LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (11/14/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI>
AIList Digest Thursday, 1 Nov 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 148
Today's Topics:
Linguistics - Bibliography Request,
AI Tools - Workstations under $50K,
News - IJCAI Awards,
Linguistics - Sastric Sanscrit,
Conference Review - Southern California AI Society,
Seminar - Coherence in Life Stories
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Date: 30 Oct 1984 20:15:33 EST
From: Miroslav Benda <BENDA@USC-ISI.ARPA>
Subject: linguistics bibliography
Several years ago, Gazdar & Klein published a "Bibliography of Contemporary
Lingustic Reasearch", which was an indexed guide to papers and books on
generative linguistics. Is there anything similar online somewhere?
Something that is kept up to date (and not several years behind, like
"Bibliografie Linguistique").
Miroslav Benda
Boeing Computer Services
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Date: Wed, 31 Oct 84 13:45:48 pst
From: (Marvin Erickson [pnl]) erickson@lbl-csam
Subject: AI Workstations under $50K
I am interested in comments on the performance of low cost (under $50K) AI
Workstations. Applications include expert system development and Landsat
image processing. I am particularly interested in the availability of tools
for either application that run under common Lisp on a PERQ and provide
object oriented capabilities in addition to Lisp.
Ron Melton
Battelle/Pacific Northwest Laboratory
(509) 375-2932
erickson@lbl-csam
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Date: Tue, 30 Oct 84 10:43:32 pst
From: Alan Mackworth <mack%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: IJCAI Awards
The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence
The Board of Trustees of International Joint Confer-
ences on Artificial Intelligence Inc. is proud to announce
the establishment of The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence
to honour sustained excellence in Artificial Intelligence
research. The Award will be made every second year, at the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of
consistently high quality yielding several substantial
results. If the research program has been carried out col-
laboratively the award may be made jointly to the research
team.
The Award carries with it a certificate and the sum of
$1,000 plus travel and living expenses for the IJCAI. The
researcher(s) will be invited to deliver an address on the
nature and significance of the results achieved. Primarily,
however, the award carries the honour of having one's work
selected by one's peers as an exemplar of sustained research
in the maturing science of Artificial Intelligence.
We hereby call for nominations for The IJCAI Award for
Research Excellence to be made at IJCAI-85 in Los Angeles.
The accompanying note on Selection Procedures for IJCAI
Awards provides the relevant details.
The Computers and Thought Award
The Computers and Thought Lecture is given at each
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence by
an outstanding young scientist in the field of artificial
intelligence. An award of $1,000 and payment for travel and
subsistence expenses are provided to the recipient. Nomina-
tion and selection procedures are outlined in the note
Selection Procedures for IJCAI Awards. The Lecture is given
one evening during the Conference, and the public is invited
to attend. The Lectureship was established with royalties
received from the book Computers and Thought, edited by
Feigenbaum and Feldman; it is currently supported by income
from IJCAI funds.
Past recipients of this honour have been Terry Winograd
(1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas
Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981) and
Tom Mitchell (1983).
Nominations are invited for The Computers and Thought
Award to be made at IJCAI-85 in Los Angeles. The note on
Selection Procedures for IJCAI Awards covers the nomination
procedures to be followed.
Selection Procedures for IJCAI Awards
Nominations for The Computers and Thought Award and The
IJCAI Award for Research Excellence are invited from all in
the Artificial Intelligence international community. The
procedures are the same for both awards.
There should be a nominator and a seconder, at least
one of whom should not have been in the same institution as
the nominee. The nominee must agree to be nominated. The
nominators should prepare a short submission less than 2,000
words for the voters, outlining the nominee's qualifications
with respect to the criteria for the particular award.
The award selection committee is the union of the Pro-
gram, Organizing and Conference Committees of the upcoming
IJCAI and the Board of Trustees of IJCAII with nominees
excluded. Nominations should be submitted before March 31,
1985 to the IJCAI-85 Conference Chair:
Alan Mackworth
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1W5
Canada Tel. (604) 228-4893
Net Addresses CSnet: mack@ubc
ARPAnet: mack%ubc@CSNet-Relay
UUCP: mack@ubc-vision
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Date: 29 Oct 1984 10:04-PST (Monday)
From: Rick Briggs <briggs@RIACS.ARPA>
Subject: Re: AIList Digest V2 #146
I have been challenged to defend some of my recent assertions.
Bill Poser should be more careful when he criticizes
("Finally, Briggs mistakenly characterizes linguists as
prescriptivists" -- I said the exact opposite on AIList of Thursday Oct.
18, that is that lingiustics has become descriptive rather than
prescriptive: my own humble opinion is that non-prescriptive linguistics
will be the death of english).
With regards to machine translation, the "aesthetic amenities"
could be an advantage rather than a disadvantage, since it might be
possible to encode poetic constructions in the interlingua, otherwise
many subtleties will be lost in the translation. The Sanskrit scholars
have done a lot of work in formulating a mechanism for expressing
natural language entities unambiguously. All I am saying is that it
would be unwise to sweep under the carpet millenia (yes, millenia) of
research without attempting to learn soemthing from it.
Word ambiguity exists in Classical Sanskrit but is not a serious
problem in the Sastra, since the level of representation of meaning
is usually below the word level. While Caitra is Caitra, cook is
a process of softening etc. By going one level of representation
deeper, ambiguity between two possible meanings of the same word
is avoided.
The use of Sastric Sanskrit can be dated back at least as far as
Patanjali's Mahabhashya (1st millenia B.C.). The tradition continued through
Bhartrhari (the Vakyapadiya), Kaundabhatta, Dikshita (Vaiyakarana-
bhusanasara) and (in the 19th century) Nagesha
(Vaiyakaranasiddhantamanjusa). That it was spoken is evidenced from the
fact that many Sastric works are actually transcripts of long dialogues
between the different "schools" (e.g. the grammarians and the logicians).
Their arguments were expressed in Sastric Sanskrit. Arguing about
whether or not it was actually spoken is similar to asking the same
of the Platonic dialogues. Admittedly, its use was limited to
the scientific community to a large extent. The same can be said about
the type of language used in today's scientific community, with its
own specialized jargon and style. Is Mr. Poser suggesting that
this also is not a natural language?
I do not understand exactly what Kiparsky means when he asserts
that there is ambiguity in whether or not Caitra or rice is in the pot.
What resides in the pot is a "locality", which as an object "rice".
Caitra is the agent of that activity; in no way can he be construed to
be in the pot. Nothing is said about where Caitra is, I suppose he
could be in the pot, but the notion of unspecified slots being filled
in by defaults would be used. Normally, the agent of cooking is not
in the pot and if he were it would probably be explicitly specified.
With regards to definiteness ("the pot" or "a pot"): "pot" is
defined as that which has potness (ghatatvam) in it. More exactly,
a pot (or any other object) is defined by three terms (the determinant
of meaninghood (shaakyatavacchedaka) is made up of three elements). The first
is the genus (potness), the second is the form (or akrti) ("having a
conch-like appearance about its neck [kambugrivadimatvam]"), and
the third is the individual (pot "ghata").
I think that much of the confusion results from too close
a correspondence being assumed from Classical to Sastric Sanskrit.
Much of so called "ambiguity" does not exist as the words themselves
are discarded for deeper representation. Syntactic cases are also
changed when they are expressed as semantic cases since "over a fire"
can mean "by means of a fire" in the case of cooking.
Let me state exactly what Sastric Sanskrit is: it is
"The most sophisticated stage of the developement of Sanskrit
(through Vedic, Classical etc.) in which a very sophisticated
philosophy of "the meaning of a sentence" was developed, and in
which unambiguity was strived for and obtained to a large extent."
By large extent I mean that it is ambiguous as a description
in semantic nets (say conceptual dependency), in fact it is more
precise. What I suggest is that the Linguistic and AI community,
and especially those who are involved in both, take a very close
look at the Sastric methodology and its philosophy, with natural
language processing in mind. They did
much research in how the mind perceives the meaning of words, and
it is surprising how little exposure it has gotten.
Rick Briggs
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Date: Tue, 30 Oct 84 10:18:47 PST
From: Scott Turner <srt@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
Subject: SCAIS Review
The first meeting of the Southern California AI Society was a major success,
with over 200 people from all walks of life (and industry too :-) attending.
The event was held at the Faculty Center at UCLA, and arrangements were
very comfortable.
The agenda included almost 8 hours of talks by over 50 speakers. This
rather long format was intended to allow all the participants to become
familar with AI activities all around Southern California, but the great
length proved to be a drawback. By the end of the day the crowd had thinned
considerably.
Most of the talks were short overviews of ongoing work, but among the
more interesting talks were Rogers Hall of UC Irvine, "Learning in Multiple
Knowledge Sources", Erik Mueller of UCLA "Daydreaming and Story Invention",
and Chuck Williams of Inference Corp., "ART: Automated Reasoning Tool."
A short business meeting was held after the talks were finished, where
preparations for IJCAI-85 were discussed and an interim governing board for
SCAIS was selected (i.e., people volunteered). In all likelihood future
SCAIS meetings will occur monthly or bi-monthly at rotating hosts. Each
host will showcase their AI acitivities and invite speakers on a selected
topic. This format will give SCAIS members a chance to visit all the local
AI Labs over the course of the year, without unduly straining the capacity of
any single Lab.
After the business meeting there was a demonstration session in the UCLA
AI Lab, hosted by the infamous UCLA Airheads. Erik Mueller demonstrated his
Daydreamer, Sergio Alvardo demonstrated OpEd, a program that models reading
editorials, Uri Zernik demonstrated GATE, the UCLA Graphical AI Tools
Environment, Charlie Dolan demonstrated Aesop, a program that learns planning
knowledge from reading Aesop's fables, and a number of other students
demonstrated other software and current work.
Scott R. Turner
UCLA Computer Science Department
3531 Boelter Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90024
ARPA: srt@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA
UUCP: ...!{cepu,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!srt
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Date: Wed, 31 Oct 84 17:33:44 pst
From: chertok@ucbcogsci (Paula Chertok)
Subject: Seminar - Coherence in Life Stories
BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM
Fall 1984
Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237A
TIME: Tuesday, November 6, 11 - 12:30
PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center
DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 2 in 200 Building T-4
SPEAKER: Charlotte Linde, STRUCTURAL SEMANTICS
TITLE: ``The Creation of Coherence in Life Stories:
Commonsense Philosophy and Special Explana-
tory Systems''
This talk reports on a study of the creation of coherence
in oral life stories. Such coherence is not a property of a
particular life, but rather an achievement of the speaker in
constructing the story. Studying the creation of coherence
permits us to examine the implicit assumptions which are
made about the nature of socially accepted reasons for life
decisions. For example, when a speaker tells us how he
became an optometrist, the way he makes this story coherent
can give us insight into folk beliefs about proper causes,
the nature of accident, etc.
The first level of the creation of coherence is the level of
implicit, commonsense philosophical categories, such as, in
English, causality, accident, continuity and discontinuity.
Speakers must show that their lives exhibit proper reasons
for major decisions. If they can not frame their stories as
exhibiting such causality, they must then analyze them as
involving accident or discontinuity. Stories about accident
or discontinuity tend to be organized to show that the
accident is purely local, that is, that only one small part
of an otherwise well-motivated life is accidental. Simi-
larly, discontinuity is managed by a variety of strategies,
such as discontinuity as only apparent, discontinuity as
sequence, and discontinuity as metacontinuity. All these
strategies work to show that the speaker's life is not as
discontinuous as it might look.
A more complex level of coherence is the level of explana-
tory systems. These are non-expert versions of various
expert systems in the culture, such as popular Freudian
theory, behaviorism, feminism, and astrology. The systems
at this level all presuppose the categories of the previous
level. That is, they all assume the existence of causality,
but specify possible causes which are somewhat different
from the causes permitted by the commonsense system.
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End of AIList Digest
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