systems Models of information management decisions Marketing and market research studies Special clientele -- arts and humanities, behavioral and social sciences, biological and chemical sciences, energy and environment, legal, medical, and education. Authors may also send in brief communications, scholarly opinion pieces, and even letters to the editor. In addition, we also have a fine book review section. Thank you in advance for your consideration of JASIS. Don Kraft kraft%lsu@csnet-relay ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************