nl-kr-request@CS.RPI.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Chris Welty) (03/08/91)
NL-KR Digest (Thu Mar 7 09:40:22 1991) Volume 8 No. 11 Today's Topics: AISB 91 Programme Available Third TAI / Call for papers Ph.D level AI Research Job at USC/ISI (Marina del Rey, CA) Consortium for Lexical Research Job Announcement - Computational Linguist Generating NL from theorem-prover output Computists International CILS Calendar, March 4 CILS Calendar 2/25/91 Syntax Workshop, Tuesday, 26 February, 7:30 p.m. 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: B M Smith <bms@dcs.leeds.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 22 Feb 91 17:15:58 GMT Subject: AISB 91 Programme Available ************************************************************************** ***************** * * * A I S B 9 1 * * * ***************** UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, UK 16 - 19 APRIL 1991 TUTORIAL PROGRAMME 16 APRIL TECHNICAL PROGRAMME 17-19 APRIL with sessions on: * Distributed Intelligent Agents * Situatedness and Emergence in Autonomous Agents * New Modes of Reasoning * The Knowledge Level Perspective * Theorem Proving * Machine Learning Programmes and registration forms are now available from: Barbara Smith AISB91 Local Organizer School of Computer Sudies University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT, UK email: aisb91@ai.leeds.ac.uk *************************************************************************** ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: ck@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Cris Koutsougeras) Newsgroups: news.announce.conferences,comp.ai.nlang-know-rep Subject: Third TAI / Call for papers Date: 4 Mar 91 02:08:59 GMT Expires: Keywords: CALL FOR PAPERS 3rd International Conference on TOOLS FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE San Jose CA., November 5-8, 1991 Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Topics * Artificial Intelligence Knowledge-Based Architectures * Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering * Machine Learning, Theory and Algorithms * Artificial Neural Networks * Artificial Intelligence Applications * Expert Systems and Environments * AI language tools * Parallel Processing and Hardware support Conference Co-Chairs : W.T. Tsai, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN 55455 Nikolas Bourbakis, 4138 Moonflower Court, San Jose, CA 95135 ((408)2846494 fax: (408)2566760) Tutorials In addition to papers proposals for one day tutorials are solicited in any of the conference areas. Such proposals should be submitted to the Tutorial Chair by April 10, 1991: Mark Perlin, 3rd TAI Tutorial Chair, Dept. of Computer Sci- ence, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pitts- burgh, PA 15213, perlin@cs.cmu.edu (412) 268-5297. Submissions Submit five copies of their double spaced typed manuscript (max of 20 pages) with an abstract to the program chair by April 10, 1991. Final papers are restricted to 7 IEEE model pages. In the cover letter please indicate the conference areas which are relevant to your paper. Authors will be no- tified of aceptance by July 15th 1991. Outstanding papers will be elligible for publication in Computer Society/IEEE journals. Submitt papers and panel proposals by April 10, 1991 to : Benjamin Wah, 3rd TAI Program Chair, Coordinated Science La- boratory, MC 228, University of Illinois, 1101 West Spring- field Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801-3082, USA. (217)333-3516(o) (217) 244-1764 (fax) wah%aquinas@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: ees@isi.edu (Cecile Paris) Newsgroups: comp.ai,misc.jobs.offered,comp.ai.nlang-know-rep Subject: Ph.D level AI Research Job at USC/ISI (Marina del Rey, CA) Keywords: Ph.D level research job, Expert Systems, Knowledge Acquisition Date: 7 Mar 91 02:20:03 GMT Reply-To: ees@venera.isi.edu (EES Project) OPENING: Full-time Ph.D. Level Researcher ======= ================================= The Explainable Expert Systems (EES) Group within ISI's Intelligent Systems Division has an immediate opening for a Ph.D. level researcher to work on topics concerned with the design and implementation of a shell for knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition tools to help a user refine and augment large systems, and the performance optimization of knowledge based systems. The focus of the successful candidate's efforts will be on developing techniques in these areas, applying and testing them in the context of the EES group's framework for building expert systems that can provide good explanations of their behavior. The ideal candidate will be willing to take responsibility for investigating new research areas and engage in programming to test new ideas within a system, and will have a strong background in artificial intelligence, knowledge based systems, and knowledge acquisition. In particular, the ideal candidate will have demonstrated experience with LISP and knowledge representation systems such as KL-ONE or LOOM. Publishable research will be performed in a collaborative, project-oriented setting involving significant contact with both internal and external users of the systems to be built; good written and verbal communication skills are therefore highly desirable. The University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a large, university-based research center which has produced top quality research in a wide range of research areas. It employs about 80 full time researchers and maintains close academic ties with the school of engineering; a number of PhD students are involved in conducting their graduate research here. Complete resumes with lists of references should be sent to Cecile Paris, USC/ISI, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292. Phone:(213) 822-1511, e-mail: paris@isi.edu. ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: sylvia@nmsu.edu Date: Wed, 20 Feb 91 14:08:00 MST Subject: Consortium for Lexical Research The Consortium for Lexical Research Rio Grande Research Corridor Computing Research Laboratory New Mexico State University Box 30001, Las Cruces, NM 88003. lexical@nmsu.edu (505) 646-5466 Fax: (505) 646-6218 Work in computational linguistics has reached the point where the performance of many natural language processing systems is limited by a "lexical bottleneck". That is, such systems could handle much more text and produce much more impressive application results were it not for the fact that their lexicons are too small. The Association for Computational Linguistics has established the Consortium for Lexical Research (CLR), and DARPA has agreed to fund this. It will be sited at the Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico, USA, under its Director, Yorick Wilks, and an ACL committee consisting of Roy Byrd, Ralph Grishman, Mark Liberman and Don Walker. The Consortium for Lexical Research will be an organization for sharing lexical data and tools used to perform research on natural language dictionaries and lexicons, and for communicating the results of that research. Members of the Consortium will contribute resources to a repository and withdraw resources from it in order to perform their research. There is no requirement that withdrawals be compensated by contributions in kind. A basic premise of the proposal for cooperation on lexical research is that the research must be "precompetitive". That is, the CLR will not have as its goal the creation of commercial products. The goal of precompetitive research would be to augment our understanding of what lexicons contain and, specifically, to build computational lexicons having those contents. The task of the CLR is primarily to facilitate research, making available to the whole natural language processing community certain resources now held only by a few groups that have special relationships with companies or dictionary publishers. The CLR would as far as is practically possible accept contributions from any source, regardless of theoretical orientation, and make them available as widely as possible for research. There is also an underlying theoretical assumption or hope: that the contents of major lexicons are very similar, and that some neutral, or "polytheoretic," form of the information they contain can be at least a research goal, and would be a great boon if it could be achieved. A major activity of the CLR will be to negotiate agreements with "providers" on reassuring and advantageous terms to both suppliers and researchers. Major funders of work in this area in the US have indicated interest in making participation in the CLR a condition for financial support of research. An annual fee will be charged for membership. It is intended that after an initial start-up period, the Consortium become self-supporting. The Computing Research Lab (CRL) already has an active research program in computational lexicons, text processing, machine translation, etc., funded by DARPA and NSF as well as a range of machines appropriate for advanced computing on dictionaries. Resources and Services of the Consortium The following lists of lexical data and tools seem to provide a reasonable starting content for the repository. We will continually solicit and encourage additions to this list. Data 1. word lists (proper nouns, count/mass nouns, causative verbs, movement verbs, predicative adjectives, etc.) 2. published dictionaries 3. specialized terminology, technical glossaries, etc. 4. statistical data 5. synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, pertainyms, etc. 6. phrase lists Tools 1. lexical data base management tools 2. lexical query languages 3. text analysis tools (concordance, KWIC, statistical analysis, collocation analysis, etc.) 4. SGML tools (particularly tuned to dictionary encoding) 5. parsers 6. morphological analyzers 7. user interfaces to dictionaries 8. lexical workbenches 9. dictionary definition sense taggers Services Repository management will involve cataloging and storing material in disparate formats, and providing for their retransmission (with conversion, where appropriate tools exist). In addition, it will be necessary to maintain a library of documentation describing the repository's contents and containing research papers resulting from projects that use the material. A brief description of the services to be provided is as follows: a. CRL will provide a catalog of, and act as a clearinghouse for, utilities programs that have been written for existing online lexical data. b. CRL will compile a list of known mistakes, misprints, etc. that occur in each of the major published sources (dictionaries etc.). c. CRL will set up a new memorandum series explicitly devoted to the lexical center. d. CRL will also be a clearinghouse for preprints and hard-to-find reprints on machine-readable dictionaries. e. CRL also expects to conduct workshops in this area, including an inaugural workshop in late 1991 or early 1992. f. CRL would provide a catalog for access to repositories of corpus-manipulation tools held elsewhere. We invite you to participate in the Consortium for Lexical Research. Anyone interested in participating even in principle as a provider or consumer of data, tools, or services should send a message to lexical@nmsu.edu or lexical@nmsu.bitnet as should anyone who would like to be on our lexical information list. ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Date: Wed, 20 Feb 91 17:28:42 EST >From: mccray@nlm.nih.gov (Alexa T. McCray) Subject: Job Announcement - Computational Linguist The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, a research division of the National Library of Medicine, is seeking a computational linguist to join its Natural Language Systems Program. We seek an individual who has demonstrated experience in natural language processing and an advanced degree in linguistics or computer science. Candidates should have experience in the development of systems using Prolog, Lisp, C or other high level languages and should be well qualified in linguistic theory. The National Library of Medicine is located on the beautiful NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The Lister Hill Center has extensive state of the art facilities including many Sun, Macintosh, and PC-compatible workstations, file servers and associated scanning and imaging equipment. Our research staff is dedicated to developing advanced technologies for storing, manipulating and disseminating biomedical information. The successful candidate will join a team of experienced professionals addressing major research issues in an environment which assures high visibility for outstanding work. Salary will range from $31,116 to $40,449 depending on education and experience. U.S. citizenship is required. The U.S. Government is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Send a resume and a cover letter describing your research interests to the following address no later than March 25, 1991. Chief, Computer Science Branch NLS Program Search Lister Hill Center National Library of Medicine 8600 Rockville Pike Bethesda, Maryland 20894 ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: Rich.Thomason@cad.cs.cmu.edu Date: Sat, 23 Feb 1991 14:40:37 EST Subject: Generating NL from theorem-prover output I am interested in any references to work that has been done or is being done on generating coherent natural language proofs from theorem prover output. I have the following references. If you know of others, please send mail to me at thomason+@cmu.cs.cmu.edu. Daniel Chester, "The Translation of Formal Proofs into English", Artificial Intelligence 7 (1976), 261-278. Xiaorong Huang, "A Human Oriented Proof Presentation Model", Technical Report SEKI SR-89-11, Kaiserslautern University, 1989. Xiaorong Huang, "Proof Transformation Towards Human Reasoning Style", Proceedings of the 13th German Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, Ed. D. Metzing, Springer-Verlag, 1989, pp. 37-42. Xiaorong Huang, "Reference Choices in Mathematical Proofs", Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Pitman Publishing, 1990, pp. 720-725. I will be happy to share results of this survey with anyone who asks. To do that, send mail to me. - -Rich Thomason ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Date: Tue 26 Feb 91 22:54:02-PST >From: Ken Laws <LAWS@ai.sri.com> Subject: Computists International Mail-System-Version: <SUN-MM(229)+TOPSLIB(128)@AI.SRI.COM> *** PLEASE POST *** This is to announce Computists International, a new "networking" association for computer and information scientists. Hi! I'm Ken Laws If this announcement interests you, contact me at internet address laws@ai.sri.com. If you can't get through, my mail address is: Dr. Kenneth I. Laws; 4064 Sutherland Drive, Palo Alto, CA 94303; daytime phone (415) 493-7390. I'm back from two years at the National Science Foundation. I used to run AIList, and I miss it. Now I'm creating a broader service for anyone interested in information (or knowledge), software, databases, algorithms, or doing neat new things with computers. It's a career-oriented association for mutual mentoring about grant and funding sources, information channels, text and software publishing, tenure, career moves, institutions, consulting, business practices, home offices, software packages, taxes, entrepreneurial concerns, and the sociology of work. We can talk about algorithms, too, with a focus on applications. Toward that end, I'm going to edit and publish a weekly+ newsletter, The Computists' Communique. The Communique will be tightly edited, with carefully condensed news and commentary. Content will depend on your contributions, but I will filter, summarize, and generally act like an advice columnist. (Ann Landers?) I'll also suggest lines of discussion, collect "common knowledge" about academia and industry, and help track people and projects. As a bonus, I'll give members whatever behind-the-scenes career help I can. Alas, this won't be free. The charter membership fee for Computists will depend in part on how many people respond to this notice. The Communique itself will be free to all members, FOB Palo Alto; internet delivery incurs no additional charge. To encourage participation, there's a full money-back guarantee (excluding postage). Send me a reply to find out more. -- Ken Computists International and The Computists' Communique are service marks of Kenneth I. Laws. Membership in professional organizations may be a tax-deductible business expense. - ------ ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Subject: CILS Calendar, March 4 X-Mailer: MH 6.6 #5[UCI] Date: Mon, 04 Mar 91 14:04:07 -0600 >From: colleen@tira.uchicago.edu _________________ T H E C I L S C A L E N D A R ________________ The Center for Information and Language Studies Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 Subscription requests to: cils@tira.uchicago.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Vol. 1, No. 18 March 4, 1991 ~*~ Upcoming events: 3/6 16:00 Wb 408 Workshop Michael Fishbane, Divinity School 3/11 16:00 Wb 130 Workshop Philip R. Cohen, SRI International - ------------------------------ WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6 4:00 p.m. Workshop on Language and Thought Wb 408 Michael Fishbane, Divinity School "Poetics of Midrash" Paper and background materials available in Classics 11. New participants welcome. _________________ MONDAY, MARCH 11 4:00 Workshop Wb 130 The Pragmatics of Language Philip R. Cohen, Computer Dialogue Laboratory Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International (pcohen@ai.sri.com) "Comfirmations and Joint Action" Abstract We argue that current plan-based theories of discourse do not by themselves explain prevalent phenomena in even simple task-oriented dialogues. The purpose of this talk is to show how one difficult-to-explain feature of these dialogues, confirmations, follows from the joint or team nature of the underlying task. Specifically, we develop a concept of a ``joint intention'' and we argue that the conversants in a task-oriented dialogue jointly intend to accomplishing the task. From this basis, we derive the goals underlying the pervasive use of confirmations observed in a recent experiment. We conclude with remarks on how to generalize the analysis to characterize dialogue itself as a joint activity, in other words, how to describe the social contract implicit in dialogue. For more information, please contact Jerrold Sadock (2-8524), Department of Linguistics, Josef Stern, Department of Philosophy (2-8594), or Scott Deerwester, CILS (2-6948). - -------------- End of CILS Calendar ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Subject: CILS Calendar 2/25/91 X-Mailer: MH 6.6 #5[UCI] Date: Mon, 25 Feb 91 16:13:09 -0600 >From: colleen@tira.uchicago.edu _________________ T H E C I L S C A L E N D A R ________________ The Center for Information and Language Studies Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 Subscription requests to: cils@tira.uchicago.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Vol. 1, No. 17 February 25, 1991 ~*~ Upcoming events: 2/25 14:30 Ry 276 Lecture C. M. Sperburg-McQueen, UIC 2/25 16:00 Wb 130 Workshop Dennis Stampe, U of Wisconsin 3/6 16:00 Wb 408 Workshop Michael Fishbane, Divinity School 3/11 16:00 Wb 130 Workshop Philip R. Cohen, SRI International - ------------------------------ MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25 2:30 Lecture Ry 276 C. M. Sperburg-McQueen ACH/ACL/ALLC Text Encoding Initiative University of Illinois at Chicago (u35395@uicvm.bitnet) "The Validated -- or Violated? -- Text: Issues in Specifying Document Structures" Abstract in February 11 calendar. ***** 4:00 Workshop Wb 130 The Pragmatics of Language Dennis Stampe, Dept. of Philosophy University of Wisconsin, Madison "Pragmatics and the Concept of Voluntary Action" For more information, please contact Jerrold Sadock (2-8524), Department of Linguistics, or Josef Stern, Department of Philosophy (2-8594). _________________ WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6 4:00 p.m. Workshop on Language and Thought Wb 408 Michael Fishbane, Divinity School "Poetics of Midrash" Paper and background materials available in Classics 11. New participants welcome. _________________ MONDAY, MARCH 11 4:00 Workshop Wb 130 The Pragmatics of Language Philip R. Cohen, Computer Dialogue Laboratory Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International (pcohen@ai.sri.com) "Comfirmations and Joint Action" Abstract We argue that current plan-based theories of discourse do not by themselves explain prevalent phenomena in even simple task-oriented dialogues. The purpose of this talk is to show how one difficult-to-explain feature of these dialogues, confirmations, follows from the joint or team nature of the underlying task. Specifically, we develop a concept of a ``joint intention'' and we argue that the conversants in a task-oriented dialogue jointly intend to accomplishing the task. From this basis, we derive the goals underlying the pervasive use of confirmations observed in a recent experiment. We conclude with remarks on how to generalize the analysis to characterize dialogue itself as a joint activity, in other words, how to describe the social contract implicit in dialogue. - -------------- End of CILS Calendar ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Date: Mon, 25 Feb 91 12:58:56 PST >From: ingrid@russell.stanford.edu (Ingrid Deiwiks) Subject: Syntax Workshop, Tuesday, 26 February, 7:30 p.m. SYNTAX WORKSHOP Thematic Arguments and Implicit Semantic Roles Abdullahi Bature Department of Linguistics Stanford University Tuesday, 26 February, 7:30 p.m. Cordura 100 The issues concerning the relation between morphology, syntax, and semantics, especially the ways in which these components are linked and contribute to the expression of the relation between predicates and their arguments, has been the subject of a running debate in current syntactic work. The cases mostly noted in the literature are morpholexical processes where the verb stem is morphologically marked, and as a result the argument structure is altered. In particular, the discussion to date has focused on constructions such as passive, causative, applicative, and reciprocal. However, when it comes to giving an account of other alternations where the verb remains unchanged and yet the argument structure is altered, it seems that present syntactic theories do not provide a simple account. Alternations that are not (entirely) signalled by morphology in the verb have been largely ignored in the literature. This thesis examines such types of (morphologically unmarked) alternations. The central claims of the study are as follows: (1) Theta roles are partially independent of lexical semantics, i.e., they are not fully predictable on the basis of semantics. (2) Semantic elements that are highly relevant to one another (i.e., those indicating manner of action vs. the action itself) are likely to be packed together and expressed either lexically or morpholexically. (3) With reference to "relational changing affixes," linguistic meanings that are expressed lexically must be distinct from (similar) meanings expressed morpholexically. ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************