nl-kr-request@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Brad Miller) (11/11/87)
NL-KR Digest (11/11/87 03:05:14) Volume 3 Number 47 Today's Topics: Genie dynamic KB restructuring Re: NL-KR Digest Volume 3 No. 34 (definite articles) RE: NL-KR Digest Volume 3 No. 45 Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? From CSLI Calendar, November 5, 3:6 Seminar--Planning Coherent Multisentential Text-- BBN AI Seminar -- Bran Boguraev BBN AI Seminar -- Reid Simmons CFP - Conference on Machine Translation CfP - 1st Australian Knowledge Engineering Congress (Nov. '88) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 5 Nov 87 12:24 EST From: Dale Hall <necntc!linus!wdh@ames.arpa> Subject: Genie I recently saw reference to the case of a person called "Genie", who was apparently horribly neglected by her parents. Perhaps it's simple morbid curiosity, but I would like to locate a case history in the open literature. Does one exist? Dale Hall ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Nov 87 12:15 EST From: William J. Rapaport <rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Subject: dynamic KB restructuring See: Jane Terry Nutter, "Assimilation: A Strategy for Implementing Self- Reorganizing Knowledge Bases," Proc. AAAI-87, pp. 449-453. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Nov 87 06:03 EST From: Gilbert Cockton <mcvax!hci.hw.ac.uk!gilbert@uunet.uu.net> Subject: Re: NL-KR Digest Volume 3 No. 34 (definite articles) In article <8710160048.AA13373@castor.cs.rochester.edu> Claus Tondering <ct@dde.uucp> writes: >2) Does anybody know about other peculiarities about the definite article? Rumanian, which is a Romance language resulting from Rome's Gulag on the Black Sea (the first Australia? :-)), has a definite article which is a suffix as in Danish, thus 'urs' - bear, 'ursul' - the bear. I know nothing of any rigorous diachronic linguistics here, but it looks to me like 'ille' from Latin going on the end. 'ille' works a bit like a definite article in Latin, hence 'il' in Italian, 'el' in Spanish, and 'le' in French. -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hwcs!hci!gilbert ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Nov 87 09:14 EST From: We're all bozos on this bus! <CZICHON%NGSTL1%eg.ti.com@RELAY.CS.NET> Subject: RE: NL-KR Digest Volume 3 No. 45 Squire Douglas Bonn, let's set the record straight. There are significant differences between monkeys and apes. Monkeys have NOT been taught ASL; apes have. Speak no evil. C. Czichon Allen, Texas ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Nov 87 20:31 EST From: David Stampe <stampe@uhccux.UUCP> Subject: Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? >I never handwrite -- much too slow, I forget what I was thinking. >I need to write at a rate comparable to measured speech. On the other >hand I, and almost all people I know, can not compose poetry when >typing. This is a demonstration of the essential difference between >poetry and non-poetry. Interesting subject. There seem to be several modes of reading, and also of thinking. One mode involves actually pronouncing phrases and sentences, in real-time, in imagination, and has an upper tempo limit approximating that of actual pronunciation. Another mode, as in speed-reading, is too fast for that. I'm not sure it really linguistic (as opposed to merely conceptual) stuff at all. Not everyone can read that fast. (In fact, not everyone can read silently. Children normally seem to read aloud at first, and only gradually to learn to read silently. The same seems to be true in human history. There's a passage, in ?Augustine, about people being amazed that ?Jerome could read without moving his lips. Maybe it is also true of speaking as well. Asking very young kids to play their verbal games of doll or cowboy-and-Indian conversation silently seems to be equivalent to asking them to stop playing altogether.) Yet another mode, as in slow writing, is perhaps so slow that it requires periodic inner re-pronunciation of the current sentence or phrase in order to keep one's place. This suggests that verbal thought, like speaking, is rhythmic. The same, mutatis mutandis, seems true of musical thought. One can't tell how, or even whether, a verse scans, or a melody sounds (or how it plays, in rehearsing an instrument mentally), without reviewing it at roughly performance tempo. Some musical tempos can be multiplied, of course, but one soon hits an upper limit. (I've seen conductors speed-reading scores but I suspect all they experience in doing so is the overall structure, rather like when one flips through a book to review its overall contents.) Linguists usually have similar experiences about phonetically transcribing their speech: they can do it silently, but only by repeating the phrase at pronounceable tempos. Indeed, the same seems to be true of mentally rehearsing all sorts of physical activity. Some high-jumpers rehearse their approach to the bar by bobbing their heads and moving their eyes to each spot where they will place their feet on each step toward the bar, all in the same rhythm that they use when they actually move. Furthermore, there seems to be only one available rhythmic channel. We can follow/imagine/play several voices in a fugue only when they are part of a single rhythmic structure. Maybe the reason we can't follow two or more conversations at once is ultimately because they aren't in rhythm. Can anyone *really* listen to music and read at the same time? We gesture in rhythm to our speech. Norman McQuown used to show a slow-motion film of a family talking at dinner, and everyone chewed and moved their forks in rhythm to the person talking. Carrying placards protesting at a military parade one can't keep from walking in rhythm to the military music. Walking faster while we're talking seems to make us talk faster. Do readers understand text by reconstructing in their minds its pronounced form, complete with rests, intonations, etc.? If so, this suggest that attempts at simulating natural language understanding (parsing, etc.) may have been missing an important step. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Nov 87 19:09 EST From: John Chambers <jc@minya.UUCP> Subject: Re: Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? In article <1074@uhccux.UUCP>, stampe@uhccux.UUCP (David Stampe) writes: > >I never handwrite -- much too slow, I forget what I was thinking. > >I need to write at a rate comparable to measured speech. On the other > >hand I, and almost all people I know, can not compose poetry when > >typing. This is a demonstration of the essential difference between > >poetry and non-poetry. Well, most people I know are unable to compose poetry when writing or talking (:-). Personally, I feel no difference that makes a difference. In fact, typing to an editor like I'm doing now, I can stop and think, back up, revise, and so on. I just deleted this entire paragraph and retyped it. That's harder to do with a pen; impossible when speaking in person (and hard enough when speaking to a recorder). Perhaps you have a bit of subconscious Luddism? [Oh, well, it's rarely fatal.;-] > Interesting subject. There seem to be several modes of reading, and > also of thinking. One mode involves actually pronouncing phrases and > sentences, in real-time, in imagination, and has an upper tempo limit > approximating that of actual pronunciation. > Another mode, as in speed-reading, is too fast for that. I'm not > sure it really linguistic (as opposed to merely conceptual) stuff at > all. Not everyone can read that fast. Sure, it's linguistic. What's being read is language, isn't it? And there are many people around who can read at 5 or 6 times normal speaking speed with full comprehension. If you can't, it's probably due to lack of training. I've always found it frustrating to listen to lectures, when I can read an hour's worth of speech in 10 or 15 minutes, with better comprehension most of the time. After all, when reading, I can stop and thing, reread, or skim past stuff that I already know. That's real hard to do when listening to speech. > ... There's a passage, in ?Augustine, about people > being amazed that ?Jerome could read without moving his lips. Maybe > it is also true of speaking as well. True, there are and always have been a lot of illiterate or marginally literate people in the world. That's not a comment on the capabilities of humans in general, but merely of the deficiencies of those illiterates. Most Americans are couch potatoes; that is no reflection at all on the rest of us. > This suggests that verbal thought, like speaking, is rhythmic. The > same, mutatis mutandis, seems true of musical thought. One can't tell > how, or even whether, a verse scans, or a melody sounds (or how it > plays, in rehearsing an instrument mentally), without reviewing it at > roughly performance tempo. Maybe *you* can't. Don't generalize to the rest of us. > Furthermore, there seems to be only one available rhythmic channel. > We can follow/imagine/play several voices in a fugue only when they > are part of a single rhythmic structure. Just yesterday about this time I was playing a Greek tune with a couple of friends, a fast hasapikos, of the sort where the tune is often in jig time, while the accompaniment is in 2/4. I had no trouble at all playing the melody on the keyboard of my accordion (in 6/8) while playing the chords (in 2/4) on the bass. I learned to do such things on the piano when I was 9, and I have done it often since. In the Mideastern musical circles with which I sometimes associate, people would give you a funny look if you suggested that such elementary polyrythms were difficult. Maybe for musical illiterates, but not for a Real Musician. > Carrying placards protesting at a military parade one can't keep from > walking in rhythm to the military music. Walking faster while we're > talking seems to make us talk faster. If you were ever involved in a musical production in school, one of the things you were probably hit with was that it is a big mistake to walk in time to music, or synchronized with someone else on stage. Such synchronisation stands out plainly to an audience, and you have to learn not to do it. True, matching a rythm in the environment is a natural trait. That's why the directors of school plays have to tell the kids not to do it. Most of them learn very quickly; they have little trouble breaking the reflex. All you have to do is shame them by saying that it looks "amateurish", and they learn real fast. In general, it is a bad idea to look at the behavior of a set of people handicapped by lack of training or interest, and generalize to all humans. -- John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Nov 87 20:08 EST From: emma@russell.stanford.edu Subject: From CSLI Calendar, November 5, 3:6 [Extracted from CSLI Calendar] NEW PUBLICATIONS The following reports have recently been published. They may be obtained by writing to Trudy Vizmanos, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115 or publications@csli.stanford.edu. 97. Constituent Coordination in HPSG Derek Proudian and David Goddeau 98. A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work Terry Winograd 99. Implicature and Definite Reference Jerry R. Hobbs 100. Thinking Machines: Can There be? Are we? Terry Winograd 101. Situation Semantics and Semantic Interpretation in Constraint-based Grammars Per-Kristian Halvorsen 102. Category Structures Gerald Gazdar, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Robert Carpenter, Ewan Klein, Thomas E. Hukari, Robert D. Levine 103. Cognitive Theories of Emotion Ronald Alan Nash 104. Toward an Architecture for Resource-bounded Agents Martha E. Pollack, David J. Israel, and Michael E. Bratman 105. On the Relation Between Default and Autoepistemic Logic Kurt Konolige 106. Three Responses to Situation Theory Terry Winograd ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Nov 87 15:02 EST From: Ana C. Dominguez <anad@vaxa.isi.edu> Subject: Seminar--Planning Coherent Multisentential Text-- Date: Wednesday November 11 Time: 3:30pm-4:30pm Place: 7th Floor Small Conference Room PLANNING COHERENT MULTISENTENTIAL TEXT Eduard Hovy USC Information Sciences Institute Marina del Rey, CA Generating multisentential text is hard. Though most text generators are capable of simply stringing together more than one sentence, they cannot determine coherent order. Very few programs have been written that attempt to plan out the structure of multisentential paragraphs. Clearly, the key here is coherence. The reason some paragraphs are coherent is that the information in successive sentences follows some pattern of inference or of knowledge with which the hearer is familiar. To signal such inferences, people usually use relations that link successive sentences in fixed ways. This point was made by Hobbs in 78. In 82, McKeown built fixed schemas (scripts) for constructing some paragraphs. Around the same time, after a wide-ranging linguistic study, Mann proposed that a relatively small number of intersentential relations suffices to bind together coherently most of the things people tend to speak about. The talk will describe a prototype text structurer that is based on the inferential ideas of Hobbs, uses Mann's relations, and is more general than the schema applier built by McKeown. The structurer takes the form of a standard hierarchical expansion planner, in which the relations act as plans and their constraints on relation fillers (represented in a formalism similar to Cohen and Levesque's work) as subgoals in the expansion. The structurer is conceived as part of a general text planner, but currently functions on its own and is being tested in two domains: database output and expert system explanantion. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 8 Nov 87 17:42 EST From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM> Subject: BBN AI Seminar -- Bran Boguraev BBN Science Development Program AI Seminar Series Lecture THE USE OF AN ON-LINE DICTIONARY FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Bran Boguraev Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK) (bkb%computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK) BBN Labs 10 Moulton Street 2nd floor large conference room 10:30 am, Friday November 13 This talk is an attempt at a retrospective analysis of the collective experience stemming from the use of the machine-readable version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English for natural language processing. It traces the relationships between specific requirements for lexical data and issues of making such data available for diverse research purposes. A particular model of on-line dictionary use is presented, which promotes a strong separation between the processes of extracting information from machine-readable dictionaries and using that information within the pragmatic context of computational linguistics. The talk further analyses some characteristics of the raw lexical data in electronic sources and outlines a methodology for making maximal use of such potentially rich, but inherently unreliable, resources. ------- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Nov 87 16:11 EST From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM> Subject: BBN AI Seminar -- Reid Simmons BBN Science Development Program AI Seminar Series Lecture GENERATE, TEST AND DEBUG: A PARADIGM FOR SOLVING INTERPRETATION AND PLANNING PROBLEMS Reid Simmons MIT AI Lab (REID%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU) BBN Labs 10 Moulton Street 2nd floor large conference room 10:30 am, Tuesday November 17 We describe the Generate, Test and Debug (GTD) paradigm and its use in solving interpretation and planning problems, where the task is to find a sequence of events that could achieve a given goal state from a given initial state. The GTD paradigm combines associational reasoning in the generator with causal reasoning in the debugger to achieve a high degree of efficiency and robustness in the overall system. The generator constructs an initial hypothesis by finding local domain-dependent patterns in the goal and initial states and combining the sequences of events that explain the occurrence of the patterns. The tester verifies hypotheses and, if the test fails, supplies the debugger with a causal explanation for the failure. The debugger uses domain-independent debugging algorithms which suggest repairs to the hypothesis by analyzing the causal explanation and models of the domain. This talk describes how the GTD paradigm works and why its combination of reasoning techniques enables it to achieve efficient and robust performance. In particular, we will concentrate on the actions of the debugger which uses a "transformational" approach to modifying hypotheses that extends the power of the "refinement" paradigm used by traditional domain-independent planners. We will also discuss our models of causality and hypothesis construction and the role those models play in determining the completeness of our debugging algorithms. The GTD paradigm has been implemented in a program called GORDIUS. It has been tested in several domains, including the primary domain of geologic interpretation, the blocks world, and the Tower of Hanoi problem. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 6 Nov 87 16:20 EST From: Machine.Translation.Journal@NL.CS.CMU.EDU Subject: CFP - Conference on Machine Translation CONFERENCE ON MACHINE TRANSLATION CALL FOR PAPERS The Second International Conference on Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages will be held June 12 - 14 at the Center for Machine Translation, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Contributions are solicited on all topics related to machine translation, machine-aided translation, and, generally, automatic analysis and generation of natural language texts, the structure of lexicons and grammars, research tools, methodologies, knowledge representation and use, and theory of translation. Relevant submissions on other topics are also welcome. Extended abstracts (not exceeding 1,500 words) should be sent to MT Conference Program Committee Center for Machine Translation Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213, U.S.A. (412) 268 6591 Submission Deadline: February 1, 1988 Notification of Acceptance: March 21, 1988 Final Version Due: April 18, 1988 All submissions will be refereed by the members of the Program Committee: Christian Boitet (University of Grenoble) Jaime Carbonell (Carnegie-Mellon University) Martin Kay (Xerox PARC) Makoto Nagao (Kyoto University) Sergei Nirenburg (Carnegie-Mellon University) Victor Raskin (Purdue University) Masaru Tomita (Carnegie-Mellon University) All inquiries should be directed to Cerise Josephs Center for Machine Translation Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 U.S.A. (412) 268 6591 cerise@nl.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Nov 87 21:05 EST From: ERIC Y.H. TSUI <munnari!aragorn.oz.au!eric@uunet.UU.NET> Subject: CfP - 1st Australian Knowledge Engineering Congress (Nov. '88) 1ST AUSTRALIAN KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING CONGRESS NOVEMBER 15TH - 17TH 1988 CALL FOR PAPERS Following the success of the 1st Australian Artificial Intelligence Congress in November 1986, Melbourne will be the host to its successor - the Australian Knowledge Engineering Congress - in November 1988. Contributions are invited on every aspect of Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge-base technology: Expressions of interest in the program and supporting activities are now invited either on the following topics or on any related theme: Expert Systems case studies Knowledge Engineering (including Prototyping) methodologies Design and use of Conceptual Schemas Natural Language Interfaces Evaluation of tools and expert systems Role of consultants in Knowledge Engineering Design of Intelligent Tutors and Conversational Advisors Knowledge Source Systems Inference mechanisms A preliminary indication of interest in offering a paper, management of specific streams and/or tutorial presentations should be sent as soon as possible to :- Professor B. Garner DEAKIN UNIVERSITY VICTORIA 3217 AUSTRALIA Electronic mail: brian@aragorn.oz ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************