Date: Fri, 9 May 86 10:20:30 edt From: vtisr1!irlistrq To: fox Subject: IRList Digest V2 #22 Status: R IRList Digest Friday, 9 May 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 22 Today's Topics: Query - Iconic Repersentation of Financial Concepts Announcement - Workshop: Writing to Be Searched CSLI - Part 2 of 2 part LONG extract from CLSI Monthly, V1. No. 1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat 3 May 86 08:52:49-EDT From: John C. Akbari Subject: RE: CONIT Intermediary = Intellignet Front End thanks for the message. please add my name to the irlist. i recently got several papers on computer-human interaction from a couple of people at virginia tech. don't have them here, so i can't give you their names. ... i am working in the financial services area here in NYC, and am developing several expert systems and possibly a NLP system as well. given the computer background of most people, you can understand the importance of the interface. one of the more difficult problems i am encountering in designing the interface is the manner of representing financial concepts in an easy-to-understand fashion. i would like to use iconic representation, but it's not easy. let me know if you'd be interested in sharing ideas. thanks john c akbari 380 riverside drive, no. 7d new york ny 10025 212.662.2476 akbari@cs.columbia.edu [John: You have been added to IRList and will receive materials separately. I think your comments and questions are of general interest and so have included them so that others can comment too. You are probably referring to work of H. Rex Hartson, D. Hix, Robert& Beverly Williges, R. Ehrich here in regard to human-computer interaction? - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: Tue 6 May 86 10:58:17-MDT From: Lee Hollaar Subject: Workshop Announcement Information Retrieval ACM SIGIR/SIGDOC Documentation ............................................................ Writing To Be Searched: A Workshop on Document Generation Principles This workshop is to bring together people who know about writing documents and people who know about retrieving them. Among the specialties we expect to attract are those interested in generating natural language documents by com- puter; those who write similar documents today; those who search free text documents; and those who evaluate writing. There is great interest today in programs to write English; However, many of the documents being planned for computer generation are reference-type materials for which efficient searching is more necessary than reading from beginning to end. In fact, what should really be built are not document generation systems, but information transfer systems, in which English is written not as an end in itself, but as a way of getting knowledge from the system to a person. To design these, we should have an interaction between those who know how to phrase the knowledge in natural language, and those who know how to find things so phrased. At present these researchers are largely separate, and this workshop will bring them together. The workshop is planned to be informal. Attendance will be limited to a maximum of 75, and we hope that as many as possible will speak. Prospective speakers should send a brief abstract (less than 100 words) along with their regis- tration. ............................................................ Where? Snowbird, Utah June 30 - July 2, 1986 How much? Registration Fee: Members of SIGIR/SIGDOC, $70; others $90. Cost of single room at Snowbird: about $50/night. Conference banquet included in registration. What should I do next? Please send your name, address, telephone number, and elec- tronic mail address with check for the registration fee (payable to ACM SIGIR/SIGDOC Workshop) to: Michael Lesk Rm 2A-385 Bellcore 435 South St. Morristown, NJ 07960 If you wish to speak, please enclose a brief (<100 words) description of your topic. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:24 est From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract of long, interesting newsletter: Pt.2 - 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. This is the final (2nd) part of the (brutally edited) summary of the four long files sent as Vol. 1 No. 1. - Ed] INFORMATION AND MEANING IN EXTENDED DISCOURSE The information content of a statement is only partially determined by the sentence used. Other tools for interpretation come from the discourse as a whole, the context of the discourse, and the states-of-mind of the participating agents. Members of [Discourse, Intention, and Action] are developing various components of theories of discourse, emphasizing the use of extended sequences of utterances to achieve particular effects and the fact that discourse is an activity of two (or more) participants located in particular contexts. They are extending the kind of semantic accounts often given to natural languages in two directions: first, by accounting for some non-declarative utterances, particularly interrogatives and imperatives, and second, by dealing with discourses containing several utterances, possibly produced by several speakers. ... o Discourse. ... includes a study of the components of discourse structure, the nature of coherence relations, ... o Sentence-level phenomena. ... questions of illocution ... the contribution of utterance mood to such a theory ... what is implicated in an utterance. o Subutterance phenomena. ... relation between referring expressions ... and speakers' and hearers' beliefs, mutual beliefs, and intentions. In thinking about how to make computer languages more like natural languages, it is useful to view computer programs as examples of extended discourse. [Linguistic Approaches to Computer Languages] is a pilot project to investigate the application of methods and findings from research on natural languages to the design and description of high-level computer languages. ... The increasing complexity of computer languages, current progress in formal linguistics, and the growing importance of ergonomic factors in computer language design motivate a combined effort between computer science and linguistics. ... Currently, the group is investigating the need for and feasibility of applying linguistic approaches, techniques, and findings to a set of sample problems: o The use of partially free word order among the arguments of functions to allow flexibility in the order of evaluation ... o The exploitation of parallels between natural language parsing schemes, based on complex structured representations and type inference in polymorphically typed computer languages. o The use of type inheritance systems for imposing a conceptually transparent structure on the lexicon. o The introduction of morphology for marking related lexical items as to type (derivational morphology), thematic structure (relation changing), or role (case marking). o The need for less restricted uses of proforms in computer languages than currently exist. The goal of the [Grammatical Theory and Discourse Structure] project is to integrate a particular theory of grammar, the lexical-functional theory (LFG), with a theory of discourse structure ... LFG, as a very explicit and highly modular theory, provides a useful framework from which to study the interaction between discourse and sentence phenomena. Moreover, the general architecture of the framework allows experimentation with different modes of interaction between different components. ... a more parallel fashion. The different subcomponents can constrain the output without being in linear order. ... INFORMATION AND MEANING IN SENTENCES Two closely connected projects are looking at representations of sentence structure from the point of view of several formalisms; they are searching for commonalities with respect to meaning and interpretation. One seeks a conceptual foundation for the theories, and the other seeks representations with direct ties to the semantics. Specifically, the goal of the [Foundations of Grammar] project is a better understanding of methods of encoding linguistic information as systems of rules or constraints, and of how that information can be used in recognition and generation. The group is developing, not a particular theory of grammar, but rather a conceptual foundation and a common frame of reference for such theories. ... The group is incorporating their results in a computational tool kit for implementing grammatical theories, and the result will be a facility for experimentation with various syntactic, semantic, and morphological theories and processing strategies. The [Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar] project is analyzing the structure and interpretation of natural language within the HPSG framework which incorporates theoretical and analytic concepts from Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Situation Semantics, Categorial Grammar, and Functional Unification grammar. The goal is a single-level, constraint-based characterization of linguistic structures, rules, and principles which interact through the operation of unification. INFORMATION AND MEANING IN WORDS Two projects are exploring the structure of information in the lexicon and its relation to larger units of communication. The goal of the [Lexical Project] is to develop a workable lexicon that integrates semantic knowledge about lexical items with the semantic and syntactic frameworks currently under development at CSLI. The group has sorted its task into a linguistic problem and a computational problem: the linguistic problem is to determine what the content of a lexical entry must be, and the computational problem is to understand how this knowledge can be built into an online lexicon. o How do knowledge of the world and lexical meaning link up? o How should lexical meaning be represented? o What is the place of lexico-semantic information in the overall grammar? o What is the structure of the lexicon? ... The [AFT Lexical Representation Theory] project is developing three basic parts of Aitiational Frame Theory, a theory of lexical representation which gives a rich internal structure to lexical meanings and is designed to feed into generative syntactic representations. SOURCES OF INFORMATION For human agents, speech and vision are the primary sources of information about the world, and we expect similar mechanisms to accommodate our communication with computers. Three projects at CSLI are concerned with representing and characterizing information contained in speech signals and with relating this information to other aspects of the communication process. A fourth is exploring comparable aspects of visual information. The [Phonology and Phonetics] project is investigating the organization of phonology and its role in language structure, with particular emphasis on postlexical phonology. ... The [Finite State Morphology] project is bringing a new kind of dialogue between linguists and computer scientists to CSLI. ... Finite State Morphology is a framework within computational morphology which uses finite state devices to represent correspondences between lexical and surface representations of morphemes. ... The goal of the project on [Computational Models of Spoken Language] is to formally specify, through computational models, the information projected from speech signals and how that information is represented and used in speech analysis. ... The [Visual Communication] project is concerned with mechanisms of visual communication and visual languages and the identification of visual regularities that support the distinctions and classes necessary for general-purpose reasoning. The group assumes that the manner in which visual languages convey meaning, is, at least in part, fundamentally different from conventions in spoken language, and, therefore, requires study beyond the confines of the standard linguistic tradition. ... --Elizabeth Macken Editor ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************