IRList Digest Saturday, 30 April 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 25 Today's Topics: Announcement - AI-ED new AERA SIG COGSCI - Justified Reformulations, How Language Structures its Concepts, Palenque (Interactive Discovery-Based Learning) - UNITRAN: A Principle-Based Parser for Machine Translation News addresses are Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 29 Apr 88 2144-PDT From: Moderator Steve Barnhouse... Subject: AI-ED Digest V3 #16 [Extract - Ed.] AI-ED Digest Saturday, 30 Apr 1988 Volume 3 : Issue 16 ... Date: 15 Apr 88 13:05:00 EST From: "ARTIC::PSOTKA" Subject: New AERA AI & ED SIG ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & EDUCATION A NEW Special Interest Group was formed at the annual meeting of AERA in New Orleans in April. I am pleased to announce that Wallace Feurzeig of BBN Laboratories is the first Chair of the SIG on AI&ED. Cathie Norris of the University of North Texas is the Newsletter Editor, and Joe Psotka of the U.S. Army Research Institute is the Secretary/Treasurer. It was the consensus of the SIG organizational meeting that it is time to put AI to use in schools by getting a broader range of researchers to be aware of its potential. Artificial Intelligence is advancing rapidly on a broad front of research issues. Many of these issues are directly relevant to the interests and needs of teachers and researchers at all levels of instruction, and in many different settings. This SIG will provide an overview of the current issues that may have the strongest effect on education. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming more applicable to practical use in education. In part, this is because the technology of AI, based as it is on specific algorithms and understanding derived from areas of computer science and cognitive science somewhat remote from the mainstream of educational research, is maturing steadily and becoming less arcane and more generally useful for instruction. The other main reason for this increasing practicality of AI technology is the continuing increase in the power of available personal computer technology at an affordable price for schools and workplaces to purchase. The outstanding example of this is the Hypercard environment on MACs, and the powerful Lisp environments on all new PCs. Both of these fatant that educational researchers understand and become familiar with AI technology. powerful Lisp environments on all new PCs. Both of these factors make it more important that educational researchers understand and become familiar with AI technology. This SIG will offer us an opportunity to introduce other educational researchers to these topics. The SIG on AI & ED will be mainly concerned with the use of AI and cognitive science technologies for education. Primary areas for reporting research in these technologies will be within Authoring systems for CBI and ICAI; intelligent microworlds; machine learning; complex environments for instruction; knowledge representation; qualitative modelling techniques; structures of declarative knowledge; computer thinking tools; rule systems for procedural knowledge; student modelling; student diagnosis; teacher amplifiers; hypertext systems; natural language processing; and other important outgrowths of AI that offer significant potential for improving education in the schools, workplace, and at home. For more information, inquiries, suggestions for symposia, and other offers of support, please contact : Wallace Feurzeig, BBN Laboratories 10 Moulton St Cambridge, MA 02238 at (617)873-3448 or Feurzeig@g.bbn.com.arpa Send newsletter contributions, announcements, and other information to: Cathie Norris University of North Texas P. O. Box 5155 Denton, TX 76203 at (817)565-4189 Joseph Psotka, Ph.D. Army Research Institute 5001 Eisenhower Avenue Alexandria, Virginia 22333-5600 OR CALL: (202)274-5540 or Psotka@ARI-HQ1.Arpa If you would like to join, please send this application. Name: Title: Affiliation: Home Address Home Phone: Business Address Business Phone: Electronic Address: ARPA Bitnet Compuserve Other: AERA member? Y or N Division (A,B,C,etc.) Check One or Two or Three: 1. New Member (One Year) - $5 2. New Member (Two Years) - $ 10 3. Student Member (One Year) - $2. Check enclosed payable to AERA AI & ED SIG Thanks! ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1988 14:50 EDT From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extracts - Ed.] Date: Tuesday, 12 April 1988 13:04-EDT From: Mary E. Spollen Re: Subramanian seminar: Tues. 4/19, 4:15, NE43-512A A THEORY OF JUSTIFIED REFORMULATIONS Devika Subramanian Department of Computer Science Stanford University Tuesday, April 19, 1988 Refreshments...4:00 p.m. Lecture...4:15 p.m. NE43-512A ABSTRACT Present day systems, intelligent or otherwise, are limited by the conceptualizations of the world given to them by their designers. This research explores issues in the construction of adaptive systems that can incrementally reformulate their conceptualizations to achieve computational efficiency or descriptional adequacy. In this talk, a special case of the reformulation problem is presented: we reconceptualize a knowledge base in terms of new abstract objects and relations in order to make the computation of a given class of queries more efficient. Automatic reformulation will not be possible unless a reformulator can justify a shift in conceptualization. We present a new class of meta-theoretical justifications for a reformulation, called irrelevance explanations. A logical irrelevance explanation proves that certain distinctions made in the formulation are not necessary for the computation of a given class of problems. A computational irrelevance explanation proves that some distinctions are not useful with respect to a given problem solver for a given class of problems. Inefficient formulations make irrelevant distinctions and the irrelevance principle logically minimizes a formulation by removing all facts and distinctions in it that are not needed for the specified goals. The automation of the irrelevance principle is demonstrated with the generation of abstractions from first principles. We also describe the implementation of an irrelevance reformulator and outline experimental results that confirm our theory. Host: Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman Date: Thursday, 14 April 1988 14:11-EDT From: Dori Wells Re: Lang. & Cognition Seminar BBN Science Development Program Language & Cognition Seminar Series HOW LANGUAGE STRUCTURES ITS CONCEPTS: THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR Leonard Talmy Program in Cognitive Science University of California, Berkeley BBN Laboratories Inc. 10 Moulton Street Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor 10:30 a.m., Wednesday, April 20, 1988 Abstract: A fundamental design feature of language is that it has two subsystems, the open-class (lexical) and the closed-class (grammatical). These subsystems perform complementary functions. In a sentence, the open-class forms together contribute most of the *content* of the total meaning expressed, while the closed-class forms together determine the majority of its *structure*. Further, across the spectrum of languages, all closed-class forms are under great semantic constraint: they specify only certain concepts and categories of concepts, but not others. These grammatical specifications, taken together, appear to constitute the fundamental conceptual structuring system of language. I explore the particular concepts and categories of concepts that grammatical forms specify, the properties that these have in common and that distinguish them from lexical specifications, the functions served by this organization in language, and the relations of this organization to the structuring systems of other cognitive domains such as visual perception and reasoning. The greater issue, toward which this study ultimately aims, is the general character of conceptual structure in human cognition. Date: Thursday, 14 April 1988 14:32-EDT From: Dori Wells Re: Lang. & Cognition Seminar BBN Science Development Program Language & Cognition Seminar Series PALENQUE: AN INTERACTIVE DISCOVERY-BASED LEARNING EXPERIENCE FOR CHILDREN Kathleen Wilson Bank Street College BBN Laboratories Inc. 10 Moulton Street Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor 2:00 p.m., Thursday, April 21, 1988 Abstract: Educational technology designers have recently been exploring the potential uses of new interactive video technologies and, in particular, experimenting with a variety of structures and metaphors for the information on a disk. Palenque is a DVI (Digital Video Interactive) pilot application that uses both spatial and thematic structures to provide students with a surrogate travel experience through Palenque, an ancient Mayan site. It is designed to be used with the second season of the Voyage of the Mimi project, an interdisciplinary curriculum that includes broadcast TV shows, software and classroom activities for grades 4 through 8. The talk will include a description of the Mimi project (including a tape of a TV excerpt), a discussion of design and pedagogical principles underlying Palenque, and a description of its use in classrooms. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1988 11:57 EDT From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.] Date: Thursday, 28 April 1988 11:59-EDT From: KASH at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU Re: Parsing Seminar announcement Wednesday, 4 May 2:00 p.m. Room: Eighth Floor Playroom Building NE43 MIT MIT Center for Cognitive Science Parsing Seminar UNITRAN: A PRINCIPLE-BASED PARSER FOR MACHINE TRANSLATION Bonnie Dorr Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Massachusetts Institute of Technology Many parsing strategies for machine translation systems are based entirely on context-free grammars. To try to capture all natural language phenomena, these systems require an overwhelming number of rules; thus, a translation system either has limited linguistic coverage or poor performance (due to formidable grammar size). A parsing design that adheres to a principle-based linguistic theory avoids the maladies of a rule-based design and approaches a solution to the parsing problem for translation. In this talk, I will present a parser that is based on the current linguistic theory of "Government and Binding" (GB). The central idea of the theory is that the linguistic knowledge common to all languages consists of independent modules, each parameterized to account for the variation among languages. The parser consists of a skeletal structure-building component that operates in conjunction with a linguistic constraint component. The "co-routine" design allows control to be passed back and forth until an underspecified skeletal phrase structure is converted into a fully instantiated parse tree. Because of the modularity and parameterization offered by the GB approach to parsing, the system accommodates cross-linguistic generalization and promotes extensibility. In the context of translation, modularity and parameterization are crucial in order to handle more than one language. Presently, the system parses both Spanish and English. Research is currently under way for the construction of a generator that adheres to the same principles and parameters incorporated into the parser. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************