nl-kr-request@CS.RPI.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Chris Welty) (04/19/91)
NL-KR Digest (Wed Apr 17 11:44:35 1991) Volume 8 No. 19 Today's Topics: Temporary 3 year Lectureship in HCI at Birmingham Re: commercial NLIs Language Sciences Conference Weekend call for participation for AAAI 1991 Fall Symposium Series Submissions: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Requests, policy: nl-kr-request@cs.rpi.edu Back issues are available from host archive.cs.rpi.edu [128.213.10.18] in the files nl-kr/Vxx/Nyy (ie nl-kr/V01/N01 for V1#1), mail requests will not be promptly satisfied. If you can't reach `cs.rpi.edu' you may want to use `turing.cs.rpi.edu' instead. BITNET subscribers: we now have a LISTSERVer for nl-kr. You may send submissions to NL-KR@RPIECS and any listserv-style administrative requests to LISTSERV@RPIECS. ----------------------------------------------------------------- To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: Aaron Sloman <aarons@syma.sussex.ac.uk> Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.cog-eng,comp.ai.nlang-know-rep,uk.jobs,misc.jobs.offered Subject: Temporary 3 year Lectureship in HCI at Birmingham Date: 12 Apr 91 09:25:40 GMT NB. I am posting this for someone temporarily without net news access, so please don't use "Reply". Address for further information is below. THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE Apricot/Mitsubishi Lectureship in Human-Computer Interaction The School of Computer Science has recently been re-organised and expanded, including new lectureships, two new Chairs, and new equipment. By this Autumn, the School will have three professors, four senior lecturers, and thirteen lecturers, with associated research, technical and administrative staff. Besides undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, the School offers a conversion MSc in Computer Science, and PhD research training. There is also a new initiative in Cognitive Science (including AI and HCI), with links to several other Schools. This initiative includes an MSc degree in Cognitive Science and PhD research training. There are several externally funded research projects. A new 3-year lectureship in HCI is being funded by Apricot Computers Limited which is part of Mitsubishi Electric UK Limited as part of their support for teaching and research in Cognitive Science and applications are sought from young computer scientists with strong interests in teaching and research in HCI. The post will be on the Lecturer A scale (minimum #12086 pounds per annum). JOB DESCRIPTION The new post, funded for three years initially, establishes Apricot/MitsubishiUs commitment to support for teaching and research in HCI. The post has been made available to release Dr W H Edmondson to concentrate primarily on research in this area. The person appointed will supply teaching in Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science, through the development of existing courses and new courses. Additional duties will include software workshop coursework. It is expected that the successful applicant will be a young computer scientist, with a strong interest in teaching and research interests in HCI. It is hoped that the successful candidate will be able to take up his/her post at the beginning of July, or very soon after. Applications are required by 3rd May 1991. For further particulars, please apply to: Mr P J F Scott Director of Staffing Services The University of Birmingham Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT. Phone: (+44) 021-414-3842 The University of Birmingham is an Equal Opportunities Employer. Email enquiries should not be addressed to the news poster but to EDMONDSONWH@VAX1.COMPUTER-CENTRE.BIRMINGHAM.AC.UK ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: imlah@canon-research-europe.co.uk Date: Tue, 16 Apr 91 13:31:33 GMT Subject: Re: commercial NLIs Also: NATURAL LANGUAGE SOFTWARE REGISTRY The Natural Language Software Registry is a catalogue of software implementing core natural language processing techniques, whether available on a commercial or noncommercial basis. NL Software Registry Center for Information and Language Studies 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637, USA registry@tira.uchicago.edu [A full description of the registry appeared in V08N16 of NL-KR - CW] ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Date: Mon, 15 Apr 91 08:55:49 EDT >From: A. Zukowski (CUNY Coordinator) <cuny91@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu> Subject: Language Sciences Conference Weekend ANNOUNCEMENT Language Sciences Conference Weekend at the University of Rochester May 9 - 12, 1991 There will be three overlapping conferences: The 1991 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference May 9-11 Workshop on Japanese Linguistics May 10-12 "Belief and Belief Attribution" Philosophy Conference May 11-12 ==> Conference fares are available from USAIR. <== ==> Travel scholarships are available for students. <== We will arrange group vans from nearby cities. **** If you are interested in more information about schedule **** or registration details, please forward a simple YES to: cuny91@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu **** If you plan to attend ANY events please let us know. **** This is the second of three messages sent to newsgroups; a final conference schedule will be posted this week. ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 16:27:29 EDT >From: pfps@allegra.att.com (Peter F. Patel-Schneider) Subject: call for participation for AAAI 1991 Fall Symposium Series CALL FOR PARTICIPATION AAAI FALL SYMPOSIUM SERIES November 15, 16, & 17, 1991 Asilomar Conference Center Pacific Grove, Monterey, California Sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (415) 328-3123 fss@aaai.org Introduction The AAAI presents the 1991 Fall Symposium Series to be held November 15 through 17, 1991, at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, Monterey, California. Asilomar is situated on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its rustic setting, secluded areas of forest and dunes, and clustered meeting space and accommodations make it ideal for smaller groups like the Fall Symposium Series. Asilomar operates under the American Plan, which means that participants are expected to room and board at Asilomar. The topics of the four symposia in the 1991 Fall Symposium Series are: - Discourse Structure in Natural Language Understanding and Generation; - Knowledge and Action at Social and Organizational Levels; - Principles of Hybrid Reasoning; - Sensory Aspects of Robotic Intelligence. Each symposia will be limited to approximately 60 participants. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to participants in each symposium. A general plenary session will be scheduled in which the highlights of each symposium will be presented. Informal receptions will be scheduled in the early evenings. Each participant will be expected to attend a single symposium throughout the symposium series. In addition to participants selected by the program committees of the symposia, a limited number of other interested parties will be allowed to register in each symposium. Registration information will be available by early September 1991. To obtain registration information please contact the AAAI office. Submission Requirements Submission requirements vary with each symposium, and are listed in the descriptions of the symposia. Please send your submissions directly to the address given in the description you are interested in. DO NOT SEND submissions to AAAI. All submissions must arrive by June 14, 1991. Acceptances will be mailed by August 15, 1991. Material for inclusion in the working notes of the symposia will be required by September 26, 1991. Discourse Structure in Natural Language Understanding and Generation Computational modeling of discourse structure is a fundamental component of theoretical and applications-oriented work in Natural Language Processing. A representation of the underlying structure of a discourse enhances the ability of a natural language system to interpret and generate a wide variety of linguistic phenomena. Modeling discourse is important to many subareas within Natural Language Processing, including text generation, plan synthesis and recognition, multi-media systems, user modeling, machine translation, psychological models of language, and spoken language systems. This symposium is designed to bring together researchers in different areas of discourse, in order to identify common issues, goals and techniques, and to transfer associated theoretical and practical results. Some of these issues are: - What should a discourse model model (e.g., rhetorical relations, speaker intentions, statistical probabilities)? - How should discourse models be represented (e.g., using logics of belief, connectionist frameworks, discourse grammars)? - How are complex discourse structures modeled (for collaborative or multi-agent discourse)? - How is the structure of a particular discourse marked (from indicators such as anaphoric reference, cue phrases, tense and aspect, intonational features, turn-taking signals, inferred speaker intention)? - How are models of discourse evaluated (e.g., what criteria are appropriate for generation or understanding)? - What advantages do various models of discourse have over one another? - What role do empirical studies play in discourse modeling and evaluation? - How are theoretical models of discourse implemented in working systems? - How can work in related disciplines such as psychology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy contribute? Those interested in presenting their work for discussion should submit an abstract of 500-1000 words. The abstract should describe the participant's current research in discourse, and point to longer papers (if available) on the subject. Those interested only in participating should submit a paragraph stating research interests, together with a recent list of related publications. For hardcopy submissions, send four (4) copies of each submission to arrive by June 14 to: Diane Litman Department of Computer Science 450 Computer Science Columbia University New York NY 10027 For e-mail submissions, send one (1) copy to arrive by 14 June 1991 to: litman@cs.columbia.edu Program Committee: Julia Hirschberg (co-chair), Diane Litman (co-chair), Kathy McCoy, Candy Sidner. Knowledge and Action at Social and Organizational Levels Research on representing and reasoning about knowledge and action at analytical levels more aggregated than that of the individual---topics such as social and organizational foundations of knowledge, multiple-perspective reasoning, consensus, multiple rationality, coordination and collaboration, commitment, stable organization, representing groups and group activity, etc.---is becoming increasingly important. Such research influences many fields, including cognitive science, distributed systems, design, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, computer-supported cooperative work, basic AI and distributed AI, social studies of science, and the engineering of AI systems. This symposium will address a number of relevant foundational scientific issues, such as: CONCEPTUAL MODELING: How can agents, knowledge, commitment, etc. be modeled at the social, the individual, and at integrated levels? Can a group be a locus of knowing, rather than an individual? How can groups model their own activities and influence other groups, even in so-called "open systems?" INTEGRATING MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES: How do actors reason among multiple representations? How can actors deal with conflict in knowledge and action? How can actors dynamically construct useful meanings for the objects and actions that are part of their joint activity? INTEGRATING SITUATED AND GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: How can agents and groups address the basic tension between local, "situated" knowledge and action, and the non-local conception of general knowledge and action-at-a-distance? How can an actor influence another actor, e.g. by sending a message, without global semantics or control? INTEGRATING SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL LEVELS OF ANALYSIS: What would a "middle ground" theory, that integrates both individual agency and social structure, be like? (How) can we make middle-ground theories computational? COMMON GROUNDS FOR INTERACTION: What are the foundations for mutually compatible languages, assumptions, and other common bases for interaction? How is global or shared knowledge possible? How can agents "stay out of each others' way?" METHOD: What are appropriate research methods for addressing these questions in principled ways? What are the roles and limitation of data from biological, human, and social studies? What are the roles and limitations of current formal models and theories? Prospective participants should contact a symposium committee member for a more detailed description of goals and issues. Then they should submit a 3 to 4 page description of their work, and some indication of their relevant background. Ideally, presentations would integrate theoretical perspectives and practical experience, addressing either the scientific issues in some space of empirical phenomena, or engineering concerns in applications domains. Submissions should be sent BY ELECTRONIC MAIL to hovy@isi.edu to arrive by June 14 and will be promptly acknowledged. If electronic mail is impossible, send four paper copies, clearly marked "AAAI FALL SYMPOSIUM" to arrive by June 14 to: Dr. Eduard Hovy USC / ISI, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695 Fax: (213) 823-6714. Program Committee: Phil Agre (agre@cogs.sussex.ac.uk), Danny Bobrow (bobrow@parc.xerox.com), Les Gasser (gasser@usc.edu, chair), Jim Hendler (hendler@cs.umd.edu), Eduard Hovy (hovy@isi.edu), Ed Hutchins (ehutchins@ucsd.edu), Leigh Star (soa03@gec.keele.ac.uk). Principles of Hybrid Reasoning One of the most promising approaches to designing more-efficient automated reasoning systems is that of integrating multiple reasoners to form a hybrid reasoner. By exploiting the efficiency of special-purpose reasoners operating on specialized representations, hybrid reasoners can outperform homogeneous systems. The common challenge faced by all hybrid-system designers is the successful integration of the system's components. The focus of this symposium will be on architectures for integrating the components of hybrid reasoners, and, in particular, on the principles that underlie such architectures. Though it seems unlikely that all hybrid reasoning systems can be explained by a common set of principles, there are general architectural classes that can each be explained by common principles. The major goals of the symposium are to explore principles that have been applied to hybrid reasoners, identify general classes to which they apply, and seek unifying themes among the current diversity of systems and theoretical models. Systems of central interest are deductive systems that incorporate special-purpose reasoning modules operating on their own representation. Examples include: - Unification-based systems that incorporate special-purpose reasoners in their unification algorithms (for example, systems that use sorted unification or E-unification); - Knowledge representation systems that mix assertional information with terminological information; - Deductive systems, including planners, that incorporate constraint processing mechanisms (especially constraint logic programming); - Systems such as theory resolution that build domain theories into reasoning algorithms; - Parsers for feature-based grammars that use special mechanisms to handle constraints among features or to perform inheritance; and - Deductive systems for modal logic that exploit special techniques for reasoning about the accessibility of possible worlds. Further examples and discussion can be found in the report on the 1988 Workshop on Principles of Hybrid Reasoning, which appears in Volume 11, Number 5 (special issue) of AI Magazine (January 1991). In addition to the obvious candidates, we encourage the participation of - those who have related interests, including interests in non-deductive systems, that bear on the central themes of the symposium; - those whose work on building hybrid reasoners raises questions about underlying principles, sheds light on the principles, or provides empirical results that must be accounted for; and - newcomers to the field, especially graduate students. Prospective participants are encouraged to contact the chair of the program committee (preferably by email) to obtain a more detailed description of the symposium's goals and issues. Those wishing to attend the symposium should submit a statement of research interests and accomplishments (2 pages maximum), a bibliography of selected publications, and, optionally, a paper. Those wishing to present their work for discussion should submit, in addition, an extended abstract (4 pages maximum). Five (5) copies of each submission should be sent to arrive by June 14 to: Alan Frisch Beckman Institute University of Illinois 405 N. Mathews Ave. Urbana, IL 61801 frisch@cs.uiuc.edu Program Committee: Alan Frisch (chair), Gert Smolka, Lynn Andrea Stein, Richmond Thomason. Sensory Aspects of Robotic Intelligence It probably is not an exercise in hyperbole to say that sensory faculties will be the primary determinants of the degree of autonomy that will be achieved by the machines of the future. Some of us therefore believe that the aspects that deal with sensing should be at the core of the intellectual enterprise that is artificial intelligence, assuming, of course, that an important aim of this enterprise is to design better and better machines in the service of humankind. This symposium will provide a forum for reviewing the state of the art in the sensory aspects of robotic intelligence and, through such review, an attempt will be made to delineate the potentially productive directions for future research. Many questions at varying levels of generality will be debated. Questions at the most general level will include: Given the level of competence we can pack into the sensory faculties of a robot today, what is the most sophisticated demonstration of robotic intelligence that could be made in the near future? More specific questions will deal with the how's and why's of integrating sensing with planning; integrating different modalities of sensing, such as vision, force/torque, touch, etc.; representation of actions; representing uncertainties and dealing with them through sensing and actions; dealing with the complexities introduced by geometry and topology; etc. Hopefully, by trying to answer such question we will see more clearly the conceptual frontiers of our knowledge in this area. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit papers that deal with the above mentioned issues at philosophical, theoretical, and experimental levels. Especially welcome will be papers that attempt to show fundamental limits on the level of competence that would be possessed by robots with the current state of our knowledge, assuming of course that it is at all possible to formulate measures of robotic competence. Also welcome will be papers that attempt to do the same in more task-specific contexts. High priority will be given to papers that report actual implementations, especially if such papers point out the lessons learned from the implementations Those interested in presenting their work for discussion at the symposium should submit a draft submission (maximum 10 pages) describing this work. Those interested only in attending the symposium need only submit a one-page summary of their research interests. Five copies of either type of submission should be sent to arrive by June 14th to: Avi Kak Robot Vision Lab EE Building Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907 kak@ecn.purdue.edu Program Committee: Bruce Donald, Avi Kak (Chair), Matt Mason, Ed Riseman, Saburo Tsuji. ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************