IRList Digest Thursday, 7 April 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 20 Today's Topics: Announcement - Open position - new chair in CL - Open positions in Dept. of Inf. Sci., Univ. of Pittsburgh CSLI - Panel discussion on compositionality - Learning at the knowledge level, Formal semantics of point of view News addresses are Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: New Chair in CL Date: Sat, 19 Mar 88 15:33:15 +0000 From: jock%language-linguistics.umist.ac.uk@RELAY.CS.NET I would be grateful if you could arrange for the display of the following announcement. John McNaught Lecturer ***************************************************************** UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (UMIST) Department of Language and Linguistics and Centre for Computational Linguistics CHAIR IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS Applications are invited for a new chair in Computational Linguistics whose purpose is to provide new leadership in this subject field and generally to strengthen the department's research base. Candidates should have a strong record of academic and/or professional experience within the broad field of computation applied to natural language processing. The department's well-established and funded Centre for Computational Linguistics concentrates on postgraduate studies and largely applied research. The successful applicant is expected to play a leading part in the stimulation of research as well as developing teaching programmes and generally contributing to the administration of the department. Informal enquiries may be made to Professor J C Sager or the Registrar. Salary will be in the professorial range with a minimum of 23,380 pounds sterling per annum (max. permitted average 28,820 pounds sterling). Requests for application forms and further particulars should be sent to the Registrar, Room B9, UMIST, P O Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD, United Kingdom, to whom completed application forms should be returned as soon as possible. UMIST is an equal opportunities employer. E-mail contact addresses: jcs%ccl.umist.ac.uk@ean-relay.ac.uk (ean) jcs%ccl.umist.ac.uk@cunyvm.cuny.edu (arpa) jcs%ccl.umist.ac.uk@ac.uk (earn) ...!ukc!ccl.umist.ac.uk!jock (uucp) Telephone: +44.61.236.3311 extension 2333 ------------------------------ From: sch@idis.lis.PITTSBURGH.EDU (stephen hirtle) Subject: Information Science Faculty Search Keywords: telecommunications, database management, software engineering Date: 29 Mar 88 21:57:35 GMT Organization: LIS Laboratories, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA. UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Department of Information Science The Department of Information Science announces three open positions for tenure track Assistant or Associate Professors, with appointments beginning in the Fall Term, 1988. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in information science, computer science, or a closely related field. We are particularly seeking applicants with teaching and research interests in information systems design, telecommunications, database management, knowledge bases, information storage and retrieval, microcomputer systems, text processing, electronic publishing, office automation, software engineering, network design, simulation, or the design of interactive systems. We strongly encourage women and minority candidates to apply. The Department has eighteen faculty members and offers a Ph.D. and master's degrees in information science. Current research interests within the Department include information storage and retrieval, telecommunications, standards, natural language processing, visual languages, human-computer interface design, human information processing, electronic publishing, and database systems design, including image databases. The Department has extensive computing facilities, including a VAX 11/780, six Sun workstations, three TI Explorers, three Xerox Viewpoints, and a large number of microcomputers. The Telecommunications Laboratory is also well equipped with an AT&T 3B/15, several smaller computers, and a wide variety of communications equipment. In addition the Department has access to the University's computing resources, which include VAX Clustered 8650s, 8800s and the Cray XMP/48 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center. The University of Pittsburgh offers a wide variety of opportunities to interact with faculty of other departments and schools including an interdisciplinary program in intelligent systems and a joint program (with Carnegie-Mellon University) in computational linguistics. In addition, the Department and the University have close relations with several major corporations that are funding research and teaching (Texas Instruments, XEROX, AT&T, IBM, and DEC). We seek applicants with balanced research and teaching interests. Our salaries, benefits, and teaching schedules are highly competitive. Applicants should send a vita, a statement of research interests, any relevant reprints or preprints, and three references to: Robert R. Korfhage, Chairman, Department of Information Science, LIS Building, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. The University of Pittsburgh is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 24 Mar 88 17:35:59 PST From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, March 24, 3:21 [Extract - Ed.] NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR Panel Discussion on Compositionality Per-Kristian Halvorsen, Stanley Peters, and Craige Roberts March 31 Compositionality, conceived as a strong constraint on the relationship between sentential structures and interpretations, has been one of the central issues in semantic theory. Since Montague's seminal work on this question, a number of analyses of specific interpretive problems have called into question whether we can maintain compositionality as a guiding principle in constructing semantic theories. And some recent theories call into question in a more general way whether compositionality is the kind of constraint we want on semantic theory. These include theories which take seriously the contribution of contextual information to interpretation, including situation semantics and discourse representation theory, and also the recent work by Fenstad, Halvorsen, Langholm, and van Benthem exploring constraint-based interpretative theories operating on unification grammars. In this panel discussion, we will briefly consider how compositionality has generally been understood in the semantic literature, give an overview of what we take to be the central problems that call its utility into question, and discuss some alternative conceptions of how semantic theory can be appropriately constrained. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Mar 88 18:04:51 PST From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, March 31, 3:22 [Extract - Ed.] THIS WEEK'S CSLI TINLUNCH Reading: "Learning at the Knowledge Level" by Thomas G. Dietterich Discussion led by Kurt Konolige (konolige@bishop.ai.sri.com) March 31 When Newell introduced the concept of the knowledge level as a useful level of description for computer systems, he focused on the representation of knowledge. This paper applies the knowledge level notion to the problem of knowledge acquisition. Two interesting issues arise. First, some existing machine learning programs appear to be completely static when viewed at the knowledge level. These programs improve their performance without changing their 'knowledge.' Second, the behavior of some other machine learning programs cannot be predicted or described at the knowledge level. These programs take unjustified inductive leaps. The first programs are called symbol level learning (SLL) programs; the second, nondeductive knowledge level learning (NKLL) programs. The paper analyzes both of these classes of learning programs and speculates on the possibility of developing coherent theories of each. A theory of symbol level learning is sketched, and some reasons are presented for believing that a theory of NKLL will be difficult to obtain. -------------- NEXT WEEK'S CSLI TINLUNCH Reading: "The Formal Semantics of Point of View" by Jonathan E. Mitchell PhD dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986 Discussion led by Syun Tutiya (tutiya@csli.stanford.edu) April 7 Some sentences are ambiguous in an interesting way. When you tell your friend standing across a table that the cat is in front of the table, the cat could be either between you and the table or between the table and her. You might be tempted to say the sentence you have just used should be interpreted relative to the point of view. Problems concerning the concept point of view are unlikely to be covered by the conventional notions in terms of which indexical expressions have been dealt with in the tradition of formal semantics, since the point of view normally is not expressed as a constituent of a sentence used. There are also some languages in which the concept point of view plays such an important role that you might think any selection of a lexical item refers to the point of view from which the speaker is speaking. In Japanese, for example, it is said that you have to use different words to describe the same transference of a property depending on from which point of view you are speaking, the donor's, the donee's, or yours. There are a lot more sentences in English and a lot more languages which are relevant to the problem of point of view, or perspectivity. It is natural, therefore, the concept point of view deserve linguists' attention. But once you try to come up with a formal treatment of the concept which is consistent with linguistic intuition and philosophical insight, you are bound to be involved in the discussion of the formal semantics of belief sentences, of the nature of mental states, and the belief de se. Mitchell seems to have decided to take on the whole job and concludes, among other things, that "the notion of self-ascription is central to the explanation of perspectivity in language." This led him to the idea of representing, within situation semantics, the interpretation of a sentence in a bifurcated formalism by ascribing to the sentence both the external and the internal contents. The external content of a sentence is almost the same as the propositional content or proposition expressed of an utterance of the sentence. Well, what is the internal content, then? This is the very question I want to be answered in the discussion. The paper is naturally very long so I will compile some excerpts from the dissertation to be picked up. Please be warned that my selection of the parts to be read does not necessarily reflect the ultimate claims of the dissertation. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************