Date: Thu, 12 Dec 85 18:59 EST To: irdis at vpi Subject: IRList Digest V1 #24 IRList Digest Thursday, 12 Dec 1985 Volume 1 : Issue 24 Today's Topics: Announcement - B. Shneiderman forwarded lecture abstracts - Cornell Tech. Reports Cog-Sci Seminars - Expert System model for uncertainty, Categorical Organization of Semantic Knowledge Systems, Hybrid Knowledge Representation and Reasoning System, On Computational Linguistics I,II ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subj: From: Ben Shneiderman Date: Sun, 1 Dec 85 22:32:48 EST announcement of lectures for ... inclusion in IRList ... ---------------------------------- A. F. Norcio and L. J. Chmura Naval Research Laboratory Since 1978, the goal of the Software Cost Reduction (SCR) project has been to redevelop the operational flight program for the A-7E aircraft and to demonstrate the use of certain software engineering techniques in complex software. Also since then, the Software Technology Evaluation (STE) project has been monitoring SCR project activity in order to provide an objective evaluation of the SCR methodologies. Project activity data are collected from SCR personnel on a weekly basis. Over 55000 hours of SCR design, code, test and other activity data have been captured and recorded in a computer data base. Analyses of module design data show that the ratio between cumulative discussing and cumulative creating activities correlates highly with cumula- tive total design activity. Thus, this ratio is in one sense a lead indicator of surges and levelings of design activity. This and other results suggest that discussion activity among software engineers may be a leading indicator of design activity progress. Note: All meetings will be held at the George Washington University's Marvin Center (800 21st Street, N.W.) between 10:00 AM and noon. Coffee and doughnuts will be provided by the Department of Electri- cal Engineering and Computer Sciences. Woodrow Barfield, Department of Engineering Administration The George Washington University The rotation transformation is used primarily to assist the computer aided design user in visualizing graphics figures on a CRT screen. Spatial reasoning, the ability to make inferences based on the information contained within a spatial representation, is an important aspect of the perceptual pro- cessing task for CAD. This research effort investigated human spatial and cognitive abilities for a figure rotation task. Two competing models of the underlying internal representation of visual information were experimentally tested. The frequen- cy of rotation errors (axes, angle) are analyzed from an information theoretic framework in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the rotation transforma- tion for the split vs. single screen CAD options. Rose Oldfield Hayes, U S Postal Service Frederick R. Glickman, U S Postal Service Key Dismukes, Air Force Office of Scientific Research The Human Factors Society has established a committee to develop technical standards for acceptable human factors principles and practices in the design and use of display terminals, workstations, keyboards, and their environment. The committee operates under the rules and procedures of the American National Standards Institute. A set of recommended standards have been distributed for comments and voting by committee members - copies will be available. The standards cover the working environment, visual display design, worksta- tion design, keyboard design, and measurement techniques. This seminar will present a walkthrough of the proposed standards. Dr. Hayes will provide com- ments as a reviewer of the standards for the HFS and as Program Manager of En- gineering Psychology for the U S Postal Service Office of Safety and Health. Dr. Glickman will provide comments as Program Director of Ergonomics Systems Research for the U S Postal Service Office of Advanced Technology. Dr. Dismukes will act as a discussant in his role as the National Academy of Science's Study Director for the report on Video Displays, Work and Vision, and as Director of Life Sciences at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology So- ciety, c/o Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rock- ville, MD 20851. ------------------------------ From: "V.J. Raghavan" Date: Mon, 25 Nov 85 16:35:16 cst Subject: Cornell Tech. Reports Abstracts of Recent Technical Reports from Computer Science, Cornell Univ., on Information Retrieval (from Carolyn Crouch) 84-588 Salton, G. The Use of Extended Boolean Logic in Information Retrieval. Jan. 84. An extended Boolean retrieval strategy has previously been introduced in which the individual Boolean operators can be treated more or less strictly, depending on the perceived strength of association of the query terms. The extended Boolean system is illustrated by examples and evaluation output is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the operations. 84-608 Salton, G. and Voorhees, E. Automatic Assignment of Soft Boolean Operators. May 84. The conventional bibliographic retrieval systems are based on Boolean query formulations and inverted file implementations. Such systems provide rapid responses in answer to search queries but they are not easy to use by uninitiated patrons. An extended Boolean retrieval strategy has been devised in which the Boolean operators are treated more or less strictly, depending on the setting of a special parameter, known as the p-value. The extended system is much more forgiving than the conventional system, and provides better retrieval effectiveness. In this study various problems associated with the determination of appropriate p-values are discussed, and suggestions are made for an automatic assignment of p-values. Evaluation output is included to illustrate the operations of the suggested procedures. 84-609 Salton, G. Some Notions about Information Retrieval in Automated Office Environments. May 1984. A substantial portion of the work required in office environments involves the processing of natural language texts. This note contains some ideas relating to the structure of natural language texts in office environments. Certain approaches are also outlined concerning the analysis, storage, search, and retrieval of such items. Attention is paid in particular to the processing of items with mixed representations and the handling of complex information specifications. 84-633 Salton, G. A Note about Information Science Research. Sept. 84. This note deals with the relationship between information science research and practice. The impression that the field is moribund and that the research output is uniformly inferior is not supported by an examination of the information retrieval literature. 84-655 Crouch, C. and Nance, R. An Approach to the Functional Description of an Information Retrieval Ssytem Based on a Generalized Model. December 84. In this paper, the authors present a high level, functional approach to the description of a generalized information retrieval system. The description is based on the top-down decomposition of the system into modules and processes and on an appropriate data abstraction. The purpose of this paper is to describe the behavior of the system in terms of the component processes and the interactions of these processes in terms of inputs, outputs, and the associated transformations. It allows one to view the system as a collection of abstract processes, each of which is concisely defined via a notation that describes what is accomplished but not how such a process is to be implemented. Semantically irrelevant details are removed, thereby producing a nonprocedural description which not only elucidates system behavior but serves as a basis for subsequent formal specification. 85-658 Voorhees, E. The Cluster Hypothesis Revisited. Jan. 85. A new means of evaluating the cluster hypothesis is introduced and the results of such an evaluation are presented for four collections. The results of retrieval experiments comparing a sequential search, a cluster-based search, and a search of the clustered collection in which individual documents are scored against the query are also presented. These results indicate that while the absolute performance of a search on a particular collection is dependent on the pairwise similarity of the relevant documents, the relative effectiveness of clustered retrieval versus sequential retrieval is independent of this factor. However, retrieval of entire clusters in response to a query usually results in a poorer performance than retrieval of individual documents from clusters. 85-686 Buckley, C. Implementation of the SMART Information Retrieval System. May 85. Abstract not available. [Note: this partially documents the current version of SMART running under 4.2bsd UNIX at Cornell. It is an experimental system with many capabilities but requires a considerable investment of time to work with. Contact chrisb@cornell for info. - Ed] ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1985 09:49 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar Monday 25, November 4:00pm Room: NE43-8th floor playroom 9.382 Seminar on Visual Information Processing (A) PROPOSAL FOR AN EXPERT SYSTEM Don Geman Department of Mathematics and Statistics University of Massachusetts at Amherst I will describe a model for decision-making under uncertainty in situations in which prior knowledge can be expressed in the form of conditional expectations. Appealing to a maximum entropy rationale, a Gibbs distribution is defined over all features of interest. Decisions and hypotheses are formed by sampling at low and nominal temperatures, respctively, from the distribution. Experiments are under way. ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1985 11:07 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extracts - Ed] Monday 2, December 4:00-6:00pm Room: E25-117 HARVARD UNIVERSITY-MIT DIVISION OF HEALTH SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY "The Categorical Organization of Semantic Knowledge Systems" Elizabeth K. Warrington Professor of Neurology The National Hospitals for Nervous Diseases Queen Square, London Patients with cerebral lesions provide an important source of evidence about the organization of semantic systems. Striking instances of the selective preservation and selective impairment in the comprehension of particular categories of verbal and visual stimuli have long been reported in the neurological literature and more recently such dissociations have been investigated and assessed using experimental methods. The issue of modality specificity will be discussed and it will be argued that there are at least partially independent systems that subserve verbal and visual semantics. Evidence for both broad category specific impairments, such as knowledge of concrete and abstract concepts, and more fine grain category impairments such as knowledge of animate and inanimate objects will be reviewed. It will be argued that there are modality specific semantic systmes and that these are categorised in their organization. Host: Lucia Vaina ------------------------------ Thursday 5. December 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom The Artificial Intelligence Lab Revolving Seminar Series CAKE: An Example of a Hybrid Knowledge Representation and Reasoning System Charles Rich MIT AI Lab Cake is a knowledge representation and reasoning system being developed to support automated programming (the Programmer's Apprentice). The first part of this talk describes the architecture of Cake, which is divided into the following nine layers, each with associated representations and reasoning procedures: Plan Synthesis Plan Recognition Plan Calculus Frames Types Algebraic Demons Equality Truth Maintenance The second part of the talk takes a look at some of the issues in the design of hybrid systems generally, such as What is a hybrid system? Why would you want one? Who is developing them? Where do we go from here? Nelson & Oppen's cooperating decision procedures, KL-Two, Krypton, and Cake will be discussed as examples of hybrid systems. ------------------------------ From: Peter de Jong Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1985 10:25 EST Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extracted and edited - Ed] Thursday, 5 December 1985 4:00pm Part 1 Friday, 6 December 1985 4:00pm Part 2 Harvard University, Lecture Hall 101, Aiken Computation Laboratory 33 Oxford St, Cambridge "On Computational Linguistics I. Discourse Structure and Intentions" "On Computational Linguistics II. The Design of a Transportable Natural Language Interface" Dr. Barbara J. Grosz ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************