Date: Wed, 23 Apr 86 10:00:28 est From: vtisr1!irlistrq To: fox Subject: IRList Digest V2 #21 Status: RO IRList Digest Tuesday, 22 Apr 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 21 Today's Topics: Announcement - May be starting an information retrieval project Query - Who and how do people search old electronic digests CSLI - Part 1 of 2 part LONG extract from CLSI Monthly, V1. No. 1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 7 Apr 86 12:23:07 est From: seismo!harvard!wjh12!mirror!rs (Rich Salz) Subject: Please add Please add info-ret to the list. We have a couple of people here who are interested, and may be starting an information retreival project here. Thanks, /rich $alz, sys Admin [Note: Can you tell us more about your group? Other groups: please do send in abstracts of new papers or reports, comments on conferences attended, etc.! - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 86 17:38 PST From: William Daul / McDonnell-Douglas / APD-ASD Subject: The Use Of Internet Digests Most people probably receive these digests, read them and then either save them for awhile (as is) and/or delete them. I would like to know how other users use these digest in a more exotic way. We use a system of electronic journals to save the digests. Any user will see a citation (or link) to the actual journal item (in this case a Digest). The digests don't have to clutter up a users directory. We can search the journal for key fields or subjects. I will compile a list of how other use it (if anyone replies) and send it to the digest. How many times do any of you go back over old digests, why and how? Thanks, --Bi// ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:24 est From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract of long, interesting newsletter: Pt.1 - Ed] [Note: CSLI seminars have often been listed in IRList issues. Since the aims of CSLI are so broad, and since many relate to IR work, it is suitable to include a description of CSLI and the research underway. Whereas Vol. 1 No. 1 was 4 long files, the summary in IRList will be two (brutally edited) moderate messages. Here is part 1. - Ed PS Since these issues are so long, I encourage those interested to subscribe directly.] C S L I M O N T H L Y March 15, 1986 Stanford Vol. 1, No. 1 A monthly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 Editor's note ... This issue introduces CSLI and then characterizes each of its current research projects; following issues will report on individual projects in more detail and discuss some of the research questions raised here. What is CSLI? CSLI is a research institute devoted to building theories about the nature of information and how it is conveyed, processed, stored, and transformed through the use of language and in computation. Researchers include computer scientists, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and workers in artificial intelligence from several San Francisco Bay Area institutions as well as graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars from around the world. [Note: no mention is made of information retrieval or information science! - Ed] Where is it located? CSLI's location is one of its more interesting features: it is discontinuous. CSLI research and activities are conducted at SRI International, Stanford University, and Xerox PARC. ... What is its research goal? In using the rich resources language provides for dealing with information, we all show mastery of a powerful apparatus which includes concepts of meaning, reference, knowledge, desire, and intention. CSLI's goal is to develop theories of information that are explicit and systematic and at least as rich as our implicit understanding, and to apply these theories to the analysis of language. The implications of these theories should be far-reaching, not only for the study of natural languages, but also for the analysis and design of computer languages. Current efforts to endow a computer with human information-processing abilities are being made without benefit of a theory of information content. This is like trying to design a calculator without a precise formulation of the laws of arithmetic: some of the pieces will be right, but their unification into a smoothly running whole is unlikely, if not impossible. For example, natural language database query systems can handle restricted uses of language, but may yield unexpected results when faced with ambiguity, anaphora, or indirect speech acts. Other artificial intelligence programs count on similarly limited domains such as characteristics of specific diseases or rules of game-playing. In real-time applications, unexpected failures are often the result of our inability to account fully for interactions of machine-processes with real world events. Even if we cannot resolve all the intricacies, a full characterization of them will increase our understanding of the limitations of computer technology and influence decisions we make about its use. CSLI researchers conceive of their work as part of the development of a newly emerging science of information, computation, and cognition. ... The endeavor requires the collaboration of all. The most explicit theories of meaning come from philosophy and logic, but these cannot be straightforwardly applied to natural languages. The most explicit and detailed theories of grammatical structure come from linguistics; these deal well with phrases and sentences, but cannot be directly applied to larger units of discourse. Computer scientists can give detailed accounts of programs, themselves large units of discourse, but the "sentences" out of which programs are built exhibit far less complexity than those of natural languages. Action has been studied in various ways by various disciplines, but the action theories that are well-worked-out mathematically -- like "choice theory" in economics -- are too simple to capture real-life applications. And those that seem more promising -- like Aristotle's theory of "practical reason" -- haven't been developed to the point where they can really be applied. Logic and psychology have quite a lot to tell us about inference and reasoning, each in its different way, but this work has seldom been related to natural language uses. How does it work? Since its inception, the Center has included a multitude of mechanisms to promote formal and informal interaction, including weekly seminars and colloquia, frequent project meetings, and daily teas. But the nature of the interaction has changed over time. At first, the main function was mutual education of a general sort. ... In time, the interactions became more focussed, and new research constellations were formed. ... Discussion focussed on the assumption, central to most AI work, that the agent's relation to the world is mediated by logical representations. ... Out of this interaction came a new goal: to give an account of an agent's place in the world that, on the one hand, is as detailed and rigorous as the AI accounts, and, on the other hand, does not start from an a priori assumption of a representational connection. CSLI's current research projects represent this sort of convergence of theories and ideas. Most activities of mutual education are now connected with the projects. However, the impact of the first two years has not dissipated. Mechanisms are being put into place to ensure that new connections are encouraged and strengthened, and the respect CSLI has for individual differences ensures that vigorous debates will continue into the foreseeable future. What made CSLI possible? o 40 researchers o 5 academic disciplines o 3 separate locations o 3 different administrations o 1 common research goal combined with o A large grant from the System Development Foundation o Smaller grants from the National Science Foundation o Equipment grants from Xerox Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation o The generosity and vision of Stanford University, SRI International, and Xerox PARC How do the present projects contribute to the common goal? One schema for organizing our research activities is the following, based roughly on sizes of information chunks: o The nature of information, representation, and action o Information and meaning in extended discourse o Information and meaning in sentences o Information and meaning in words o Sources of information As with any schema, this one is useful only as long as it's taken with a grain of salt. It doesn't, for instance, imply an ordering on the process of understanding information; it doesn't mean that information is passed upwards, or from one level to its nearest neighbors ... THE NATURE OF INFORMATION, REPRESENTATION, AND ACTION A full account of the content and transfer of information requires us to embed theories of meaning and interpretation in the real world. A first step is to understand how information about the world is represented. The [Representation and Reasoning] project is developing a general theory of representation and modelling that will characterize a variety of representational systems including sentences, utterances, parse-trees, computer screens, minds, and computers. The goal is to build the foundations of a theory of computation that can explain what it is to process, rather than merely to carry, information. The group considers the following properties of representation essential: o Representation is a more restrictive notion than information, but a broader one than language. (Representation includes photographs and other physical simulations, such as model airplanes, and also uses of non-linguistic symbols like numbers to represent distances and sets to represent meanings.) o Representation is circumstantially dependent, not only because it is specifically relational, but also because whether A represents B depends, in general, on the whole context in which A and B appear. o There is no reason to suppose that representation is "formal"; it emerges out of partially disconnected physically embodied systems or processes. o It matters that "represent" is a verb. Representational acts are the primary objects of study, and representational structures, especially those requiring an independent act of interpretation, are taken as derivative. ... Acts of communication do not occur in a vacuum but among a host of activities, including other acts of communication. In addition, the communication often refers to other situations and assumes a certain state of mind on the part of the receiver. The [Situation Theory and Situation Semantics] project is a coordinated effort, both to develop a unified theory of meaning and information content that makes use of all of these activities and assumptions, and to apply that theory to specific problems that have arisen within the disciplines of philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. ... The group has five overlapping semigroups ...: developing an information-based theory of inference, developing an information-based theory of representation, examining problems in the semantics of natural languages, examining problems in the semantics of computation, and axiomatizing and modeling situation theory. ... The [Situated Automata] project is concerned with the analysis of dynamic informational properties of computational systems embedded in larger environments, especially physical environments. The theory takes as its point of departure a model of physical and computational systems in which the concept of information is defined in terms of logical relationships between the state of a process (e.g., a machine) and that of its surrounding world. ... In order to deal with the enormous number of states typically encountered in realistic systems, the theory is being extended to hierarchically constructed machines, the informational characteristics of which can be rigorously derived in a compositional fashion from those of its component machines. Theoretical work is also being done to relate this work to abstract models of concurrent processes. ... the situated automata project has been developing tools for constructing complex machines with well-defined informational properties, and has been testing the theory by applying these tools to software design for robots and other reactive systems. Planned future work includes applying the situated automata framework to the analysis of dynamic informational properties of systems engaged in linguistic interaction. ... In the [Rational Agency] project, philosophers and researchers in AI are merging their two traditions in the study of rational behavior to build a theory of belief, desire, and intention as these attitudes act collectively, informed by perception, to produce action. They seek models that take account of the resource limitations of humans and computers, and formal, automatable theories that can be used to endow artificial agents with the requisite commonsense reasoning abilities. They are investigating ways by which planning will fit into their theory of rationality, e.g., can plans be reduced to some configuration of other, primitive mental states, or must they also be introduced as a primitive? Finally, because a main function of planning is the coordination of an agent's own projects and of interpersonal activities, they require their theories to account for multiagent interaction. Recent developments in philosophy of action ... have provided insights about the nature of "intention formation" and its function as a mechanism required by a resource-bounded agent in evaluating and making decisions in a constantly changing world. Recent developments in AI planning theory have ... have provided insights into the nature of intention realization. Researchers in the Rational Agency project are bringing about a convergence of these two developments and are looking to it as the cornerstone of their future work. The [Semantics of Computer Languages] project is seeking to develop a theory of semantics of computational languages through the design of a specific family of languages for system description and development. The theory will serve as the basis for a variety of constructed languages for describing, analyzing, and designing real world situations and systems. ... For example, in describing any complex real-world situation, people mix descriptions at different levels of abstraction and detail. They use generalization, composition, idealization, analogy, and other "higher-level" descriptions to simplify in some way the account that is needed at a "lower" or more detailed level. ... The group is experimenting with a class of languages called "system description languages" which share some properties with programming languages, but have a semantics more in the tradition of model theory and work on natural languages. Finally, to provide the ease and flexibility they need for experimenting with description languages, the group is developing an environment ... Researchers in the closely related [Embedded Computation] project wish to understand how the local processing constraints, physical embodiment, and real-time activity of a computer or other computational system interact with the relational constraints of representing and conveying information and language. They wish to account for these interactions in information processing systems that range in complexity from those with perceptual mechanisms connected rather directly to their environment such as thermostats and the sensory transducers of humans, to those able to use language, reason deliberately, and reflect in a detached way about situations remote in space, time, or possibility. Members of the project are searching for system architectures and theoretical techniques that can adequately analyze this range of capacities. For example, they ... are formulating type theories able to deal with both procedural and declarative information, developing a theoretical framework for a full semantical analysis of a simple robot ... The [Analysis of Graphical Representation] project is concerned with developing an account of the document as an information-bearing artifact, a topic which until now has been largely neglected by many of the fields that count language among their subject matter. Issues include: the relationship between the concepts of "text" and "document", an analysis of systems of graphical morphology, and the nature of writing in relation to representational systems in general. ... --Elizabeth Macken Editor [Note: Part 2 will appear in next IRList issue - Ed] ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************