Date: Sun, 25 May 86 16:51:48 edt From: vtisr1!irlistrq To: fox Subject: IRList Digest V2 #25 Status: R IRList Digest Sunday, 25 May 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 25 Today's Topics: Query - Computer Tech. & Automation product 'Retrieval'? Discussion - User Models: infer movie enjoyment Abstract - Thesis Proposal on IR by Text Skimming: FERRET Announcement - Workshop on Intelligent Interfaces Announcement - Computers & Music Research mtg (incl. discussion on IR) CSLI - Why Language Isn't Information ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 23 May 86 06:49:28 edt From: SUEARNOLD@TI-EG.CSNET Subject: Retrieval, a Computer Technology & Automation (CTA) product I am interested in any available information concerning the Computer Technology & Automation (CTA) organization and one of its products named 'Retrieval'. I believe that CTA is located in Vienna, Austria. It is my understanding that Retrieval is an information retrieval system for both data and text documents which uses 'Oracle' (a relational DBMS product from Oracle Corp. Menlo Park, CA) as the underlying support system. Retrieval runs under both VMS and MicroVMS. Any information would be appreciated. Thanks, Susan Arnold Texas Instruments, Inc. P.O. Box 869305 M/S 8435 Plano, TX 75086 (214)575-3510 CSNET: suearnold%ti-eg.csnet@csnet-relay ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 May 86 06:49:19 edt From: LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: User Modeling > Date: Wed, 14 May 86 01:09:59 edt > From: ben@MIMSY.UMD.EDU > > USER MODELS AND THE AUTOMATIC SELECTION OF ARTICLES > FOR AN ELECTRONIC NEWSPAPER > Bob Allen, Bell Communications Research > 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ 07960 > > The potential for automatic modelling of people's prefer- > ences for news stories was examined in several experiments. > ... Some similar work is being done by Peter Cheeseman at NASA-Ames (Cheeseman%PLU@AMES-IO). He is starting with a list of movie ratings by a set of people and is trying to infer automatically which additional movies each person is likely to enjoy. (No other information is available about either the movies or the people, although demographic and other information could be integrated without trouble and should improve performance considerably.) This could be approached as a cluster-analysis problem, but Peter is working on maximum-entropy and information- theoretic approaches that give prababilistic estimates for the enjoyment of each movie by each person. -- Ken Laws ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 May 86 06:41:12 edt From: LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Thesis Proposal What: Thesis Proposal: Information Retrieval By Text Skimming Who: Michael L. Mauldin When: May 29, 1986 At 3pm Where: In Wean Hall 5409 Two copies of the proposal will appear in the lounge on Thursday; advance copies may be obtained by contacting me by mail (mlm@cad) or by finding me in my office (8105 WeH, x3065). ABSTRACT Most information retrieval systems today are word based. But simple word searches and frequency distributions do not provide these systems with an understanding of their texts. Full natural language parsers are capable of deep understanding within limited domains, but are too brittle and slow for general information retrieval. The proposed dissertation attempts to bridge this gap by using a text skimming parser as the basis for an information retrieval system that partially understands the texts stored in it. The objective is to develop a system capable of retrieving a significantly greater fraction of relevant documents than is possible with a keyword based approach, without retrieving a larger fraction of irrelevant documents. As part of my dissertation, I will implement a full-text information retrieval system called FERRET (Flexible Expert Retrieval of Relevant English Texts). FERRET will provide information retrieval for the UseNet News system, a collection of 247 news groups covering a wide variety of topics. Initially FERRET will cover NET.ASTRO, the Astronomy news group, and part of my investigation will be to demonstrate the addition of new domains with only minimal hand coding of domain knowledge. FERRET will acquire the details of a domain automatically using a script learning component. FERRET will consist of a text skimming parser (based on DeJong's FRUMP program), a case frame matcher that compares the parse of the user's query with the parses of each text stored in the retrieval system, and a user interface. The parser relies on two knowledge sources for its operation: the sketchy script database, which encodes domain knowledge, and the lexicon. The lexicon from FRUMP will be extended both by hand and automatically with syntax and synonym information from an on-line English dictionary. The script database from FRUMP will be extended both by hand and automatically by a learning component that generates new scripts based on texts that have been parsed. The learning component will evaluate the new scripts using feedback from the user, and retain the best performers for future use. The resulting information retrieval system will be evaluated by determining its performance on queries of the UseNet database, both in terms of relevant texts not retrieved and irrelevant texts that are retrieved. Over six million characters appear on UseNet each week, so there should be enough data to study performance on a large database. The main contribution of the work will be a demonstration that a text skimming retrieval system can make distinctions based on semantic roles and information that word based systems cannot make. The script learning and dictionary access are new capabilities that will be widely useful in other natural language applications. ------------------------------ Date: 9 May 86 1819-EDT From: Dave Steiner (The Moderator) Subject: WORKS Digest V6 #16 [Extract - Ed] Today's Topics: ... Announcement - Workshop on Intelligent Interfaces at AAAI-86 ... Date: 6 May 1986 12:15-PDT Subject: Workshop on Intelligent Interfaces at AAAI-86 From: Neches@isi-vaxa.arpa (Robert Neches) A workshop on Intelligent Interfaces is scheduled to be held on Thursday, August 13th, as part of the AAAI conference in Philadelphia. We would like to bring the call for abstracts to your attention, and would appreciate it if you would circulate it to anyone else who might find it of interest. -- Tom Kaczmarek (Kaczmarek@USC-ISIB.arpa) Bob Neches (Neches@ISI-Vaxa.arpa) Workshop Co-chairs. USC / Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292 (213) 822-1511 Questions may be addressed to either chairman; abstracts should be sent to Tom Kaczmarek by June 15. The complete call for abstracts follows. ********************************************************************* WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT INTERFACES AT AAAI-86 Many AI techniques are applicable to building better human-machine interfaces. The purpose of this workshop is to investigate intelligent interface techniques that can potentially span many interaction modalities. The workshop will discuss interfaces to knowledge-based systems as well conventional interactive systems. Past work in this area has been directed at using AI to provide either an "intelligent apprentice" or a collection of "power tools." The intelligent apprentice emphasizes assistance based on an understanding of the user's intentions and task domain. The power tool approach emphasizes a powerful command set, but leaves the responsibility for selecting and applying commands in the hands of the user. This workshop is concerned not just with the extremes of this dichotomy, but also with work that shows how to blend the two approaches effectively. Work on specific media and modalities, (e.g., natural language text or speech understanding) is also relevant in that it can provide abstractions of understanding and generation that will be potentailly useful across a wide range of interface media and modalities. Topics to be discussed: What are the fundamental interface problems that AI can help solve? What specific AI techniques can be useful in solving these problems? What abstractions of "understanding" and "generation" can come from work on natural language text and speech? What are the possibilities for symbiotic relationships between intelligent interfaces and intelligent systems? What does it take to create intelligent interfaces to conventional interactive systems? Are the power tools and intelligent assistance approaches at odds with one another? Are middle-of-the-road approaches motivated by pragmatism or principle? Organizers: The workshop organizers are Thomas Kaczmarek, Larry Miller, Robert Neches and Norman Sondheimer of the USC/Information Sciences Institute. Participation: The workshop will run for a full day on Thursday, August 13 at the University of Pennsylvania. The format will be a combination of short informal presentations and open discussions with the former being used to stimulate the latter. These will be organized in four sessions, the topics of which will be finalized after reviewing the declared interests of participants. Attendence will be by invitation only; there will be a maximum of 50 participants. Those wishing to participate should submit four copies of a 1000-word abstract describing either their work building intelligent interfaces or a position on a topic relevant to the goals of the workshop. Abstracts should provide contact information at the top, as they will be duplicated and distributed to the other workshop attendees. Participants with a willingness to make a short presentation (15-30 minutes) about either their research or a position on a relevant topic should indicate this desire in a cover letter sent with the abstract. If multiple members of a research group would like to attend, please indicate the number involved in the cover letter also. Abstracts should be sent to Thomas Kaczmarek, USC/ISI, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA. 90292-6695. They may also be transmitted electronically to Kaczmarek@USC-ISIB.arpa. The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 15, 1986. Invitations will be issued by July 15. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 May 86 06:49:58 edt From: sdpage%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK Subject: Computers and Music Research: meeting announcement ---------------------------------------- | COMPUTERS AND MUSIC RESEARCH | | | | A two-day set of talks and discussions | ---------------------------------------- Date: 9th-10th July 1986 Venue: Computing Laboratory University of Oxford England Computers are playing an increasingly important role in music research. There are a number of important projects being developed in this country and abroad---but researchers have been working in isolation and lack a suitable forum to exchange ideas. This two-day meeting will involve some of the key people in the field, and will offer an opportunity to discuss the major common problems and needs. Subjects to be covered will include input and representation systems, database structures for music information retrieval, query languages, general-purpose and specific tools for musicology and music analysis, methods of printing music by computer, and computers in tertiary music education. This event is not a tutorial on the use of computers, and it is recommended that all participants be computer users. All registering participants will be invited to write a short paragraph on their current work. A select few will then be asked to give ten-minute presentations about their research. Participants will include Ian Bent (Nottingham), Clive Broadbent (Durham), Alan Marsden (Lancaster), Stephen Page (Oxford), Alastair Pearce (London) and Richard Vendome (OUP). Bruce McLean, the database programmer for The DARMS Project, will be coming from California. For more information, or to register as a participant, please contact Stephen Page, New College, Oxford OX1 3BN, UK (phone 0865-251609) or mail to sdpage%uk.ac.oxford.prg (in the UK, via JANET) or sdpage%prg.oxford.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk (via ARPANET) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 May 86 06:41:17 edt From: JAMIE@SU-CSLI.ARPA Subject: Calendar, May 22, No. 17 [Extract - Ed] CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, May 29, 1986 NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR Why Language isn't Information Terry Winograd (Winograd@csli) In developing theories of language, researchers introduce formal objects corresponding to meanings and try to develop rules relating those objects. These rules may be more or less sophisticated in taking into account context, utterance situation, etc., but they all ground their account of linguistic meaning in terms of something that lies ouside of language, whether it be truth conditions, possible worlds, situations, or ``concepts''. This seems to work well enough when dealing with simple descriptions of perceived physical reality (``The cat is on the mat'', ``Snow is white'', etc.) but is far more difficult and less convincing when applied to more realistic examples of languge use, either from casual conversation (``You aren't kidding, are you?'' or from text like this abstract. I will argue that in basing theories of meaning on an articulation of ``objects,'' ``properties'', etc. we never escape the domain of language, and are really articulating the possible moves in a kind of conversation. Much of the technical work done in semantics and philosophy of language can be reinterpreted in this light, but it leads to radically different overall obejctives and different expectations about the potential for building computer programs that could legitimately be said to ``understand'' or ``mean what they say''. The talk is based on parts of a book I have recently completed with Fernando Flores, entitled Understanding Computers and Cognition, and on discussions in the Representation and Reasoning group. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************