Date: Fri, 28 Feb 86 09:10:28 est To: fox Subject: IRList Digest V2 #11 Status: RO 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >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 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 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 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 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. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************