IRList Digest Wednesday, 23 December 1987 Volume 3 : Issue 48 Today's Topics: Email - Correction on #47 Query - Scholars and telecommunications - Machine readable thesauri - Text retrieval program for SUN - Source for NEWEUL Reply - Language recognition - Why comp.theory.info-retrieval - Hypermedia bibliography Announcement - Rumor on CD-ROMs with Hypercard stackware CSLI - Interpretation as abduction COGSCI - On universal theories of defaults News addresses are Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 23 Dec 87 01:54:16 est From: fox (Ed Fox) Subject: correction IRList Digest V 3 #47 was incorrectly labelled as #45 on the top line. Please correct that in your files. The topics included two COGSCI and one CRTNET messages, in case you have trouble identifying which issue is the correct #47. Sorry for the error - Ed PS I hope everyone has a happy holiday season and a happy New Year! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11-DEC-1987 22:25 EST From: Subject: Author's query on scholars and telecommunications For a book forthcoming from Paradigm Press, entitled The Electronic Scholar's Resource Guide, I am putting together a piece on telecommunications, which will include bulletin board systems, libraries with catalogs capable of dial-up connections, Humanet on Scholarsnet, BRS and Dialog, some forums on CompuServe, Bitnet's Humanist, as well as, of course, IRList Digest. I would appreciate any suggestions for broadening the scope of coverage as well as any information about specific resources. Terrence Erdt Erdt@vuvaxcom.Bitnet Technical Review Editor Computers and the Humanities Grad. Dept. of Library Science Villanova University Villanova, PA 19085 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1987 10:24:23 LCL From: Ruth A. Palmquist Subject: machine readable thesauri Hello Ed, I would like to add three more userid's to the subscription list for IR LIST. They are all Information Studies faculty here at SU. Jeffrey Katzer JKATZER at SUVM Barbara Kwasnik BKWASNIK at SUVM Ruth Palmquist PALMQUIS at SUVM Item two, I am looking for information on who might have a machine readable thesaurus. I have worked with the ERIC Thesaurus, as you know, and find it lees than satisfactory. Could I put out an APB on IR List? Thanks and have a good holiday. Ruth Palmquist ------------------------------ Date: 3 Dec 87 9:02 +0100 From: Igor Metz Subject: Text-retrieval program? [Forwarded from SUN-SPOTS DIGEST Monday,14 December 1987 Volume 5: Issue 69] We are looking for a text-retrieval program for our Sun (pd preferred). With 'text-retrieval program' I mean a program that can index the words in a text-file (ascii) and provides some type of access to the indexed data. In this sense grep and awk are "trivial" examples of text-retrieval programs. Such a program should read a stopword file (file of words to be skipped while indexing, eg. "the", "a", "and" etc.). Such a program could be used to search big files (like the SUN-SPOTS) for keywords (eg. find message where the body contains keywords "environment" and "pascal", but does not contain the keyword "TeX"), or it could be used to build thesauri etc. Thanks in advance, Igor Igor Metz EAN: metz@iam.unibe.ch or metz@iam.unibe.chunet Institut fuer Informatik or iam.unibe.ch!metz@seismo.CSS.GOV und angewandte Mathematik UUCP: ..!uunet!mcvax!iam.unibe.ch!metz Universitaet Bern BITNET: u04z@cbebda3t.bitnet Switzerland Phone: (+31) 65 49 02 [[ Such a thing would be useful to help people find things in the archived Sun-Spots digests. Sadly, there is no mechanism to do so right now. --wnl ]] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 23 Dec 87 00:44:54 est From: John Goldak Subject: Source for NEWEUL:a Symbolic Mechanics Program Does anyone know where NEWEUL can be obtianed? It is a symbolic algebra program that deals with computational dynamics of some type. ------------------------------ From: Aviezri Fraenkel Date: Fri, 1 Jan 88 03:55:10 -0200 Subject: LanguageRecognition Hello Ed, I attempted to send my reply to Lou's inquiry directly to him with a cc to you, but our mailer didn't like his address and "ate up" my msg. Hence I send it to you, in the hope that you will relay it to him. We had success using the sequence of all adjacent pairs or triples of letters. It seems that their frequencies characterize languages quite nicely. The end of Lou's letter suggests he might have had something along these lines in mind. Best wishes, Aviezri S. Fraenkel. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Dec 87 02:55:26 PST From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) Subject: IRList => comp.theory.info-retrieval I run the ARPANET (and BITNET) Mailing List to USENET Newsgroup Gateway at Berkeley and I chose that name because after reading IRList for about a year, because it seemed appropriate to me. Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu [Note: It is nice to see people reminded about the importance of theory in information retrieval! - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 16 Dec 87 10:39:57 EST From: Paul Kahn Subject: Hypermedia bibliography Coombs forwarded a question from IRLIST about the Hypermedia bibliography. I sent you a paper copy of this yesterday. You are free to copy it and distribute it. Please include the cover letter which requests corrections and addition. Nicole Yankelovich has put this together (ny@iris.brown.edu) and she should be contacted for additional copies or information. The bibliography currently exists in the form of a Pro-Cite database. Pro-Cite is a bibliographic management system from Personal Bibliographic Software in Ann Arbor. There is a DOS version (current version is 1.3) and a Mac version (should be released early 1988) which are binary compatible. I have also produced a flat file containing all the records in a tagged format. I could send that to you over BITNET, or offer it to people that way or on a DOS diskette, as long as someone supplies the diskette and mailer. [Note: Subsequent messages (51-53) will have the bibliography as sent to me. - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 21 Dec 87 13:36:21 est From: fox (Ed Fox) Subject: CD-ROMs with Hypercard stacks [Forwarded from INFO-MAC Digest Saturday, 12 Dec 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 144] Date: Tue, 01 Dec 87 00:14 EST From: SEWALL%UCONNVM.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu Subject: December Vaporware (Newsletter column) VAPORWARE Murphy Sewall From the December 1987 APPLE PULP H.U.G.E. Apple Club (E. Hartford) News Letter $15/year P.O. Box 18027 East Hartford, CT 06118 Call the "Bit Bucket" (203) 569-8739 Permission granted to copy with the above citation . . . Coming Soon, REALLY BIG Stackware. Apple finally is nearing release of a CD ROM drive for the Macintosh which will be accompanied by a new version of Hypercard that will enable the program to work with read-only devices. Apple's drive is a half-height SCSI device made by Sony which has an average access time of 500 milliseconds and a planned price of $1,500. Several sources say Microsoft will introduce Bookshelf Mac (a collection of reference material on CD ROM) simultaneously with Apple's introduction. Lodown of Scotts Valley California which already has a Macintosh compatible CD ROM has announced plans to offer its drive bundled with 100 megabytes of shareware and 10 to 15 megabytes of stackware it's already received from Apple for use with Hypercard. Lodown's drive is both quicker (average access time of 200 milliseconds) and less costly ($1,100). - InfoWorld 8 October ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Dec 87 10:33:52 PST From: emma@russell.stanford.edu Subject: Revised title and abstract for CSLI Seminar [Extract - Ed] ... CSLI SEMINAR Interpretation as Abduction Jerry R. Hobbs December 17, 1987 2:15, Redwood Hall G-19 The goal of the TACITUS project at SRI is investigate the use of commonsense knowledge in the interpretation of discourse. We have recently developed a new scheme for abductive inference that yields a dramatic simplification of our characterization of what interpretation is. I will discuss its use in solving various local pragmatics problems, such as the resolution of reference, metonymy, and syntactic ambiguity problems and the interpretation of compound nominals. The scheme also suggests an elegant way to integrate syntactic and pragmatic processing, and this will be discussed briefly. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1987 16:22 EST From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed] Date: Monday, 14 December 1987 10:07-EST From: Rosemary B. Hegg Re: Jon Doyle seminar on 12/18 at 2pm DATE: December 18, 1987 TIME: Refreshments: 1.45 pm Lecture: 2:00PM PLACE: NE43-8th floor playroom ON UNIVERSAL THEORIES OF DEFAULTS JON DOYLE Department of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University ABSTRACT Though unifications of some of the numerous theories of default reasoning have been found, we bolster doubts about the existence of universal theories by viewing default reasoning from the standpoint of decision theory as a case of rational self-government of inference. Default rules express not only methods for deriving new conclusions from old, but also preferences among sets of possible conclusions. Conflicting default rules, which form the central difficulty in the theories, represent inconsistent preferences about conclusions. These conflicting rules arise naturally in practice, especially in databases representing the knowledge of several experts. We formally compare these theories of rational inference with theories of group decision making, and develop doubts about universal theories of the former by considering well-known negative results about the latter. HOST: Prof. Peter Szolovits ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************