IRList Digest Tuesday, 14 April 1987 Volume 3 : Issue 6 Today's Topics: Query - Seeking dictionary with parts of speech - AI bibliographies Seminar - CANSEARCH and Knowledge-Based Intermediary Systems SIGIR - Front matter of FORUM that should arrive soon COGSCI - Natural Object Categorization News addresses are ARPANET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet CSNET: fox@vt UUCPNET: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 13 Mar 87 02:15:25 est From: vtcs1::in% Subject: seeking dictionary with part-of-speech noted I am in search of a machine readable dictionary or lexicon with part-of-speech denoted. Anybody know of one? The purpose is to create a fact database in prolog as part of a `natural language' interface. Any comments? -- Dave Stoffel (703) 790-5357 seismo!mimsy!dave dave@Mimsy.umd.edu Amber Research Group, Inc. [Note: a reply appeared in digest NL-KR recently. Also, we are getting very close to finishing the Collins Dictionary of the English Language lexicon here, which will be in the form of Prolog facts and will include POS information. It should be available from Oxford Text Archive after we send it to them. - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Mar 87 02:15:32 est From: vtcs1::in% Subject: AI bibliographies Does anyone have a file containing all the titles of papers published in the leading AI sources e.g. Journal, IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI etc.? It would be nice to do a string search for certain topics and find relevant papers instantly. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 24 Mar 87 02:35:32 est From: vtcs1::in% Subject: computer science seminar Dr. Steven Pollitt of the Dept. of Computer Studies and Mathematics, Huddersfield Polytechnic (UK) will give a seminar on Monday, March 23, 11:30 a.m., in the Colloquium Room of the Chase building at Dalhousie University. Dr. Pollitt is currently doing research in information retieval at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. The seminar in entitled, "CANSEARCH and Knowledge-Based Intermediary Systems." It is concerned with the building of a knowledge-based intermediary system for end-user searching of the cancer therapy literature references stored in the MEDLINE database. The seminar is sponsered by the Computing Science Division of Dalhousie. For more information contact Mike Shepherd, 424-2572. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Mar 87 22:16:43 est From: foxea@vtvax5 Subject: Front section of next ACM SIGIR Forum Fall 86 / Winter 87 ACM SIGIR Forum Page 1 Table of Contents SIGIR NEWS From the Editor 1 Growth of IRList Digest 1 From the Treasurer 2 Reminder! 1987 Int'l Conf. on R&D in IR, New Orleans 2 New Arrangement between SIGIR and IP&M 3 Conference Reports Conf. on R&D in IR, Pisa Italy, 1986 4 1st Int. Conf. on Expert Database Systems, South Carolina, 1986 6 NSF Awards 11 Articles Van Rijsbergen 23 Frakes 30 Marcus 37 Abstracts of Articles in IR Area Selected by G. Salton 39 Selected by M. Wyle 51 Announcements Chemical Structures 61 Santa Cruz 62 Join SIGIR 63 SIGIR Order Form 64 ____________________________________________________________________________ Page 2 From the Editor As can be seen from the size of this Forum, information retrieval is an area of growing importance. Costs are growing, as indicated in the special message from our Treasurer (see page 2). Interest in our work is growing, as evidenced by a new special relationship recently established with Information Processing and Management (see page 3) and by the growth of membership in IRList (see below). Many of the awards recently made by the National Science Foundation are tied in with research in information retrieval (see pages 11-22). We hope SIGIR will grow in membership rapidly too -- please make copies of the form on page 63 and distribute it widely to those who might become members. There are also changes. Several revised addresses and other differences can be seen in the inside front cover. The parts of the National Science Foundation relating to information retrieval have been reorganized; our field is now more closely allied with knowledge and data bases. [There is now a Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems with programs on Information Impact, Interactive Systems, Knowledge and Database Systems, and Robotics and Machine Intelligence.] The conference report on pages 4-10 about expert database systems should therefore be of particular interest. The article by C.J. Van Rijsbergen reflects a shift in approach to retrieval problems. It appeared in the Proceedings of the Pisa Conference, which can be ordered from ACM (see form on page 64). Abstracts of other presentations from that Proceedings appear on pages 45-50. The article by William Frakes suggests that information retrieval can be important in software engineering, and the article by Richard Marcus gives insights based on use of information retrieval in corporate libraries. Remember to come to the 1987 SIGIR International Conference in New Orleans -- see the reminder on page 2. Also, remember to send in book reviews, articles, abstracts, dissertation abstracts, announcements, or other items of interest. Please provide camera ready single spaced copy -- this issue was held up because many items had to be retyped to save pages. Please contribute and help SIGIR grow! Ed Fox, Co-Editor _____________________________________ Growth of IRList Digest IRList Digest, an electronic digest encouraged by ACM SIGIR, has grown since its inception in August 1985 so that now there are hundreds of readers around the world. Volume 1 had 28 issues, and Volume 2 (for 1986) had 71. There are subscribers on the DARPA Internet, the UUCP network, BITNET, CSNET, and many other networks that have gateways to one or more of these. Abstracts, articles, announcements, calls for papers, questions, discussions, bibliographies and important mailing issues are included. New members are encouraged; just send an electronic message indicating what network you are on, and what your complete address is. However, if you are at a site that currently receives IRList and has a local redistribution list, then you can ask your computer system manager instead to add you locally. Please use IRList as your discussion list, to help with the growth and development of SIGIR! Ed Fox IRList Editor BITNET: fox@vtcs1 or foxea@vtvax3 CSNET: fox@vt Internet: fox@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu UUCPnet: seismo!vtopus!fox ____________________________________________________________________________ Page 2 From the Treasurer The SIGIR dues of $6.00 for a regular membership have been held constant for many years, making us one of the least expensive SIGs to belong to. During this time our expenses have risen, including the overhead charge applied to us by the ACM headquarters. This charge is currently $5.00 per year per member. The average cost of a newsletter is $2.00 per subscriber. This puts our costs this year (including 3 newsletters) at well over $11.00 per member, creating a projected deficit of over $15,000, and bringing our reserve to a dangerous level. Obviously we cannot continue at this level of deficit spending, and are therefore asking approval from the SIG Board for a raise in dues to the following schedule. Regular members $ 12.00 Associate members 12.00 Student members 6.00 Designees 12.00 Non-ACM members 40.00 Subscriptions 24.00 This increase will allow us to have a balanced budget next year. I feel that these dues are still a bargain, expecially considering the three vastly improved newsletters this year, including interesting articles and conference/workshop reports, timely information on conference programs and NSF grants, and many pointers to current journal articles pertinent to our field. Obtaining a balanced budget is a first step towards providing more service to our members. Donna Harman, Treasurer _________________ REMINDER!!! 1987 ACM SIGIR INT'L CONFERENCE on R&D in INFORMATION RETRIEVAL This conference will be held in the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA on June 3-5, 1987. This conference is sponsored by ACM/SIGIR in cooperation with BCS/IRSG, AICA, and IMAG. It is supported by OCLC, Inc. and System Development Foundation, with other support being generated. The topics to be covered by the conference include retrieval system modeling, system development and evaluation, knowledge representation, multimedia retrieval, cognitive and semantic models, user interfaces, natural language processing, linguistic models, storage and search techniques, retrieval system performance, retrieval in office environments, mathematical models, hardware developments, complexity problems, and information retrieval and database management. The Technical Program Committee is being co-chaired by C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen and Clement Yu; in addition, the members include Abraham Bookstein, Yves Chiaramella, Jochum Friedbert, W. S. Luk, Fausto Rabitti, Nick Cerone, Martha Evens, Richard Frost, Michael McGill, Gerard Salton, Michael Wong, Stavros Christodoulakis, Aviezri Fraenkel, Tetsuro Ito, Esen Ozkarahan, and Peter Scheuermann. Donald H. Kraft, Professor and Chairman ACM/SIGIR Conference Chair LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY Department of Computer Science 298 Coates Hall Baton Rouge, LA 70803-4020 (504) 388-1495 kraft%lsu@csnet-relay.arpa ____________________________________________________________________________ Page 4 NEW ARRANGEMENT BETWEEN SIGIR AND IP&M I. ANNOUNCEMENT ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) has many members involved or interested in research activities. Some of those members receive news through IRList Digest, but only if they have access to a computer network reachable from BITNET or the DARPA Internet. All SIGIR members receive the Forum, which is an unrefereed newsletter. As a additional aid to SIGIR members, and to better serve the readers of "Information Processing and Management," an international journal published by Pergamon Press, a new arrangement has been established between ACM SIGIR and IP&M. 1) Pages Set Aside Since SIGIR members are actively involved in research that is of interest to IP&M readers, there will be a number of pages set aside each year for SIGIR use. Some of the possibilities are listed below; other suggestions are welcome. 2) SIGIR Meetings IP&M will publish selected papers from SIGIR meetings, and will if agreeable to all, publish a special issue where such papers are assembled. 3) Special Issues IP&M is interested in special issues on topics related to SIGIR members' work and/or broader interests. An example of this is the special issue on "Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval" now being assembled by W. Bruce Croft. An editor can be appointed for other such issues when a suitable topic is identified. 4) Articles IP&M is interested in receiving other articles from SIGIR members. They should be sent to the Liason (see 7 below) and will be reviewed by at least 2 referees in standard fashion. Submissions to SIGIR Forum that have such potential will be screened with this in mind. 5) Camera Ready Publications Brief communications can appear quickly in IP&M if sent in camera ready form -- providing a fast publication outlet. 6) Announcments IP&M is willing to publish SIGIR announcements such as calls for papers, free of charge. 7) Liason Dr. Edward A. Fox has been appointed to serve on the editorial board of IP&M. He will serve as a liason between SIGIR and IP&M. He can be contacted to receive submissions of any of the types mentioned above, or for other related matters. Correspondence should be sent to Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061 II. CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS In light of the above arrangements, a call is hereby made to all SIGIR members to send in articles, announcements, suggestions for special issues, or other comments relating to this new arrangement. Please communicate directly with the Liason and be sure to indicate that you wish your submission to be considered for IP&M. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Mar 87 16:43:45 est From: vtcs1::in% Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed] Date: Tuesday, 3 March 1987 15:52-EST From: JHC at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU Subject: Revolving Seminar (wednesday) - - - - Wednesday, 4 March 2:00pm Room: NE43-8th floor playroom Natural Object Categorization Aaron F. Bobick Stanford Research Institute One of the most commonly proposed goals of a perceptual system is that of object recognition. Yet, to date, we have been unable to define precisely what the task of recognition really entails. In this talk I will provide a definition of recognition in terms of classifying objects into natural categories and I will discuss some of the issues relating to the discovery of these categories. A procedure for recovering good perceptual categories which is based upon the uncertainty of categorical inferences will be presented; one important property of this procedure is that the vaildity of the recovered categories can be tested explicitly. This procedure has been tested in the domains of leaves (using descriptions, not images), soybean diseaes (Michalski's data), and bacterial infections. Finally, some potential extensions of this work will be related to the machine learning literature. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************