[comp.ai.nlang-know-rep] NL-KR Digest Volume 5 No. 29

nl-kr-request@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Brad Miller) (12/01/88)

NL-KR Digest             (11/30/88 19:54:03)            Volume 5 Number 29

Today's Topics:
        NEW NL-KR MODERATOR SOUGHT

        BBN AI Seminar -- Tom Knight
        ai colloquia
        BBN AI/Education seminar: John Dixon
        BBN AI/Education Seminar: Susanne Lajoie
        Generation  And  Recognition  Of Affixational Morphology 
        From CSLI Calendar, November 10, 4:8
        From CSLI Calendar, November 17, 4:9
        BBN AI Seminar: Peter F. Patel-Schneider
        Conceptual Graphs Workshop '89 (Second call for papers) 
        ai talk abstracts
        SUNY Buffalo Cog Sci:  Nakhimovsky
        
Submissions: NL-KR@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU 
Requests, policy: NL-KR-REQUEST@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Wed, 30 Nov 88 19:04 EST
From: Brad Miller <miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>
Subject: NEW NL-KR MODERATOR SOUGHT

As most of you have noticed, the postings to this list have gotten pretty
sporadic of late. This has not been due to a dearth of articles to be sent
(after filtering), but to the other demands on yours truely, the moderator.

Unfortunately, I expect these outside activities to continue to preclude
more timely moderation of this list. I would like to ask for volunteers to
take over this list, who have the time to do the work, and whose machine has
the necessary connectivity (USENET, ARPANET, possibly BITNET) to continue
sending out the list.

If you are interested, please send mail to miller@cs.rochester.edu for more
information on what is involved. Your time commitment would be about an hour
or so a week, your technical commitment is some knowledge of the groups
topics (obviously), as well as parsing failed mail messages, mail addresses
in various domains, etc. You may need to have intimate knowledge of the
mailer on your machine, or have someone next door who has it.

Thanks!
----
Brad Miller		U. Rochester Comp Sci Dept.
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}

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

Date: Thu, 3 Nov 88 11:17 EST
From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM>
Subject: BBN AI Seminar -- Tom Knight

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

                     SPECIALIZATION IS FOR INSECTS

                               Tom Knight
                    MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
                           (tk@AI.AI.MIT.EDU)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Tuesday 8 November


	The chaos of the last decade in parallel computer architecture
is largely due to the premature specialization of parallel computer
architectures to support particular programming models.  The careful
choice of the correct primitives to support in hardware leads to a
general purpose parallel architecture which is capable of supporting a
wide variety of programming models.

	This talk will argue that low latency communication emerges as
the essential component in parallel processor design, and will
demonstrate how to use low latency communication to support other
programming models such as data level parallelism and coherent shared
memory in large processor arrays.

	We are now designing a very low latency, high bandwidth, fault
tolerant communications network, called Transit.  It forms the
communications infrastructure - the replacement of the bus - for a high
speed MIMD processor array which can be programmed using a wide variety
of parallel models.  Transit achieves its high performance through a
interdisciplinary approach to the problem of communications latency.

	The packaging of Transit is done using near isotropic density
three dimensional wiring, allowing much tighter packing of components,
and routing of wires on a 3-D grid.  The network is direct contact
liquid cooled with Fluorinert.  The use of custom VLSI pad drivers and
receivers provides very high speed signalling between chips.  The
topology of the network provides self-routing, fault tolerant, short
pipeline delay communications between pairs of processors.  And finally,
the design of the processor itself allows high speed message dispatching
and low latency context switch.

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

Date: Fri, 4 Nov 88 10:49 EST
From: Ron Loui <loui@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Subject: ai colloquia



			COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM
			
			   Washington University
			         St. Louis

			      4 November 1988


 TITLE: Why AI needs Connectionism? A Representation and Reasoning Perspective


			      Lokendra Shastri
		 Computer and Information Science Department
			   University of Pennsylvania



Any generalized notion of inference is intractable, yet we are capable of
drawing a variety of inferences with remarkable efficiency - often in a few
hundered milliseconds. These inferences are by no means trivial and support a
broad range of cognitive activity such as classifying and recognizing objects,
understanding spoken and written language, and performing commonsense
reasoning.  Any serious  attempt at understanding intelligence must provide a
detailed computational account of how such inferences may be drawn with
requisite efficiency.  In this talk we describe some  work within the
connectionist framework that attempts to offer such an account. We focus on
two connectionist knowledge representation and reasoning systems:

1) A connectionist semantic memory that computes optimal solutions to an
interesting class of inheritance and recognition  problems  extremely
fast - in time proportional to the depth of the conceptual hierarchy.  In
addition to being efficient, the connectionist realization is based on an
evidential formulation and provides a principled treatment of exceptions,
conflicting multiple inheritance, as well as the best-match or
partial-match computation.

2)  A connectionist system that represents knowledge in terms of multi-place
relations (n-ary predicates), and draws a limited class of inferences based on
this knowledge with extreme efficiency. The time taken by the system to draw
conclusions is proportional to the length of the proof, and hence,
optimal.  The system incorporates a solution to the "variable binding" problem
and uses the temporal  dimension to establish and maintain bindings.

We conclude that working within the connectionist framework is well motivated
as it helps in identifying interesting classes of limited inference that can
be performed with extreme efficiently, and aids in discovering constraints
that must be placed on the conceptual structure in order to achieve extreme
efficiency.


host:  Ronald Loui
________________________________________________________________________________

	1988-89 AI Colloquium Series (through February)


Sep	16	Michael Wellman, MIT/Air Force
			"The Trade-off Formulation Task in Planning under
			Uncertainty"
	30	Kathryn Laskey, Decision Science Consortium
			"Assumptions, Beliefs, and Probabilities"
Nov	4	Lokendra Shastri, University of Pennsylvania
			"Why AI Needs Connectionism?  A Representation and Reasoning
			Perspective"
	11	Peter Jackson, McDonnell Douglas 
			"Diagnosis, Defaults, and Abduction"
	18	Eric Horvitz, Stanford University
Dec	2	Mark Drummond, NASA Ames 
Feb	3	Fahiem Bacchus, University of Waterloo
	10	Dana Nau, University of Maryland

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

Date: Mon, 7 Nov 88 16:51 EST
From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM>
Subject: BBN AI/Education seminar: John Dixon

                    BBN Science Development Program
                  AI/EDUCATION Seminar Series Lecture

              WRITING AND READING: THE VIEW FROM THE U.K.

                               John Dixon
	
                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                     10:30 am, Thursday November 10


        ********************************************************
        *                                                      *
        *   No abstract was available for this presentation.   *
        *      Below is a short biography of the speaker.      *
        *                                                      *
        ********************************************************


John Dixon is an educational writer and consultant from London,
England, who has been a teacher in an inner-city school in London
as well as a Senior Lecturer in a teacher training college at Leeds.
Dixon is the author of "Growth through English", the major report of
the Anglo-American Dartmouth Seminar in 1966.  His writing since then
has included anthologies for school use and a number of books on the
teaching of writing, the most recent of which is "Writing Narrative -
and Beyond".

For many years a member of and then chair of The Schools Council
Committee on English, Dixon has directed research and studies on
Teaching English to the School Leaving Age and has investigated
the effect of the questions asked on university examinations on
the teaching of literature in schools.

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

Date: Mon, 7 Nov 88 16:52 EST
From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM>
Subject: BBN AI/Education Seminar: Susanne Lajoie

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

               SHERLOCK:  A COACHED PRACTICE ENVIRONMENT
                 FOR AN ELECTRONICS TROUBLESHOOTING JOB

                             Susanne P. Lajoie
               Learning Research and Development Center,
                        University of Pittsburgh
                 (LAJOIE%LRDCA@Vms.Cis.Pittsburgh.Edu)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Tuesday November 15


Sherlock is a computer-based practice environment for teaching
first-term airmen avionics troubleshooting skills.  Sherlock's
instructional goals were determined by a cognitive task analysis of
skill differences in this domain. The predominant instructional
strategy is to support holistic practice of troubleshooting rather
than train discrete knowledge skills. Instruction is based on complex
decision graphs of skilled and less skilled plans and actions for each
troubleshooting problem. As a trainee works through a problem Sherlock
observes the quality of decisions the trainee makes and uses that
information to provide the level of hint explicitness necessary at
particular decision points in the problem. In this way, specific
competency building is situated within the troubleshooting context and
is sharpened to the extent that satisfies each individual's needs.   

Sherlock was field tested in a controlled study that compared tutored
trainees with a control group that received no extra training other than
"on-the-job" experience.  Pre and post tests of verbal troubleshooting
indicated that the tutored group performed better than the control group
on post tests of troubleshooting proficiency.  Not only were more
problems solved but there were several indications of emerging
competence over the course of tutoring that demonstrated that trainees
were becoming more "expert-like" in the overall troubleshooting process.
In an independent evaluation the Air Force found the Sherlock treatment
to be equivalent to 47-51 months of "on the job" experience.

Enhancements have been added to Sherlock that could increase its
effectiveness even more.  An explicit articulation of expert and
student problem solving traces now exists that could facilitate the
comparison process of different levels of expertise. At the completion
of each problem trainees will be able to interrogate the trace of the
expert problem solution and see why an expert would make a particular
move as well as see the mental models used by an expert to test
different paths in the problem space.  

-----
This research was made possible through the combined efforts of the
following individuals:  Alan Lesgold, Jaya Bajpayee, Marilyn Bunzo,
Gary Eggan, Linda Greenberg, Debra Logan,  Thomas McGinnis, Cassandra
Stanley, Arlene Weiner, Richard Wolf, and Laurie Yengo, as well as
researchers at AFHRL Brooks, and the Air Force personnel that made our
study possible.   
-------

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

Date: Wed, 9 Nov 88 09:50 EST
From: Kent Wittenburg <HI.WITTENBURG@MCC.COM>
Subject: Generation  And  Recognition  Of Affixational Morphology 

                 HUMAN INTERFACE LAB SEMINAR
        John Bear, IBM Germany and SRI International 
   GENERATION  AND  RECOGNITION  OF AFFIXATIONAL MORPHOLOGY 



Abstract:  A major contribution to computational  morphology
in  recent  years has come from a two-level finite state ap-
proach to the analysis and  generation  of  the   morphology
of   natural   languages.   The  source for this approach is
Kimmo Koskenniemi's dissertation work in   Finland.     Many
others,  including Lauri Karttunen,  Ron  Kaplan,  and  Mar-
tin  Kay of Xerox  PARC  have  elaborated  on  the  original
model.   The  Kimmo approach is characterized  by  a  phono-
logical rule component  based  on finite-state  transduction
where  lexical and surface levels represent the two tapes of
the transducer.  A second level   of   information  is  mor-
phosyntactic information where, for example, one would state
that a language such as English  allows  plural  affixes  to
follow noun roots but not verbs.    In the Kimmo model, mor-
phosyntactic information is stated as a set of  continuation
classes,  again  a finite state model.  In this talk it will
be argued that  the  morphosyntactic   component  is  better
represented as a unification grammar.  The particular imple-
mentation of the author's has used  a   unification  grammar
for  the   morphosyntax   component   similar  to  the  PATR
system  developed  at  SRI.  A  second  extension   of   the
author's   to   the  original  Kimmo  system involves incor-
porating   the   negative   rule   features  into  the  pho-
nological  rule  interpreter.   The  resulting system can be
made to do generation and recognition  of  words  using  the
same grammars.

Where: Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation
       Balcones Research Center
       3500 West Balcones Center Drive
       HI Conference Room - 2.806 

When:  Friday, November 11, 1:30 P.M.

Host:  Kent Wittenburg, Kent@mcc.com

-------

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

Date: Thu, 10 Nov 88 11:38 EST
From: Emma Pease <emma@csli>
Subject: From CSLI Calendar, November 10, 4:8

			  NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
		   Reading: "E-Type Pronouns in 1987"
			      by Irene Heim
		   Discussion led by Fernando Pereira
			  (pereira@ai.sri.com)
			       November 17

   We will discuss Irene Heim's draft "E-Type pronouns in 1987." This
   paper considers the question of whether there are good reasons to
   prefer DRT or situation-theoretic treatments of bound anaphora to an
   older approach, due to Evans, Cooper, and others, for which she coins
   the term "E-type analysis." In an E-type analysis, a pronoun is
   represented in LF as a term of the form f(v1,...,vn) where f is a
   function made salient in the context and the vi are variables
   associated to quantified expressions on which the pronoun depends.
   Farmers, donkeys, paychecks, sage plants, spare pawns, and other
   famous characters of semantics play excellent roles in a plot with
   many unexpected turns.

			      ____________
			NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
	 The Resolution Problem for Natural-Language Processing
	   Weeks 8: Some Aspects of the Connectionist Approach
			 to Ambiguity Resolution
			     David Rumelhart
			(der@psych.stanford.edu)
			       November 17

   I will try to sketch the "connectionist program" for linguistic
   information processing.  In particular, I will challenge the idea of a
   fixed lexicon and rather suggest how "word meanings" might be
   "synthesized" as required by the contexts in which they occur.  I will
   offer slightly different instantiations of this idea---one of them
   primarily due to Kowamoto and one due to McClelland and St. John.  I
   will also, time permitting, sketch the rather different connectionist
   approach represented by the work of Gary Cottrel (among others).

			      ____________
			 SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
		Logic and Information in Symbolic Systems
		     Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy
			Friday, 11 November, 3:15
		     Sweet Hall, room 026 (basement)

   Many cognitive scientists, though not all, take cognition to be
   intrinsically symbolic.  In particular, they view inference as symbol
   manipulation.  However, another view is that inference is the
   extraction of information.  How do these two views fit together?
      The two of us are currently engaged in a project with SSP major
   Alan Bush to build a computer system, Hyperproof, that allows the user
   to reason by manipulating information, not symbols.  The question is,
   how can one get one's hands on information?  To find out, come to our
   talk.
      Next week, 18 November, the Symbolic Systems Internship Forum will
   be held: in it, each student and faculty sponsor will discuss how the
   summer project went.  This forum is open to the public and will be of
   special interest to: (1) students interested in obtaining Symbolic
   Systems Internships and (2) faculty interested in having interns.

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

Date: Wed, 16 Nov 88 19:46 EST
From: Emma Pease <emma@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: From CSLI Calendar, November 17, 4:9

			    NEXT CSLI SEMINAR
	 The Resolution Problem for Natural-Language Processing
		   Week 9: Interpretation as Abduction
			       Jerry Hobbs
			   (hobbs@ai.sri.com)
			       December 1

   We will return to a discussion of knowledge-based AI approaches to the
   resolution problem, and in particular to an approach using a scheme
   for abductive inference developed in the TACITUS project at SRI.  It
   will be argued that to interpret a text, one must prove the logical
   form of the text from what is already mutually known, merging
   redundancies where possible and making assumptions where necessary.
   It will be shown how the problems of, among others, reference,
   ambiguity, and metonymy can be addressed with this method.  This
   approach, in addition, suggests an elegant and thorough integration of
   syntax, semantics, and pragmatics---one moreover that works for
   integration and generation both.  This will be described, and its
   significance for modularity will be discussed.
			      ____________
			      STASS SEMINAR
		 Multimodal, Information-based Inference
	       Jon Barwise, Alan Bush, and John Etchemendy
		       (barwise@csli.stanford.edu,
	     bush@csli.stanford.edu, etch@csli.stanford.edu)
			 Cordura Conference Room
			  December 1, 4:00-5:30

   We will talk about our work designing an inference system that allows
   the direct manipulation of information provided via different
   modalities (e.g., visual and sentential).  We will demonstrate a
   mock-up of a program we are developing to teach this approach to
   inference.

   Time and place subject to change due to the availablity of equipment.
			      ____________
		       PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT TALK
		 "Unless"---Norms and Default Reasoning
			Professor Irina Gerasimov
			 Institute of Philosophy
		   Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow
		    Thursday, 17 November, 4:15 p.m.
			  Ventura Seminar Room

			      ____________
			 SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
		    Symbolic Systems Internship Forum
			Friday, 18 November, 3:15
			      Bldg. 60:62N

   In the Symbolic Systems Internship Forum, each student and faculty
   sponsor will discuss how the summer project went.  This forum is open
   to the public and will be of special interest to: (1) students
   interested in obtaining Symbolic Systems Internships and (2) faculty
   interested in having interns.
			      ____________
				CSLI TALK
		      External and Internal Logics
		       Professor Vladimir Smirnov
			 Institute of Philosophy
		   Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow
			      Sponsored by
		Department of Philosophy, CSLI, and IMSSS
		     Tuesday, 22 November, 4:15 p.m.
			  Ventura Seminar Room
	     Tea will be held at 3:45 in the Ventura Lounge
			      ____________
			      ANNOUNCEMENT

   The Stanford Department of Philosophy announces a new special program
   within their Ph.D. program: Philosophy and Symbolic Systems.  The
   program is designed to allow students to do interdisciplinary
   coursework and research in the area of symbolic systems.  For more
   information, contact the philosophy department (723-2547) or Jon
   Barwise (barwise@csli.stanford.edu).

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

Date: Mon, 21 Nov 88 17:40 EST
From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM>
Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Peter F. Patel-Schneider

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

          COMPLEXITY AND DECIDABILITY OF TERMINOLOGICAL LOGICS

                        Peter F. Patel-Schneider
                   AI Principles Research Department
                         AT&T Bell Laboratories
                         (pfps@allegra.att.com)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                     10:30 am, Tuesday November 29


Terminological Logics are important formalisms for representing
knowledge about concepts and objects, and are attractive for use in
Knowledge Representation systems.  However, Terminological Logics with
reasonable expressive power have poor computational properties, a fact
which has restricted their use and utility in Knowledge Representation
systems.  This talk gives a brief description of Terminological Logics,
presents some results concerning their tractability and decidability,
and discusses the role of Terminological Logics in Knowledge
Representation systems.

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

Date: Wed, 23 Nov 88 23:49 EST
From: ERIC Y.H. TSUI <munnari!aragorn.oz.au!eric@uunet.UU.NET>
Subject: Conceptual Graphs Workshop '89 (Second call for papers) 

Dear Colleague,

Last year, the second Annual Conference on conceptual graphs was organised by 
Jean Fargues at the IBM Paris Scientific Center.

In 1989, I shall organise the Annual Conference on conceptual graphs at 
Deakin University on the 9th and 10th of March, 1989.

I wish to invite you to attend this workshop, and I am looking forward to a 
possible contribution you could propose, such as a 30 minutes presentation 
with some handouts or an article. If you are interested in attending, 
please notify

	Professor Brian J. Garner
	Division of Computing and Mathematics
	Deakin University
	Geelong, Victoria 3217
	Australia

	Phone: 61 52 471 383
	Telex: DUNIV AA35625
	FAX: 61 52 442 777
	Email: brian@aragorn.oz (CSNET)

Expenses will be the responsibility of the participants but there is no special 
fee for attending the workshop. I am looking forward to your participation and 
possible contribution.


					Brian J. Garner
					Professor of Computing
                                        Deakin University
                                        Geelong, Victoria 3217
                                        AUSTRALIA


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

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 88 21:55 EST
From: Ron Loui <loui@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Subject: ai talk abstracts


			COMPUTER SCIENCE COLLOQUIUM
			
			   Washington University
			         St. Louis

			      2 December 1988


			Planning and Plan Execution

				Mark Drummond
				NASA Ames

We are given a table on which to place three blocks (A, B, and C).  We begin
in a state where all the blocks are available for placement; there is also an
unspecified means of transporting each block to its target location on the
table.  We might imagine that there are an unlimited number of
interaction-free robot arms, or that each block may be levitated into place
once it is available.  The exact means for moving the blocks does not matter:
given that a block is available it may be placed.  The only constraint is that
B cannot be placed last.  We call this the "B-not-last" problem.

We must produce a plan which is as flexible as possible.  If a block can be
placed then our plan must so instruct the agent.  If a block cannot be placed
according to the constraints then our plan must prevent the agent from
attempting to place the block.  The agent must never lock up in a state from
which no progress is possible.  This would happen, for instance, if A were on
the table, and C arrived and was placed.  B could then not be placed last.

It takes four totally ordered plans or three partially ordered plans to deal
with the B-not-last problem.  In either representation there is no one plan
that can be given to the assembly agent which does not overly commit to a
specific assembly strategy.  Disjunction is not the only problem.  Actions
will often fail to live up to the planner's expectations.  An approach based
on relevancy analysis is needed, where actions are given in terms of the
conditions under which their performance is appropriate.  The problem is even
harder when there can be parallel actions.

Our approach uses a modified Condition/Event system (Drummond, 1986a,b) as a
causal theory of the application domain.  The C/E system is amenable to direct
execution by an agent, and can be viewed as a nondeterministic control
program.  For every choice point in the projection, we synthesize a "situated
control rule" that characterizes the conditions under which action execution
is appropriate.  This can be viewed as a generalization of STRIPS' algorithm
for building triangle tables from plan sequences (Nilsson, 1984).


________________________________________________________________________________

				5 December 1988

	Coping with Computational Complexity in Medical Diagnostic Systems

				Gregory Cooper
		Stanford University/Knowledge Systems Laboratory

Probabilistic networks will be introduced as a representation for medical
diagnostic knowledge.  The computational complexity of using general
probabilistic networks for diagnosis will be shown to be NP-hard.  Diagnosis
using several important subclasses of these networks will be shown to be
NP-hard as well.  We then will focus on some of the approximation methods
under development for performing diagnostic inference.  In particular, we will
discuss algorithms being developed for performing diagnostic inference using a
probabilistic version of the INTERNIST/QMR knowledge base.

_______________________________________________________________________________

		Computation and Inference Under Scarce Resources

				Eric Horvitz
				Stanford University
				Knowledge Systems Laboratory


I will describe research on Protos, a project focused on reasoning and
representation under resource constraints.  The work has centered on building
a model of computational rationality through the development of flexible
approximation methods and the application of reflective decision-theoretic
control of reasoning.  The techniques developed can be important for providing
effective computation in high-stakes and complex domains such as medical
decision making.  First, work will be described on the decision-theoretic
control of problem solving for solving classical computational tasks under
varying, uncertain, and scarce resources.  After, I will focus on
decision-theoretic reasoning under resource constraints.  I will present work
on the characterization of partial results generated by alternative
approximation methods.  The expected value of computation will be introduced
and applied to the selection and control of probabilistic inference.  Plans
for extending the work to inference in a large internal-medicine knowledge
base will be described.  Finally, I extend the techniques beyond the tradeoff
between computation time and quality of computational results to explore
issues surrounding complex reasoning under cognitive constraints.



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

Date: Tue, 29 Nov 88 14:24 EST
From: William J. Rapaport <rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Subject: SUNY Buffalo Cog Sci:  Nakhimovsky


                         UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO
                      STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

                  GRADUATE GROUP IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE

                                PRESENTS

                         ALEXANDER NAKHIMOVSKY

                     Department of Computer Science
                           Colgate University

              GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES AND SHAPES OF EVENTS

                       Tuesday, December 13, 1988
                               4:30 P.M.
                     280 Park Hall, Amherst Campus

This talk traces recurrent patterns in two linguistic and two  ontologi-
cal  domains:   (1)  grammatical categories of the noun, (2) grammatical
categories of the verb, (3) shapes of visually  perceived  objects,  and
(4)   aspectual   classes   of  events.   Correspondences  between  noun
categories and visual properties of objects are shown by  comparing  the
semantics of noun classifiers in classifier languages with some computa-
tional objects and processes of early and late vision.

Among grammatical categories of the verb, only those having to  do  with
aspect  are  discussed,  and  three  kinds of phenomena identified:  the
perfective-imperfective distinction, corresponding to the  presence  vs.
absence  of  a contour, at a given scale, in the object domain (and thus
to the count-mass distinction in the noun-categories domain); the aspec-
tual  types  of  verb  meanings  (a.k.a. Aktionsarten); and coersion, or
nesting, of aspectual types.  Unlike previous treatments, a  distinction
is  drawn betweem aspectual coersion within the word (i.e., in word for-
mation and inflection) and aspectual coersion above the word  level,  by
verb  arguments  and  adverbial  modifiers.   This  makes it possible to
define the notion of an aspectual classifier and (on analogy with  noun-
classifier languages) the notion of an aspectual language.  Several pro-
perties of aspectual languages are identified, and a comparison is  made
between  the  ways  aspectual  distinctions  are  expressed in aspectual
languages (e.g.,  Slavic  languages),  predominantly  nominal  languages
(e.g., Finnish, Hungarian), and a weakly typed language like English.
The similarities between the  object-noun  domains  and  the  event-verb
domains  point to a need for topological (rather than logical) represen-
tations for aspectual classes, representations that  could  support  the
notions  of  connectedness, boundary, and continuous function.  One such
representation is presented and shown to  explain  several  facts  about
aspectual  classes.   Tentative  proposals  are made toward defining the
notion of an ``aspectually possible word''.  In  conclusion,  I  discuss
the implications of the presented material for the problem of naturalis-
tic explanation in linguistics and the modularity hypothesis.

     There will be an evening discussion at Stuart Shapiro's house,
               112 Park Ledge Drive, Snyder, at 8:15 P.M.

Contact Bill Rapaport, Dept. of Computer Science, 673-3193, for further details.

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

End of NL-KR Digest
*******************