AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA (AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws) (01/23/86)
AIList Digest Thursday, 23 Jan 1986 Volume 4 : Issue 12 Today's Topics: Natural Language - Modulated Kitchens and Superior Borders, Humor - Pseudoscience Jargon, Logic & Humor - Proof that P = NP, Games - Othello Tournament Information Literature - New Text on Natural Language Processing ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 22 Dec 1985 1822-PST (Sunday) From: Steven Tepper <greep@camelot> Subject: modulated kitchens and superior borders From a recent issue of the Chronicle: "When you mount the cooker hood on a modulated kitchen, please care that the superior border of the caliber is on the inferior border of the incorporated board. When you fix the cooker hood to the incorporated board, please set this border on the wall up on the bottom of the incorporated board and use the unhooped holes." Instructions for fitting a stove hood made in Italy by the Zanussi company. The Plain English Campaign in London has awarded the directions its annual prize for the worst example of bureaucratic language, citing an "incompetent and baffling translation from an unknown language into sub-English." [This should give the machine translation people something to shoot for. -- KIL] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Jan 86 09:59 EST From: Sonny Crockett <weltyc%rpicie.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> Subject: A good one on HAL I just got the videotape of 2010, and figured out what Dr. Chandra said about the reason HAL screwed up in the first mission. The major problem most SF authors have is trying to come up with ways to express advanced scientific things in a way that sounds very scientific...this is a great one: (Dr. Chandra has just finished explaining that HAL was given conflicting orders, and was only trying to interpret them the best he could) "...HAL was trapped, more precisely he got caught in an H. Mobius Loop, which is possible in autonomous call-seeking computers." I thought it was funny, anyway... -Chris PS If anyone (like me) enjoys laughing at these kind of "pseudo-science" phrases, I recommend watching Dr. Who (most famous for "Multi-dimensional Time/Space Vortex"), and Star Trek ("Hodgkins Theory for Parallel Planet Development," is one of my favorites). I'm sure there are many others as well. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 27 Dec 85 16:11:46 pst From: Alain Fournier <fournier@su-navajo.ARPA> Reply-to: fournier@Navajo.UUCP (Alain Fournier) Subject: Logic & Humor - Proof that P = NP [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] > From: Len <Lattanzi@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> > > $15 to anyone who can prove P = NP. > > #8^) > Len This is an old one, but what the hell, it's $15.00: ----------------------------------- | Exactly 2 of the statements | | in these 3 boxes are false | | | ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- | | | P != NP | | | ----------------------------------- ----------------------------------- | The statement in the first | | box is true. | | | ----------------------------------- It is left to the reader to show that assuming statement 1 is true leads to a contradiction, so 1 is false, therefore 3 is false, and 2 has to be false. The same conclusion is reached if the truth value of 3 is examined. So 2 is false, and P=NP, QED. The $15 can be sent in my name to my favourite charity, the Douglas Hofstadter Home for the Terminally Self-Referential. An accompanying note should specify that I requested that my gift should have no accompanying note. ------------------------------ Date: January 17, 1986, 5:51 PM. From: <1gtlmkf%calstate.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU> Subject: Othello Tournament Information For anyone who might be interested in the upcoming Computer Othello Tournament at CSU, Northridge on February 15-16: Yoy may contact the tournament organizers over BITNET at the following addresses -- Brian Swift (AGTLBJS@CALSTATE.BITNET) Marc Furon (1GTLMKF@CALSTATE.BITNET) Any questions or requests for information about the tournament may be sent to either of us at the addresses above. We look forward to a successful tournament and hope to hear from any and all interested Othello programmers. Thanks to Kurt Godden for sending the announcement to AILIST. Marc Furon Yes, Othello is a trademark of CBS Toys. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jan 86 09:52:55 EST From: "Richard E. Cullingford" <rec%gatech.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> Subject: new AI text This note is an announcement of a new AI book which may be of interest to the readers of this newsgroup. The book is "Natural Language Processing: A Knowledge Engineering Approach," and it will be available from Rowman & Allanheld, Publishers, of Totowa, NJ, early in the spring of 1986. The work is intended as a practical introduction to a theory and technology for building natural language text-processing interfaces to database management or expert reasoning systems. The text has been in use, in manuscript, in courses at Princeton University and Georgia Tech for the past two years, and extensive course materials have been developed. A software system, the NLP Toolkit, is also available, through the publisher, that runs all of the text's examples, and is suitable for experimentation by teachers and programmers. The Toolkit contains representation design tools, a conceptual analyzer, a conceptual generator, a large shared dictionary, and a knowledge-base management support package. Questions regarding the book and the programs can be addressed to the author, Richard E. Cullingford, at the School of Information & Computer Science, georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332; at (404) 894-3227; or gatech!rec (uucp) or rec@gatech (csnet). The book's table of contents follows: Table Of Contents Natural Language Processing: A Knowledge Engineering Approach Preface Notes on the Use of This Book Acknowledgments Table of Contents Table of Diagrams Table of Figures Chapter 1: Natural Language Processing: An Overview 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Related Fields: An Overview 1.1.1 NLP, Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Engineering 1.1.2 NLP and the Sciences of Language 1.2 NLP Efforts in AI 1.2.1 Early Efforts 1.2.2 Second Generation Systems 1.2.3 Third Generation Systems: A Look into the Future 1.3 Outline of the Book Part I: A General-Purpose Language Processing Interface Chapter 2: An Introduction to Representation Design 2.0 The Representation Problem 2.1 The Need for a Formal Representational System 2.2 Requirements on a Representational System 2.3 Introduction to ERKS 2.3.1 The ISA-Hierarchy of the Core System 2.3.2 Criteria for Selection of the Primitive Types 2.4 ERKS in LISP 2.5 The Maximal Inference-Free Paraphrase 2.6 Building a Model Corpus 2.7 A Simple Corpus 2.8 Primitive Actionals and Statives 2.9 Conceptual Relationships 2.10 A Representational Case Study: CADHELP 2.10.1 The CADHELP Microworld 2.10.2 A Typical Command 2.10.3 Knowledge Representation Issues 2.11 Summary Chapter 3: Software Tools for Representation Design 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Navigating in an ISA-Hierarchy 3.2 Defining ERKS Types 3.3 Access and Updating Machinery 3.4 The def-wordsense Record Macro 3.5 Summary Chapter 4: Surface-Semantic Conceptual Analysis 4.0 Introduction: Lexicon-Driven Analysis 4.1 A Simple Model of Sentence Structure 4.2 Production Systems, Requests, and Processing Overview 4.3 Request Pool Consideration 4.3.1 Analysis Environment 4.3.2 Request Types 4.4 Requests in More Detail 4.5 Morphological Fragments and "to be" 4.6 A Processing Example 4.7 Summary Chapter 5: Problems in Conceptual Analysis 5.0 Introduction 5.1 Tri-Constituent Forms and Imbedded Sentences 5.1.1 Handling Indirect Objects 5.1.2 Infinitives and Gerunds 5.1.3 Relative Clauses 5.2 Prepositions and "to be," Revisited 5.3 Word Meaning Disambiguation 5.3.1 Pronominal Reference 5.4 Coordinate Constructions 5.5 Ellipsis Expansion 5.6 A Concluding Example 5.7 Summary Chapter 6: Generating Natural Language from a Conceptual Base 6.0 Introduction 6.1 Overview of Generation Process 6.2 Dictionary Entries 6.3 Morphology and the Verb Kernel 6.3.1 Plural and Possessive Morphology 6.3.2 Subject-Verb Agreement and Modals 6.3.3 Tensing 6.3.4 Subject-Auxiliary Inversion 6.4 "Advanced" English Syntax 6.4.1 The Infinitive Construction 6.4.2 The Possessive Sketchifier 6.4.3 The Entity-Reference Sketchifier 6.5 A Processing Example 6.6 Summary Part II: Building a Conversationalist Chapter 7: Summarizing Knowledge Bases 7.0 Introduction: What to Say versus How to Say It 7.1 Explanations as Summaries 7.2 Explanations in CADHELP 7.3 Representational Overview 7.4 Concept Selection 7.5 An Example 7.6 Summary Chapter 8: Knowledge-Base Management 8.0 Introduction 8.1 KB Organization 8.1.1 The Slot-Filler Tree 8.1.2 Slot-Filler Tree Construction 8.1.3 Index Quality 8.1.4 Best-First Ordering of KB Items 8.2 KB Search 8.2.1 The Tree Search Mechanism 8.3 Performance 8.4 Summary Chapter 9: Commonsense Reasoning 9.0 Introduction: The Need for Reasoning in Language Understanding 9.1 Deductive Retrieval 9.2 YADR, Yet Another Deductive Retriever 9.3 The YADR Interface 9.4 The YADR Top Level 9.5 Logical Connectives in Antecedent Forms 9.6 Summary Chapter 10: Putting It All Together: A Goal-Directed Conversationalist 10.0 Introduction 10.1 The ACE Microworld 10.2 A Model of Purposive Conversation 10.3 The Conversational Strategist 10.4 The Conversational Tactician 10.5 The Academic Scheduling Expert 10.6 More Problems in Language Understanding 10.6.1 Coordinate Constructions and Ellipses 10.6.2 Defining "And" for the Analyzer 10.6.3 Using Expectations during Analysis 10.7 More Problems in Language Generation 10.7.1 Asking Questions 10.7.2 Producing Coordinate Constructions 10.7.3 Generating Attributes, Absolute Times, Locales, and Names 10.8 Putting It All Together: A Session with ACE 10.9 Parting Words Appendix I: The ERKS Types Appendix II: Source for YADR, Yet Another Deductive Retriever Appendix III: Glossary of Terms Rich Cullingford ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************