[comp.ai.nlang-know-rep] NL-KR Digest, Volume 6 No. 22

nl-kr-request@cs.rpi.edu (NL-KR Moderator Chris Welty) (04/20/89)

NL-KR Digest      (Thu Apr 20 11:49:56 1989)      Volume 6 No. 22

Today's Topics:

	 Parsing Hungarian: Answer to Nurkkala
	 IJCAI-89 Workshop on Conceptual Graphs
	 BBN AI Seminar: Paul Cohen
	 BBN AI Seminar: Gunar Liepins
	 CSLI Calendar, April 20, 4:23

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To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 89 08:19:10 +0200
>From: Klaus Schubert <dlt1!schubert@nluug.nl>
Phone:        +31 30 911911
Telex:        40342 bso nl
Subject: Parsing Hungarian: Answer to Nurkkala

An answer to Tom Nurkkala:

You are looking for references to work on languages with an affix-based
syntax. According to Mel'^cuk's judgement ("English is very exotic") any
language other than English will do. I cannot offer Finnish, which would
match your name best, but Hungarian. The article is written by a scholar who
has written a Hungarian word parser and deals mainly with the underlying
morphological analysis, suited for dependency-syntactic parsing:

Pr'osz'eky, G'abor (1988): Hungarian - a special challenge to machine
	translation?
	In: New Directions in Machine Translation.
	    Ed. Dan Maxwell / Klaus Schubert / Toon Witkam.
	    Dordrecht / Providence: Foris Publications,
	    pp. 219-231

Regards,
Klaus Schubert

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

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: 19 Apr 89 09:22:13 EDT
>From: john Sowa <SOWA@ibm.com>
Subject: IJCAI-89 Workshop on Conceptual Graphs

                        Call for Participation:
                     Workshop on Conceptual Graphs
                          August 20 & 21, 1989
                                IJCAI-89

The Fourth Annual Workshop on Conceptual Graphs will be held at IJCAI-89
in Detroit, Michigan, on Sunday August 20 and Monday August 21.  It will
provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas
about the theory and applications of conceptual graphs.  Attendance will
be limited to people who are actively using, developing, extending, or
implementing conceptual graphs.

Those who are interested in participating should submit a two-page
extended abstract about their work with an indication of whether they
would like to (a) present a full paper, (b) present a short summary of
their work, or (c) simply attend.  Seven copies of the abstract are due
by May 10 at the following address:

    Conceptual Graph Workshop Committee
    c/o Janice A. Nagle
    1641 E. Old Shakopee Road
    Bloomington, MN  55425

Copies of the proceedings of the 1988 Conceptual Graph Workshop are
available from the AAAI for $20.  No proceedings are available for the
first two workshops.

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

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
>From: Marc Vilain <mvilain@BBN.COM>
Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Paul Cohen
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 89 14:30:37 EDT

		 BBN STC Science Development Program
		      AI Seminar Series Lecture
				   
	      PLAUSIBLE INFERENCE, EXTENDED COMPOSITION,
		       AND ONTOLOGY MAINTENANCE
				   
			    PAUL R. COHEN
	      Experimental Knowledge Systems Laboratory
	    Department of Computer and Information Science
		 University of Massachusetts, Amherst
				   
	       BBN STC, 2nd floor large conference room
		  10 Moulton St, Cambridge MA, 02138
		     Friday April 21st, 10:30 AM

I will present work I have done with Cynthia Loiselle on a simple
method for generating rules of plausible inference from the relations
in a knowledge base, and, more recently, on the question of how to
predict the plausibility of the conclusions of inferences. Unlike
deductive inferences, conclusions generated by rules of plausible
inference are not *guaranteed* to be "true" or plausible in any sense,
so for every rule, we need to know whether it generates plausible
conclusions (or, in the case of Collins' certainty conditions, what
would make the conclusions more or less plausible). Experiments with
human subjects show that relatively little information is needed to
make moderately accurate plausibility predictions for the rules we
generated. Still, roughly 30% of the implausible inferences in our
test set were predicted to be plausible, so we have been examining
what additional knowledge is necessary to improve this performance. I
will describe Huhns and Stephens' adaptation of relation element
theory (called extended composition) to the task of predicting the
plausibility of inferences, and show that their system is essentially
equivalent to our own, but could be extended to provide the
information needed to improve plausibility predictions. I will also
touch on the role of plausible inference in ontology maintenance, the
process of determining the meaning of new relations or revising the
meaning of existing relations in a very large knowledge base such as
CYC.

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

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
>From: Marc Vilain <mvilain@BBN.COM>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 89 15:35:55 EDT
Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Gunar Liepins

		 BBN STC Science Development Program
		      AI Seminar Series Lecture
				   
		    ISSUES IN GENETIC OPTIMIZATION
				   
			    GUNAR LIEPINS
		   Oak Ridge National Laboratories
				   
	       BBN STC, 2nd floor large conference room
		  10 Moulton St, Cambridge MA, 02138
		     Tuesday April 25th, 10:30 AM
				   

This presentation reviews several genetic algorithm applications,
provides a brief introduction to the genetic paradigm, and addresses
multi-objective and constrained optimization.  The roles of sampling
(embedding) and representation are made explicit and illustrated from
the perspective of function dimensionality and smoothness.  The four
modes of GA failure: estimation, crossover disruption, stability of
regions of attraction, and schemata deceptiveness, are reviewed.  A
simple construction for fully deceptive problems of arbitrary size is
given.  The presentation concludes that the primary challenges are to
improve GA efficiency and better characterize their domain of
applicability.

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

To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 89 16:33:52 PDT
>From: emma@csli.Stanford.EDU (Emma Pease)
Subject: CSLI Calendar, April 20, 4:23

       C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
_____________________________________________________________________________
20 April 1989                    Stanford                      Vol. 4, No. 23
_____________________________________________________________________________

     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
			      ____________
	    CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR THIS THURSDAY, 20 April 1989

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Cordura Hall	Varieties of Context: Session 3
     Conference Room	Indexicality in Context
			Geoffrey Nunberg, Xerox PARC
			(nunberg.pa@xerox.com)
			Respondent: Brian Smith
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall

   4:00 p.m.		STASS Seminar
     Cordura Hall	Dewey on Defeasible Reasoning
     Conference Room	Tom Burke
			(burke@csli.stanford.edu)
			Abstract in last week's Calendar

                              ____________
	    CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, 27 April 1989

   12:00 p.m.		TINLunch
     Cordura Hall       Reading: "A compositional approach to discourse 
     Conference Room    representation theory" by Henk Zeevat
			Discussion led by Stanley Peters
			(peters@csli.stanford.edu)
			Abstract below

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Cordura Hall	Varieties of Context: Session 4
     Conference Room	Contexts in Activity
			Lucy Suchman, Xerox PARC
			(suchman.pa@xerox.com)
			Respondent: Susan Stucky
			Abstract below
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall

   4:00 p.m.		STASS Seminar
     Cordura Hall	To be announced
     Conference Room	
                              ____________
			  NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
	     Reading: "A compositional approach to discourse
		  representation theory" by Henk Zeevat
	      (Linguistics and Philosophy 12:95-131, 1989)
		    Discussion led by Stanley Peters
		       (peters@csli.stanford.edu)
				April 27

   Hans Kamp and others have talked about the system for representing
   discourse, which he introduced in "A theory of truth and semantic
   representation," as both a formal language for analyzing the
   contribution sentences make to the truth conditions of a discourse and
   an account of the representation that hearers construct mentally of a
   situation or world being described to them.  These authors have
   emphasized the noncompositionality of discourse representation
   systems.  Zeevat's paper attempts to show how Kamp's DRT can be
   formulated as a compositional system within Montague's framework of
   Universal Grammar, and thereby to isolate what is really distinctive
   about DRT as contrasted with Montague's Intensional Logic and other
   more "traditional" ways of representing truth conditions.

                              ____________
			NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
		     Varieties of Context: Session 4
			  Contexts in Activity
			Lucy Suchman, Xerox PARC
			 (suchman.pa@xerox.com)
			Respondent: Susan Stucky
				April 27

   In "Plans and Situated Actions" (1987) I argued that the central
   problem for an account of purposeful action is to understand the
   relation between our reasoning about action and the organization of
   our activity in situ.  Such an understanding requires that we take
   efficient descriptions like plans as resources for rather than
   determinants of the organization of situated activity.  In this talk
   I'll review the argument briefly, drawing a parallel between this view
   and the architecture of John Perry's three-story house.  In
   particular, I'll locate the problem of situated activity as the role
   of the second floor, the missing middle, in establishing a productive
   interaction between intentions and the requirements of locally
   contingent action.
      Recently, we have embarked on a new project to explore the problem
   of situated activity in a specific setting.  A starting premise for
   the investigation is that rather than there being a context that
   surrounds this setting's activity and gives it sense, participants in
   the setting continually reproduce multiple domains of relevance which
   organize their actions and to which their actions are made
   accountable.  We'll work through this premise and some of its
   implications in relation to a piece of activity recorded on videotape.

                              ____________
			 SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
			   Symbols and Thought
			Fred Dretske, Philosophy
		     Friday, 28 April, 3:15, 60:62N

   Symbols have meaning.  Hence, to manipulate symbols is to operate
   on---or at least with---meaningful elements.  And this, according to
   some, is what both minds do when they think, reason, and infer and
   what machines (mainly digital computers) do when they multiply,
   renumber footnotes, or correct our spelling.  Hence, a computer's
   manipulation of symbols is an attractive model for the mind.  Both are
   symbol systems---systems that traffic in meanings.
      If thinking that the sun is shining was manipulating (in some
   appropriate way) a symbol, or a set of symbols, that meant that the
   sun is shining, then there would be reason to believe that machines
   could (or would some day---as soon as we got them to manipulate
   symbols the right way) think that the sun is shining.
     Is this right?  Is thinking that the sun is shining merely a matter
   of manipulating (in the right way) symbols that mean the sun is
   shining?  If not, what more is required?

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End of NL-KR Digest
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