Subject: IRList Digest V2 #11
To: fox
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 86 09:10:28 est

IRList Digest           Friday, 28 Feb 1986      Volume 2 : Issue 11

Today's Topics:
   Announcement - A REAL FIND!
   Reports - MIT Activities
           - OED Centre Activities
   Cog-Sci Seminars - Auxiliary Reduction in GPSG
                    - Explanation-Based Learning
                    - Interpretation of Scientific and Mathematical Concepts
   CSLI Calendar - Lexical Rules and Representations, 
                     Reflexivisation, Representation

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>From fox Fri Feb 28 08:22 EST 1986
Subject: A Real Find

The latest issue of ACM SIGIR Forum has recently arrived for members of the
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.  The Contents were listed
in IRList Digest V2 #4.  This issue has 53 pages, with news, articles,
calls for papers, collections of abstracts, ...

What a FIND!  Membership in SIGIR is ONLY $6 per year for ACM members, $20
to non-ACM members.  A subscription to the newsletter only is $12.

Send in your funds with your next ACM renewal, checking off SIGIR, or write
to ACM, 11 West 42nd Street, NY, NY 10036.

------------------------------

>From fox Wed Feb 26 08:51 EST 1986
Subject: Extracts from Friday Memo, 11/22/85, Newsletter of Inf. Ind. Assoc.

[Note: the following has been edited slightly.  Please, any folks from
MIT who can tell us more, send in a msg! - Ed]

A) MIT's NEW INFO CENTER
  Last Oct. 29, MIT announced the creation of a new Center for Information
Technology and Society.  ... "It is surprising how many of the
objectives of society can be gained through ... info. technology ...
info. tech can aid in attaining these goals by making information
available in the particular form and at the particular time for
learning and making choices."
  The Center proposes to carry out a research effort of its own, while
emphasizing its intent to play a coordinate role through newsletters
and teleconferencing.  The prospectus, mentioning specifically the
importance of copyright in the development of information, indicates
the Center will attempt to identify needed legislation.
  Program Director Dr. W. Curtiss Priest has a varied background
including having developed a bibliographic management system.  He is
seeking foundation, academic, and corporate sponsors for the Center
and may be reached at 617/253-6469.

B) "ULTRA-PERSONAL"
  An MIT professor made few friends in predicting the demise of
traditional newspapers, with an autidence comprised of numerous
newspaper publishing executives attending the 17th Annual Convention
and Exhibition of the IIA.  According to Nicholas Negroponte, Director
of MIT's New Media Laboratory, a research facility for new information
technology, traditional newspapers are outdated and will be replaced
by a computerized "ultra-personal" newspaper.  The alternative he
described is MIT's newly-developed electronic newspaper that delivers
personalized news to individuals each morning.
  The computer scans newswiere services and other news sources and,
equipped with a profile of the user's interests, selects appropriate
stories and presents them to the user.  MIT's prototype system
presents the news on paper or on a video display terminal, and can
also convert print into audio form.
  According to Negroponte, the "ultra-personal" newspaper is a
"complete redefinition of the concept of newsworthiness."  The
personalized newspaper is one way of dealing with an exploding mass of
information.

------------------------------

>From fox Wed Feb 26 08:31 EST 1986
Subject: UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dict. - Jan. 86 Newsletter

[Note: following are extracts that may be of interest. - Ed]

1) The database design group is looking at several possible data models for 
  the Dictionary.  A successful design will address the three primary functions 
  of the database: the lexicographic function, publishing activities, and 
  end-user support.
2) On Feb. 6 Silvia Pavel presented a seminar on "Computerized
  Terminological Research in Canada." 
3) Michael Lesk will present a seminar on Thursday, March 6 at 1:30pm
  ... on "Automatic Sense Disambiguation Using Dictionary Definitions."
4) The Information in Data proceedings will be available in the next
  few weeks. The cost is $10 per copy, $12 for outside Canada, cheques
  made payable to Univ. of Waterloo.  
  [Note: this was reported on in V1 #28 - Ed]
5) The Centre is planning a second conference on Advances in
  Lexicology to be held in November of this year.  Papers presenting
  original research on theoretical and applied aspects of lexicology are
  being sought.  A formal call for papers will be distributed shortly.

------------------------------

From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 1986  15:02 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

Friday,  21 February  10:30am  Room: BBN 
  3rd floor large conference room, 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge, Ma
                  BBN Laboratories SDP AI Seminar

      Syntactic Conditions on Auxiliary Reduction in GPSG
                  Annette S. Bissantz
               The Ohio State University

                        Abstract

     This paper focuses on the syntactic conditions governing auxiliary
reduction (AR) and how these are accounted for in a Generalized Phrase
Structure Grammar framework.  AR in particular has been something of a
problem for syntactic theory for some time and a great number of
different analyses have been proposed for this phenomenon.  None of these,
however, have been entirely accurate.  In a GPSG analysis, however, the
facts are easily accounted for by appealing to conditions on the syntactic
structures that sentences are assigned.  A further advantage of this
analysis is its ability to account for dialect variation with a minimum of
effort while making strong predictions about the organization of
cliticization rules within the grammar.

------------------------------

From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1986  10:11 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

Thursday, 20  February  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom
		       The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			   Revolving Seminar Series

			  Explanation-Based Learning

				 Tom Mitchell
		    Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

The problem of formulating general concepts from specific training
examples has long been a major focus of machine learning research.
While most previous research has focused on empirical methods for
generalizing from a large number of training examples using no
domain-specific knowledge, in the past few years new methods have been
developed for applying domain-specific knowledge to formulate valid
generalizations from single training examples.  The characteristic
common to these methods is that their ability to generalize from a
single example follows from their ability to explain why the training
example is a member of the concept being learned.  This talk proposes a
general, domain-independent mechanism, call EBG, that unifies previous
approaches to explanation-based generalization.  The EBG method is
illustrated in the context of several example problems, and used to
contrast several existing systems for explanation-based generalization.
The perspective on explanation-based generalization afforded by this
general method is also used to identify open research problems in this
area.

------------------------------

From: Cognitive Science Program <admin%cogsci%ucbvax.berkeley.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 86 15:17:34 PST
Subject: UCB Cognitive Science Seminar--Feb. 25 (F. Reif) [Extract - Ed]

                     BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM
                                 Spring 1986
                    Cognitive Science Seminar - IDS 237B

                     Tuesday, February 25, 11:00 - 12:30
                              2515 Tolman Hall
                          Discussion: 12:30 - 1:30
                          3105 Tolman (Beach Room)

          ``Interpretation of Scientific and Mathematical Concepts:
              Cognitive Issues and Instructional Implications''
                                   F. Reif
               Department of Physics and School of Education,
                    University of California at Berkeley

       Scientific and mathematical  concepts  are  significantly  dif-
       ferent  from everyday concepts and are notoriously difficult to
       learn.  A cognitive analysis shows that the  values  of  scien-
       tific  concepts can be identified or found by several different
       modes of concept interpretation.  Some of these modes use  for-
       mally  explicit  knowledge  and  thought processes; others rely
       more on various kinds of compiled  knowledge.   Each  mode  has
       distinctive  consequences  in  terms  of  attainable precision,
       likely errors, and ease of use.   An attempt is made to  formu-
       late  an   "ideal"  model of scientific concept interpretation;
       such a model uses a combination of modes to interpret  concepts
       in  manner  that  achieves reliable scientific effectiveness as
       well as processing efficiency.  This model can be compared with
       the  actual  concept  interpretations  of  expert scientists or
       novice students.  All these remarks can be well illustrated  in
       the  specific case of the physics concept "acceleration".   The
       preceding discussion helps reveal both cognitive and metacogni-
       tive  reasons  why  the  learning of scientific or mathematical
       concepts is particularly difficult.  It also suggests  instruc-
       tional methods for teaching such concepts more effectively.

------------------------------

From: Emma Pease <Emma%su-csli.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Wed 12 Feb 86 17:40:37-PST
Subject: Calendar February 13, No. 3 [Extract - Ed]

                Lexical Rules and Lexical Representations
                Mark Gawron, Paul Kiparsky, Annie Zaenen
                      February 20, 27, and March 6

   This series of talks reflects the ongoing elaboration of a model of
   lexical representation.  In the first, Mark Gawron will discuss a
   frame-based lexical semantics and its relationship to a theory of
   lexical rules. In the second, Paul Kiparsky will propose a theory of
   the linking of thematic roles to their syntactic realizations,
   emphasizing its interactions with a theory of morphology; and in the
   third, a sub-workgroup of the lexical project will sketch a unification
   based representation for the interaction of the different components
   of the lexical representation and both syntax and sentence semantics.

                            Reflexivisation:
                        Some Connections Between
             Lexical, Syntactic, and Semantic Representation
                        Annie Zaenen, Peter Sells, Draga Zec
                                March 27

   This presentation will concentrate on cross-linguistic variation in
   the expression of simple direct object reflexivisation (as found in
   English in a sentence like `John washed himself'). It will be shown
   that the counterparts of such sentences in different languages can be
   lexically transitive or intransitive, can be expressed in one word or
   in two or three, and allow for one or more semantic interpretations
   requiring semantic representations that treat the reflexive as a bound
   variable in some cases but not in others. The data presented will show
   that some simple ideas about the mapping from lexical arguments to
   surface structure constituents and/or to semantic arguments are not
   tenable.

                             Representation
    Brian Smith, Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy, Ken Olson, John Perry
                         April 3, 10, 17, and 24

   Issues of representation permeate CSLI research, often in implicit
   ways.  This four-part series will examine representation as a subject
   matter in its own right, and will explore various representational
   issues that relate to mind, computation, and semantics.  

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END OF IRList Digest
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