Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 15:59:43 est From: vtisr1!irlistrq To: fox Subject: IRList Digest V2 #17 Status: R IRList Digest Friday, 28 Mar 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 17 Today's Topics: Query - Keyword Consistency and Thoroughness Reply - Intelligent front ends Announcement - IR Intermediary System Conference Announcement - Human Information Technologies Interest Group CSLI - Semantics & Property Theory, Representation, Modelling Concurrency with Partial Orders - Data-Flow Environment for Interactive Graphics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 14 Mar 86 18:28:43 EST From: James H. Coombs Subject: Keyword Consistency and Thoroughness One of my primary concerns with IMSS is providing some way to help users maintain keyword consistency [IMSS is explained at the bottom of this notice]. Users tend to select keywords from the same semantic category, but they may select different words or even different inflections for the same word. An entry about meter, for example, might be appropriately coded with any word from the following set: {meter, metrics, scansion, scan, scanning, form, iambic, ...}. Some of these terms are more suited for specific information than others, and one might hope that a user would use both IAMBIC and METER, for example. Still, when dealing with a personal database maintained over a period of years, one can expect lapses in memory as well as lack of training to cause considerable deviance in the keywords that are selected for entries that the user considers members of the same category. Are there any established practices for maximizing consistency and thoroughness in keyword coding? IMSS includes a function that generates a list of all keywords used and their locations, and this could help users to some extent. But I would expect this to be of most value where a user knows that the choice is either METER or METRICS. It might not be of any help where some entries have been coded METER and others SCANSION unless the user studies the list carefully. In my own preliminary use of this system, I have established some informal guidelines. 1) Use only nouns and verbs; avoid adjectives and adverbs. 2) Use singular forms of nouns and present singular forms of verbs. These rules establish some consistency and prevent the program from having to lemmatize keywords. Still, I am not satisfied that this is enough. For one thing, these rules do not address the problem of thoroughness, which is probably at its worst when we are dealing with hierarchies. Unless users regularly include the keyword FORM, for instance, for each entry that has to do with meter, they will not be able to retrieve all of the metrics entries along with all other entries that have to do with form. There are some relatively elaborate solutions to this problem, but their implementation is not reasonable in generalized retrieval situations. So, I guess to repeat my question: are there standard practices for maximizing consistency and thoroughness in keyword coding? If not, I would appreciate any suggestions. [I have chosen to direct this note toward a problem in a specific application instead of as a general theoretical problem for two reasons: 1) the application helps make the theoretical problems clear, and 2) the application promises to be of considerable utility to members of most scholarly disciplines. Briefly, then, IMSS stands for Information Management System for Scholars. It includes some 10 functions for editing, retrieving, ordering, and maintaining bibliographies and notes. An early version for bibliographies has been available on the mainframe at Brown since last May. The full system is currently in beta test and should be released later this semester. A version for the IBMPC is well under way and may be available this summer.] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1986 15:32 GMT From: Alan Smeaton Subject: for the IRLIST [intelligent front ends] in response to h.p. giger's request for info on intelligent front ends ... Stephen Jamieson's work was followed up by Joan Morrissey at University College Dublin which led to "An Intelligent Terminal for Implementing Relevance Feedback on Large Operational Retrieval Systems", J. Morrissey, Proceedings of Research and Development in IR, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 146, Berlin, May 1982 This work was then followed up by Stephen Robertson who sorted out some of the hardware problems (I think) and led to a publication in theBCS Colloquium Proceedings of 1985, and possibly elsewhere. Also, a system called CONIT seems to do what H.P. is looking for, but we can't find any references to it ! Hope that info is of some use ... Alan Smeaton UCD, Ireland. [Note: Thanks for the references and names! I hope we will hear from Dick Marcus at MIT about CONIT in response to you allusion. See the following message for more information too. - Ed] ------------------------------ Posted-Date: 25 Mar 86 12:45 EST Acknowledge-To: "Richard (Dick) Marcus" Date: Tue, 25 Mar 86 12:41 EST From: "Richard (Dick) Marcus" Subject: IR Intermediary System Conference There follows a preliminary announcement of a conference on interfaces and intermediary systems for IR to be held in Boston at the end of May, 1986. Details on the program and registration are being finalized and will be reported soon. Some people/projects expected to be represented include: Martha Williams, Charles Meadow, Gerry Salton, Rita Bergman, Emily Fayen, Lionel Bernstein, Marcia Bates and projects/products from Lawrence Livermore Labs (TIS, DTIC Gateway), ISI (SCI-MATE), Telebase (EasyNet), BBN, U. Mass. (Bruce Croft's expert system), GTE, AI Corp, Chem Abstracts, Dialog, MIT (CONIT), and others. * * * CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT * * * Conference Name: The Second Conference on Computer Interfaces and Intermediaries for Information Retrieval Dates: 28 May - 1 June 1986 Location: The Boston Park Plaza Hotel; Boston, Massachusetts Sponsors: Defense Technical Information Center and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Agenda: * Discussions on Current Research and Development in Computer Interfaces and Intermediaries * Vendor Presentations and Demonstrations of Existing Computer Interfaces * Panel Discussions on the Attitudes of Database Producers and Users Toward Computer Interfaces * Discussions on the Use of Commands Versus Menus in Information Retrieval For additional information, contact: Ms. Carol E. Jacobson or Mr. Allan D. Kuhn Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC-EB) Cameron Station Alexandria, VA 22304-6145 Electronic Mail: JACOBSON@LLL-TIS-A.ARPA Telephone: (202) 274-5367 or Richard S. Marcus M.I.T. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Room 35-414; Cambridge, MA 02139; Electronic mail: Marcus@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA Telephone: (617) 253-2340 ------------------------------ From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY Date: Sat, 15 Mar 86 09:58 EST Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER 31 [Extract - Ed] HUMAN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES INTEREST GROUP (ECA) _____ ___________ ____________ ________ _____ ___ The Human Information Technologies Interest Group (HIT) of the Eastern Communication Association is intended to facilitate the study of ways in which technologies affect the processes and consequences of all human communication, from the intrapersonal and interpersonal through the group and mass to the international levels of communication. The focus of HIT is upon (1) the mediation of information and the various ways in which the formal and structural features of each medium and technology of communication uniquely affect human communication; and (2) the patterns and evolutions of communication creating and controlling all features of the Information Society. HIT will meet at the Atlantic City convention of the Eastern Communication Association in May 1986. Business Meeting: Friday, May 2, noon-1pm, Julius Room at Caesar's Palace. To be added to HIT mailing list, send a request to: Janice L. Platt Communication Arts and Sciences Department Queens College-CUNY 64-15 Kissena Blvd. Flushing, NY 11367-0904 USA To join Eastern Communication Association, with subscription to its journal, COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, write: Warren O. Richardson Communication Arts Department Villanova University Villanova, PA 19085 USA ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Mar 86 02:28:48 est From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA Subject: Calendar, March 27, No. 9 [Extract - Ed] NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH Semantics and Property Theory by Gennaro Chierchia and Raymond Turner Discussion led by Chris Menzel (chris@su-csli) Following Frege, Chierchia and Turner argue that properties play two metaphysical roles. In one role, they are ``unsaturated'' predicative entities, the semantic counterparts of predicate expressions in natural language (e.g., ``is running''). In the other, they are full-fledged ``complete'' individuals, the semantic counterparts of singular terms (e.g., ``to run'', or ``running''). In this paper, the authors develop a first-order theory of properties which incorporates this insight, and which they argue is better suited to the semantics of natural language than any currently existing alternative. In this TINLunch, I will sketch the theory informally, then we will discuss its philosophical foundations, and examine the evidence the authors' adduce for its superiority as a logical foundation for semantic theory. NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR 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. NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM Modelling Concurrency with Partial Orders V. R. Pratt, Stanford University We describe a simple and uniform view of concurrent processes that accounts for such phenomena of information systems as various kinds of concurrency, multiparty communication, mixed analog and digital information, continuous and discrete time and space, the dataflow concept, and hierarchical organization of systems. The model is based on a notion of process as a set of partial strings or partially ordered multisets (pomsets). Such processes form an algebra whose main operations are sums and products, Boolean operations, and process homomorphisms. By regarding pomsets as partial strings we make a connection with formal language theory, and by regarding them as algebraic structures we make connections with (the models of) first-order logic and temporal logic. These connections are helpful for comparisons between language-based and logic-based accounts of concurrent systems. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:08:09 est From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA Subject: Calendar, March 20, No. 8 [Extract - Ed] PIXELS AND PREDICATES MEETING A Data-Flow Environment for an Interactive Graphics Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Inc. 1:00 p.m., Wednesday, March 26, Ventura trailers Multiple windows are a common feature of contemporary interactive programming and application environments, but facilities for communicating data between windows have been limited. Operating system extensions are described that allow programs to be combined in a flexible way. A data-flow manager is introduced to control the flow of data between concurrent processes. This system allows the interconnection of processes to be changed interactively, and places no limitations on the structure of process interconnection. As a result, this environment encourages creation of simple, modular graphics tools that work well together. A video tape of the system will be shown during the talk; there will be a demo afterwards on an IRIS workstation. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************