LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (11/16/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI> AIList Digest Sunday, 11 Nov 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 152 Today's Topics: Msc. - Band Name, Machine Translation - Aymara as Interlingua, Linguistics - Sastric Sanskrit & Language Degeneration, Knowledge Representation - Problem Solving Representations, Seminars - Rule-Based Debugging System & PROLOG Data Dependency Analysis, Conference - IJCAI-85 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 10 Nov 84 18:53:18 PST (Saturday) From: Mark Sabiers <Sabiers.es@XEROX.ARPA> Reply-to: Sabiers.es@XEROX.ARPA Subject: The names of bands The enclosed message came through net.music (uucp) and Info-Music (ARPA). Thought it was appropriate to this list. Mark Subject: Artificial Intelligence Date: 8 Nov 84 04:46:12 GMT Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ From: "N.BRISTOL" <bristol@hou2h.uucp.ARPA> Has anyone heard of a band called Artificial Intelligence? I heard a tune on the radio and I would like to know more about the band. RSVP by mail or the net, I don't care. Gil Bristol AT&T Consumer Products Neptune, NJ hou2h!bristol ------------------------------ Date: Fri Nov 9 1984 13:22:59 From: Yigal Arens <arens%usc-cse.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Strange new languages As if we didn't have enough trouble with Sastric Sanskrit, last Wednesday's LA Times contains a story about wonderful advances in machine translation using an Indian language (Aymara) which "according to some historians [was constructed by] wise men from scratch, by logical, premeditated design, as early as 4,000 years ago." How "some historians" know this remains a mystery, all the more so since according to the article there are hardly any written records of the langauge. Anyway, a Bolivian mathematician, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, has devised a system for machine translation using this language as a "bridge". "Sitting at a computer terminal, Guzman de Rojas demonstrates by typing a tricky Spanish sentence: `La mujer que vino ayer tomo vino.' Less than a second after he pushes a button, five translations flash on the screen and roll off a printer. The English reads: `the woman who came yesterday drank wine.' "The system is remarkable, according to US and Canadian experts, not only for its speed and versatility, but its ability to sort out ambiguities. Other systems, they say, cannot distinguish between uses of the word `vino' - which can mean `came' or `wine' - without an awkward modification of the computer logic." The article is full of inaccuracies concerning machine translation. It claims that Wang has recently given Guzman de Rojas $50,000 plus a $100,000 computer "to refine his system." Anybody know more about this? Yigal Arens USC ------------------------------ Date: 8 Nov 1984 11:59-PST (Thursday) From: Rick Briggs <briggs@RIACS.ARPA> Subject: Sastric Sanskrit & Language Degeneration By "has begun", I meant since the mid-nineteenth century. Since the time frame I have been writing in is measured by millenia, one century qualifies for "has begun". Anyway, I wonder what Bill Poser means by saying: "But that does not mean that the *language* degenerates--only that its use degenerates." If a language is abused to a large extent by its speakers, has it not degenerated? What seems to be implied here is that there is some abstract "language" prototype which exists independent of use. If this is so, violations to this prototype are degeneration. This is exactly the point of view of Panini etc. The Indian and Greek cultures considered language to be a primary component of culture(in the Indian case, language IS culture: the word Aryan originally meant one who spoke Aryan language(i.e. Sanskrit)). To illustrate what I mean by degeneration, consider a group of primitives who begin to use language. They begin with primitive grunts to signify essential notions such as "food". Later, they find that the machinery of the language does not allow the expression of concepts. Thus the langauge evolves and evolves. The ultimate evolution is reached when a language can express all notions in the realms of the physical, emotional, conceptual, and spiritual in a concise unambiguous way. Sastric Sanskrit may indeed be that language(or close to it). Now the less lofty of the population find no need to use such words as "none other than", "agreeing with no other", "activity conducive towards existence" etc. (these are words in Sastric Sanskrit). So they cease to use the complex machinery and revert to simple formatrions to express what they need to. If there is no prescription, or encouragement in the educational process to stick to the higher form of the language, the more popular masses(consider television) will produce a pressure on the less numerous scholarly class, and the language will begin to revert backwards. This is exactly what happened to Sanskrit. The "Prakrits" and "Apabrahmshas" eventually turned Sanskrit into Hindi, Bengali etc., which do not have the sophisticated machinery Sastric Sanskrit had. In other words, where one word in the Sastra signified a concept, an entire sentence is now needed in the degenerated form of the language. I believe this is also the pattern which Proto-Indo-European followed, and which English is following now. Once again, Sastric Sanskrit is a natural language. But what exactly is a natural language? Is it existence of native speakers (as Bill Poser suggests), or is it something about the nature of te language itself? Whether consciously or not, Linguists and NLP people think of natural languages as necessarily being ambiguous and very different from the predicate calculus. What the existence of the Sastra indicates is that the definition of natural language should be changed. I would say that a natural language is one which 1) is used 2) which has the ability to express naturally, all the various aspects of the natural world. Thus, if Esperanto were used in a culture, it would be a natural language. Mathematics cannot naturally express poetic notions, it is defined over only a small aspect of the natural world. Sastric Sanskrit(so I have been told by Sanskrit experts) had(and may still have) native speakers. It is also capable of expressing anything any other natural language can express. You can write philosophy or poetry in the Sastra. I challenge anybody to find a sentence in any language which cannot be expressed using the machinery of Sastric Sanskrit. I think the real point is that the Sastra is a bridge between the natural and artificial and challenges common notions of what the boundary is. One conclusion I would make is that it is possible for a child to be raised speaking totally unambiguously from birth and never suffer from lack of expression or cumbersomeness. As an interlingua, Sastra would be great because it can codify with exactitude and make inferences naturally, and yet poetic notions can be coded and not lost on the target language. Rick ------------------------------ Date: Fri 9 Nov 84 07:41:30-CST From: Aaron Temin <CS.Temin@UTEXAS-20.ARPA> Subject: convenient problem solving representations There was a conference on knowledge representation and languages at the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins from Oct 29-31. One of the main issues was that current programming languages force one to use primitives that map well to a machine, but badly to most problem domains. Thus there are two problems: What primitives are appropriate for a given problem domain and how can one map those into an executable module on a given machine? Jean Sammet from IBM contended that many problem-domain specific languages already exist, but obviously there aren't enough or everyone would be pretty content by now. What is seems we need are guidelines to help with these questions. These are questions for all computer scientists, but especially those of us in AI who have spent time developing new knowledge representations rather than implementing old ones. -Aaron ------------------------------ Date: 8 November 1984 1227-EST From: Staci Quackenbush@CMU-CS-A Subject: Seminar - Rule-Based Debugging System [Forwarded from the CMU bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Name: Bernd Bruegge Date: November 12, 1984 Time: 3:30 - 4:30 Place: WeH 5409 Title: "PATH RULES: Debugging as a Rule-Based Activity Debugging has often been considered an ad hoc technique with no underlying model for the user. In this talk we show how debugging can be viewed as a rule based activity. Rule based systems have been used extensively in the area of artifical intelligence. We demonstrate that they can be quite useful in the area of debugging. We have designed and implemented a language called PATH RULES. Several examples of PATH RULES on the implementer as well as on the user level are given: We show how rules can be used in the design of the command language, the implementation of debugging mechanisms (breakpoints, tracing, etc), screen layout, dialog control and multiple process debugging problems. PATH RULES have been used in the implementation of the Interim Spice Debugger KRAUT. KRAUT is a remote, source oriented debugger for Pascal running under the Accent Operating system and is currently being modified for Ada. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 9 Nov 84 09:32:17 pst From: (Julia D. Snyder [csam]) julia@lbl-csam Subject: Seminar - PROLOG Static Data Dependency Analysis [Forwarded from the LBL distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] High Performance Execution of PROLOG Programs Based on a Static Data Dependency Analysis by Jung-Herng Chang* (UCB Aquarius Group) Room: Bldg. 50B Rm. 4205 Date: November 12, 1984 Time: 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Outline What is PROLOG ? Why is it an important symbolic manipulation language? The Performance of executing PROLOG programs has been improved by going from interpreters to compilers, and then to special hardware (e.g. the PLM Machine at UCB). What is the next step to improve performance? This talk begins with an introduction to PROLOG, followed by a discussion of more advanced topics in PROLOG. A methodology for a static data dependency analysis for PROLOG is introduced, as well as its applications to the PLM Machine and a parallel execution environment. *The speaker is also affiliated with ACAL LBL. ------------------------------ Date: Fri 9 Nov 84 08:49:27-PST From: name AAAI-OFFICE <AAAI@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: IJCAI-85 Call IJCAI-85 CALL FOR PAPERS The IJCAI conferences are the main forum for the presentation of Artificial Intelligence research to an international audience. The goal of the IJCAI-85 is to promote scientific interchange, within and between all subfields of AI, among researchers from all over the world. The conference is sponsored by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Inc., and co-sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). IJCAI-85 will be held at the University of California, Los Angeles from August 18 through August 24, 1985. * Tutorials: August 18-19; Technical Sessions: August 20-24 TOPICS OF INTEREST Authors are invited to submit papers of substantial, original, and previously unreported research in any aspect of AI, including: * AI architectures and languages * AI and education (including intelligent CAI) * Automated reasoning (including theorem proving, automatic programming,plan- ning, search, problem solving, commensense, and qualitative reasoning) * Cognitive modelling * Expert systems * Knowledge representation * Learning and knowledge acquisition * Logic programming * Natural language (including speech) * Perception (including visual, auditory, tactile) * Philosophical foundations * Robotics * Social, economic and legal implications REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION Authors should submit 4 complete copies of their paper. (Hard copy only, no electronic submissions.) * LONG PAPERS: 5500 words maximum, up to 7 proceedings pages * SHORT PAPERS: 2200 words maximum, up to 3 proceedings pages Each paper will be stringently reviewed by experts in the topic area specified. Acceptance will be based on originality and significance of the reported research, as well as the quality of its presentation. Applications clearly demonstrating the power of established techniques, as well as thoughtful critiques of previously published material will be considered, provided that they point the way to new research and are substantive scientific contributions in their own right. Short papers are a forum for the presentation of succinct, crisp results. They are not a safety net for long paper rejections. In order to ensure appropriate refereeing, authors are requested to specify in which of the above topic areas the paper belongs, as well as a set of no more than 5 keywords for further classification within that topic area. Because of time constraints, papers requiring major revisions cannot be accepted. DETAILS FOR SUBMISSION The following information must be included with each paper: * Author's name, address, telephone number and net address (if applicable); * Topic area (plus a set of no more than 5 keywords for further classification within the topic area.); * An abstract of 100-200 words; * Paper length (in words). The time table is as follows: * Submission deadline: 7 January 1985 (papers received after January 7th will be returned unopened) * Notification of Acceptance: 16 March 1985 * Camera Ready copy due: 16 April 1985 Contact Points Submissions should be sent to the Program Chair: Aravind Joshi Dept of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA General inquiries should be directed to the General Chair: Alan Mackworth Dept of Computer Science University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 Inquiries about program demonstrations (including videotape system demonstrations) and other local arrangements should be sent to the Local Arrangements Chair: Steve Crocker The Aerospace Corporation P.O. Box 92957 Los Angeles, CA 90009 USA Inquiries about tutorials, exhibits, and registration should be sent to the AAAI Office: Claudia Mazzetti American Association for Artificial Intelligence 445 Burgess Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************