clarke@csri.toronto.edu (Jim Clarke) (10/24/88)
(SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road)
(GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)
SUMMARY:
AI SEMINAR - Tuesday, November 1, 11 a.m. in SF1105 -- Dave Moffat:
"An Overview of a Natural Language Interface System"
GRAPHICS & INTERACTION SEMINAR: Fri., Nov. 4, 10 a.m. in GB 405 -- Mark Apperley
"Lean Cuisine: A Low-Fat Notation for Menus"
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AI SEMINAR - Tuesday, November 1, 11 a.m. in SF1105
Dave Moffat
Department of Artificial Intelligence
Edinburgh, Scotland
"An Overview of a Natural Language Interface System"
Abstract. The System is one under development at three sites in the UK. It
is to be an NL interface to a planning system.
The purpose of the project is to investigate certain features of
language that have not hitherto been addressed by other NL interface sys-
tems. The features of specific interest are tense, modality (necessity and
possibility), conditionals, and counterfactuals.
The talk will firstly overview the prototype system, that simply
evaluates queries with respect to a single plan. Then it will go on to
discuss the design of the second system that is currently being coded, that
calls the planner interactively in order to evaluate some queries. This
version will treat modal queries and some conditionals and counterfactuals,
as well as some assertions. While far from being a single cohesive theory
of natural language understanding of modal and conditional queries, it is
at least a system that allows us to begin a discussion of these issues, and
of the use of a planning system in their evaluation.
GRAPHICS & INTERACTION SEMINAR - Friday, November 4, 10:00 a.m. in GB 405
Mark Apperley
Massey University
New Zealand
"Lean Cuisine: A Low-Fat Notation for Menus"
Abstract. Existing techniques for the specification, design, implementa-
tion and control of highly interactive direct manipulation dialogues fall
well short of the goal of isolating their design from the detail of their
implementation. The structural characteristics of menu systems, a key com-
ponent of such dialogues, are closely examined and, arising from this
analysis, a new diagrammatic approach to their description is proposed.
This approach is shown to be able to completely specify the details and
behaviour of a system of menus from an external point of view. The paral-
lels between this notation and other formal dialogue models are discussed,
demonstrating the potential for a direct implementation of an interface
from this description. Further, it is suggested that the notation could be
extended to cover all aspects of direct manipulation interaction.
--
Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
(416) 978-4058
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