IRList Digest Sunday, 28 February 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 13 Today's Topics: Call for Papers - Centre for the New OED 4th Annual Conference COGSCI - Qualitative probabilistic networks - Automated program recognition CSLI - Default reasoning, nonmonotonic logics, frame problem; theory of types and propositions - New publications News addresses are Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 19 Feb 88 09:56:33 EST From: Maureen Searle Subject: Call for papers for 4th U. of Waterloo New OED Conf. UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO CENTRE FOR THE NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 4TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS - CALL FOR PANELISTS INFORMATION IN TEXT October 27-28, 1988 Waterloo, Canada This year's conference will focus on ways that text stored as electronic data allows information to be restructured and extracted in response to individualized needs. For example, text databases can be used to: - expand the information potential of existing text - create and maintain new information resources - generate new print information Papers presenting original research on theoretical and applied aspects of this theme are being sought. Typical but not exclusive areas of interest include computational lexicology, computational linguistics, syntactic and semantic analysis, lexicography, grammar defined databases, lexical databases and machine-readable dictionaries and reference works. Submissions will be refereed by a program committee. Authors should send seven copies of a detailed abstract (5 to 10 double-spaced pages) by June 10, 1988 to the Committee Chairman, Dr. Gaston Gonnet, at: UW Centre for the New OED University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario Canada, N2L 3G1 Late submissions risk rejection without consideration. Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by July 22, 1988. A working draft of the paper, not exceeding 15 pages, will be due by September 6, 1988 for inclusion in proceedings which will be made available at the conference. One conference session will be devoted to a panel discussion entitled MEDIUM AND MESSAGE: THE FUTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC BOOK. The Centre invites individuals who are interested in participating as panel members to submit a brief statement (approximately 150 words) expressing their major position on this topic. Please submit statements not later than June 10, 1988 to the Administrative Director, Donna Lee Berg, at the above address. Selection of panel members will be made by July 22, 1988. The Centre is interested in specialists or generalists in both academic and professional fields (including editors, publishers, software designers and distributors) who have strongly held views on the information potential of the electronic book. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Roy Byrd (IBM Corporation) Michael Lesk (Bell Communications Research) Reinhard Hartmann (Univ. of Exeter) Beth Levin (Northwestern University) Ian Lancashire (Univ. of Toronto) Richard Venezky (Univ. of Delaware) Chairman: Gaston Gonnet (Univ. of Waterloo) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1988 15:14 EST From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.] Date: Monday, 1 February 1988 11:31-EST From: Paul Resnick Re: Revolving Seminar Thursday Feb. 4-- Mike Wellman Thursday 4, February 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom The Artificial Intelligence Lab Revolving Seminar Series Qualitative Probabilistic Networks Mike Wellman Many knowledge representation schemes model the world as a collection of variables connected by links that describe their interrelationships. The representations differ widely in the nature of the fundamental objects and in the precision and expressiveness of the relationship links. Qualitative probabilistic networks occupy a region in representation space where the variables are arbitrary and the relationships are qualitative constraints on the joint probability distribution among them. Two basic types of qualitative relationship are supported by the formalism. Qualitative influences describe the direction of the relationship between two variables and qualitative synergies describe interactions among influences. The probabilistic semantics of these relationships justify sound and efficient inference procedures based on graphical manipulations of the network. These procedures answer queries about qualitative relationships among variables separated in the network. An example from medical therapy planning illustrates the use of QPNs to formulate tradeoffs by determining structural properties of optimal assignments to decision variables. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1988 10:06 EST From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.] Date: Thursday, 4 February 1988 11:05-EST From: Paul Resnick To: dejong at oz Re: AI Revolving Seminar Feb. 11-- Linda Wills Thursday, 11 February 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom The Artificial Intelligence Lab Revolving Seminar Series Automated Program Recognition Linda Wills By recognizing familiar algorithmic fragments and data structures in a program, an experienced programmer can understand the program, based on the known properties of the structures found. Automating this recognition process will make it easier to perform many tasks which require program understanding, e.g., maintenance, modification, and debugging. This talk describes a recognition system which automatically identifies occurrences of stereotyped computational structures in programs. The system can recognize these standard structures, even though they may be expressed in a wide range of syntactic forms or they may be in the midst of unfamiliar code. It does so systematically by using a parsing technique. Two important advances have made this possible. The first is a language-independent graph representation for programs, which canonicalizes many syntactic features of programs. The second is an efficient graph parsing algorithm. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Feb 88 17:30:51 PST From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, February 4, 3:16 [Extract - Ed.] NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH Reading: "Default Reasoning, Nonmonotonic Logics, and the Frame Problem" by Steve Hanks and Drew McDermott Proc. of AAAI-86, pp. 328-33 Discussion led by Hideyuki Nakashima (nakashim@csli.stanford.edu) 11 February 1988 In the beginning was the frame problem. Then came nonmonotonic logics. Nonmonotonic logics are meant to be the logical counterpart of the human default-reasoning process, which is capable of jumping to conclusions, neglecting irrelevant conditions without even thinking about them. The history is explained clearly in the article, which is a good introduction to the field. However, the authors claim that nonmonotonic logics are not the solution to the frame problem. They are too weak to capture human default reasoning. The temporal projection problem (now known as "the Yale shooting problem") is introduced as an example. I want to discuss (0) the view that the frame problem is unsolvable, (1) why humans do not seem to have the same problem, (2) whether we need nonmonotonic logics to capture default reasoning. -------------- NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR A Type-free Theory of Types and Propositions Jon Barwise (barwise@csli.stanford.edu) 11 February 1988 Since the beginning of the century, starting with Frege and Russell, theories of types and propositions have played an important role in logic and the foundations of mathematics. Recent applications in computer science and in the analysis of natural language have brought them back into the limelight. In this talk I will outline a theory of types and propositions that not only avoids the paradoxes that plagued Frege and Russell, but also "explains" them. Familiarity with situation theory is needed only for the last ten minutes of the talk. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Feb 88 19:23:49 PST From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, February 11, 3:17 [Extract - Ed.] NEW LECTURE NOTES Two new titles in the CSLI Lecture Notes series have recently been published. The first, by David Hilbert, is entitled "Color and Color Perception: A Study in Anthropocentric Realism." A brief description of the book appears below. "Natural Language Processing in the 1980s: A Bibliography" (ed. Gerald Gazdar et al.) is the second volume. This book contains over 1,700 entries and an introduction, as well as two indexes, one to keywords, the other to second and subsequent authors. An online version of this bibliography can be found on Russell, and, according to Jeff Goldberg, "It is possible to search this bibliography automatically by computer mail." As he points out, "Mail to clbib@russell.stanford.edu with the word `help' as the Subject line of your message for details. Most questions you may have are likely to be answered in that file. Mail to clbib-request@russell.stanford.edu to report bugs in the program that handles the automatic searching." Both titles are distributed by the University of Chicago Press and may be ordered directly (5801 Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637) or purchased at the Stanford University Bookstore. Color and Color Perception ISBN 0--937073--16--4 (Paper) $11.95 ISBN 0--937073--15--6 (Cloth) $24.95 Natural Language Processing in the 1980s ISBN 0--937073--28--8 (Paper) $11.95 ISBN 0--937073--26--1 (Cloth) $29.95 Color and Color Perception Color has often been supposed to be a subjective property, a property to be analyzed correctly in terms of the phenomenological aspects of human experience. In contrast with subjectivism, an objectivist analysis of color takes color to be a property objects possess in themselves, independently of the character of human perceptual experience. David Hilbert defends a form of objectivism that identifies color with a physical property of surfaces---their spectral reflectance. This analysis of color is shown to provide a more adequate account of the features of human color vision than its subjectivist rivals. The author's account of color also recognizes that the human perceptual system provides a limited and idiosyncratic picture of the world. These limitations are shown to be consistent with a realist account of color and to provide the necessary tools for giving an analysis of common-sense knowledge of color phenomena. -------------- OTHER NEW PUBLICATIONS The Sixth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics Proceedings (WCCFL6) volume has just appeared. It is available at the Stanford University Bookstore or may be purchased by writing to the CSLI Publications office at Ventura Hall. (ISBN 0-937073-31-8; 352 pp.; $12.00) This volume contains twenty-four papers presented at the 1987 WCCFL held at the University of Arizona. WCCFL proceedings are published by the Stanford Linguistic Association. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************