nl-kr-request@cs.rpi.edu (NL-KR Moderator Chris Welty) (03/29/89)
NL-KR Digest (Tue Mar 28 11:51:14 1989) Volume 6 No. 13 Today's Topics: Work on esperanto used as interlingual form LOOPS Guaranteeing Serializable Results in Parallel ... (Unisys AI Seminar) Conference on AI and Communicating Processes Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox (Long) Submissions: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Requests, policy: nl-kr-request@cs.rpi.edu Back issues are available from host archive.cs.rpi.edu [128.213.1.10] 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. --------------------------------------------------------- To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu To: comp-ai-nlang-know-rep@ohio-state.edu >From: vdasigi@silver.wright.edu (Venu Dasigi) Newsgroups: comp.ai.nlang-know-rep Subject: Work on esperanto used as interlingual form Keywords: machine translation, dutch project, logical form, esperanto Date: 17 Mar 89 23:15:53 GMT In the past couple of years, I remember some postings in this or some related newsgroup about Esperanto used in the conceptual representation of text during machine translation. I also remember that it was a project in the Netherlands. I would like to find out more information about that project and its current status. Either post the information, since I think it is of interest to this newsgroup, or send me the information by electronic mail (vdasigi@cs.wright.edu). If all fails, it will be greatly appreciated if the information is sent by regular mail (address below). - -- Venu Dasigi Department of Computer Science and Engineering Wright State University Research Center 3171 Research Blvd Dayton, OH 45420 USA vdasigi@cs.wright.edu Venugopala Rao Dasigi CSNet: vdasigi@cs.wright.edu US Mail: Dept. of CS&Eng, Wright State U, 3171 Research Blvd, Dayton, OH 45420 ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: mcvax!crin.crin.fr!napoli@uunet.UU.NET (Amedeo NAPOLI) Date: 14 Mar 89 19:10:07 GMT Subject: LOOPS Here is a sentence in the beginning of the LOOPS Manual (1983) : LOOPS grew out of our research in a knowledge representation language (called Lore) for use in a project to create an "expert assistant" for designers of integrated digital systems. Could somebody tell me if "integrated digital systems" means "integrated circuits" ? I am not sure, but the LOOPS Manual was referenced as a VLSI Group Memo. Many thanks for your help. "Au revoir" Napoli Amedeo - - - -- Amedeo Napoli @ CRIN / Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy EMAIL : napoli@crin.crin.fr - POST : BP 239, 54506 VANDOEUVRE CEDEX, France ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu Date: Fri, 24 Mar 89 11:09:08 -0500 >From: finin@PRC.Unisys.COM Subject: Guaranteeing Serializable Results in Parallel ... (Unisys AI Seminar) AI SEMINAR UNISYS PAOLI RESEARCH CENTER Guaranteeing Serializable Results in Parallel Production Systems Jim Schmolze Computer Science Tufts University schmolze@cs.tufts.edu To speed up production systems, researchers have studied how to execute many rules simultaneously. Unfortunately, such systems can yield results that are impossible for a serial system to produce, leading to erroneous behaviors. We present algorithms that prevent all non-serializable effects for parallel production systems that execute many rules simultaneously. Our framework is taken from [1] and improves upon their solution. The practical advantages of these strategies is demonstrated using estimates from a large production system, the Manhattan Mapper [2]. [1] T. Ishida and S.J. Stolfo. "Towards the parallel execution of rules in production system programs." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing, 1985. [2] L. Lerner and J. Cheng. "The Manhattan Mapper expert production system." Tech. Report, Computer Science, Columbia , May 1983. 11:00 am, Monday April 3, 1989 BIC Conference Room Unisys Paoli Research Center Route 252 and Central Ave. Paoli PA 19311 -- non-Unisys visitors who are interested in attending should -- -- send email to finin@prc.unisys.com or call 215-648-7446 -- ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: Steven Zenith <zenith%inmos.co.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK> Date: Thu, 23 Mar 89 20:56:07 GMT Subject: Conference on AI and Communicating Processes International conference ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND COMMUNICATING PROCESS ARCHITECTURE 17th/18th of July 1989, at Imperial College, London UK. Keynote speaker Prof. Iann Barron Invited speakers Prof. Igor Aleksander Neural Computing Architectures. Prof. Colin Besant Programming of Robots. Prof. David Gelernter Information Management in Linda. Dr. Atsuhiro Goto The Parallel Inference Machine. Prof. Tosiyasu Kunii Primitive Image Understanding. Dr. Rajiv Trehan Parallel AI Systems. Prof. Alan Robinson Functional and Relational reasoning. Prof. Les Valiant] Bulk-synchronous Parallel Computing. * Parallel Processing and AI * Parallel Processing and Artificial Intelligence are two key themes which have risen to the fore of technology in the past decade. This international conference brings together the two communities. Communicating Process Architecture is one of the most successful models for exploiting the potential power of parallel processing machines. Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most challenging applications for such machines. This conference explores the interaction between these two technologies. The carefully selected programme of invited talks and submitted papers brings together the very best researchers currently working in the field. * Topics include * Robotics Neural Networks Image Understanding Speech Recognition Implementation of Logic Programming Languages Information management The Japanese Fifth Generation Project Transputers and Occam * Conference programme * Keynote speaker Prof. Iann Barron ; "Transputer Technology and AI." Iann Barron is co-founder of INMOS, is Corporate Development Director, currently leading the design of next generation transputers. Iann Barron is visiting professor at the University of Bristol, and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. He was previously a visiting Professor at the University of London. In addition to writing various technical papers on computing and the consequences of information technology, he has published two books - ``The future of Real Time Technology'' and jointly with R.C Curnow, ``The Future of Information Technology''. Invited speakers Prof. Igor Aleksander ; "Myths and Realities about Neural Computing Architectures." Professor Igor Aleksander is Head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Imperial College, where he is also Professor of Neural Systems Engineering. He is one of the worlds leading researchers in Neural Computing Architectures and has been developing usable systems since 1965. He was responsible for the design and transfer into industry of WISARD; the worlds first general purpose neural system directed at vision problems. Prof. Colin Besant ; "Application of Artificial Intelligence to the Programming of Robots." Colin Besant is Professor of Computer-Aided Manufacture in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College. His interests are predominantly in the field of flexible Manufacturing Systems including Robotics. His research concentrates on the programming of manufacturing systems in order to achieve a high degree of flexibility in terms of manufacturing batch size and past variety. Artificial Intelligence plays an increasing role in this research in the scheduling of manufacturing systems and in robotics, where problems of collision avoidance, path planning and grasping require a solution. John S. Bridle ; "Automatic Speech Recognition and Parallel Processing" John Bridle is a Principle Scientific Officer at RSRE where he is co- director of the Speech Research Unit and leads the Machine Intelligence Theory section of his division. His current research interests include fundamental studies of artificial neural systems and stochastic model-based pattern processing, and applications of advanced pattern processing principles to speech, image and other domains. Prof. David Gelernter ; "Information Management in Linda." David Gelernter is an associate professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He works on parallelism, on heuristic programming (particularly medical applications) and on the overlap between the two. As a graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook he designed a parallel programming system called `Linda'; several years ago he and his colleagues built the first working version at Yale. The system is now seeing increasingly widespread use, and has been advertised by the heads of two independent parallel machine startups as an `emerging industry standard' (which it isn't - yet). David Gelernter continues to develop Linda, and working also on `symmetric languages', a class of languages which make no distinction between program structures and data objects. His work in heuristic programming centres on intelligent monitoring systems and on expert inferencing from databases. Dr. Atsuhiro Goto ; "Research and Development of the Parallel Inference Machine in the FGCS Project." Dr Goto is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for New Computer Technology (ICOT) Tokyo, which he joined in August 1985. He is conducting research and development of parallel inference machine architecture. His current research interests include parallel architectures for parallel logic programming languages, garbage collection, memory architectures and parallel programming. Prof. Tosiyasu Kunii ; "A Communicating Process Architecture Model of Primitive Image Understanding - A Case Study." Tosiyasu L. Kunii is currently Professor of Information and Computer Science, at the University of Tokyo. He began his work in raster computer graphics at the University in 1968, which led to the Tokyo Raster Technology Project. His particular research interest is in the elements of artificial intelligence to recognize and create images. He has authored and edited more than 25 computer science books, and published more than 100 refereed papers and articles in computer science and applications. Professor Kunii is also chairman of the Occam User Group in Japan. Dr. Rajiv Trehan ; "Concurrent Logic Languages for the design and implementation of Parallel AI Systems." Rajiv Trehan has been working for the last four year in the area of parallel declarative systems within the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh. His research activities include: hardware support for large knowledge bases; concurrent logic languages, like PARLOG, GHC and Concurrent Prolog; distributed Artificial Intelligence and parallel architectures. This work has formed the basis of his PhD, which is an investigation of the concurrent logic languages and how they support Artificial Intelligence programming techniques and applications. Much of his work has been adopted by the Parallel Architectures Laboratory, Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI), Edinburgh. Prof. J.A.Robinson ; "Functional and Relational reasoning with a fine-grain parallel reduction system." Since 1967 J.A.Robinson has been a Professor at Syracuse University. >From 1967 to 1984 he was Distinguished Professor of Logic and Computer Science, in 1984 he was appointed University Professor. His research interests center around exploiting logical methods on the computer. In 1963 he devised the ``resolution principle'', an automatic deduction technique based on the ``unification'' pattern-matching algorithm. resolution has been applied by Colmerauer and Kowalski to develop what is now known as ``logic programming''. His current research interest is in designing massively-parallel symbolic computation systems in which the underlying logics of LISP-like and PROLOG-like programming languages are completely intergrated. Prof. Les Valiant ; "Bulk-synchronous Parallel Computing." Professor Leslie G. Valiant is currently Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathemmatics at Harvard University. His current research interests are computational complexity, machine learning and the theory of parallel algorithms and architectures. In 1986 he received the Navanlinna prize for theory of information processing from the International Mathematical Union. * Proceedings * The edited proceedings includes invited and submitted papers and is intended for publication in a new book series on Communicating Process Architecture published by John Wiley and Sons. * The conference organising committee * Organising committee, programme editors and conference chairmen: Dr. Mike Reeve Imperial College, London, UK. Steven Ericsson Zenith INMOS Limited, Bristol, UK. The programme and organising committee: J.T Amenyo Ctr. Telecoms Research, Columbia University. Jean-Jacques Codani INRIA, France. Dr. Atsuhiro Goto Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT), Japan. Dr.med.Ulrich Jobst Ostertal - Klinik fur Neurologie und Klinische Neurophysiologie Dr. Peter Kacsuk Multilogic Computing, Budapest, Hungary. Pasi Koikkalainen Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland. Prof. T. L. Kunii The University of Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Heather Liddell Queen Mary College, London. Prof. Y. Paker Polytechnic of Central London Prof. L. F. Pau Technical University of Denmark. Prof. Bernd Radig Institut Fur Informatik, Munchen. Prof. Alan Robinson Syracuse University, USA. Kai Ming Shea University of Hong Kong. Prof. David Warren Bristol University, UK. Chung Zhang Brighton Polytechnic. UK. * Programme timetable * The timetable is as follows: Sunday 16:00pm to 18:00pm Registration Monday Tuesday 8:30am to 10:00pm Registration 09:00am Submitted paper 10:00am Introduction 09:30am Submitted paper 10:15am Keynote speach 10:00am Invited speaker - Professor Iann Barron 10:45am Coffee 11:00am Coffee 11:15am Invited speaker 11:30am Invited speaker 12:00pm Invited speaker 12:15pm Invited speaker 12:45pm Lunch 13:00pm Lunch 14:00pm Invited speaker 14:30pm Submitted paper 14:45pm Invited speaker 15:00pm Submitted paper 15:30pm Coffee 15:30pm Submitted paper 16:00pm Submitted paper 16:00pm Coffee 16:30pm Submitted paper 16:30pm Invited speaker 17:00pm Submitted paper 17:15pm Invited speaker 17:30pm End 18:00pm Break 19:00pm Transport to Dinner Before Dinner Sherry 20:00pm Conference Dinner * Conference dinner * The conference dinner will be held at London Zoo, with before dinner sherry in the Aquarium. Coaches will transport delegates. * Accommodation * Accommodation is available on the Campus of Imperial College. Campus accommodation is available for Sunday and/or Monday night. Hotel accommodation can be arranged separately by writing to the conference secretary. * Car parking * Available at a number of local NCP sites. * Payment * Cheques or bankers drafts in pounds sterling should be made payable to: OUG AI Conferences Full name___________________________________________ Institute/Company___________________________________ Address_____________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________ Country_____________________________________________ email :_____________________________________________ Non-residential 200 pounds sterling [] Residential (1 night) 225 pounds sterling [] Residential (2 nights) 250 pounds sterling [] Conference dinner 42 pounds sterling [] Total Payable________________________ Some student subsidy is available, for details contact the conference secretary. Special dietary requirements: Vegan [] Vegetarian [] Other (Please specify) Date____________ Signed_______________________________ Dated_____________________ * Registration * Registration should be received by June 16th. Late registration will incur a 20 pound surcharge. All enquiries should be addressed to the conference secretary: The Conference Secretary, OUG AI Conferences, INMOS Limited, 1000 Aztec West, Almondsbury, Bristol BS12 4SQ, UNITED KINGDOM. Tel. 0454 616616 x503 email: zenith@inmos.co.uk occam user group * artificial intelligence * special interest group 1st technical meeting of the OUG AISIG This conference is underwritten by INMOS Limited, to whom the organising committee wish to extend their thanks. ------------------------------ To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu >From: Aaron Sloman <mcvax!cvaxa.sussex.ac.uk!aarons@uunet.UU.NET> Date: 2 Mar 89 10:56:44 GMT Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.nlang-know-rep Subject: Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox (Long) Keywords: paradox,semantics,Frege There's been a lot of discussion of logical and semantic paradoxes in comp.ai. As my comments are also relevant to comp.ai.nlang-know-rep I am cross posting. Here's and exaple of a type that has not yet appeared in comp.ai: The father of the subject of this sentence is bald This is a case of infinite recursion in the semantics of the referring expression "The father of the subject of this sentence" Take any function symbol f (e.g 'the father of'), and an expression s such that s refers to the thing denoted by 'f(s)' (in my example s is 'the subject of this sentence'). Then if P is any predicate, the sentence P(f(s)) will have this property of infinite recursion (or infinite iteration if you prefer) in the natural semantic interpretation of the argument of the predicate. This, like all the old philosophical examples ('This statement is false', 'The present king of france is bald' and the like), are illustrations of the very same general principle: In a natural language (or a sufficiently rich formal language) it is impossible to guarantee that syntactically well formed expressions (whether referring expressions, predicate expressions, or whole sentences) are semantically well formed in the sense of identifying some entity (an object, a function, a truth value) of the type normally identified by expressions of that syntactic category. I.e. you cannot use syntactic well formedness to guarantee extension (or reference, or denotation.) This is not to say that the resulting complex expressions are meaningless. I think Gottlob Frege had all the essential insights required to understand these phenomena (see the collection of translations of his papers edited by P.Geach and M. Black Oxford: Blackwell 1960, especially the paper on 'Sense and Reference' German version 'Sinn und Bedeutung'). (Incidentally, all the main ideas of lambda calculus come from Frege.) Frege's key idea, which I think disposes of the paradoxes, is a distinction between what we might call extensional meaning (= reference, denotation, extension, and includes objects, sets, truth-values etc) and intensional meaning (= sense, connotation, intension). Roughly, but only VERY roughly (remember that qualification), the latter is closer to what gets preserved when you translate from one language to another. Two referring expressions that have different senses can refer to the same object, i.e. have the same extension (Frege's example was 'the evening star is the morning star' i.e. both expressions refer to the planet Venus, but in different ways. I.e. different procedures are relevant to checking whether an object is the one referred to. I am not saying, however, that the procedures are well defined in this case). Similarly two predicate expressions or function expressions may correspond to the same mathematical function in the sense of the same set of argument/value pairs, yet identify that function in different ways, simple examples being the functions f(x) = x*x - 16 f(x) = (x - 4)*(x + 4) or the predicates x has a heart x has kidneys (I think these are co-extensive) Frege showed that a great deal of linguistic complexity can be accounted for as resulting from the application of functions to arguments, including higher order functions, which is how he (with great originality) analysed quantifiers ("all", "some", "every" etc.) Some of the functions (and here he generalized the work of Boole), including not only things like "and", "not" etc, but also predicates and quantifiers, were analyzed as having truth values for their values (i.e. some arbitrary pair of objects T and F, treated in an asymmetrical way pragmatically, but otherwise TOTALLY symmetrical). He then suggested that just as the denotation (reference, extension, value or whatever you want to call it) of a complex expression was determined by the way in which it was composed of sub-expressions (e.g. '(3 * 5) + (6 - 99)') similarly the SENSE (intension, connotation, Sinn, or whatever you want to call it) is determined by the senses of the sub-expressions and they ways they are combined. Although he did not use a computational explanation of all this, I think a very natural interpretation is that the SENSE of an expression corresponds to what we would now call a PROCEDURE that can be executed to compute the value, and the DENOTATION is the result you get. The notion of a procedure here is actually very difficult to define with sufficient generality, and there are problems defining criteria for identify of procedures, especially when they are expressed in totally different formalisms -- discussing that would lead into a discussion of layers of procedures involving different virtual machines. It is particularly difficult to make precise the notion of a procedure that is not applied to internal datastructures, but to objects in the real world to compute a value. Worse, we have many expressions that allude to an ill defined assumed equivalent family of procedures, without selecting one unambiguously as THE sense of the expression. (Bill Woods has been trying to clarify these notions for years.) Anyhow, once you have gone down this route, the paradoxes are relatively easy to dispose of, because, assuming that semantic complexity does derive from the application of procedures to arguments which themselves may have to be identified by procedures applied to arguments, it follows that there are various ways in which a simple or complex expresion that is well formed may fail to determine a denotation, just as every programming language rich enough to be general purpose allows syntactically legal programs to be constructed that generate run time errors or loop forever. Examples of ways in which reference of an expression can fail are: a. It's a totally undefined expression - e.g. the subject expression in Zappwiddle is bald. b. The execution of the corresponding procedure fails to identify any object because that's how the reality referred to happens to be The present king of france The largest prime number between 24 and 28 (The sense is pretty clear - if there were such an object we'd know what the epression referred to.) c. There is not a unique object The person in the next room (There may be five persons in the next room) d. The procedure cannot be executed because the arguments to which it is applied are of the wrong type Thursday + 17.3 The king of space Thursday is bald e. The procedure can be executed but it fails to terminate because of some aspect of the reality it is applied to Start with 0 and keep adding 1 and stop when you get to the largest number (or some number x such that x + 1 = x, or ...) The original male ancestor of Fred (in a world with an infinite past) f. The procedure has an internal loop f(10), where f(x) = x * f(x-1) or f(f), where f(x) = not(x(x)) (Note that this "Russell" function is easy to define in languages like Lisp and Pop-11. What this sentence says is false (You first have to identify what it says, then check its truth value, but to do that you have to identify what it says and check its truth value, ... etc.) What this sentence says is true (It has EXACTLY the same problems) The father of the subject of this sentence is bald (You have to find the subject, then get his father, then that is the subject, but then you have to get his father, then that is the subject ... etc.) The set of all sets that do not contain themselves The set of all sets that do contain themselves In all these cases except the use of undefined symbols, we have a syntactically well formed expression with a well defined SENSE (i.e. complex procedure defined in terms of the application of simpler procedures to their arguments), and in some cases we can even begin to execute the procedure though not all, (e.g. where a primitive argument expression totally fails to refer). But there is no DENOTATION (reference, extension, value) though for different reasons. Frege's definition of "sense" was not expressed in terms of procedures. He used a host of unsatisfactory metaphors (including comparing the sense with the image in a telescope). Neither is it clear that it can be used in connection with all referring expressions (e.g. personal pronouns and other indexicals), as he found when he tried. He also at once stage abandoned one of his main insights when he proposed that if an expression in his formal language failed to denote anything then it should be taken to denote "the false" (removing the symmetry of truth values). By assuming the law of the excluded middle ( 'P or not P' must be true, no matter what P is) without allowing for cases where there is no value, you can, of course, get contradictions out of these examples. That was the source of Bertrand Russell's misery. He did not wish to give up the law. This forced him into a totally unnatural interpretation of (1a) The present king of france is bald as equivalent to something of the form: (1b) There is at least one thing which is a KofF & There is at most one thing which is a KofF and for all x if x is a KofF then X is bald NB this is not a circular analysis because "KofF" is treated as a predicate in (1b), not a referring expression. (1b) is false because of the first conjunct, whereas on the above, Fregean, analysis (1a) would simply fail to denote any truth value because the function 'x is bald' is not supplied with an argument since the subject fails to refer, because that's how the world is. Frege also pointed out that there are some contexts in which we manage to refer to the SENSE normally expressed by an expression (as I have done several times above). The expression whose reference is a sense then has a higher order sense. Defining the semantics of such higher order expressions is tricky, e.g. in contexts like Fred wants to meet the King of France Joe is trying to find the largest prime number There are many loose ends in the above theory especially when you try to apply it to something as rich, messy and ill defined as a natural language. However, the main point of this posting is that you can't hope to understand the problems generated by the paradoxes (or most other deep philosophical problems) without exploring a lot of the existing literature. Unfortunately, my own explorations are probably now out of date (the above analysis was done long ago). In particular, it is possible that recent work on the semantics of programming languages is very relevant, and perhaps a suitably informed reader will comment. But I suspect that even that work has not addressed all these issues properly, since programming languages are not YET rich enough to generate the problems. Just wait will we program computers in English! Aaron Sloman, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, Univ of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QN, England ARPANET : aarons%uk.ac.sussex.cogs@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk aarons%uk.ac.sussex.cogs%nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk@relay.cs.net JANET aarons@cogs.sussex.ac.uk BITNET: aarons%uk.ac.sussex.cogs@uk.ac UUCP: ...mcvax!ukc!cogs!aarons or aarons@cogs.uucp IN CASE OF DIFFICULTY use "syma" instead of "cogs" ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************