rapaport@sunybcs.UUCP (William J. Rapaport) (11/18/86)
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO
GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
DAVID McDONALD
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF NATURAL-LANGUAGE GENERATION: WHAT IT MEANS TO HAVE ONE
In the field of AI, the notational vehicles for our theories are com-
puter programs: they describe processes, contexts, modularity, con-
straints, and resources with greater facility than any other system
available to cognitive scientists. Not every program can serve as the
statement of a theory, however. Limitations on representational expres-
siveness and computational power must be prescribed; otherwise, a theory
will be able to claim nothing more than that the process it character-
izes is Turing-computable (e.g., could be written in LISP), which would
seldom be a surprise. At UMass, this limitation has been carried out by
implementing a special virtual machine--MUMBLE-86--that defines the pro-
cedural interpretation of the generator's grammar and input-
specification language, and defines the space of possible
realization/usage decisions: when they can be made, what they can refer
to, and what kinds of things they can choose between. The rationale
behind the design decisions that went into MUMBLE-86--in effect, what I
take it that a computational theory of generation is a theory of--will be
the main point of the talk. I will also describe where the state of the
art in the field of generation is today and where it seems to be going,
and discuss how alternative formulations of the problem by other genera-
tion projects are making different predictions and tend to have less
explanatory force.
Monday, December 1, 1986
3:30 P.M.
Baldy 684, Amherst Campus
Co-sponsored by: Department of Computer Science
Informal discussion at 8:00 P.M. at Stuart Shapiro's house,
112 Parkledge Drive, Snyder, NY.
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For further information, contact:
William J. Rapaport
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260
(716) 636-3193, 3180
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