nl-kr-request@cs.rochester.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Brad Miller) (01/26/88)
NL-KR Digest (1/26/88 03:22:09) Volume 4 Number 10 Today's Topics: From CSLI Calendar, January 21, 3:14 BBN AI Seminar: Vineet Singh Seminar - Towards a many-valued logic of belief (Rochester) Don Norman colloquium Lang. & Cog. Seminar Submissions: NL-KR@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU Requests, policy: NL-KR-REQUEST@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 20 Jan 88 20:35 EST From: Emma Pease <emma@alan.stanford.edu> Subject: From CSLI Calendar, January 21, 3:14 [Excerpted from CSLI Calendar] Reading: "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works" by Daniel Dennett In D. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, chapter 2, Bradford Books, 1987. Also in A. F. Heath, ed., Scientific Explanation, Oxford University Press, 1981. Discussion led by Adrian Cussins (cussins.pa@xerox.com) January 28 Dennett's article "True Believers" is, as he says, the flagship expression of his theory of the intentional stance replacing his 1971 article "Intentional Systems." It seems to me that the theory should be discussed around CSLI since there appear to be many commonalities between his position and the Barwise/Perry/Israel attitude to psychology. For example (and a little flippantly): there is no qualitative difference between people and frogs; there is no such thing as intrinsic intentionality; the language of thought is false; the notion of representation is not primary in psychological theory; psychological properties are not natural kinds. I will briefly introduce Dennett's theory for those not familiar with it, and raise one or two objections. I think that what Dennett is really saying is that there can be no such thing as The Science of the Mind, or, in other words, that the best a psychologist can hope for is to be a hacker. Now, if CSLI shares this view it might explain a lot ... -------------- NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR Modal Subordination, Situations, and Reference Time Craige Roberts (croberts@csli.stanford.edu) January 28 The phenomenon of modal subordination involves the apparent extension of the scope of modal operators intersententially across segments of a discourse. This presents problems both for the analysis of the logical entailments of individual sentences in such contexts, and for theories of anaphora in discourse. In earlier work, I proposed an account of modal subordination which involved extending discourse representation theory to include modal operators. In this talk I will briefly review that proposal and present recent work that attempts to address two unresolved problems: the existence of similar examples, which involve non-modal operators, such as temporal operators and adverbs of quantification, and a restriction on the interpretation of tenses in modal subordination contexts. I will suggest that these problems may be resolved by taking modal operators to range over situations (whether the situations of situation semantics, or the partial worlds situations recently proposed by Angelika Kratzer), and by taking temporal units to be defined in terms of primitively ordered events (themselves a type of situation). I will present a theory of the interpretation of discourse representations, which implements these ideas in a possible-worlds semantics. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jan 88 10:16 EST From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM> Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Vineet Singh BBN Science Development Program AI Seminar Series Lecture DISTRIBUTING BACKWARD-CHAINING DEDUCTIONS TO MULTIPLE PROCESSORS Vineet Singh Stanford University, and SPAR (VSINGH@SPAR-20.SPAR.SLB.COM) BBN Labs 10 Moulton Street 2nd floor large conference room 10:30 am, Friday January 29th The talk presents PM, a parallel execution model for backward-chaining deductions. PM exploits more parallelism than other execution models that use data-driven control and non-shared memory architectures. The talk also presents an application-independent, compile-time allocation strategy for PM that is both fast and effective. Effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing speedups obtained from an implementation of the allocator to an unreachable upper bound and speedups obtained from random allocations. The resource allocator uses probabilistic techniques to predict the amount of communication and the parallelism profile; this should be useful for other allocation strategies as well. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Jan 88 10:37 EST From: patricia Subject: Seminar - Towards a many-valued logic of belief (Rochester) UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT SEMINAR Thursday, January 21, 1988 Computer Studies Building, Room 601 3:00 p.m. Speaker Dimiter Driankov University of LinkHoping Department of Computer Science LinkHoping, Sweden Topic *Towards a many-valued logic of belief: A representation of uncertainty which takes into account two reports about the validity of a proposition is considered: 1) a report on how strongly the validity of A is believed, and 2) a report on how strongly it9s validity is disbelieved. This type of representation is studied in terms of two different lattice structures: the so-called logical and information lattices. It is shown that the first one provides a many-valued variant of *relevance: logic, while the other one helps in dealing with non truth-functional aspects of knowledge about belief and/or disbelief in the validity of formulas, i.e., representing belief and/or disbelief in the validity of complex formulas having only partial information about their atomic constituents. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 08:53 EST From: William J. Rapaport <rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Subject: Don Norman colloquium STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO The Steering Committee of the GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC SCIENCES PRESENTS DONALD A. NORMAN Institute for Cognitive Science University of California, San Diego THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS How do we manage the tasks of everyday life? The traditional answer is that we engage in problem solving, planning, and thought. How do we know what to do? Again, the traditional answer is that we learn, in part through experience, in part through instruction. I suggest that this view is misleading. Less planning and problem solving is required than is commonly supposed. Many tasks need never be learned: the proper behavior is obvious from the start. The problem space for most everyday tasks is shallow or narrow, not wide and deep as the tradi- tional approach suggests. The minimization of the problem space occurs because natural and contrived properties of the environment combine to constrain the set of possible actions. The effect is as if one had put the knowledge required to do a thing on the thing itself: the knowledge is in the world. I show that seven stages are relevant to the performance of an action, including three stages for execution of an act, three for evaluation, and a goal stage. Consideration of the rule of each stage, along with the principles of natural mappings and natural constraints, leads to a set of psychological principles for design. Couple these principles with the suggestion that most real tasks are shallow or narrow, and we start to have a psychology of everyday things and everyday actions. The talk itself is meant to be light and enjoyable. However, there are profound implications for the type of theory one develops for simulating cognitive computation. There are serious implications for massively parallel structures (what we call Parallel Distributed Processing or connectionist approaches), for memory storage and retrieval via descrip- tions or coarse coding, and, in general, for a central role for pattern matching, constraint satisficing, and nonsymbolic processing mechanisms in human cognition. But the main implications of the work are for the design of understandable and usable objects. Monday, February 1, 1988 4:00 P.M. Park 280, Amherst Campus There will also be an informal evening discussion that evening at David Zubin's house, 157 Highland St., at 8:00 P.M. Call Bill Rapaport (Com- puter Science, (716) 636-3193, 3180) for further information. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 15:52 EST From: Dori Wells <DWELLS@G.BBN.COM> Subject: Lang. & Cog. Seminar BBN Science Development Program Language and Cognition Seminar THE ROLE OF THE CONSTRUCT "POSSIBLE WORD MEANING" IN VOCABULARY ACQUISITION Bill Nagy Center for Study of Reading University of Illinois Urbana, Illinois BBN Laboratories Inc. 10 Moulton Street Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor 10:30 a.m., Monday, February 1, 1988 Abstract: It has been argued that in vocabulary acquisition, as in other aspects of language acquisition, learning is possible only if there are severe constraints on the hypotheses entertained by the learner. In the recent psycholinguistic literature, there are a few experiments suggesting that there are some general constraints on the types of word meanings acquired by young children. In this talk, experiments with adults will be described which attempts to provide evidence that language specific constraints on what constitutes a possible word meaning play a role in the generation and testing of hypotheses about the meanings of unfamiliar words. ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************