IRList Digest Tuesday, 7 May 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 32 Today's Topics: Query - Public domain IR collections Call for Papers - Algorithms and data structures for IR Abstract - Tools for Designing&Implementing User-Computer Interfaces CSLI - The Algebra of Events - Representation versus Interpretation COGSCI - Abstraction in symbolic planning; Software, imagination, education conference News addresses are Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 2 Jun 88 15:41 PDT From: Pedersen.pa@Xerox.COM Subject: Public-domain corpora Prof. Fox, I'm a member of a group at Xerox PARC investigating some aspects of Information Retrieval. One of the major stumbling blocks we've come across is the relative scarcity of public-domain corpora which may be used for empirical studies of retrieval effectiveness and general experimentation. It is evident from the literature that a number of standard reference corpora with queries are available (eg. CACM, MEDLARS, CISI, etc.). Is there a recognized source for these corpora? I noticed a message on the IR-list referring to a CDROM containing various IR collections (Virginia Disk One?). Is there any more information available on this project, in particular, a list of the included collections? Thanks in advance for your help. Jan Pedersen [Note: Virginia Disk One is now being tested and I hope to have it out in a month or so. We will send you a copy and can make others - I have some requests but can accept more. The CD-ROM will have over 6000 files, and will include the collections you mentioned above. We will have a hypertext system used to access vegetable gardening data, Personal Librarian (whose ancestor was SIRE) accessing a number of collections, TOPIC (whose ancestor was RUBRIC) accessing one collection, etc. The 1st 3 years of IRList will be searchable. But be aware that I believe we need more controlled realistic studies with human-computer interaction, and that collaboration between corporations, funding sources, and universities has been sorely lacking in the area of studying the effectiveness of retrieval systems. I am pleased to see a group at Xerox working on this! I hope that many new evaluation studies will be carried out! - Ed.] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 May 88 23:25:10 PDT From: likewise!hoqas!thor!wbf@uunet.UU.NET (Bill Frakes) Subject: Call for Papers for SIGIR Forum Call for papers on algorithms and data structures for information retrieval Papers are solicited on data structures and algorithms for information retrieval. Accepted papers will be published in SIGIR Forum. Papers should survey the topic and be tutorial. The papers should begin with an introduction to the topic, and then present a discussion of the data structures and algorithms in a standard language. C is preferred, but other languages such as PASCAL are OK. Papers should include references to relevant literature, and should be evaluative as well as descriptive. Some possible topics are given below. If a sufficient number of quality papers are submitted, we will try to publish them in book form. o Stoplists o Stemming o String Search o P-norm algorithms o Parsing o Boolean operations o Inverted lists o File structures o Ranking Algorithms o Clustering algorithms Send papers to: Bill Frakes AT&T Bell Laboratories Room. 2J-502 Crawfords Corner Rd. Holmdel, N.J. 07733 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 May 88 11:05:50 EDT From: Una Smith Subject: James Foley at JvNC, Tuesday 5/24, 4:00 pm Tuesday, May 24, at 4:00 pm. Tools for Designing and Implementing User-Computer Interfaces ============================================================= James Foley George Washington University The engineering of the human-computer interface defines "usability," yet user interface software has not improved historically as much as computers or display/sensor hardware. Systematic methods and design environments now permit formal specification of a user interface in terms of objects, actions, attributes, preconditions, and effects. The specification can then be transformed into functionally equivalent interfaces, to measure or optimize speed-in-use, default conditions, scope, or the need for assistance. This talk explores the issues that arise in theory and practice when designing interfaces. James Foley is professor and chairman-elect in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the George Washington University, and a fellow of the IEEE. His cover article for the October 1987 issue of _Scientific_American_, "Interfaces for Advanced Computing," touches on many of the issues that will be developed in this talk. Foley has written the standard text in computer graphics, "Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics," with Andries van Dam, and is currently building UIDE, the User Interface Design Environment. The talk is open to the public. Refreshments will be served at 3:40 pm. The John von Neumann National Supercomputer Center is located at 665 College Road East, Princeton Forrestal Center, Plainsboro NJ. For more information, call (609) 520-2000. Una Smith Q2813@PUCC.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 May 88 17:14:44 PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, May 19, 3:29 [Extract - Ed.] Reading: "The Algebra of Events" by Emmon Bach Discussion led by Bob Carpenter (carp@drifters.stanford.edu) May 26 Emmon Bach claims that the "basic aim of this paper is to try and elucidate this proportion: events:processes :: things:stuff." He exploits the structural parallels between the domain of individuals and events to propose a semantics for verbal aspect, and in particular the progressive, identical to Godehard Link's semantics for mass and count nominals. We'll concentrate on the "Puzzles and Problems" section, which deals with three unresolved issues. The first is the general mechanism of languages for "packaging" objects into new objects and "grinding" existing objects into their constituents. The second deals with the relation between the partitive and the progressive and their admission of real, but incomplete complements as in "part of a bridge" and "was building a bridge" where the bridge was never built. The final puzzle is the key, where the general ontological question of object individuation and its relation to the attunement of agents is brought out of the closet. Time permitting, we can discuss some comments of Fred Landman's (in "Groups," UMass ms) pertaining to the general topic of collectivity and individuation, which is closely related to the notions of "actual" situation in situation semantics. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 May 88 16:31:02 PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar addition CSLI COLLOQUIUM Representation versus Interpretation J. E. Fenstad University of Oslo, Norway Cordura Conference Room, 4:15, May 26 One basic assumption of the Montague approach is the compositionality principle, i.e., the existence of a homomorphism from the "syntactic" algebra to the "semantic" algebra. But various problematic aspects of the "pull-back" from interpretation to linguistic forms argue for an independent representational level. Another problematic aspect of the Montague model is the extreme "constructionalism" of the approach, i.e., everything is constructed by abstraction from individuals and truth-values. In the talk I will give a survey of some recent work in Oslo related to these problems. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 27 May 88 09:30:44 EDT From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Date: Thu 26 May 88 14:21:38-EDT From: Marc Vilain Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Josh Tennenberg BBN Science Development Program AI Seminar Series Lecture ABSTRACTION IN SYMBOLIC PLANNING Josh Tennenberg University of Rochester (josh@cs.rochester.edu) BBN Labs 10 Moulton Street 2nd floor large conference room 10:30 am, Tuesday May 31 The use of abstraction in planning is explored in order to simplify the task of reasoning about the effects of an agent's actions within a complex world. Two representational issues emerge which form the basis of this research. First, the abstract views must sanction plan construction for frequently occurring problems, yet never sanction the deduction of contradictory assertions. Second, a correspondence between the abstract and concrete views must be maintained so that abstract solutions bear a precise relationship to the concrete level solutions derived from them. These issues are explored within two different settings. In the first, an abstraction hierarchy is induced by relaxing some of the constraints on the application of actions. In the second, a predicate mapping function is defined which extends the notion of inheritance from object types to arbitrary relations and actions. ______________________________ Date: Thu, 26 May 88 15:17:08 EDT From: adelson%cs.tufts.edu@relay.cs.net Subject: please post SOFTWARE, IMAGINATION, EDUCATION: Educationally Effective Curricular Software in Higher Education SPEAKERS: Jon Barwise John Kemeny John Seely Brown Seymour Papert Marc H. Brown Judah L. Schwartz Daniel C. Dennett George Smith Mitchell Kapor Edwin Taylor Alan Kay Effective educational software is rare indeed--hard to create, and hard to recognize. This conference will address the difficult questions: What software actually works with students, and why? Leading thinkers will explore the possibilities and limitations of computers in higher education, and discuss demonstrations of the best existing software. CONFERENCE HELD MAY 31 THROUGH JUNE 3, 1988 For reservations and information about fees and location phone or mail: Judy Medler 617-628-5000 X 5209 CSNET: BARNEY%CC.TUFTS.EDU BITNET: JCMEDLER@TUFTS Sponsored by the Curricular Software Studio, with major funding by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************