IRList Digest Saturday, 12 November 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 52 Today's Topics: Call for Papers - Computers and Information Processing COGSCI - Bayesian/Dempster-Shaffer, Qualitative Reasoning CSLI - Resolution problem for NLP - High level lexical structures Abstracts - Software Psychology Society (Potomac) News addresses are Internet: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtcc1.bitnet (replaces foxea@vtvax3) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 11 Nov 88 10:30 PST From: Christine Borgman Subject: (COPY) Call for Papers - Computers and Inf. Processing [Note: this was forwarded by C. Borgman, who received it from roberts@src.dec.com, who received the msg from Jeff Johnson, who received it from Jim Katz as below - Ed.] >From thumper!katz Wed Nov 9 09:02:22 1988 To: SocialIssuesOfComputing.DL Re: PLEASE FORWARD: Call for papers Dear colleagues: I'd appreciate your forwarding message to potential interested parties. Of course you're also invited to send me a submission. Call for Papers American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 1989 August 9-13 1989 San Francisco Hilton Square Session: COMPUTERS AND INFORMATION PROCESSING I'm looking for papers that will be path-breaking and exciting in terms of their findings about computers' impact on society/groups/individuals. The papers will hopefully also attract the non-specialist to the session. Where to send papers: Members of the ASA and other interested persons should submit papers directly to: James Katz/ASA Session Room 2E-264 Bell Communications Research 445 South Street Morristown, NJ 07960-1910 Detailed information regarding the submissions follows. All papers will be judged competitively on universalistic criteria. Deadline. Papers should be submitted by December 15, 1988. Length and Style. Papers as submitted are limited to 20 pages, including footnotes, tables and bibliographies. For presentations at the meetings, papers should be turned into 15-minute talks. Presentations should highlight and interpret major points only and the delivery should be carefully paced. (Details of empirical data and procedures of collection and analysis should be reserved for handouts or written versions). Original Contribution. Papers must reflect original work or major developments in previously reported work. Papers are not eligible if they have been published prior to the meeting or accepted for publication before being submitted to organizers for consideration, or if they have been modified in only secondary respects after similar readings or publication. Only manuscripts that are accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope will be returned. Authors who want an acknowledgment of receipt of the paper by the organizer should also include a self-addressed, stamped postcard. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 13:06:10 EDT From: Peter de Jong Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.] Date: Mon, 24 Oct 88 14:41:23 EDT From: reiter@harvard.harvard.edu (Ehud Reiter) Subject: Harvard AI colloquim HARVARD UNIVERSITY Center for Research in Computing Technology Colloquium Series Presents BAYESIAN AND DEMPSTER-SHAFER FORMALISMS FOR EVIDENTIAL REASONING: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS Judea Pearl Cognitive Systems Laboratory Computer Science Department University of California, Los Angeles. Thursday, October 27, 1988 4 PM, Aiken Computation Lab. 101 (Tea: 3:30 pm, Aiken Basement Lobby) ABSTRACT Evidential reasoning is the process of drawing plausible conclu- sions from uncertain clues and incomplete information. In most AI applications (e.g., diagnosis, forecasting, vision, speech recognition and language understanding), this process has been handled by ad-hoc techniques, embedded in domain- specific procedures and data structures. Recently, there has been a strong movement to seek a more principled basis for evi- dential reasoning, and the two most popular contenders that have emerged are the Bayesian and the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) ap- proaches. The Bayesian approach is by far the more familiar between the two, resting on the rich tradition of statistical decision theory, as well as on excellent axiomatic and behavioral arguments. Its three defining attributes are (1) reliance on complete proba- bilistic model of the domain (2) willingness to accept sub- jective judgments as an expedient substitute for empirical data and (3) the use of Bayes conditionalization as the primary mechanism for updating beliefs in light of new information. D-S belief functions offer an alternative to Bayesian inference, in that they do not require the specification of a complete probabilistic model and, consequently, they do not (and cannot) use conditionalization to represent the impact of new evi- dence. Instead, belief functions compute PROBABILITY INTERVALS, the meaning of which has been a puzzling object to many researchers, and a subject of much confusion. The main purpose of this talk is to offer a clear interpretation of belief functions, thus facilitating a better appreciation of their power and range of applicability vis a vis those of Baye- sian inference. We view a belief function as the PROBABILITY-OF- NECESSITY, namely, the probability that the uncertain constraints imposed by the evidence, together with the steady constraints which govern the environment, will be sufficient to compel the truth of a proposition (by excluding its negation). We shall demonstrate this interpretation on simple examples, then address the more general issues of computational, epistemological and semantic adequacies of the Bayesian and D-S approaches. Host: Professor Barbara Grosz ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1988 15:41 EDT From: annette@xx.lcs.mit.edu Subject: Judea Pearl Date: Friday, October 28 Time: 9:30 Place: 8th floor playroom PROBABILISTIC SEMANTICS FOR QUALITATIVE REASONING: PRELIMINARY RESULTS AND OPEN QUESTIONS Judea Pearl Computer Science Department University of California, Los Angeles The prospect of attaching probabilistic semantics to con- ditional sentences promises to provide current theories of commonsense reasoning with useful norms of coherence. For exam- ple, if we interpret the sentence "Birds fly" to mean "If x is a bird, it is highly probable that x can fly", then the logic of high probabilities (Adams,1966) imposes some desir- able disciplines on how default theories should behave -- it posts requirements of consistency on default statements, it per- mits the derivation of plausible conclusions that have been missed by other formalisms and it is free of spurious exten- sions. Using nonstandard analysis for infinitesimals (Spohn, 1988), this logic can be further refined to represent shades of likelihood, e.g., "likely", "very likely", "extremely likely", etc. However, shades of likelihood are not sufficient to capture many plausible patterns of reasoning, and must be augmented with assumptions invoking notions of independence and causation. The maximum-entropy approach succeeds in emulating conventions of independence, but it appears to have a basic clash with human understanding of causation. I shall illustrate the na- ture of these problems using the "Yale shooting problem" and the "UCLA party problem". ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 19 Oct 88 17:31:00 PDT From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, October 20, 4:5 [Extract - Ed.] The Resolution Problem for Natural-Language Processing Week 4: Psychological Processes Herb Clark (herb@psych.stanford.edu) 20 October I will review part of what is known about the process of resolving ambiguities and indeterminacies from work in psychology. Last week I took up, among other things, the issues of automaticity and modularity in resolving structural ambiguities--that is, ambiguous words, attachment ambiguities, and other local parsing ambiguities. The question is, how are these ambiguities resolved so quickly and apparently automatically on the basis of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, and what does this say about the process of understanding in general? This week I will take up the more pragmatic issues in resolution, such as how people resolve references, illocutionary force, and implicatures, and how speakers and listeners manage to do this collectively. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Nov 88 17:28:12 PST From: Emma Pease Subject: CSLI Calendar, November 3, 4:7 [Extract - Ed.] Higher-Level Lexical Structure and Parsing Michael Tanenhaus University of Rochester (mtan@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu) November 10 Sentences with long-distance dependencies (filler-gap sentences) present interesting problems of ambiguity resolution. This paper will present results from a series of experiments, using both behavioral measures and brain-evoked potential measures, that provide a detailed picture of how people use verb argument structure and verb control information to posit and fill gaps. The results provide intriguing suggestions about the interaction among syntactic, semantic, and lexical information in parsing. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 31 Aug 88 15:25:37 EDT From: Ben Shneiderman Subject: Software Psychology Society announcement SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY POTOMAC CHAPTER VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1 FALL 1988 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 Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology Society, c/o Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD 20851. September 9 Room 413-414 ASSIMILATIVE STRUCTURING, FRAGMENTED STRUCTURING AND INTEGRATIVE MODELING: SOME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS ON THE ROLE OF 'MENTAL MODELS' DURING EARLY SKILL ACQUISITION Marc Sebrechts, Department of Psychology Catholic University, Washington, DC 20071 Two studies were conducted to clarify the meaning and utility of "mental models" for initial learning of basic UNIX operating system commands. More specifically, we examined how manipulating the types of "explicit models" presented to the user could influence resultant mental models and related performance. The explicit models were characterized by different types of conceptual elaborations (i.e. functional models and analogies) and syntactic elaborations (i.e. examples). Our results indicate that the utility of different instructional elaborations interacts with both task requirements and subjects' own elaborations. The transitions that we observed during learning are used to support a three component description of how mental models develop. Analyses of errors and protocols indicate that some of the subjects' models are closely linked to prior knowledge and form reasonably coherent structures, a process termed "assimilative structuring." At the same time, performance indicates that much of the learner's knowledge consists of discrete facts or isolated models, what we call "fragmented structuring." The modified schemata and facts that result from these processes are combined by "integrative modeling" into a more coherent representation. October 14 Room 413-414 AN OPTOMETRIC VIEW OF CRT SCREEN VISUAL EFFICIENCY AND WORKSTATION DESIGN" Alan H. Grant, OD, FAAO 2813 University Blvd., West, Kensington, MD 20895 This talk previews a new computer hardware configuration that is harmonic with human ocular neurology and hand-wrist biomechanics. We deal with questions such as: Does visual perception or tactile requirements predominate in system usage? Should the screen, keyboard, and copy-viewing area be one and the same (i.e. a co-visualization system)? These issues are gaining governmental recognition, for example the Suffolk County, NY legislation requiring 15 minute breaks every 3 hours and employer subsized eye care. Most conventional computer hardware systems have been inadequately designed for the functional comfort and efficient usage by human operators. The effects of excyclotorsion, inadequate depression-of-gaze, excessive hand-wrist pronation, and ulnar abduction are discussed. The neurology of ocular movements, synkinesis, saccades, pursuits, and orthopedic hand-wrist biomechanics are reviewed. The interrelationships of these ocular and orthopedic phenomenon have been synthesized into a comprehensive hypothesis, in an effort to create a computer configuration that permits greater integration of the keyboard with the screen visualization, and improves visual feedback. November 11 Room 413-414 EVALUATING HYPERTEXT APPLICATIONS Gary Marchionini, College of Library and Information Services University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 Hypertext computing environments are finding widespread acceptance by both authors and users. As increasing numbers of "hyperdocuments" are produced, however, more attention must be given to evaluating the effects of hypertext. Effects of hypertext will depend on users, tasks, and the computing environment. A series of studies of novice users of hypertext systems has been conducted in the College of Library and Information Services in conjunction with the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. These studies have involved users from elementary and high schools, and university settings; a variety of information retrieval tasks; and several systems. Results from these studies and descriptions of work in progress will be discussed with special attention to the issues of user control and authoring. December 9 Room 413-414 HUMAN FACTORS CONSIDERATIONS FOR HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEMS Jim Battaglia, American Voice & Robotics 1115 Paint Branch Drive (Suite 3181), College Park, MD 20742 Kent Norman, Catherine Plaisant & Dan Wallace Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 Sophisticated electronic control over complex systems has been used in industrial applications, but the operators were highly trained technologists. Today untrained consumers desire control over increasingly complex domestic environments. American Voice & Robotics and the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory are jointly researching human factors in home automation systems. The project involves the design and development of advanced user interface devices for these systems, such as touch screens, hand-held remote controls, and voice recognition. AVR builds sophisticated home automation systems for up-scale homes, integrating available entertainment, security, lighting, climate control, and communication products into a comprehensive easy-to-use package. Well-designed user interfaces are critical to success in the emerging home automation market. The joint research includes formal evaluation of user responses to existing designs, and development of new approaches for touch screens, menu selection, online help, information services, alarms, and events. ------------------------------ END OF IRList Digest ********************