[comp.ai.nlang-know-rep] NL-KR Digest, Volume 6 No. 46

nl-kr-request@cs.rpi.edu (NL-KR Moderator Chris Welty) (12/07/89)

NL-KR Digest      (Wed Dec  6 14:15:16 1989)      Volume 6 No. 46

Today's Topics:

	 chemical softwares
	 SUNY Buffalo Cognitive Science Colloquium
	 Seminar on Computers, Design, and Work - Wednesday, 6 December
	 AI Seminar
	 Announcement of talks

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To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
>From: napoli@loria.crin.fr (frames )
Subject: chemical softwares
Date: 1 Dec 89 10:54:38 GMT
Reply-To: napoli@loria.crin.fr (Amedeo Napoli)
Organization: CRIN - INRIA, Nancy, France
Keywords: chemistry, knowledge representation, chemical sotwares

"Bonjour"

I would like to draw up a list of avalaible softwares (free or
industrial softwares) working in chemistry, especially:
- chemical data-base management systems,
- knowledge-based systems for automatic synthesis,
- MNR or mass spectra interpretation systems,
- molecular drawing systems,
- etc.

I would gretly appreciate if people who send me information can also
provide the address where theses sotware can be found, thier prices,
and all other relevant things that would be of interest in this context.
I will put on the net the list I will get.

Many thanks in advance,

- -- Amedeo Napoli (EMAIL : napoli@loria.crin.fr)
    CRIN-INRIA Lorraine
    BP 239
    54506 Vandoeuvre-Les-Nancy Cedex, France

------------------------------

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 89 15:31:05 -0500
>From: rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU (William J. Rapaport)
Subject: SUNY Buffalo Cognitive Science Colloquium

                              SUNY Buffalo
                      Center for Cognitive Science

                                presents

                            CHARLES O. FRAKE

                       Samuel P. Capen Professor
                       Department of Anthropology
                              SUNY Buffalo

                    WHERE DO DIRECTIONS COME FROM?
        FROM INFORMATION PROCESSING TO THE DISPLAY OF KNOWLEDGE
                   IN REAL-WORLD SPATIAL ORIENTATION

Attempts to understand ethnographic and historical data on diverse mari-
time  navigational  systems have uncovered several curious puzzles whose
solution requires attention to some major problems confronting all  stu-
dents  of  human cognition.  These problems concern mental models, their
representations,  technological  embodiments,  ecological  applications,
social  uses,  and  cultural  sources.   A  discussion of these problems
informs the larger issue of identifying the sources  of  uniformity  and
variation in human cognitive systems.  It also makes an argument for the
practicality and utility  (and  enjoyment)  of  investigations  of  non-
artificial intelligence.

                       Thursday, December 7, 1989
                               4:00 P.M.
                      280 Park Hall, Amherst Campus

For further information, contact Erwin Segal, Department of  Psychology,
716-636-3675, segal@cs.buffalo.edu, or William J. Rapaport, Department of
Computer Science, 716-636-3193, rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu

------------------------------

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 89 10:24:24 PST
>From: ingrid@russell.Stanford.EDU (Ingrid Deiwiks)
Subject: Seminar on Computers, Design, and Work - Wednesday, 6 December

		SEMINAR ON COMPUTERS, WORK, AND DESIGN
		   The Negotiation of Expert Status
			  William D. Rifkin
			 Stanford University
		     Wednesday, 6 December, 12:15
			      Ventura 17

Expert ability differs from expert status.  I argue in this paper that
the office of "expert" represents a provisional social status.  This
negotiated status emerges as a measure of authority in a relationship
conducted between a relative specialist, who is a candidate for expert
status, and someone who is effectively a client consulting the
specialist for help in making a decision.  The client, in attempting
to evaluate whether the specialist has something credible and relevant
to say, gauges the person, the specialist, as much as the utterance.
The client's joint selection of whom and what to heed rests on
understandings of the discourse and social structure of an issue-based
community.  This "issue arena," like other types of communities, is
wrought through with internal stratification (here, based on
occupational affiliation) and interest group conflict.  In presenting
this interpretation, I am engaging in an exercise in discourse design
based on grounded theory.  I am borrowing from literature on language
and community and illustrating my points with examples from three
years of observations of a local water board concerned with toxic
waste issues.  I am designing a discourse for laypersons to link their
feelings of disenfranchisement as relative nonexperts to cultural
understandings of occupational culture, status, and the ritual nature
of relationships between specialists and clients.

------------------------------

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 14:45 EDT
>From: MMETEER@rcca.bbn.com
Subject: AI Seminar

[[ Note this is late, but I'm posting it anyway - CW ]]

                  BBN STC Science Development Program
                      AI Seminar Series Lecture

		SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION AND THE LEXICON:
       			WHAT MAKES SENSE?

			Paul S. Jacobs
	  	    AI Program, GE Research 
	      	   Schenectady, NY 12301 USA
                      jacobs@crd.ge.com

                BBN STC, 2nd Floor Conference Room
            10 Moulton Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts
                  Tuesday, December 5, 10:30 am

	Practical applications of natural language demand precision in
semantic interpretation, highlighting the problems of lexical ambiguity 
and vagueness.  The representation and discrimination of word meanings 
is thus a key issue for language analysis, motivated especially by the 
need for broad scale NL systems and by applications in information retrieval.
A successful method for distinguishing word senses, however coarsely, 
could be a major contribution to natural language processing technology.

	Past research does not point to a successful strategy for sense
discrimination, but it does reveal some naive approaches that won't work.
The most obvious of these is the simple search for intersections or
``lexical coherence'' among word sense categories.  This twenty-year-old
approach is still popular and still destined to fail.  Sense discrimination
depends on context, and context is more than the combination of the words
that appear together.  Context comprises topic analysis, phrasal constructs,
complex events, and linguistic and conceptual structures.  This research
focuses on accessing the power of these more complex contextual structures
in identifying word senses using a lexicon of over 10,000 roots.  Semantic
and syntactic preferences, lexical relations, and other structural knowledge 
combine in our approach to help with generic sense discrimination.  

------------------------------

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 89 09:47:18 PST
>From: ingrid@russell.Stanford.EDU (Ingrid Deiwiks)
Subject: Announcement of talks

		SEMINAR ON COMPUTERS, WORK, AND DESIGN
		   The Negotiation of Expert Status
			  William D. Rifkin
			 Stanford University
		     Wednesday, 6 December, 12:15
			      Ventura 17

Expert ability differs from expert status.  I argue in this paper that
the office of "expert" represents a provisional social status.  This
negotiated status emerges as a measure of authority in a relationship
conducted between a relative specialist, who is a candidate for expert
status, and someone who is effectively a client consulting the
specialist for help in making a decision.  The client, in attempting
to evaluate whether the specialist has something credible and relevant
to say, gauges the person, the specialist, as much as the utterance.
The client's joint selection of whom and what to heed rests on
understandings of the discourse and social structure of an issue-based
community.  This "issue arena," like other types of communities, is
wrought through with internal stratification (here, based on
occupational affiliation) and interest group conflict.  In presenting
this interpretation, I am engaging in an exercise in discourse design
based on grounded theory.  I am borrowing from literature on language
and community and illustrating my points with examples from three
years of observations of a local water board concerned with toxic
waste issues.  I am designing a discourse for laypersons to link their
feelings of disenfranchisement as relative nonexperts to cultural
understandings of occupational culture, status, and the ritual nature
of relationships between specialists and clients.
			     ____________

			PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

	   Mencius and Hsun-tzu: Two Views of Human Agency
			   Bryan Van Norden
		       Department of Philosophy
			 Stanford University

		    Friday, 8 December 1989, 3:15
			  Bldg. 90, Room 92Q

No abstract available.
			     ____________

	    COMMONSENSE AND NONMONOTONIC REASONING SEMINAR
   Implementing Autoepistemic Logic on a Reason Maintenance System
			    Kurt Konolige
			  SRI International
		      Monday, 11 December, 3:15
		       Margaret Jacks Hall 252

Recent work shows that a Reason Maintenance System (RMS) can be
formalized as a type of autoepistemic theory.  In this paper, we
consider the inverse transformation: trying to implement an arbitrary
autoepistemic theory as an RMS.  In so doing, we provide a
computationally attractive theorem-proving methodology for
autoepistemic logic.
			     ____________

			   SYNTAX WORKSHOP

	     Switch-reference in Jiwarli (and elsewhere)
			     Peter Austin
			 La Trobe University

		      Tuesday, 12 December, 7:30
			  CSLI, Cordura 100

Switch-reference is a syntactic device found in many languages whereby
the subjects of two clauses are indicated to be coreferential (SS -
same subject) or noncoreferential (DS - different subject).
Typically, switch-reference is coded on the dependent clause verb, as
in the following examples from Diyari (central Australia):

(1) Ngathu  nhinha  nhayiyi  yatha-rna
    I       him     see      talk-SS
    "I see him as (I'm) talking"

(2) Ngathu  nhinha  nhayiyi  yatha-rnanhi
    I       him     see      talk-DS
    "I see him as (he's) talking"

Switch-reference has been discussed in the G-B literature by Finer
1985, Hale 1989, and Jeanne and Hale 1989 in terms of a binding
relationship between the two clauses.  In LFG, Simpson 1983 and
Bresnan and Simpson 1983 discuss switch-reference in terms of a
relation of anaphoric control.

I will examine data from a number of Aboriginal languages, primarily
Jiwarli from Western Australia, describing their switch-reference
systems and discussing whether either the G-B or LFG accounts (or some
other account) best deals with the systems found in these languages.

The next workshop will be on 9 January 1990.

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End of NL-KR Digest
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