nl-kr-request@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Brad Miller) (07/12/88)
NL-KR Digest (7/11/88 19:21:00) Volume 5 Number 2 Today's Topics: ON applying AI Re: Word for word translations Re: Grammatic number of quantifiers (NL-KR Digest V4 #64) Re: presupposition Seminar - Bilingual Children As Translators Fifth Israeli Symposium on Artificial Intelligence SPEECH SCIENCE & TECH. CONFERENCE SST-88 Submissions: NL-KR@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU Requests, policy: NL-KR-REQUEST@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Jul 88 14:18 EDT From: Bruce E. Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com> Subject: ON applying AI The following is excerpted without permission from The Boston Globe Magazine for June 26, 1988, pp. 39-42 of the cover article by D. C. Denison entitled "The ON team, software whiz Mitch Kapor's new venture": In the conference room, where the ON team has assembled for a group interview, a question is posed: What developments in artificial intelligence have made their project possible? The first response comes immediately: "The lack of progress." Then William Woods, ON's principal technologist, takes a turn. "What came out of artificial intelligence that's useful to us is kind of like what came out of the space program that's useful for everybody on Earth --" "Velcro," someone interrupts. "Tang." From the other side of the table. "Are we the Tang of artificial intelligence?" Woods continues undaunted. "Artificial intelligence has given us a tool kit of engineering techniques. AI has been dirven by people who've been tilting at windmills, but their techniques are pretty good for what we want to do." <Paragraph on Bill's background & experience omitted> Although the early promise of artificial-intelligence research has been tempered--we still don't have computers that can understand English or reason like a human expert--the possibilities are so seductive, so intriguing, and so potentially profitable that the field continues to attract some of the best minds in the computer field. Which is why it wans't surprising that when Mitchell Kapor left Lotus two years ago, he became a visiting scholar at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science, a leading center of artifial-intelligence-related research. And it's not at all surprising that when Kapor and [Peter] Miller put together the ON team, at least one AI veteran of Woods' stature was part of the group. Yet "artificial intelligence" has become such a buzzword, such an umbrella term, that when the topic is brought up, experts such as Woods and interested explorers such as Kapro take deep breaths and try to redefine the terms of discussion. "When you talk about AI," Kapor says, "you're talking about many, many things at once: a body of research, certain kinds of goals and aspirations that are characteristic of the people who are in it, certain fields of inquiry; you've got soft stuff, you've got hard stuff, you have mythology--the term 'AI' casts a broad shadow. "I also think there's a reason why so much attention is paid to the AI question in the nontechnical press," he continues, "and that is that there are some very bombastic people in the AI community who have spoken incredibly irresponsibly, who've made careers out of that. But if you make the assumption that because AI gets a lot of attention in the press there's a lot going on in the field, you might be making a big mistake." When kapor and Woods first met soon after Kapor left Lotus, they discovered that they shared a similar view of the value of current AI research. First of all, they both felt that the goal most often attributed to artificial-intelligence research--the creation of a computer that "thinks" just like a human--was so remote as to be essentially impossible. Kapor's experience at MIT had convinced him that scientists still have no idea how people really think. Therefore, any attempt to design a computer that works the way people think is doomed. A more realistic approach, according to Kapor, would be to design computer programs that are compatible with the way people think, that help amplify a person's intelligence rather than try to duplicate it. Kapor felt that some artificial-intelligence techniques, when applied to that goal, could be very powerful. <Another bg paragraph omitted> Last year, Woods, who was working at Applied Expert Systems, discovered that Kaapor had leased a floor in the same building, and he began stopping in for informal conversations. Eventually, after discussing the ON Technology project with Kapor and Miller, and studying their business plan, he accepted the position of principal technologist and moved his things down two floors into a large corner office. <paragraph omitted about micros such as Mac II getting more memory> One of the possibilities [that opens up], which Woods will be actively working on during the next two years, is a more sympathetic fit between people and their computers. "I want to take an abstract perspective of what people's mental machinery does very well and what a machine can do well," Woods says, "and design ways that you can couple the two together to complement each other. For example, machines can do long sequences of complicated steps without leaving out one. People will forget something with frequency. On the other hand, people can walk down the street without falling in holes. To get a mechanical artifact to do that is a challenge that hasn't even been aapproximately approached after several decades of research." Woods pauses to frame his thoughts. "But if you could get the right interface technology and conceptual framework, on the machine side, to match up with what people really want to do on our side--that would be a very nice arrangement. Bruce Nevin bn@cch.bbn.com <usual_disclaimer> ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 3 Jul 88 04:58 EDT From: rutgers!gatech!sbmsg1!bpa!temvax!pacsbb!swiener Subject: Re: Word for word translations I must protest that Scott Horne's "word-for-word" translation of a few Chinese paragraphs is a stacked deck, due to his definition of "word." Horne translates tai4-tai, word for word, as "grand grand." Few people could accurately translate "grand grand" to mean "wife." However, I would submit that tai4-tai is in fact a single word meaning "wife." Intuitively, this is certainly easier for language students to grasp. The Chinese linguist Yuen-Ren Chao, in his _Mandarin Primer_, writes: Chinese scholars recognize two kinds of word-like subunits in speech. The commonest small change of everyday speech is the monosyllable or tzyh [zi4]. . . . Western Sinologists have called tzyh a "word." But if we analyze the structure of Chinese sentences, we shall find that the syntactic subunits which are capable of being uttered independently or combined with a high degree of freedom are not always monosyllables, but often combinations of two or more syllables. Such syntactic units, whether of one or more syllables, are more like the words of other languages. There is, however, no common Chinese name for them. Chinese grammarians call them tsyr [ci2], which is a learned term and not an everyday word. This excerpt, by the way, is from the most delightful language textbook I've ever used. The first 81 pages are a (somewhat dated) discussion of Chinese linguistics and related issues, which I'd strongly recommend to any linguist who would like to become more familiar with Chinese (without actually learning the language). -- Stewart Wiener UUCP: {rutgers,ihnp4}!bpa!temvax!pacsbb!swiener Internet: swiener@pacsbb.UUCP, maybe. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 8 Jul 88 15:18 EDT From: David H. West <umix!umich!eecs.umich.edu!itivax!dhw@uunet.UU.NET> Subject: Re: Grammatic number of quantifiers (NL-KR Digest V4 #64) > Date: Thu, 23 Jun 88 11:37 EDT From: morgan@clio.las.uiuc.edu Subject: > > Don't expect the facts of agreement to be rational. They aren't. For > example, > > More than one student was/*were arrested. Fewer than two students > were/*was arrested. On the other hand, with something like None of them are/?is coming. rationality will certainly not help decide between singular and plural. (Is there a language with a separate grammatical number for no actors?) > Another example: decimal fractions <= 1.0 take plural agreement. For > example, > > On the average, .34 (pronounced 'point three four') babies were born > each month. It's the number of the noun, not the presence of the fraction, that controls. That example could alternatively have been phrased as On the average, .34 of a baby was born each month. It's no less strange-sounding than the other, but also no more so. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 10 Jul 88 10:46 EDT From: Graeme Hirst <gh%aipna.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.CS.UCL.AC.UK> Subject: Re: presupposition In a recent article, Ching-Yuan Tsai asks about presuppositions of sentences in which a false belief is reported. The confusion caused by such sentences lies in considering presuppositions to be a property of a sentence rather than of an agent. The agent is usually the speaker or hearer of a sentence, but can be a third party. An approach that treats presuppositions as beliefs, using an underlying belief logic, is reported in a paper "Presuppositions as beliefs" by Diane Horton and myself, to be presented at the COLING conference next month. A longer version of the paper, and/or the thesis on which it is based, may be obtained by writing to Diane Horton Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, CANADA M5S 1A4 ----- >>Graeme Hirst, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh >>[usually at Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jul 88 09:41 EDT From: Dori Wells <DWELLS@G.BBN.COM> Subject: Lang. & Cognition Seminar BBN Science Development Program Language & Cognition Seminar Series BILINGUAL CHILDREN AS TRANSLATORS: RECOGNIZING AND CAPITALIZING ON NATURAL ABILITIES IN LANGUAGE MINORITY STUDENTS Sheila M. Shannon Research Associate, Department of Psychology Yale University BBN Laboratories 10 Moulton Streeet Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor 10:30 a.m., Tuesday, July 12, 1988 Abstract: Recent research in psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language pedadgogy has looked at translation (oral) and interpretation (written) activities and skills in bilingual children. Earlier work on translation strictly dealt with the professional field of translation and interpretation, and not with the spontaneous kinds of translating in which bilinguals engage. This presentation reviews the more recent work in the three disciplines with a focus on the author's own work in sociolinguistics and pedadgogy. I examine the nature of translation skills and ways they naturally emerge as a benefit to being bilingual; explore ways that cognitive, linguistic, and social abilities are involved in translation activity; consider how these abilities may be integrated into language classroom experiences; and assess a pilot program based on translation exercises implemented in one classroom. The work presented here fundamentally concerns itself with bilingual children of language minority communities in this country--those who require our greatest efforts to insure their academic success. I present work carried out with one Mexican American community in California and a Puerto Rican community in Connecticut. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jul 88 13:14 EDT From: udi@WISDOM.BITNET Subject: Fifth Israeli Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Call For Papers Fifth Israeli Symposium on Artificial Intelligence Tel-Aviv, Ganei-Hata`arucha, December 27-28, 1988 The Israeli Symposium on Artificial Intelligence is the annual meeting of the Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence, which is a SIG of the Israeli Information Processing Association. Papers addressing all aspects of AI, including, but not limited to, the following topics, are solicited: - AI and education - AI languages, logic programming - Automated reasoning - Cognitive modeling - Expert systems - Image understanding, pattern recognition and analysis - Inductive inference, learning and knowledge acquisition - Knowledge theory, logics of knowledge - Natural language processing - Perception, machine vision - Planning and search - Robotics This year, the conference is held in cooperation with the SIG on Vision, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, and in conjunction with the Tenth Israeli Conference on CAD and Robotics. There will be a special track devoted to Vision, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. Joint activities with the Confernece on CAD and Robotics include the openning session, a session on Robotics and AI, and the exhibition. Submitted papers will be refereed by the program committee, listed below. Authors should submit 4 _camera-ready_ copies of a full paper or an extended abstract of at most 15 A4 pages. Accepted papers will appear without revision in the proceedings. Submissions prepared on a laser printed are preferred. The first page should contain the title, the author(s), affiliation, postal address, e-mail address, and abstract, followed immediately by the body of the paper. Page numbers should appear in the bottom center of each page. Use 1 inch margin and single column format. Submitted papers should be received at the following address by October 1st, 1988: Ehud Shapiro 5th ISAI The Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot 76100, Israel The conference program will be advertized at the end of October. It is expected that 30 minutes will be allocated for the presentation of each paper, including question time. Program Committee Moshe Ben-Bassat, Tel-Aviv University Martin Golumbic, IBM Haifa Scientific Center Ehud Gudes, Ben-Gurion University Tamar Flash, Weizmann Institute of Science Yoram Moses, Weizmann Institute of Science Uzzi Ornan, Technion Gerry Sapir, ITIM Ehud Shapiro (chair), Weizmann Institute of Science Jeff Rosenschein, Hebrew University Shimon Ullman, Weizmann Institute of Science Hezy Yeshurun, Tel-Aviv University Secreteriate Israeli Association for Information Processing Kfar Hamacabia Ramat-Gan 52109, Israel ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Jul 88 01:59 EDT From: Michael Wagner <munnari!csadfa.oz.au!miw@uunet.UU.NET> Subject: SPEECH SCIENCE & TECH. CONFERENCE SST-88 The 2nd Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, SST-88, will be held at Macquarie University in Sydney from 29 November to 1 December 1988. The Conference will address all areas related to Speech Science and Technology, specifically Speech synthesis & voice response systems Automatic speech recognition & understanding Speaker verification & identification Speech analysis & reconstruction Speech coding, compression & encryption Acoustic phonetics & speech production Speech disorders & speech aids for the disabled Speech technology applications The 2 keynote speakers are: Dr James Flanagan, Director, Information Principles Research Laboratory, AT&T Dr Anthony Bladon, Director, Phonetics Laboratory, Oxford University The Conference will be preceded by a 1-day speech science and technology tutorial on 28 November. Submission of papers: Prospectice authors are invited to submit a 400-word summary to Dr M. Wagner, SST-88 Program Coordinator, Dept of Computer Science, University College/ADFA, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia, Tel. (062)688955, Fax (062)688581, Telex AA62030adfadm, ACSnet: miw@csadfa.oz, UUCP: ...!uunet!munnari!csadfa.oz!miw, ARPA: miw%csadfa.oz@uunet.uu.net, JANET: csadfa.oz!miw@ukc to be RECEIVED by 8 August 1988. Authors will be notified of the acceptance of their papers by 22 August and photo-ready papers are due by 17 October 1988. Conference registration A$195 (A$230 after 17 October), Full-time students A$65, Tutorial registration A$180 (A$215 after 17 October), Full-time students A$10. Further information from Prof. J.E. Clark, SST-88 Secretary, Speech Hearing & Language Research Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia, Tel. (02)8058784 or 8058782, Fax (02)8874752, Telex AA122377macuni, ACSnet: sr_mail@mqccvaxa.mq.oz ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************