-VOL-
1

-N-
1
-FROM-
From: Ed Fox <fox%vpi@csnet-relay>
-DATE-
Date: August 13, 1985
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Kick-Off Message
-BODY-
Hi!  At long last the first issue is being sent out!  I have enough
in hand for a few more issues, but will soon need additional
materials.  Please contribute freely so this will be a success!
There are now 128 addresses in the distribution list, some of which
are redistribution lists to groups of people, so if everyone contributes
at least every few months, IRList should come out >= once/week.

As time goes on I hope to add in features so people with text
editor type mail interfaces can find interesting parts more quickly.
That is something that many of you may have suggestions, so please
share your ideas.

>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Elliot Soloway <Soloway@YALE>
-DATE-
Date:    Fri, 19 Jul 85 13:43:38 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Call for Papers
-TO-
To: ai-ed@SUMEX-AIM
-BODY-
[Forwarded from ai-ed@sumex-aim, the AI in Education Bulletin Board. - Ed]

                                CALL FOR PAPERS

Research  in  the  development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems has been growing
over the past few years.  To bring together the best work in one volume, we are
organizing a special issue of the Journal  of  Artificial  Intelligence.    All
submissions will be stringently reviewed and selected for publication according
to  the  usual  standards  of the Journal.  Topics appropriate for this special
issue include:

   - Knowledge representations tailored for use in an Intelligent Tutoring
     System (ITS)

   - Architectures for ITSs

   - Methods for building student models

   - Methods for diagnosing students' bugs and misconceptions

   - Tutoring strategies

   - The use of natural language

   - Design of the human-computer interface

   - Case studies of ITSs

   - Psychological research relevant to the construction of ITSs

Guest editors for this special issue are:

Dr. Elliot Soloway                      Dr. William J. Clancey
Dept. of Computer Science               Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory
Yale University                         701 Welch Road, Building C
P.O. Box 2158                           Palo Alto, CA 94304
New Haven, Ct.  06520
SOLOWAY@YALE                            CLANCEY@SUMEX

Please send manuscripts to one of the above editors by Feb. 15, 1986.

>------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 85 02:48 EDT
-FROM-
From: Carl Hewitt <Hewitt@MIT-XX.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Call for papers: OIS-86
-BODY-
[Forwarded from AIList Bulletin Board - Ed]

        ******************************************************
        *                CALL FOR PAPERS                     *
        *                                                    *
        *             THIRD ACM CONFERENCE ON                *
        *       OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: OIS-86           *
        *                                                    *
        *                October 6-8, 1986                   *
        *               Biltmore Plaza Hotel                 *
        *                  Providence, RI                    *
        ******************************************************

General Chair:  Carl Hewitt,              Program Chair:  Stanley Zdonik,
                MIT                                       Brown University

Treasurer:  Gerald Barber,                Local Arrangements: Andrea Skarra,
            Gold Hill Computers                               Brown University

An interdisciplinary conference on issues relating to office
information systems sponsored by ACM/SIGOA in cooperation with Brown
University and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Submissions from the following fields are solicited:

Anthropology                           Artificial Intelligence
Cognitive Science                      Computer Science
Economics                              Management Science
Psychology                             Sociology

Topics appropriate for this conference include (but are not restricted
to) the following:

Technologies including Display, Voice, Telecommunications, Print, etc.

Human Interfaces
                                  Deployment and Evaluation
System Design and Construction
                                  Goals and Values
Knowledge Bases and Reasoning
                                  Distributed Services and Applications
Indicators and Models
                                  Needs and Organizational Factors
Impact of Computer Integrated Manufacturing

Unpublished papers of up to 5000 words (20 double-spaced pages) are
sought.  The first page of each paper must include the following
information: title, the author's name, affiliations, complete mailing
address, telephone number and electronic mail address where
applicable, a maximum 150-words abstract of the paper, and up to five
keywords (important for the correct classification of the paper).  If
there are multiple authors, please indicate who will present the paper
at OIS-86 if the paper is accepted.  Proceeedings will be distributed
at the conference and will later be available from ACM.  Selected
papers will be published in the ACM Transactions on Office Information
Systems.

Please send eight (8) copies of the paper to:

       Prof. Stan Zdonick
       OIS-86 Program Chair
       Computer Science Department
       Brown University
       P.O. Box 1910
       Providence, RI  02912

DIRECT INQUIRIES TO:   Rita Desormeau   (401) 863-3302

******************************************************************************

                            IMPORTANT DATES

     Deadline for Paper Submission:                   February 1, 1986
     Notification of Acceptance:                      April 30, 1986
     Deadline for Final Camera-Ready Copy:            July 1, 1986
     Conference Dates:                                October 6-8, 1986

>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Roy Rada CSB <rada@NLM-MCS>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 85 00:15:10 edt
-TO-
To: IRList%vpi@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
Ed,
  I'm glad to hear about IRList.  I work with several
people on "Building Classification Structures for Biomedical
Literature" and have forwarded your note to them and some others.
  Congratulations.
    Roy Rada

>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: michon%sprite.DEC@DECWRL
-DATE-
Date: Friday, 19 Jul 1985 12:30:24-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: please put me on the Information Retrevial mailing list
-BODY-
My name is Brian Michon, I'm with DEC's Educational Service's R&D group.
I'm currently working on a Advanced Learning Workstation project

My focus is on user interfaces for the direct manipulation of
video (disc, tape, camera, digital), graphics and text.

>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: WEYER@HPLABS
-DATE-
Date: 18 Jul 1985 0724-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: Welcome to IRList
-BODY-
yes. please include me on irlist. i've also forwarded it to steve gano
here at hplabs, and to robert crickman@umn who just contacted me with
regard to the encyclopedia article.

are you aware of the linkers distribution list related to online info
access, run by Kirk Kelley?
[Could anyone knowledgeable about 'linkers' let us all know what it
 is about and how it operates?  Thanks, Ed]

steve

>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: WEYER@HPLABS
-DATE-
Date: 18 Jul 1985 0749-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: electronic encyclopedia talk & paper
-CC-
Cc: weyer@HPLABS, borning@WASHINGTON
-BODY-
Although the date for the talk below has passed and you may have seen this
in several other digests, I thought it of interest to pass on.

Here is a pointer to a recent paper discussing this work.

Stephen Weyer & Alan Borning
A Prototype Electronic Encyclopedia
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan. 1985, pp. 63-88.


Stephen Weyer
Hewlett Packard Laboratories
1501 Page Mill Road, 3U
Palo Alto, CA 94303-0866

(415) 857-3059
weyer@hplabs, weyer.hplabs@csnet-relay, ...hplabs!weyer

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
 Date: 12 Jul 1985  10:49 EDT (Fri)
-FROM-
 From: Crisse Ciro <CRISSE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
 Subject: Seminar - Electronic Encyclopedia (MIT)
-BODY-
                         Wednesday, July 17
                         8th Floor Playroom
                               NE43
                             3:00 PM
         INTERACTIVE SIMULATIONS FOR AN ELECTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA
                           Alan Borning
                    Computer Science Department
                     University of Washington
   In the first part of this seminar, I'll describe work on a prototype
 electronic encyclopedia.  The prototype makes use of the text from an
 existing print encyclopedia, and employs a window-oriented browser on a
 Symbolics 3600 computer.  Selected articles in the prototype also include
 some features that take advantage of the new medium, including interactive
 simulations, links to a picture library stored on a videodisk, and active
 text for browsing cross references, expanding abbreviations, and converting
 from one measurement system to another.
   The construction of a comprehensive electronic encyclopedia that takes
 full advantage of the computer medium will be an enormous task, and will
 require good computer-based tools to support the encyclopedia's authors.
 The second part of the seminar will concern research on one such tool: a
 kit for constructing interactive simulations.  Using this kit, authors can
 construct simulations of such things as manipulable diagrams illustrating
 geometric theorems or simulations of physics experiments.  The kit, an
 extension of the ThingLab system, uses constraints to specify the relations
 between parts of the simulations, and provides convenient graphical tools for
 assembling and manipulating simulations.
   As part of the talk two videoptapes will be shown: first, a brief demo of
 the prototype electronic encyclopedia, and second, a demo of ThingLab,
 including recent enhancements.

>------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
2
-FROM-
From: John Shepherd <jas@mungunni>
-DATE-
Date: 23 Jul 85 12:57:22 +1000 (Tue)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Adding Australia to IRList
-BODY-
Ed,
We here at Melbourne University would be very interested in
receiving and contributing to the Information Retrieval Digest.
In order to cut transmission costs we plan to set up a mail
alias on the Australian gateway machine (munnari), and distribute
the list from there ...

As you can see, we will handle requests from our end, and simply
add people to the mailing list.

I have one major question, related to a recent experience with
the Parallel Symbolic computation digest. A number of people here
at Melbourne were put onto that mailing list, and received the
first few issues. Suddenly, they received mail telling them that
they would no longer be receiving the list because they were "foreign
nationals" and there was some problem with "technology transfer".
Do you have any feelings on this matter? (Perhaps Parallel Symbolic
computation is slightly more sensitive because of its military
connections). ...

Regards, John Shepherd (jas@mungunni)
UUCP:	{seismo,ukc,mcvax,ubc-vision}!munnari!jas
ARPA:	munnari!jas@seismo.ARPA
CSNET:	jas@munnari.oz
>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: pje@munnari [Note- this is reachable by UUCP from SEISMO.ARPA - Ed]
-DATE-
Date: 23 Jul 85 12:55:25 +1000 (Tue)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList
-BODY-
Would you please add IR-List@munnari to the IRList subscription list.

We provide for redistribution of mailing list items to all sites in
the "oz" domain.  So if you receive any subscription requests
from sites in Australia, please refer them to IR-List-Request@munnari.

Thank you.						Peter Eden.

[Australian members please note!  After this issue, you will be
 deleted from the list, so be sure to get added as mentioned. - Ed]
>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Wolf-Dieter Batz <L12%DHDURZ2.BITNET@WISCVM>
-DATE-
Date: 24-July-85
-BODY-
[Comments on interests by new members is most welcome!  Please feel
 free to respond to the implied question, folks! - Ed]

I'm interested in human memory phenomena as well as in
silicon-based memory systems. The latter interest especially
concentrates on an expert system for political issues.
Cordial Thanx & kind regards
                                --- Wodi
>------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	From: Lee Hollaar <Hollaar@UTAH-20>
-DATE-
Date: Tue 30 Jul 85 06:25:42-MDT
-BODY-
Would you please add me to your distribution list for the IR digest.
I am the principal investigator of a project developing a distributed
workstation environment for information handing and retrieval, and
and directing the implementation of a high-speed backend search engine
(announced as a product through a spin-off company).  I'm also the
Vice-Chair of SIGIR.

[SIGIR Forum should be of interest to all readers.  It is distributed
 to all members of the ACM Special Interest Group on Inf. Ret. - Ed]

			Lee Hollaar
			Hollaar@Utah-20
>------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "girill terry%d.mfenet"@LLL-MFE
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 85 07:26 pst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Access aids bibliography for IRlist distribution
-BODY-
     IRlist readers who did not attend the ACM Twelfth Annual User
Services Conference, November 1984, in Reno, Nevada, may find this
bibliographic outline interesting.  It covers recently discussed access
aids for online documentation......

                     Online Access Aids For Documentation:
                            A Bibliographic Outline
                                  T. R. Girill
                National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center
                            University of California
                              Livermore, CA 94550
                           Background for a Panel on
                     Online Documentation and User Services
                                  ACM SIGUCCS
                        Twelfth User Services Conference
                                  Reno, Nevada
                               November 12, 1984
         Computer documentation poses three information management problems,
    access problems that readers face when they try to find answers to
    questions using the documentation.  All three problems arise from a
    mismatch between what readers want or expect and what document authors
    provide in (1) vocabulary, (2) text structure, and (3) text scope.
         Techniques exist for addressing this threefold mismatch in
    traditional, offline documentation.  But these offline techniques are
    often limited in breadth or power, or prove prohibitively complex or
    expensive to apply.
         Online solutions for each access problem also exist, and are much
    more effective than their traditional counterparts.  They apply
    computational tools already successfully tested elsewhere, and they all
    share the property of adapting a document's terminology, structure, or
    scope to meet reader needs.  The relative benefits of these adaptive
    access aids can make a well-designed online documentation system very
    helpful to answer-seeking users.
         This outline reviews the three kinds of mismatch that cause access
    problems for readers, and inventories the online techniques that respond
    to each problem.  Implementation details are already available in other
    published articles and books, for which I provide full bibliographic
    references.
    Vocabulary Mismatch
    -------------------
    Mismatch between the vocabulary in a document and the query or search
    terms used by prospective readers poses the first major access problem.
    1.  That a document's vocabulary affects the ease with with one can read
        it is well known.
    2.  But vocabulary also strongly affects the retrieval of answer
        passages from documents.
        a.  Common practice selects index terms and keywords chiefly from
            the text of the document itself. [Browning]
        b.  But these text terms are only a small fraction of all possible
            terms.  This makes the index entries and keywords inappropriate
            for many readers, who then cannot locate answer passages even
            when the text does contain relevant answers and when the
            searcher has a specific question formulated. [Sullivan]
    3.  Psychological experiments confirm the seriousness of this mismatch
        of terms. [Furnas]
        a.  For passsages flagged with a single keyword, the probability
            that a user's search term will match that keyword is often less
            than 20%.
        b.  Even if keyword choice exploits empirical evidence of user
            preferences, the match probability remains below 40%.
        c.  One must assign as many as 15 distinct keywords to a sought
            passage to raise the probability of a first-time match by users
            to 60-80%.  "Different people, contexts, and motives give rise
            to so varied a list of names that no single name, no matter how
            well chosen, can do very well." [Furnas, p. 1796]
    4.  Although professional indexers know techniques to enhnace
        index-entry and keyword choice, offline indexes can never adapt to
        reader needs at the time of use.
    5.  On the other hand, actively "negotiating" search terms with
        documentation users while they look for answers, via an interactive
        interface to online text, can dramatically improve term-match (and
        hence search-success) probability.
        a.  Programs that "begin with user's words and look for
            interpretations--that is, try to recognize every possible word
            that the users generate, and use empirical data to determine
            what they mean by that word" by iterative guessing, can yield
            match probabilities around 90%. [Furnas, p. 1797]
        b.  Even when keywords come exclusively from a standard, limited
            thesaurus, "relevance feedback" from users during a search
            improves performance. [Doszkocs]
        c.  Soliciting and exploiting feedback on term correlations in
            online documents during a search promotes success by letting
            users recognize, rather than try to imagine, the semantic
            relationships they seek. [Doyle]
        d.  Soliciting and exploiting feedback on term frequencies in online
            documents during a search quickly reveals and isolates relevant
            passages amidst large collections. [Burket]
        e.  "Query optimization" programs can exploit synonymy and other
            semantic relations to convert queries posed in user's terms into
            faster-searching, less-expensive queries behind the scenes.
            [Barr]
    Structure Mismatch
    ------------------
    Mismatch between a document's structure and the structure expected or
    needed by the reader poses the second major access problem.
    1.  That a document's structure affects its coherence and clarity is
        well known.
    2.  But document structure also strongly affects the ease with which
        readers can find answer passages. [Gerrie, p. 117]
    3.  In this access-support role, the structure of offline documents is
        intrinsically limited. [Swigger] [Wright]
        a.  No matter how astute its organization, a printed document can
            have only one hierarchical structure.
        b.  Any single structure will fail to match the needs, expectations,
            and distinctions of some who encounter it.
        c.  The more diverse a document's audience, the more common and
            severe this mismatch will be.
        d.  Even a single reader may bring to a document different needs and
            interests at different times, although its structure remains
            unchanged.
    4.  Techniques to adapt document structure to user needs have been
        developed to cope with these limitations.
        a.  Two techniques apply both offline and online.
            1.  Providing more than one outline or "retrieval guide" for a
                document, where each embodies quite different distinctions,
                can improve access. [Sprowl]
            2.  Converting the table of contents or text hierarchy into a
                decision tree for locating passages can improve access.
                [Wright]
        b.  Even in these cases, online implementation is often more
            successful than offline.
            1.  Programs exist to easily generate outlines and decision
                trees online. [Gaffney]
            2.  Updating is easier and more frequent if the outlines and
                decision trees are kept online. [Sprowl]
            3.  Use can be monitored online, and the (empirically) most
                common choices can then be offered first.
    5.  Furthermore, some adaptive techniques are only available online:
        computer-directed searching techniques can actively adapt to suit
        readers in ways impossible with traditional publications.
        a.  Document distribution and passage retrieval programs can keep a
            model of the user, constantly modified in light of past requests
            and performance.  By relying on this model, the software can
            actively map the user's needs onto the document's structure,
            even if his interests change during a search. [Oddy]
        b.  Online search interfaces can infer a user's goals from his overt
            request (including indirect or implicit goals).  They can then
            plan a "cooperative response" that furthers those search goals,
            even when the user might have been unable to formulate them
            himself (something no book can do). [Wilensky] [Jackson]
        c.  Integrating online documentation with the program it explains
            can provide an alternative access structure, one tied to
            practical applications and actual user tasks.  Query-in-depth
            (increasingly detailed) passage display can make integrated
            documentation even more adaptive. [Houghton]
        d.  Online passage-retrieval programs can use data structures much
            more complex and sophisticated than any writer could support or
            any reader could exploit offline.  Linked lists, associative
            networks, and other relation-rich structures support diverse
            search paths, multiple classifications, and elaborate cross
            references among passages. [Price]
    Scope Mismatch
    --------------
    Mismatch between a document's scope and the scope expected or needed by
    readers poses the third major access problem.
    1.  That the scope of a document's passages affects readers' ability to
        learn from them and notice key features in them is well known.
        [Fleming] [Conklin]
    2.  But scope also strongly influences the ease with which readers can
        find adequate answers.
        a.  If passages are too small or sparse (compared to what readers
            need), then readers must "jump, detour, and change [search]
            directions" frequently to find complete answers. [Weiss, p. 10]
        b.  If passages are too large or detailed (compared to what readers
            need), they intimidate and confuse readers, leading to awkward
            rereading and lengthy searches. [Bethke]
    3.  The ability of offline documents to provide passages of suitable
        scope is limited.
        a.  Documents that avoid redundancy to keep passages small must rely
            on an elaborate web of cross references to provide detailed
            answers.  Following these reference chains can be awkward and
            confusing.
        b.  Documents that avoid cross references by including many
            intentionally redundant (hence complete) passages automatically
            grow in bulk.  Their large size can intimidate readers and boost
            costs.
    4.  Techniques to adapt passage scope to reader needs are available
        online that would be impractical or impossible in offline
        documentation.
        a.  Freed from the offline contraints of page size and binding, one
            can package online text in intellectually meaningful chunks, in
            display units whose scope is based on content alone. [Badre]
            [Rothenberg]
        b.  Online cross references between such meaningful chunks minimize
            access delays and reader confusion because they lead directly
            and precisely to related text, which seldom occurs offline.
            [Girill]
        c.  Online passage-display programs can support virtual redundancy,
            by showing a set of text lines wherever it is relevant but
            without storing duplicate copies of the lines.  This gives the
            reader the quick-answer benefits of a highly redundant document,
            yet without an increase in total size, and hence without
            intimidation, unwieldy bulk, or higher storage costs. [Luk]
    References
    ----------
    Badre, Albert.  "Designing Chunks for Sequentially Displayed
             Information," in Albert Badre and Ben Shneiderman, Eds.,
             Directions in Human/Computer Interaction (Norwood, NJ:  Ablex
             Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 179-193.
    Barr, Avron and Edward A. Feigenbaum.  The Handbook of Artificial
             Intelligence (Los Altos, CA:  William Kaufman, Inc., 1982),
             vol. 2, Ch. VII-D, "Artificial Intelligence in Database
             Management."
    Bethke, F. J.  Ease-of-Use Study Group Report (San Jose, CA:  IBM Santa
             Teresa Laboratory, 1979).
    Browning, Christine.  Guide to Effective Software Technical Writing
             (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1984), Ch. 8.
    Burket, T. G., P. Emrath, and D. J. Kuck.  "The Use of Vocabulary Files
             for On-line Information Retrieval," Information Processing and
             Management, 15 (1979), 281-289.
    Conklin, E. J., K. Ehrlich, and D. D. McDonald.  "An Empirical
             Investigation of Visual Salience and its Role in Text
             Generation," Cognition and Brain Theory 6 (1983), 197-225.
    Doszkocs, Tamas and Barbara A. Rapp.  "Searching MEDLINE in English:  A
             Prototype User Interface with Natural Language Query, Ranked
             Output, and Relevance Feedback," Proceedings of the ASIS 42nd
             Annual Meeting, vol. 16 (White Plains, NY:  Knowledge Industry
             Publications, 1979), 131-137.
    Doyle, Lauren B.  "Semantic Road Maps for Literature Searchers," Journal
             of the Association for Computing Machinery, 8 (October 1961),
             553-578.
    Fleming, Malcolm and W. Howard Levie.  Instructional Message Design
             (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:  Educational Technology Publications,
             1978), Ch. 2.
    Furnas, G. W. , T. K. Landauer, L. M. Gomez, and S. J. Dumais.
             "Statistical Semantics:  Analysis of the Potential Performance
             of Key-Word Information Systems," Bell System Technical
             Journal, 62 (July 1983), 1753-1806.
    Gaffney, P. W., J. W. Wooten, and K. A. Kessel.  NITPACK--A Numerical
             Interactive Tree Package (Oak Ridge, TN:  Oak Ridge National
             Laboratory, 1982), Report ORNL/CSD-89.
    Gerrie, Brenda.  Online Information Systems (Arlington, VA:  Information
             Resources Press, 1983), Ch. 4, "The Retrieval Process."
    Girill,  T. R.  "Display Units for Online Passage Retrieval:  A
             Comparative Analysis," Proceedings of the 31st International
             Technical Communication Conference, (Seattle:  Society for
             Technical Communication, 1984), ATA87-90.
    Houghton, Raymond C. Jr.  "Online Help Systems:  A Conspectus,"
             Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 27
             (February 1984), 126-133.
    Jackson, Peter and Paul Lefrere.  "On the Application of Rule-Based
             Techniques to the Design of Advice-Giving Systems,"
             International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 20 (January
             1984), 63-86.
    Luk, Clement and T. R. Girill.  "DOCUMENT:  An Interactive, Online
             Solution to Four Documentation Problems," Communications of the
             Association for Computing Machinery, 26 (May 1983), 328-337.
    Oddy, R. N.  "Information Retrieval Through Man-Machine Dialogue,"
             Journal of Documentation, 33 (March 1977), 1-14.
    Price, Lynne A.  "Using Offline Documentation Online," SIGSOC Bulletin,
             13 (January 1982), 15-20.
    Rothenberg, J. H.  "Online Tutorials and Documentation for the SIGMA
             Message Service," Proceedings of the AFIPS National Computer
             Conference, vol. 48 (Montvale, NJ:  AFIPS Press, 1979),
             863-867.
    Sprowl, James A.  "Computer-Assisted Legal Research--An Analysis of
             Full-Text Document Delivery Systems," American Bar Foundation
             Research Journal, 175 (1976), 175-226.
    Sullivan, Patricia, and Carol Janik.  "Adapting Manuals to a Variety of
             Audiences:  Information Access," Proceedings of the 31st
             International Technical Communication Conference (Seattle:
             Society for Technical Communication, 1984), WE187-190.
    Swigger, Keith.  "A Structured Model for Software Documentation," 13th
             ASIS Midyear Meeting, Bloomington, IN, May 21, 1984, 9 pp.
    Weiss, Edmond.  "Usability:  Toward a Science of User Documentation,"
             Computerworld, 17 (January 1983), 9-16.
    Wilensky, Robert.  Talking to UNIX in English:  An Overview of an Online
             Consultant, (Berkeley:  Computer Science Division, University
             of California, 1982), Report UCB/CSD 82/104.
    Wright, Patricia.  "Presenting Technical Information:  A Survey of
             Research Findings," Instructional Science, 6 (April 1977),
             93-134.
>-------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
3
-FROM-
From: Tom Scott <scott@BGSU>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 85 12:46:51 edt
-BODY-
Ed:
	Congratulations  on  the  IRList  newsgroup.   It's an excellent
idea.  Please add me to the mailing list.  Have you read my  article  in
Ken  Laws's  AIList  (volume  3  #92)?   Your  comments on the vision of
knowledge  engineering  that   I'm   preparing   are   welcome.    ...

[Perhaps you would like to send an excerpt of your AIList article?  We
 can then all make comments.  IRList is to help each of us obtain a
 broader vision of the field! - Ed]

	Jai Guru Dev,

	Tom Scott                  UUCP: cbosgd!osu-eddie!bgsuvax!scott
	Dept. of Math. & Stat.     CSNET/ARPANET: scott@bgsu
	Bowling Green State Univ.  ATT: 419-372-2636
	Bowling Green, OH
	43403-0221

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	From: klahr@NYU-CSD2
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 85 16:45:26 edt
-BODY-
Your IRList sounds like a good idea.  Could I subscribe to it?  I am an MD-PhD
student working on medical AI and decision support systems.  Thank you.

Sincerely...Phillip Klahr    KLAHR@NYU

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Anton Tomas <TOMAS%HLERUL5.BITNET@WISCVM>
-DATE-
Date: 23-JUL-1985 23:26:17 MET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NEW MEMBER IRLIST
-BODY-
Following your message in AIlist, I should be able to reach
you on BITNET, but irlist-request@vpics1 didn't work.

[Thanks for informing me!  I have corrected the Welcome message
accordingly.   fox@vpics1 & sigir@vpics1 DO work for BITNET. - Ed]

           Anton J Tomas                       University of Leiden
                                               School of Medicine
   BITNET: TOMAS@HLERUL5                       Medical Informatics
     ARPA: TOMAS%HLERUL5.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA    P.O.Box 9604, 2300RC Leiden
    Phone: +31 71 148333 ext 4187 or 3610      The Netherlands

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Christopher Schmidt <SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM>
-DATE-
Date: Thu 18 Jul 85 10:04:31-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: sigir list
-TO-
To: fox.vpi@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
	Please add Incoming-IRList@SUMEX-AIM to the IRLIST distribution.
This forwards into a bboard locally where our users will pick it up.
	At the same time, please remove Richer@SUMEX-AIM from the list.
	Thanks,
>-Christopher

[IRList members at SUMEX-AIM please note: I will remove all addresses of
 people at SUMEX-AIM as per the above request, before the next issue.

 Other members please note: several locations have groups of people
 working on information retrieval (ex. faculty, students, staff,
 programmers).  You may wish to have local redistribution set up,
 open to all interested parties. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Glenn Rennels <Rennels@SUMEX-AIM>
-DATE-
Date: Thu 25 Jul 85 09:07:46-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Orals - Deep Models from Clinical Literature (SU)
ReSent-From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI>
-BODY-
		  University Orals Examination

	"A Structured Representation of the Clinical Literature
	  and its Use in a Medical Management Advice System"

			Glenn  Rennels
		Medical Information Sciences
 	         Wednesday, July 31, 2:15 pm
                M-112 Stanford Medical Center

	                  ABSTRACT

  Published reports of clinical trials are important to medical
practice.  This biostatistical literature allows physicians to keep
abreast of rapidly changing medical knowledge.  There has been little
or no integration of the clinical literature with computer-based
medical advice systems.  More commonly, these programs use human
pathophysiology to explain disease and to direct physicians in their
decision making. This "causal modelling" work has correlates in
non-medical AI research: programs that can diagnose faults in
electronic equipment.  In medical AI, the representation of
multi-layered causal models has been called "deep models" and
continues to be a major research focus.

 The thesis of this research is that the clinical literature forms the
basis of a deep model of clinical decision making.  A computer system
ignoring this model will be severely lacking in its relevance to the
practitioner.  The goals of this research are to conceptualize the
model and to test the conceptualization by implementing a computer
program that draws upon structured representations of the clinical
literature in order to critique plans for medical management.  The
application domain is the management of primary breast cancer, but it
is emphasized that the issues are general and arise in every medical
management domain.

 There are at least three problems that are relevant to building a
computer system such as the one proposed; these are the principal
topics of this talk.  First of all, using the literature for clinical
advice requires assessing the distance from a study to the clinical
decision at hand.  Second, there must be a method for resolving
conflicts between studies.  Finally, it is desirable that the system
have at least a rough understanding of the physicians objectives and
how therapy choice incorporates those, so that the system can discuss
study results with reference to those objectives.

   [ PhD Oral Examinations in Medical Information Sciences are
     administered approximately 1 year prior to the completion
                    of the dissertation. ]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI>
-DATE-
Date: Wed 7 Aug 85 22:29:48-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: [Robert Sansom@CMU-CS-SPICE.ARPA: Time Machines?]
-BODY-
This note from the CMU bboard may amuse IRList readers.
					-- Ken Laws

Return-Path: <rds@cmu-cs-spice.arpa>
Date: Tue 06 Aug 85 11:46:45-EDT
From: Robert Sansom@CMU-CS-SPICE.ARPA
Subject: Time Machines?


  Received: from CMU-CS-K.ARPA by CMU-CS-SPICE.ARPA;  6 Aug 85 11:28:21 EDT
  Received: from CMU-CC-TE.ARPA by CMU-CS-K.ARPA;  6 Aug 85 11:28:22 EDT
  Received: ID <xx@CMU-CC-TE.ARPA>; 6 Aug 85 11:29:27 EDT
  Date: 6 Aug 85 11:29:27 EDT

The mail starts at Tops-E at 11:29:27.
A little more than a minute earlier it is received by the K Vax.
A second earlier it is received by the Spice Vax.

	Isn't computer science wonderful?

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
4
-DATE-
Date: 17 Aug 1985 11:45-EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  IRList V 1 No. 2
-BODY-
It would be nice if you could change the format of the IRList digests
to match the "standard" ARPAnet digest layout, so that those of us with
digest reading software could read the digests more effectively.
Basically the lines of -------- aren't quite right -- if you need
details, let me know and I'll look them up.

>-david
[Note:  Thanks to David and some others that pointed this out!  I believe
the digests are in correct form now.  That is, 70 dashes at top, and
30 dashes separating messages, with a blank line before. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Aviezri Fraenkel <fraenkel@wisdom>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 85 09:53:43 -0200
-BODY-
    Ed,
    Who are the new SIGIR Officers? Could you pls send me a list of names
with their functions? Thanks very much.
    Best wishes,  Aviezri S. Fraenkel, Professor.
                Bitnet:  fraenkel@wisdom.bitnet
          From Arpanet:  fraenkel%wisdom.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
            From Csnet:  fraenkel%wisdom.bitnet@csnet-relay.arpa

[Note: here is the requested information.  Remember, ACM SIGIR needs
 new members!  The new officers are energetic and have good plans. - Ed

   Chairman:
   Professor Clement Yu		    Secretary:
   Department of Elect. Eng.	    John Tolle, Ph.D.
     and Computer Science	    OCLC, Inc.
   Univ. of Illinois at Chicago	    6565 Frantz Road
   Chicago, Illinois 60680	    Dublin, Ohio 43017-0702
   (312) 996-2318		    (614) 764-6000
   Vice Chairman:		    Treasurer:
   Professor Lee A. Hollaar	    Donna Williamson
   Department of Computer Science   National Library of Medicine
   University of Utah		    8600 Rockville Pike
   3160 Merrill Engineering Bldg.   Bethesda, Maryland, 20894
   Salt Lake City UT  84112	    301-496-1936
   801-581-3203			    donna@nlm-vax.arpa
   hollaar@utah-20.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Aviezri Fraenkel <fraenkel@wisdom>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 85 09:30:23 -0200
-BODY-
    Ed,
    At the recent SIGIR Conference in Montreal, a panel on Theoretical and
Algorithmic Aspects of Information Storage and Retrieval took place. I thought
that the abstracts of the panel might be of general interest, so I forward
them to you hereby:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
                              Panel on
  THEORETICAL AND ALGORITHMIC ASPECTS OF INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
                   Chairman: Aviezri S. Fraenkel
      The main aim of the panel is to portray a large number of examples
illustrating how theoretical and algorithmic approaches can lead to a better
understanding of problems or to improved solutions to problems in Information
Storage and Retrieval.
      Abstracts of the addresses follow below. Each address will probably
be limited to 10 minutes -- the mean free attention span at the end of a
strenuous day! -- followed by a 5 minute question and answer period.
                          SELECTION OF CLUSTERS
                               Clement  Yu
                   The University of Illinois at Chicago
         Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
                          Illinois 60680, U.S.A.
     The problem of deciding the clusters to be searched is considered.
If terms are distributed independently, a simple algorithm is given for
the problem. The algorithm is then modified to take into consideration
dependencies between terms. It is shown that the algorithm has low time
complexity and yields accurate estimation.
             ON THE PHYSICAL ORGANIZATION OF CLUSTERED FILES
                           Vijay V. Raghavan
                         University of  Regina
                    Department of  Computer Science
                        Regina S4S 0A2,  Canada
        The process of classification involves placing a set of objects into
affinity classes or clusters, in such a way that the objects within a class are
more similar to each other than they are to objects outside the class. In
information retrieval, the documents comprising the bibliographic data base
may be classified in order to identify clusters of documents that exhibit
similar characteristics. In addition, there may also be a need to cluster
index terms used to represent documents or to obtain a clustering of user
queries.
        Since the objects within a cluster are to be retrieved jointly, it is
desirable that they be kept in close proximity in physical storage. When the
clusters are pairwise disjoint, a simple scheme called the cluster-inverted
organization provides the answer.
        More generally, when clusters are allowed to overlap or when multi-
level clusterings are employed, specialized algorithms are needed to ensure
that physical proximity of objects of a cluster is achieved while keeping
the redundancy in stored objects as small as possible.
        Some recent results in this area are identified. In particular, it
is pointed out that for a single level, overlapping clustering, identifying
minimum redundacy organization is NP-complete. This result justifies the
development of a heuristic algorithm that is efficient, although not always
optimal. The results for multi-level clusterings deal with the issue of
having one arrangemet of the objects that would simultaneously achieve
consecutive retrieval for clusters in every level of a clustering.
        THE USE OF FUZZY SUBSET THEORY IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
                          Donald H. Kraft
                  Department of Computer Science
                    Louisiana State University
                Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, U.S.A.
Substantial work has been done on the application of fuzzy subset theory
to information retrieval.  Boolean query processing has been generalized to
allow for weights to be attached to individual index term and to terms in a
query.  However, problems still remain in terms of preservation of the Boolean
lattice structure.  Interesting applications using weights to generate
the linguistic structure of queries have been considered.  Moreover, work is
ongoing to develop retrieval performance measures taking ranked output into
consideration.
            SOME RECENT ADVANCES IN STRING-MANIPULATION ALGORITHMS
                              Alberto Apostolico
                          Computer Science Department
                              Purdue  University
                     West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, U.S.A.
The talk will briefly review some recent progress in (serial as well as
parallel) Algorithmics on Strings which seem of relevance to common
tasks of Information Storage and Retrieval.
One such task is the well known, and widely investigated, pattern matching
problem, i.e., the problem of finding the first (or all) occurrences of
an assigned string (the pattern) in a longer string (the text). Some
practically relevant variations of the pattern matching problem
have also been enhanced to some extent, although the main questions
posed by them are still open: examples are the so-called pattern matching
with don't care and the approximate pattern matching ,i.e.,
pattern matching within an assigned edit distance. Other advances
revolve around index structures built around the notion of Suffix Tree.
Such structures have been found suitable to such tasks as
multiple pattern matching in time linear in the sum of the  lengths of the
patterns, computing the complete substring statistics with or without
overlaps, supporting some data compression techniques, building
inverted files associated with a set of text files, etc.
Finally, recent progress in problems related to common subsequences
of strings will be pin-pointed.
                         ROBUST DATA COMPRESSION
                           Aviezri S. Fraenkel
                    The Weizmann Institute of Science
                    Department of Applied Mathematics
                          Rehovot 76100, Israel
    For speeding up data retrieval or data encryption, or for reducing
communication costs, it is often desirable to compress data. Many of
the standard encodings used for compression are very error-sensitive
in the sense that a single error may render the entire tail of the
encoded string undecipherable. A new class of robust universal and
uniquely decipherable encodings, based on exotic numeration systems,
will be reviewed briefly.
   MEASUREMENT-THEORY AND EVALUATION MEASURES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
              Peter Bollmann, Technische Universitaet
                             Berlin
If we get measurement-values by the application of an evaluation measure
we want to make statements using these values. Such statements include
the comparison of these values, of differences, of percentages or
of arithmetic means. These comparisons are not meaningful for all
kinds of scales. For example the comparison of two arithmetic means is
meaningful for an interval scale but not for an ordinal scale.
Measurement-theory yields criteria which assumptions scales have to
fulfil and hence whether a statement is meaningful or not. In order to
have a foundation for measurement in information retrieval the basic
concepts of measurement-theory have to be interpreted in terms of
information retrieval. Examples will be given.
    With best wishes, Aviezri S. Fraenkel.
                Bitnet:  fraenkel@wisdom.bitnet
          From Arpanet:  fraenkel%wisdom.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
            From Csnet:  fraenkel%wisdom.bitnet@csnet-relay.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: thrapp@noscvax.UUCP (Gary R. Thrapp)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: summary, map generation on micros
-DATE-
Date: 31 Jul 85 17:33:57 GMT
-BODY-
[Forwarded from WORKS Digest V.5 No. 31. - Ed]
A couple of weeks ago I submitted the following request:

****************************************************************

I am interested in obtaining software to generate geographic maps on
Sun workstations and other micros of various word sizes.  I expect
this will involve a map database and software to access it.  The
preferred features are to accept a map center and radius (or
latitude-longitude boundaries) and generate a display with shore
outlines or filled landforms with a lat-lon grid.  If the software
used high level generic graphics calls for lines and polygons it
could help for portability.

A while ago I checked into getting a database called World Databank
II, however I was told it took 9 reel-to-reel tapes to hold it.  I am
interested in something with perhaps less resolution but that would
fit on micros with limited storage.

I plan to post a summary of responses I receive by mail.  Thank you.

Gary R. Thrapp
Naval Ocean Systems Center
San Diego, CA

MILNET/ARPANET: thrapp@nosc
UUCP: {ihnp4,akgua,decvax,dcdwest,ucbvax}!sdcsvax!noscvax!thrapp

****************************************************************

Thank you all for the responses I received.  There are some
possibilities here given some work.  However my interest was in a
medium resolution map database of a couple of megabytes or so with
landforms and high level source code to display it.  I was
considering something simple that could be easily ported to various
micros.  If someone knows of such software please send me mail.

For those who expressed interest in the CIA generated map database
and software, here is the information I have found:

        World Databank II, 5 volume set ( > 400 megabytes, perhaps
             much more) $660.
        CAM Fortran software to access and display
             the map database $400.

        National Technical Information Service
        5285 Fort Royal Road
        Springfield, VA  22161

        Products  703-487-4600
        Sales     703-487-4650

Here is an edited summary of the responses that I received, minus
references to others that I don't have permission to post:

****************************************************************

        For ibm-type pc's, you might consider routines from a company
called Golden Software.  They have a series of programs, fairly cheap
that take x,y,z coordinates and plot 3-D and topographic maps.
Various rotations, translations, and slices are possible.

****************************************************************

How about World Database I? It's about 5 megabytes.

****************************************************************

I think you can get whatever map information you want, in up to 1/2
kilometer (or better) resolution, from the National Center for
Cartieographic Studies or something.  Check in a book called
"Information USA," it's listed there.  They can provide it on 9-track
tape in various formats.

If too much resolution is a problem, you can write some programs to
take, for instance, a costal outline and do vector sums until you
reduce it to something reasonable.

****************************************************************

        I am writing software to display maps (color or black &
white) on Sun workstations.  The software is in C, utilizing the
SunCGI low-level graphics package.  CGI is an ANSI Computer Graphics
Interface standard currently under development.  Also I am using the
the multiple tools/windows, subwindows and icon facilities (Pixwin)
of the Sun workstations.
        As for the map information itself, I'm planning on using the
US Geological Survey (USGS) digital cartographic standards.  There
are two parts to the standards: Digital Line Graphs (DLG), such as
rivers and roads; Digital Elevation Models (DEM), ground elevations.
The DEM is available also in a modified format (a tighter gridding of
elevation points) from the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), and also
from USGS.  I'm currently working with the DLG attributes only.  The
USGS has completely mapped the USA with a 1:250,000 map scale and is
slowly digitizing on a 1:24,000 scale.  Eventually I believe the
digital standards will apply to overseas maps as well, the DMA is
already using a modified DEM standard.
        I plan to allow zooming between 1:250,000 and 1:24,000 scale
maps, panning, toggling of features, etc.  The software will be
mostly mouse driven with an eye toward easing the usage by
non-typists.  Various dynamic features, such as military units, will
be represented by icons (standard military symbols) which can be
manipulated by a mouse.
        In general most of the software will be portable to other
systems, the only exception will be the Pixwin features of the Sun
workstations.  I am using the ANSI CGI and the USGS DLG/DEM standards
with regards to portability to, and compatabilty with, other machines
and/or software.
        As for the storage of data on micros, that will be a problem.
I found that maps are very detailed, dense pieces of information.  I
suggest that the map data base be eventually stored on optically
encoded disks (giga-bytes).

****************************************************************

        This won't help with a Sun, but it might give you someting to
look into: Software Concepts, Stamford CT (203-357-0522) sells a
low-priced graphics program for the IBM-PC that is supposed to
provide a 3-D world map. It costs $69.95 and fits on one disk.  The
features seem impressive for this package - turning the globe N, E, S
or W, zoom, etc. It also does some distance calculating and plotting.
        All this info from an articel in PC Week of a few months ago.

****************************************************************

We have the NCAR graphics package up and running on our Suns.  One of
the routines is called SUPMAP, and its purpose is to draw maps in
various projections centered at various points.  It may have all of
the capabilities you need.  My only experience with it is running the
test program provided by NCAR to see if it worked as expected (it
did).  The map database is about 1Mbyte.  I don't know how hard it
would be to port the NCAR package to other micros.  The thing is
written in Fortran 66, but is very machine dependent, and we had to
hack hard to get it to work on the Suns and the Vax.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: rick@seismo.UUCP (Rick Adams)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: summary, map generation on micros
-DATE-
Date: 14 Aug 85 22:41:57 GMT
-BODY-
[Forwarded from WORKS Digest V.5 No. 31. - Ed]
Actually the World Databank II is really only about 20 Mbytes. It
comes on 5 tapes and looks like 400 Mbytes of data because, as
delivered, it has everything in fixed length records of ascii
characters. Once on your target machine, by writing binary floating
point numbers instead of the characters, you can get it down to a
reasonable size.  You can reduce it even smaller by throwing out the
rivers and state/province boundaries.

>--rick

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
5
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 85 00:00:19 cdt
-FROM-
From: Mark Turner <mark%gargoyle.uchicago.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: representation of knowledge
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Volume 3 : Issue 90 - Ed]

I am gathering for my students a bibligraphy
of works on representation
of knowledge.  I am particularly concerned with
cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence,
philosophy, linguistics, and natural language processing.
I would appreciate receiving copies of bibliographies
others may already have on-line.
Mark Turner
Department of English
U Chicago 60637
>ihnp4!gargoyle!puck!mark

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: ihnp4!utzoo!lsuc!dave@UCB-VAX
-DATE-
Date: 7 Jul 85 13:10:14 CDT (Sun)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: AI techniques for teaching tax law?
-BODY-
[Forwarded from AI-ED.  Also could be of interest to legal IR people. - Ed]
 ...
I've developed a fully-operating CAI course on Canadian income
tax law which is used to teach Ontario's law students. This course
uses no AI techniques at all. I believe that within certain domains
(such as tax) and subject to certain limitations, one can design
a surprisingly "intelligent" CAI system without AI. My CAI runs
with an interpreter from disk files, and it's trivial to modify the
disk files to catch wrong student answers which have been flagged
by the system as unrecognized. After plenty of iteration with test
students, therefore, I now have a system which "recognizes" and
correctly responds to almost every imaginable wrong answer which
students will try for a given question.

Sample:
++++++++++
Computer: [long fact situation]
	  How much tax is payable by X?
Student:  $1,500
Computer: Sorry, that's wrong.
	  You're miscalculating the capital gain. Remember to
	  take the cost base into account, and don't forget that
	  only one-half of the gain is taxable!
++++++++++

Having said that, I do think AI has a role to play in my course
and I'd like to explore using it in future lessons. In particular,
I'd like to develop a mini-simulation using Prolog, and let the
student play with variables or with input and output values and
examine the results. Does anyone out there use Prolog models for
CAI in this kind of way?

The other advantage AI techniques would have over my present code
is that questions could have randomly-different numbers instead
of being the same each time through. However, it must still be
possible to easily write tailored answers. In the above example,
I would need a simple way to indicate "1500" as "(a+b)*d", where
the correct answer is known to be "(a+b-c)*d/2".
It must also be possible to generate only those fact situations
(i.e., numbers) which are (a) easy for students to compute the
answers to, and (b) unambiguous in terms of different answers -
that is, 1500 in the example above must not be able to reflect
two different chains of wrong reasoning. Perhaps, given these
limitations, it would be better to hand-code a set of possible
values for a, b, c and d rather than have the computer generate them.
Any ideas out there? Has anyone done this kind of thing?

Dave Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@UCB-VAX>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 85 15:47:30 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: new wkshp rprt
-BODY-
				WORKSHOP REPORT


	A workshop was organized and conducted on June 10-11, 1985 at
the University of Regina, Regina, Canada. It was entitled "Workshop On
Foundations Of Adaptive Information Processing" and was sponsored by the
Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and the Computer Science
Department of our University.

	The impetus for the workshop came as result of the following
eventualities:

	(i)	There has been a great surge of interest in the recent
		years on investigating research progress in AI and
                their implications for computer science research in general,

	(ii)	In a number of sub-disciplines of computer science such
		as Information Retrieval, Pattern Recognition, Expert systems
		and Decision Support, there is a striking similarity in the
		manner in which the problems of interest are formulated,

	(iii)	There are several faculty members in the computer
		science department at University of Regina whose research
		interests overlap information retrieval, AI, expert
		systems and so on,

	(iv)	The ACM - SIGIR annual conference was in Montreal,
		Canada in the first week of June and several individuals,
		coming to that conference, had expressed a desire to visit
		University of Regina, and

	(v)	The dean of our Graduate Studies and Research faculty
		was enthusiastic in providing financial support for
		this venture.

	The total attendance at the workshop was 20, including faculty
members and graduate students of our department and eight guests who
agreed to participate upon our invitation. There were, in all, twelve
presentations each lasting for approximately forty minutes. Four of the
twelve presentations were by faculty members of our computer science
department. There was ample opportunity for informal discussions and
exchange of ideas. This contributed greatly to the success of the
workshop.

	The participants had many varied backgrounds. This was in line
with the main emphasis of the workshop, which was to compare and
contrast the various problem formulations in the disciplines represented
by the participants and to discuss models and theoretical foundations
upon which solutions to these problems are based. Following is a list of
individuals who participated and the titles of their presentations.

	*	Research into fuzzy extensions of information retrieval
		D. Kraft, Louisiana State University

	*	Problems of introducing a Boolean structure into
		probabilistic retrieval
		A. Bookstein, University of Chicago

	*	Adaptive Boolean information retrieval
		T. Radecki, Louisiana State University and Tech.
		University of Wroclaw

	*	On metric data models and associated search strategies
		L. Goldfarb, Univ. of New Brunswick

	*	A unified model for information retrieval
		M. Wong, Univ. of Regina

	*	Effectiveness of genetic algorithm for document
		redescription
		M. Gordon, The Univ. of Michigan

	*	Cluster analysis and genetic algorithm in machine
		learning
		L.A. Rendell, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-champaign

	*	A system for detecting "deep" and "shallow" concepts in
		simple definitions
		M. Janta-Polczynski, Univ. of Regina

	*	A concept-learning information retrieval system - basic
		ideas
		W. Ziarko, Univ. of Regina

	*	A generalized retrieval facility for management decision
		support
		J.S. Deogun, Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln

	*	Two axioms for performance evaluation of information
		retrieval systems
		P. Bollmann, Tech. University of Berlin

	*	Some thoughts on adaptive clustering for information
		retrieval
		V.V. Raghavan, Univ. of Regina

	Dr. Jeff Sampson of Univ. of Alberta was to give a presentation
entitled "Genetic algorithms - A class of adaptive search procedures".
But to our great disappointment and deep sorrow, we learned that he
passed away, the week earlier, while travelling in France.

	It is expected that a proceedings of the workshop would be
published in the near future. In addition, a summary of each
presentation is due to appear over next several issues of the SIGIR
Forum.

						Workshop Chairman
						Vijay Raghavan
						University of Regina

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 05 Jul 85 13:45:05 +1000 (Fri)
-FROM-
From: John Shepherd <munnari!mungunni.oz!JAS@Seismo>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: New Deductive Database System
-BODY-
[Forwarded from PROLOG Digest Volume 3 : Issue 30 - Ed]

       A System for Very Large Deductive Databases
      using a Superimposed Codeword Indexing Scheme
                          =====

This note is to announce  the  (near)  availability  of  a
deductive  database  system suitable for dealing with very
large databases of Prolog rules.  The indexing scheme used
by  the  system  is  based  on  the  method  of  two-level
superimposed codewords as described in [1],  which  allows
partial  match  retrieval.   Superimposed codeword schemes
provide a very efficient method of retrieving records from
large  databases  in only a small number of disk accesses.
Further, the access method can be tuned so that the  ratio
of  "false  matches" can be reduced by an arbitrary amount
(with a corresponding increase in storage costs).   Unlike
many earlier systems, this system supports the storage and
retrieval of completely general  Prolog  terms,  including
functors  and  variables, and it is even possible to store
Prolog rules in the database.

The system is in the final  stages  of  development  under
Berkeley  Unix (4.2BSD) and has already been interfaced to
the MU-Prolog system[2,3]; it will  be  incorporated  into
release  3.2db  of  MU-Prolog which will be available soon
for Unix and VMS.  It is being developed as  part  of  the
Machine   Intelligence   Project   at  the  University  of
Melbourne on a Pyramid 90x which was loaned to the project
by  Pyramid  Technology  in  Australia.  The figures given
below are taken from the Pyramid running version 2.3.1  of
the  OSx  operating system (in the Berkeley universe) with
one 400 Mb disk.

Preliminary tests, on a database of mail transfer pathways
through  Usenet  containing  one  million facts, have been
very encouraging.  To store these  facts,  which  have  an
average length of 60 bytes, required just over 80Mb, which
means a storage overhead of about  30%.   In  the  present
system,  with  a  one-million  record  database indexed on
three attributes, the rate of insertion is six records per
CPU  second.  The rate of insertion could be significantly
increased if the system were run as a  single-user  batch-
type system without locking controls.  Specifying just two
of  the  fields  (each  record  contains   four   fields),
retrieved  on average just 3 records for a query which had
only one correct answer.  The system can achieve a  record
retrieval  rate  of  around  1000 records per second for a
query on highly clustered records, to about 50 records per
second  for  a  query on unclustered records, even on this
large database; for smaller databases, even  faster  rates
are   achievable.   A  query  with  complete  information,
required on average 1.1 retrievals, and  required  4  disk
accesses (excluding overheads from the Unix file system).

This system overcomes some of the limitations of the  Unix
file  system.   For  example,  it  overcomes  the limit of
twenty open files per process  by  caching  on  Unix  file
descriptors,  thus  allowing several database relations to
be accessed simultaneously.  The system also provides data
buffering  to  reduce  the  number  of file opens and data
reads.  The processing time of logic programs such as  the
"ancestor" relation can be minimised by this feature.

We would be interested in hearing from  other  groups  who
are  developing  similar systems.  For further information
on this system, contact Dr. K. Ramamohanarao (Rao) or John
Shepherd at the following addresses:

HardMail:
Department of Computer Science
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, 3052
AUSTRALIA

SoftMail:
UUCP:   {seismo,ukc,prlb2}!munnari!jas
        {decvax,eagle,pesnta}!mulga!jas (SLOW)
ARPA:   munnari!jas@seismo.ARPA
CSNET:  jas@munnari.oz
        ("jas" can be substituted by "rao")

Also, Dr. Rao will  be  attending  the  Logic  Programming
Symposium  in  Boston, and would be willing to discuss the
system there.

[1]  R.Sacks-Davis  and  K.Ramamohanarao  "A   Two   Level
     Superimposed   Coding   Scheme   for   Partial  Match
     Retrieval", Information Systems, v.8, n.4, 1983

[2]  By way of comparison, this system eliminates a number
     of   restrictions  which  were  associated  with  the
     deductive database system provided with  release  3.1
     of  MU-Prolog.  That  system implemented the database
     manager  as  a  separate  process  from  the   Prolog
     interpreter,   communicating   via  Unix  pipes.  The
     present system is designed as a library package which
     is  compiled  into  the  host  system;  it  could  be
     incorporated   fairly   easily   into   most   Prolog
     interpreters,  or,  in  fact,  into  any systems that
     wished to perform partial match retrieval. The use of
     pipes  in  the  old  MU-Prolog  system  placed severe
     limitations  (because   of   Unix   file   descriptor
     limitations)  on the number of transactions (queries)
     which could be active concurrently;  the  new  system
     has eliminated this restriction. Finally, this system
     lifts the restriction that only ground facts could be
     stored  in  the  database, by allowing the storage of
     arbitrary Prolog terms (including rules).

[3]  L.Naish "MU-Prolog 3.2db Reference Manual", Technical
     Report, Department of Computer Science, University of
     Melbourne, 1985.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 10 Aug 1985 02:25-EST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Articles, bibliography
-BODY-
 ... [Extracted from messages in AIList Digest Volume 3: #109 - Ed]

%A Barbara Kellam-Scott
%T Harvard Law School Computerizes the Paper Chase
%J Hardcopy
%D JUL 1985
%P 19
%V 14
%N 7
%K DEC
%X Harvard Law School is automating their Legal Services Clinics.
They have plans to include an expert system to assist lawyers in
handling these cases.  Digital Equipment has contributed to this program.

%A Clara Y. Cuadrado
%A John L. Cuadrado
%T Prolog Goes to Work
%J MAG4
%P 151-159
%K Symbolics Al Despain Yale Patt Berkely
%X Al Despain and Yale Patt of Berkeley have achieved 425,000 LIPS using
a custom designed processor.  Symbolics has achieved 100,000 LIPS using
custom microcode. Discusses general issues of Prolog in the contex of
a maze traversing system.  Also discusses the Japanese Fifth Generation
project.

%A F. Bouille
%T The 'HBDS' Database Model Kernel of a Structured Data
Base System.  Making Databases Work
%J IEEE Proceedings of Trends and Applications
%D 1984
%P 324-331

%A V. P. Kobler
%T Overview of Tools For Knowledge Base Construction
%J International Conference on Data Engineering
%I IEEE
%C Los Angeles, Ca
%D 1984
%P 282-285

%A C. Maioli et al.
%T Prototypes of Expert Systems for a Friendly Man Machine Interaction.
User Terminals for Information/Communication Systems
%J 31st International Congress on Electronics.  Proceedings
%D 1984
%P 35-42

%A Z. L. Rabinovich
%T Machine Intelligence and Fifth Generation Computer Structures
%J Cybernetics
%V 20
%N 3
%D MAY-JUN 1985
%P 426

%A W. Dilger
%A W. Womannn
%T The METANET: A Means for the Specification of Semantic Networks as
Abstract Datatypes
%J International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
%V 21
%N 6
%D DEC 1984
%P 463

%A Michael B. First
%A Lynn J. Soffer
%A Randolph A. Miher
%T QUICK (quick Index to Caduceus Knowledge) Using the
Internish/Cadaceus Knowledge Base as an Electronic Textbook of
Medicine
%J Computers and Biomedical Research
%V 18
%N 2
%D APR 1985
%P 137

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI>
-DATE-
Date: Fri 9 Aug 85 13:48:26-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: JAI Issue on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
-BODY-
>From CACM, August 1985: [Forwarded from AI-ED. - Ed]

Papers on intelligent tutoring systems are sought for a special issue
of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence.  Topics appropriate for
this issue include knowledge representations tailored for use in an
Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS); architectures for ITSs; methods
for building student models; methods for diagnosing student's bugs
and misconceptions; tutoring strategies; the use of natural language;
design of the human-computer interface; case studies of ITSs; and
psychological research relevant to the constructions of ITSs.  Manuscripts
should be submitted by February 15, 1986, to one of the guest editors:
Elliot Soloway, Department of Computer Science, Yale University,
P.O. Box 2158, New Haven, CT 06520; or William Clancy, Stanford
Knowledge Systems Laboratory, 701 Welch Road, Building C, Palo Alto,
CA 94304.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: dartvax!creare!pbb%creare%dartmouth.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1985 09:02 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: AI Work in ED
-BODY-
[Forwarded from AI-ED. - Ed]

			AI Work in ED at Creare


	 The following describes ongoing work at Creare (KREE-`ARE-EE) in
	 the field of AI in education and ends with a call for
	 consultant help.

	 We at Creare are writing a phase II proposal for the design of
	 an Expert System which will be used for discovering and
	 describing scientific giftedness in students, primarily in the
	 Junior High age group.

	 The Expert System will try to detect the presence of
	 giftedness by matching computer administered test results
	 against knowledge based "feature models".  We will develop a
	 set of knowledge bases to be used in the adaptive testing
	 environment where the selection of questions and the
	 interpretation of answers are dynamically compared to a set of
	 rule based models of gifted scientific thinking.  The
	 administration of questions will be controlled by another
	 knowledge base which has the goal of efficiently determining
	 which model best conforms to the testing results.

	 These models of giftedness do not really exist yet, and we are
	 not aware of any "experts" currently in this field.  We hope
	 that we can develop expertise in this area as our models are
	 augmented and refined.  We are working with education and
	 testing specialists to achieve this goal.

	 We are currently looking for help with the overall design of
	 the the proposed Expert System.  Experienced knowledge-base
	 system designers are being sought to help review our design
	 and to become part of the project should Creare be awarded the
	 phase II grant.

	 Anyone who might be interested and qualified, particularly
	 those reasonably close to New Hampshire, should contact:

					Phil Bowman
					Creare, Inc.
					Box 71
					Hanover, NH   03755
					(603) 643-3800
					dartvax!creare!pbb


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
6
-DATE-
Date: 19 August 1985, 16:06:40 GMT
-FROM-
From: AFS      at IRLEARN
-TO-
To:   FOX at VPICS1
-BODY-
[Note - the above are BITNET addresses. - Ed]
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your letter - I'm receiving your communications
loud and clear and I'm getting the IRList digest also. Thanks
for adding me to the list. As for providing other addresses, we
here in UCD have only recently become connected to BITNET so we're
only finding our way around. You already have Keith van Rijsbergen,
David Harper and Bruce Croft on your mailing list ...

I'm working on integrating linguistic techniques (in particular,
parsing of text) with information retrieval, both in filing and
retrieval. My work is being done as part of an ESPRIT (European
Strategic Programme for Research into Information Technology)
Project (EEC backing) on Office Information Systems, which also involves
Keith, Bruce and David, as well as some partners in Denmark. Our
project has been running for two years (one of them a pilot study)
and has two more years left, at which point I should be finishing my
PhD.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 85 10:07 P
-FROM-
From: Henry Nussbacher  <vshank%weizmann.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Expert System definition vs Database Systems
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest  Volume 3 : Issue 110 - Ed]

I have been reading over the definitions of what an expert system is and
isn't and I have seen in many of the comments that an expert system needs
to be able to learn as it continues.  Somehow, I have always felt Expert
Systems to be glorified database systems.  A database system gains more
information as you add data to it.  Th common example of Expert Systems
(in my opinion) is the DOCTOR program:
1) Does the patient have a fever? Y
2) Has the patient vomitted in the past 24 hours? Y
3) Are the pupils dilated? N
4) etc...

The AI program asks questions and based on the answers, determines what
future questions to ask.  In the end it narrows it down and comes up with
a diagnoses based on the results of the questions.

But I know of many database packages where a question in the form of:

FIND FEVER > 100 & VOMIT = YES & DILATED = NO
DISPLAY ALL

My question is: What distinguishes the database search and display interface
from an AI Expert System?

Hank

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 85 00:35:00 edt
-FROM-
From: BostonU SysMgr <root%bostonu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: Expert System definition vs Database Systems
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList V3 #112. - Ed]

    From: Henry Nussbacher  <vshank%weizmann.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA>
    ...Somehow, I have always felt Expert
    Systems to be glorified database systems....
      1) Does the patient have a fever? Y
      2) Has the patient vomitted in the past 24 hours? Y
      3) Are the pupils dilated? N
      4) etc...
    But I know of many database packages where a question in the form of:
      FIND FEVER > 100 & VOMIT = YES & DILATED = NO
      DISPLAY ALL

In the first place, differential diagnosis is both a good and a bad
example.  Bad because it is meant to provide a lot of structure that can
be likened to a data-base query with boolean logic and good because it
has been worked on a lot in AI and as you get into more details it
starts to become more clear why the database approach isn't always
powerful enough.

Consider: In the first place, there are many, many diseases. A doctor
doesn't attempt to know all of them. In fact, the questioning (in a
doctor's mind) I believe starts with something more like:

        is this person in front of me about to drop dead?

a lot of info has to be processed real fast and inaccurately (from a
data base/strict machine point of view) to answer that and act on it.
Ok, let's try it again:

        IF s/he has a fever AND s/he has been vomiting
                THEN (will s/he drop dead in a moment?)

        or FIND DISEASE WHERE FEVER & VOMIT & DEATH

hmmm, doesn't work. Maybe that's all the patient is saying though. I
guess we better find out if s/he's severely dehydrated, measure the
fever, or maybe they just have a little food poisoning.

Ok, try again:

        IF he has a fever AND he has been vomiting
                THEN he has malaria...

wait a minute! there's no malaria around here...try again (darn, if s/he
hadn't just fallen over I might have asked if s/he have been traveling in
the tropics lately or eaten any jalisco cheese, now what do I do...)

I think my point is, yes, it's kind of like a database query BUT WHO IS
GENERATING THE QUESTIONS. I think your example weakens a lot once the
first query is made, who decides what the second query is to be?  The
expert system of course. You are assuming some magic actor generating
all these nice queries and inferences, get rid of that actor and try it
again.

        -Barry Shein, Boston University
[Let's have some comments on DB and expert systems, and IR! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue 13 Aug 85 09:28:58-PDT
-FROM-
From: Mike Dante <DANTE@EDWARDS-2060.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Master Bibliography
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Volume 3: #110 - Ed.]
        I suspect that I am not the only one reading this BB who finds some
of the submissions less than completely understandable due to lacunae in my
own background.  Hence a suggestion:  Would it make sense to establish and
maintain a bibliography (hopefully annotated), whose existence and address
would be mentioned in the header of the AIList Digest?  Then when someone
like myself wanted to understand more, he or she could FTP a copy of the
bibliography and with a little study, at least understand the terminology.
[Note - for those who cannot directly access copies, a query handling
 process would be necessary. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 85 12:46:07 pdt
-FROM-
From: aurora!eugene@RIACS.ARPA (Eugene miya)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: Master bibliography
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest  Volume 3 : Issue 112 - Ed]
Excellent suggestion.  The net's biggest problem is a lack of
memory.  ;-)

I am trying something like this right now for parallel and distributed
computing.  Mine is ftp-able, and has over 5000 entries.  It also has
some copyright restrictions because I used several preexisting
bibliographies [i.e., stand on the shoulders of giants...].  There is only
one bibliography in the field larger than mine, but it's hardcopy,
hard to use, but it has many more European papers.  Mine's dynamic,
useable with text formatters, and updateable.  Keys and annotations, too.

I suspect an AI bibliography will have two major problems:
1) AI is a much bigger field.
2) AI has more hype literature associated with it.
If it were possible to moderate the technical content of the papers,
you will succeed nicely.  I have a separate bibliography for the
"top ten" required readings in software engineering.  I plan to update it
yearly with a call for suggestions.  Books will be booted in and out (I hope).

Other minor problems: some work was received in Scribe bibliographic
format: I decided on refer: ran on smaller machines, Unix more widely
available, and so on.  I had to write crude Scribe->refer translators.
Getting people to help add, correct, and delete work is surpising difficult:
everybody wants loaves of bread, but few want to do the work.
The initial start is the hardest of course.  Try to build off of others
work if they will let you.

>-eugene miya
  NASA Ames Research Center
  emiya@ames-vmsb.ARPA
  ames!aurora!eugene on UUCP

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 85 13:28:56 pdt
-FROM-
From: aurora!eugene@RIACS.ARPA (Eugene miya)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Additional comment about master bibliography
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList V 3 #113. - Ed]
Oh, I forgot one MAJOR point of maintenance work.

I am just now receiving smaller bibiliographies on things like computer
networks.  There are many collisions with papers already in the existing file.
The problem is subtle because of slight variations in annotation
styles which bibliographic sorting programs cannot appropriately
handle.  Also, transferring interesting comments and annotations
from one entry to another is also time consuming.  Two smaller
bibliographies have come from England, and differences in spelling are
another subtle problem: Defense and Defence.

>-eugene miya
  NASA Ames Research Center
  {hplabs,hao,dual,ihnp4,vortex}!ames!aurora!eugene
  emiya@ames-vmsb.ARPA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI>
-DATE-
Date: Sat 17 Aug 85 08:34:38-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Export Control
-BODY-
 ... big file of mail on the issue of technology export control ...
The gist is that the regulations cover everything under the sun,
but that no one is likely to come down on your discussion list.
Just be sure that your list members know they are presenting their
material in an international forum so that the responsibility is theirs.
[Please note! - Ed ]

					-- Ken

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Lee Hollaar <Hollaar@UTAH-20>
-DATE-
Date: Mon 19 Aug 85 19:22:39-MDT
-BODY-
 ...
We have the latest prototype of the hardware-based search engine operating,
and plan to take it to Washington DC next week to show it off to a number
of government agencies.  It is being offered for sale through a spin-off
of the University of Utah.  Since it's now a commercial product, albeit in
limited production, I don't know how you would like to handle news of it
for the IR net list.
				Lee
[As long as people are not advertising, we are all interested in
 hearing about developments in research and industry. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 13 AUG 85 15:57-N
-FROM-
From: ROSNER%CGEUGE51.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Call for Papers - Knowledge Represention, Proc. IEEE
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList V3 #112. - Ed]
CALL FOR PAPERS

Proceedings of the IEEE
Special Issue on Knowledge Representation


Guest Editors: M King, M Rosner, University of Geneva


The special issue is scheduled for publication during the second half of
1986. You are invited to submit a 6-10 page extended abstract on any topic
relevant to the current state of the art in Knowledge Representation.

Deadlines:
        submission of abstracts:        30th September 1985
        notification of acceptance:     30th December 1985
        final copy:                     15th February 1986

contact: ROSNER%cgeuge51@WISCVM.ARPA (bitnet)
         mcvax!cernvax!cui!rosner (usenet, eunet, uucp)

M Rosner
ISSCO,
54 route des Acacias,
1227 Geneva, Switzerland

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
7
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox"  <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 85 18:02:02 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: BITNET sites please note change at Virginia Tech
-BODY-
[Note: Our BITNET and CSNET gateway machine just came up after 1 week,
       so please forgive delay in sending this issue out.]
The BITNET node names for Virginia Tech will change on Sept. 15.
Whereas previously my address was fox@vpics1 it will then be fox@vtcs1.
This goes along with the popular trend, reinforced by sports
announcers and by the VT President, to refer to Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University by its other name, Virginia Tech.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@UCB-VAX>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 85 21:25:15 cst
-BODY-
[Following is msg from Chairman of SIGIR that will appear in upcoming
 issue of the Forum and so will be received by ACM SIGIR members. - Ed]
                               CHAIRMAN's MESSAGE

   I would like to encourage you to participate in the activities of ACM-
SIGIR. The Forum is for all of us. You are all cordially welcome to contribute
regular papers, reviews, important news, etc. Some of you may like to specify
problems that have long-term interests, but without immediate solutions. The
problems should be stated in such a way that readers will understand the
various facets of the problems, their difficulties and their significance. I
am sure there are plenty of researchers who are looking for interesting
problems. Hopefully, this will rejuvenate our field.

   IR overlaps with many fields: data base, artificial intelligence, office
automation, architecture, etc. Those of you who work in IR and in one or more
of the other fields may wish to initiate joint conferences or workshops. This
will bring new and exciting problems into our area and broaden our scope of
interests. Mike Lesk, our past chairman, is preparing a joint workshop with
SIGDOC on Document Generation Principles. If you are interested in initiating
joint ventures with other special interest groups, please let me know.

   Our regular membership fee of $6 per year is one of the lowest among all
ACM SIGs (if not the lowest). Unfortunately though a very substantial overhead
charge is applied by ACM headquarters, and we are projecting a deficit. This
will force us to increase our membership fee. The amount of increase will be
determined when accurate financial data are available.

   If you have any good ideas to improve ACM-SIGIR, feel free to contact me.


                                                       Clement Yu
                                                       ACM-SIGIR Chairman

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft@LSU>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 85 14:27:02 cdt
-TO-
To: IRlist@VPI
-BODY-
   ll
    l
    l
    l      ssss     u    u     LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
    l     s    s    u    u     Department of Computer Science
    l      ss       u    u     298 Coates Hall
    l        ss     u    u     Baton Rouge, LA  70803-4020
    l     s    s    u   uu     (504) 388-1495
   lll     ssss      uuu u     kraft%lsu@csnet-relay


                               August 22, 1985

 Dear IRlist Readers:

      As the editor of the Journal of  the  American  Society
 for  Information  Science  (JASIS),  I am writing to request
 that you consider submitting articles on your work to  JASIS
 for  consideration  for publication.  I have attached a copy
 of the "Scope of JASIS," which should show you  the  breadth
 of  coverage of the journal.  I also need referees for arti-
 cles as well as book reviewers; if you are willing to  serve
 as  such,  please  send  me your name, address, and a set of
 keywords describing your areas of interest.

      Thank you for your consideration of JASIS.

                               Sincerely yours,


                               Donald H. Kraft
                               Professor and Chairman
                               JASIS Editor

 DHK:unix

 Encl.


                            - 2 -


                        Scope of JASIS



 1. Theory of Information Science          4. Applied Information Science

    Foundations of Information Science        Informations systems design --
    Information theory                           tools, principles,
applications
    Bibliometrics                             Case histories
    Information retrieval --                  Information system operations
       models and principles                  Standards
    Evaluation and measurement                Information technology --
hardware
    Representation, organization, and             and software
        classification of information         Automation of information systems
    Artificial intelligence and natural       Online retrieval systems
        language processing                   Office automation and records
                                                  management

 2. Communication                          5. Social and Legal Aspects of
                                                  Information
    Theory of communication
    Non-print media                           Impact of information systems and
    Man-machine interaction                       technology upon society
    Network design, operation, and            Ethics and information
        management                            Legislative and regulatory
aspects
    Models and empirical findings about       History of information science
        information transfer                  Information science education
    User and usage studies                    International issues

 3. Management, Economics, and Marketing

    Economics of information
    Management of information systems
    Models of information management decisions
    Marketing and market research studies
    Special clientele -- arts and humanities,
         behavioral and social sciences, biological
         and chemical sciences, energy and environment,
         legal, medical, and education.



 Authors may also send  in  brief  communications,  scholarly
 opinion pieces, and even letters to the editor.



 Thank you again for your consideration of JASIS.

 Donald Kraft
 kraft%lsu@csnet-relay

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 20 Aug 1985 21:44-EST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Technical Reports
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest V. 3 # 114. - Ed]

%A Robert Stepp
%T A Description and User's Guide for Cluster/2 A Program for
Conjunctive Conceptual Clustering
%R Department of Computer Science Report No. 1085
%I University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
%D FEB 1985

%A Richard Preston Hooper
%A Michel A. Melkanoff
%T An Application of Knowledge-Based Systems to Electronic Computer-Aided
Engineering, Design and Manufacturing Data Base Transport
%R CSD-850011
%I Computer Science Department, UCLA
%K IGES
%X describes a method of developing methodology for transferring databases
between CADCAM systems
There is a charge of $19.25 for this item

%A Geoffrey E. Hinton
%T Distributed Representation
%I Carnegie Mellon University Department of Computer Science
%D OCT 1984

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 22 Aug 1985 02:23-EST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Articles
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest V. 3 # 114. - Ed]

%A I. Peterson
%T Conversing with Computers Naturally
%J Science News
%V 128
%D JUL 27, 1985
%N 4
%P 53
%K microcomputers natural language database Bozena H. Thompson
Frederick B. Thompson Microrim Savvy Caltech Natural Access System
%X discusses Intellect Microrim, and Savvy and a Natural Language System
developed by Bozena H. Thompson and Frederick B. Thompson for IBM PC's

%A Howard Morgan
%T The Microcomputer and Decision Support
%J ComputerWorld
%V 19
%N 33
%P 39-46
%D AUG 19, 1985
%K Lightyear microcomputer Expert-Ease
%X discusses the use of AI in MIS, particularly Light-Year and
Expert Systems in MIS on page 44 of this article.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 28 Aug 85 08:21:59 EDT (Wed)
-FROM-
From: Marshall D. Abrams <abrams@mitre.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Program of Expert Systems in Government Symposium
-BODY-
[Extracted from AIList V 3 # 115 - only some of sessions are included
 here for brevity. - Ed]

Following is a list of all the sessions and papers for the Expert
Systems in Government Symposium to be held October 24-25, 1985 at the
Tysons Westpark Hotel, McLean, VA. The symposium is sponsored by the
MITRE Corporation and the IEEE Computer Society. Two one-day tutorials
are scheduled for October 23rd: "Concepts of Knowledge Engineering" by
Kamran Parsaye and "Expert Systems Development" by Elaine Kant.
Additional information is available from abrams@mitre. A registration
form follows the session listing.



PANEL:  FRONTIERS OF KBES:  PRO & CON

MODERATOR:  Dr. Marvin Denicoff, Thinking Machine, Inc.


Panelists:

PRO  Prof. Chandrasekaran, Ohio State University  PRO   Dr.  Neil
Pundit, DEC

CON  Dr. Gary Martins,  Intelligent  S/W,  Inc.   CON   Dr.  John
Benoit, MITRE

MIDDLE   Dr. Robert Milne, Pentagon MIDDLE   Dr. Kamran  Parsaye,
Intelliware


UNCERTAINTY MANAGEMENT

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. North Fowler, RADC

Sessions_Chairman:  Dr. Piero Bonissone, G.E.


"An     Application     of     Fuzzy     Reasoning      to      A
Confirmation/Disconfirmation  Decision  Making Algorithm," Joseph
A. Karakowski, U.S. Army

"An Expert System Based on a  Stochastic  Parallel  Network,"  V.
Venkatasubramanian, Northeastern University

"Data Analysis Assisted by an Uncertainty Varying Expert System,"
Petr Hajek, Fred Neil Springsteel

"In Introduction to Fact Based Model Expert  Systems,"  Sing  Chi
Koo, Software Intelligence Lab, Inc.



INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM

Vice_Chairman:  Prof Saj-Nicole Joni, Yale

Session_Chairman:   Prof.  Beverly  Woolf,  University  of   Mas-
sachusetts


"Intelligent Tutoring Using the Integrated Diagnostic Model:   An
Expert  System for Diagnosis and Repair," Howard R. Smith, Pamela
K. Fink, John C. Lusth, Southwest Research Institute

"An Informal Programming Language," Jeffery Bonar, William  Weil,
University of Pittsburg

"Understanding Discourse Conventions in Tutoring," Beverly Woolf,
University of Massachusetts

"PRUST:  An Automatic System Program  Debugger,"  Lewis  Johnson,
ISI


NEW DIRECTIONS IN KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Bruce Bullock, Teknowledge

Session_Chairman:  Ethan Scarl, The MITRE Corporation


"Artificial Intelligence for C:3:I:  The Design  and  Development
of  a  Prototype Causal Schema Knowledge-Based System," Gerard W.
Hopple, Stanley M. Halpin, Defense Systems, Inc.

"Capturing Domain Primitives for Knowledge Engineering," R. Peter
Bonasso, The MITRE Corporation

"A Shared Knowledge Base for Independent Problem Solving Agents,"
Susan E. Conry, R.A.  Meyer, J.E. Searleman, Clarkson College

"Research in the Applications  of  Expert  Systems  at  the  NASA
Ames-Dryden  Flight  Research Facility," Eugene L. Duke, Victoria
A. Regeniek, NASA Ames Research Center




PANEL:  INTELLIGENT COMPUTER ASSISTED INSTRUCTION

MODERATOR:  Dr. Jeff Bonar, LRDC/University of Pittsburg

Panelists:

1.   Dr. Beverly Woolf, University of Massachusetts.

2.   Dr. Joseph Psotka, PERI-IC, Army Research Institute

3.   Prof Walker Schneider, University of Illinois

4.   Prof. T. Govindraj, Georgia Instute of Technology

5.   Dr. Stelan Ohlsson, University of Pittsburg


LANGUAGE TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Thomas London, AT&T Bell Laboratories

Session_Chairman:  Dr. Kamran Parsaye, Intelliware, Inc.


"A Multicriteria Model to Select An Expert System Shell,"  Ernest
H. Forman, Thomas J.  Nagy, The George Washington University

"Guess/1:  A General Purpose Expert  Systems  Shell,"  Newton  S.
Lee,  John  W.  Roach,  Virginia  Polytechnic Institute and State
University

"Prolog for Expert Systems:  An Evaluation," Richard Helm,  Cath-
erine Lassez, Kim Marriott, University of Melbourne

"Evaluating the Existing Tools for Developing Expert  Systems  In
PC  Environment,"  Animesh  Karna and Amitabh Karna , Information
Technical Institutes


INTELLIGENT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL-1

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Roy Rada, National Library of Medicine

Session_Chairman:  Dr. Brian McCune, Advanced Information & Deci-
sion Systems


"A Rule-Oriented Methodology for Constructing  a  Knowledge  Base
from  Natural Language Documents," Dr. Stan Matwin, University of
Ottawa

"Understanding Technical Documents and Graphics," R.P.  Futrelle,
University of Illinois

"Information Retrieval Techniques In An Expert System for  Foster
Care,"  Sheila G. Winett, Edward A. Fox, Virginia Polytechnic In-
stitute

"Cognitive  Graphing   &   The   Representation   of   Biomedical
Knowledge,"  G.  Matthew Bonham, George J. Nozicka, F.N. Stokman,
The American University




INTELLIGENT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL-2

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Roy Rada, National Library of Medicine

Session_Chairman:  Dr. Roy Rada, National Library of Medicine


"An Expert System for Document Retrieval," Bruce Croft, Roger  H.
Thompson, University of Massachusetts

"Building A Knowledge Base Statistically," Hafedh Mili, Roy Rada,
George Washington University

"The Application of an Expert System for Information Retrieval at
the  National  Archives," Daniel DeSalvo, Jay Liebowitz, American
Management Systems, Inc.

"Intelligent Information Retrieval:  Issues in  User  Modelling,"
Robert R. Korfhage, So.  Methodist University


MEDICINE-1

Vice_Chairman:  Prof. B. Chandrasekaran,

Session_Chairmen:  Dr. R. Smith, Ohio State University


"A Deductive Inference & Associative Memory Retrieval," James  A.
Reggia, University of Maryland

"An Expert Advisory System for Primary  Eye  Care  in  Developing
Countries,"  Jack  H..   Ostroff,  Chandler  R.  Dawson,  John  K.
Kastner, Sholom Weiss, Casimir A.  Kulikowski,  Kevin  B.   Kern,
Rutgers University

"Knowledge Representation for Knowledge Directed Data Retrieval,"
Jon Sticklen, Ohio State University

"Mapping  Medical  Knowledge  Into   the   Conceptual   Structure
Representation Language," Thomas C.  Bylander, Ohio State Univer-
sity




MEDICINE-2

Vice_Chairman:  Prof. Sholom Weiss, Rutgers University

Session_Chairmen:  Dr. R. Smith, Ohio State University



"RED:  A Classification &  Abductive  Inference  Expert  System,"
Jack W. Smith, Jr., Ohio State University

"Improved Retrieval Through Traversal of a Knowledge-Base," Ellen
Bicknell-Brown, Roy Rada, National Institutes of Health

"Semantic Network Representations for Neurological Diagnosis," S.
Srihari, Xiang, Chatkow, Shapiro, SUNY at Buffalo

"An Expert System for Interpretation of  Cranial  C.T.  Scan  Im-
ages," R. Kremar, S.  Srihari, SUNY at Buffalo




INTELLIGENT INTERFACES

Vice_Chairman:  Prof. Saj-Nicole Joni, Yale University

Session_Chairman:   Prof.  Beverly  Woolf,  University  of   Mas-
sachusetts


"A Knowledge Based Lab Assistant for a Computer Based Instruction
System,"  Larry  Christensen,  Gordon  Stokes, Bill Hays, E. Dale
Coons, Brigham Young University

"The Cognitive Principles Underlying Software Design,"  B.  Adel-
son, Yale University

"Tutoring Expertise:  Human & Otherwise," David Littman, Jeannine
Pinto, Elliot Soloway, Yale University

"Application of Expert Systems to Training," David L. Young, Mys-
tech Associates, Inc.



This list of session was compiled 8/20/85 and is subject to further
correction.


send REGISTRATION to:   Expert Systems Symposium
                        IEEE Computer Society
                        1730 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
                        Washington, DC  20036-1903

                prior to 10/1/85        late reg. surcharge
                member  non-member
tutorial        $200    $250            $30
symposium       $120    $160            $30

Give membership #, name, title, company, address, etc.

Blood type is optional (joke).

On-site registration may be limited. Call 202/371-0101 for latest
information on space availability.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox"  <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 85 18:12:32 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IR speakers sought this fall at Virginia Tech
-BODY-
The Dept. of Computer Science at Virginia Tech would like to invite
speakers for its fall (and winter, spring) graduate seminar series.
Talks are given Wedn. afternoons at 4 pm.  Discussions on information
retrieval, computer networks, etc. are of particular interest.
Contact Dr. E. A. Fox at (703) 961-5113 or 6931 if you can come or
would like to recommend another.  Blacksburg is in a beautiful area
of the country, on a plateau surrounded by mountains, near the
Jefferson National Forest, so fall is a particularly nice time to come!

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
8
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox"  <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 85 18:02:02 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: BITNET sites please note change at Virginia Tech
-BODY-
[Note: Our BITNET and CSNET gateway machine just came up after 1 week,
       so please forgive delay in sending this issue out.]
The BITNET node names for Virginia Tech will change on Sept. 15.
Whereas previously my address was fox@vpics1 it will then be fox@vtcs1.
This goes along with the popular trend, reinforced by sports
announcers and by the VT President, to refer to Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University by its other name, Virginia Tech.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@UCB-VAX>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 85 21:25:15 cst
-BODY-
[Following is msg from Chairman of SIGIR that will appear in upcoming
 issue of the Forum and so will be received by ACM SIGIR members. - Ed]
                               CHAIRMAN's MESSAGE

   I would like to encourage you to participate in the activities of ACM-
SIGIR. The Forum is for all of us. You are all cordially welcome to contribute
regular papers, reviews, important news, etc. Some of you may like to specify
problems that have long-term interests, but without immediate solutions. The
problems should be stated in such a way that readers will understand the
various facets of the problems, their difficulties and their significance. I
am sure there are plenty of researchers who are looking for interesting
problems. Hopefully, this will rejuvenate our field.

   IR overlaps with many fields: data base, artificial intelligence, office
automation, architecture, etc. Those of you who work in IR and in one or more
of the other fields may wish to initiate joint conferences or workshops. This
will bring new and exciting problems into our area and broaden our scope of
interests. Mike Lesk, our past chairman, is preparing a joint workshop with
SIGDOC on Document Generation Principles. If you are interested in initiating
joint ventures with other special interest groups, please let me know.

   Our regular membership fee of $6 per year is one of the lowest among all
ACM SIGs (if not the lowest). Unfortunately though a very substantial overhead
charge is applied by ACM headquarters, and we are projecting a deficit. This
will force us to increase our membership fee. The amount of increase will be
determined when accurate financial data are available.

   If you have any good ideas to improve ACM-SIGIR, feel free to contact me.


                                                       Clement Yu
                                                       ACM-SIGIR Chairman

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft@LSU>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 85 14:27:02 cdt
-TO-
To: IRlist@VPI
-BODY-
   ll
    l
    l
    l      ssss     u    u     LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
    l     s    s    u    u     Department of Computer Science
    l      ss       u    u     298 Coates Hall
    l        ss     u    u     Baton Rouge, LA  70803-4020
    l     s    s    u   uu     (504) 388-1495
   lll     ssss      uuu u     kraft%lsu@csnet-relay


                               August 22, 1985

 Dear IRlist Readers:

      As the editor of the Journal of  the  American  Society
 for  Information  Science  (JASIS),  I am writing to request
 that you consider submitting articles on your work to  JASIS
 for  consideration  for publication.  I have attached a copy
 of the "Scope of JASIS," which should show you  the  breadth
 of  coverage of the journal.  I also need referees for arti-
 cles as well as book reviewers; if you are willing to  serve
 as  such,  please  send  me your name, address, and a set of
 keywords describing your areas of interest.

      Thank you for your consideration of JASIS.

                               Sincerely yours,


                               Donald H. Kraft
                               Professor and Chairman
                               JASIS Editor

 DHK:unix

 Encl.


                            - 2 -


                        Scope of JASIS



 1. Theory of Information Science          4. Applied Information Science

    Foundations of Information Science        Informations systems design --
    Information theory                           tools, principles,
applications
    Bibliometrics                             Case histories
    Information retrieval --                  Information system operations
       models and principles                  Standards
    Evaluation and measurement                Information technology --
hardware
    Representation, organization, and             and software
        classification of information         Automation of information systems
    Artificial intelligence and natural       Online retrieval systems
        language processing                   Office automation and records
                                                  management

 2. Communication                          5. Social and Legal Aspects of
                                                  Information
    Theory of communication
    Non-print media                           Impact of information systems and
    Man-machine interaction                       technology upon society
    Network design, operation, and            Ethics and information
        management                            Legislative and regulatory
aspects
    Models and empirical findings about       History of information science
        information transfer                  Information science education
    User and usage studies                    International issues

 3. Management, Economics, and Marketing

    Economics of information
    Management of information systems
    Models of information management decisions
    Marketing and market research studies
    Special clientele -- arts and humanities,
         behavioral and social sciences, biological
         and chemical sciences, energy and environment,
         legal, medical, and education.



 Authors may also send  in  brief  communications,  scholarly
 opinion pieces, and even letters to the editor.



 Thank you again for your consideration of JASIS.

 Donald Kraft
 kraft%lsu@csnet-relay

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 20 Aug 1985 21:44-EST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Technical Reports
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest V. 3 # 114. - Ed]

%A Robert Stepp
%T A Description and User's Guide for Cluster/2 A Program for
Conjunctive Conceptual Clustering
%R Department of Computer Science Report No. 1085
%I University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
%D FEB 1985

%A Richard Preston Hooper
%A Michel A. Melkanoff
%T An Application of Knowledge-Based Systems to Electronic Computer-Aided
Engineering, Design and Manufacturing Data Base Transport
%R CSD-850011
%I Computer Science Department, UCLA
%K IGES
%X describes a method of developing methodology for transferring databases
between CADCAM systems
There is a charge of $19.25 for this item

%A Geoffrey E. Hinton
%T Distributed Representation
%I Carnegie Mellon University Department of Computer Science
%D OCT 1984

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 22 Aug 1985 02:23-EST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Articles
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest V. 3 # 114. - Ed]

%A I. Peterson
%T Conversing with Computers Naturally
%J Science News
%V 128
%D JUL 27, 1985
%N 4
%P 53
%K microcomputers natural language database Bozena H. Thompson
Frederick B. Thompson Microrim Savvy Caltech Natural Access System
%X discusses Intellect Microrim, and Savvy and a Natural Language System
developed by Bozena H. Thompson and Frederick B. Thompson for IBM PC's

%A Howard Morgan
%T The Microcomputer and Decision Support
%J ComputerWorld
%V 19
%N 33
%P 39-46
%D AUG 19, 1985
%K Lightyear microcomputer Expert-Ease
%X discusses the use of AI in MIS, particularly Light-Year and
Expert Systems in MIS on page 44 of this article.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 28 Aug 85 08:21:59 EDT (Wed)
-FROM-
From: Marshall D. Abrams <abrams@mitre.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Program of Expert Systems in Government Symposium
-BODY-
[Extracted from AIList V 3 # 115 - only some of sessions are included
 here for brevity. - Ed]

Following is a list of all the sessions and papers for the Expert
Systems in Government Symposium to be held October 24-25, 1985 at the
Tysons Westpark Hotel, McLean, VA. The symposium is sponsored by the
MITRE Corporation and the IEEE Computer Society. Two one-day tutorials
are scheduled for October 23rd: "Concepts of Knowledge Engineering" by
Kamran Parsaye and "Expert Systems Development" by Elaine Kant.
Additional information is available from abrams@mitre. A registration
form follows the session listing.



PANEL:  FRONTIERS OF KBES:  PRO & CON

MODERATOR:  Dr. Marvin Denicoff, Thinking Machine, Inc.


Panelists:

PRO  Prof. Chandrasekaran, Ohio State University  PRO   Dr.  Neil
Pundit, DEC

CON  Dr. Gary Martins,  Intelligent  S/W,  Inc.   CON   Dr.  John
Benoit, MITRE

MIDDLE   Dr. Robert Milne, Pentagon MIDDLE   Dr. Kamran  Parsaye,
Intelliware


UNCERTAINTY MANAGEMENT

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. North Fowler, RADC

Sessions_Chairman:  Dr. Piero Bonissone, G.E.


"An     Application     of     Fuzzy     Reasoning      to      A
Confirmation/Disconfirmation  Decision  Making Algorithm," Joseph
A. Karakowski, U.S. Army

"An Expert System Based on a  Stochastic  Parallel  Network,"  V.
Venkatasubramanian, Northeastern University

"Data Analysis Assisted by an Uncertainty Varying Expert System,"
Petr Hajek, Fred Neil Springsteel

"In Introduction to Fact Based Model Expert  Systems,"  Sing  Chi
Koo, Software Intelligence Lab, Inc.



INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM

Vice_Chairman:  Prof Saj-Nicole Joni, Yale

Session_Chairman:   Prof.  Beverly  Woolf,  University  of   Mas-
sachusetts


"Intelligent Tutoring Using the Integrated Diagnostic Model:   An
Expert  System for Diagnosis and Repair," Howard R. Smith, Pamela
K. Fink, John C. Lusth, Southwest Research Institute

"An Informal Programming Language," Jeffery Bonar, William  Weil,
University of Pittsburg

"Understanding Discourse Conventions in Tutoring," Beverly Woolf,
University of Massachusetts

"PRUST:  An Automatic System Program  Debugger,"  Lewis  Johnson,
ISI


NEW DIRECTIONS IN KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Bruce Bullock, Teknowledge

Session_Chairman:  Ethan Scarl, The MITRE Corporation


"Artificial Intelligence for C:3:I:  The Design  and  Development
of  a  Prototype Causal Schema Knowledge-Based System," Gerard W.
Hopple, Stanley M. Halpin, Defense Systems, Inc.

"Capturing Domain Primitives for Knowledge Engineering," R. Peter
Bonasso, The MITRE Corporation

"A Shared Knowledge Base for Independent Problem Solving Agents,"
Susan E. Conry, R.A.  Meyer, J.E. Searleman, Clarkson College

"Research in the Applications  of  Expert  Systems  at  the  NASA
Ames-Dryden  Flight  Research Facility," Eugene L. Duke, Victoria
A. Regeniek, NASA Ames Research Center




PANEL:  INTELLIGENT COMPUTER ASSISTED INSTRUCTION

MODERATOR:  Dr. Jeff Bonar, LRDC/University of Pittsburg

Panelists:

1.   Dr. Beverly Woolf, University of Massachusetts.

2.   Dr. Joseph Psotka, PERI-IC, Army Research Institute

3.   Prof Walker Schneider, University of Illinois

4.   Prof. T. Govindraj, Georgia Instute of Technology

5.   Dr. Stelan Ohlsson, University of Pittsburg


LANGUAGE TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Thomas London, AT&T Bell Laboratories

Session_Chairman:  Dr. Kamran Parsaye, Intelliware, Inc.


"A Multicriteria Model to Select An Expert System Shell,"  Ernest
H. Forman, Thomas J.  Nagy, The George Washington University

"Guess/1:  A General Purpose Expert  Systems  Shell,"  Newton  S.
Lee,  John  W.  Roach,  Virginia  Polytechnic Institute and State
University

"Prolog for Expert Systems:  An Evaluation," Richard Helm,  Cath-
erine Lassez, Kim Marriott, University of Melbourne

"Evaluating the Existing Tools for Developing Expert  Systems  In
PC  Environment,"  Animesh  Karna and Amitabh Karna , Information
Technical Institutes


INTELLIGENT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL-1

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Roy Rada, National Library of Medicine

Session_Chairman:  Dr. Brian McCune, Advanced Information & Deci-
sion Systems


"A Rule-Oriented Methodology for Constructing  a  Knowledge  Base
from  Natural Language Documents," Dr. Stan Matwin, University of
Ottawa

"Understanding Technical Documents and Graphics," R.P.  Futrelle,
University of Illinois

"Information Retrieval Techniques In An Expert System for  Foster
Care,"  Sheila G. Winett, Edward A. Fox, Virginia Polytechnic In-
stitute

"Cognitive  Graphing   &   The   Representation   of   Biomedical
Knowledge,"  G.  Matthew Bonham, George J. Nozicka, F.N. Stokman,
The American University




INTELLIGENT INFORMATION RETRIEVAL-2

Vice_Chairman:  Dr. Roy Rada, National Library of Medicine

Session_Chairman:  Dr. Roy Rada, National Library of Medicine


"An Expert System for Document Retrieval," Bruce Croft, Roger  H.
Thompson, University of Massachusetts

"Building A Knowledge Base Statistically," Hafedh Mili, Roy Rada,
George Washington University

"The Application of an Expert System for Information Retrieval at
the  National  Archives," Daniel DeSalvo, Jay Liebowitz, American
Management Systems, Inc.

"Intelligent Information Retrieval:  Issues in  User  Modelling,"
Robert R. Korfhage, So.  Methodist University


MEDICINE-1

Vice_Chairman:  Prof. B. Chandrasekaran,

Session_Chairmen:  Dr. R. Smith, Ohio State University


"A Deductive Inference & Associative Memory Retrieval," James  A.
Reggia, University of Maryland

"An Expert Advisory System for Primary  Eye  Care  in  Developing
Countries,"  Jack  H..   Ostroff,  Chandler  R.  Dawson,  John  K.
Kastner, Sholom Weiss, Casimir A.  Kulikowski,  Kevin  B.   Kern,
Rutgers University

"Knowledge Representation for Knowledge Directed Data Retrieval,"
Jon Sticklen, Ohio State University

"Mapping  Medical  Knowledge  Into   the   Conceptual   Structure
Representation Language," Thomas C.  Bylander, Ohio State Univer-
sity




MEDICINE-2

Vice_Chairman:  Prof. Sholom Weiss, Rutgers University

Session_Chairmen:  Dr. R. Smith, Ohio State University



"RED:  A Classification &  Abductive  Inference  Expert  System,"
Jack W. Smith, Jr., Ohio State University

"Improved Retrieval Through Traversal of a Knowledge-Base," Ellen
Bicknell-Brown, Roy Rada, National Institutes of Health

"Semantic Network Representations for Neurological Diagnosis," S.
Srihari, Xiang, Chatkow, Shapiro, SUNY at Buffalo

"An Expert System for Interpretation of  Cranial  C.T.  Scan  Im-
ages," R. Kremar, S.  Srihari, SUNY at Buffalo




INTELLIGENT INTERFACES

Vice_Chairman:  Prof. Saj-Nicole Joni, Yale University

Session_Chairman:   Prof.  Beverly  Woolf,  University  of   Mas-
sachusetts


"A Knowledge Based Lab Assistant for a Computer Based Instruction
System,"  Larry  Christensen,  Gordon  Stokes, Bill Hays, E. Dale
Coons, Brigham Young University

"The Cognitive Principles Underlying Software Design,"  B.  Adel-
son, Yale University

"Tutoring Expertise:  Human & Otherwise," David Littman, Jeannine
Pinto, Elliot Soloway, Yale University

"Application of Expert Systems to Training," David L. Young, Mys-
tech Associates, Inc.



This list of session was compiled 8/20/85 and is subject to further
correction.


send REGISTRATION to:   Expert Systems Symposium
                        IEEE Computer Society
                        1730 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
                        Washington, DC  20036-1903

                prior to 10/1/85        late reg. surcharge
                member  non-member
tutorial        $200    $250            $30
symposium       $120    $160            $30

Give membership #, name, title, company, address, etc.

Blood type is optional (joke).

On-site registration may be limited. Call 202/371-0101 for latest
information on space availability.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox"  <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 85 18:12:32 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IR speakers sought this fall at Virginia Tech
-BODY-
The Dept. of Computer Science at Virginia Tech would like to invite
speakers for its fall (and winter, spring) graduate seminar series.
Talks are given Wedn. afternoons at 4 pm.  Discussions on information
retrieval, computer networks, etc. are of particular interest.
Contact Dr. E. A. Fox at (703) 961-5113 or 6931 if you can come or
would like to recommend another.  Blacksburg is in a beautiful area
of the country, on a plateau surrounded by mountains, near the
Jefferson National Forest, so fall is a particularly nice time to come!

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
8
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox" <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 85 17:45:48 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Errors - number of last issue, mail addresses
-BODY-
1) This is Issue 8 whereas the last one was 7.  Please correct the
second mention of Issue number in your last digest.

2) Some of you may not have been receiving IRList due to changes in
CSNET site lists, handling of domain names, etc.  Please advise if
you missed issues and cannot obtain them from other more easily.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: William HATFIELD <686@njit-eies>
-TO-
To:         fox%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject:    Question Sudden Interest in IR
Message-ID: <M22.19778@NJIT-EIES.MAILNET>
-BODY-
  Ed I have the impression of a recent resurgence of interest in IR,
and maybe also more work, papers, etc., in the last YEAR after a lull
throughout the 1970s.  And maybe even more off the wall:  that there's
been little fundamental research in IR since the mid-1960s.  Do you
know of any basis for this, have a similar (or different) impression?
regards,

  wm%NJIT-EIES.MAILNET@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA

[Comments:
1) See the short article by G. Salton in July issue of JASIS for a
  survey of some good work done during the time you indicate there
  was a lull.
2) I personally do feel there has been a lot of activity recently,
  and that the trend continue.  IR and AI have found each other, and
  there are many cross interests with other areas too: office inf.
  systems, new processor and storage hardware, networks, etc.
3) The distribution list for IRList is still growing!
Does anyone have firm evidence in terms of memberships, papers
submitted, etc.? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Mark Richer <RICHER@SUMEX-AIM>
-DATE-
Date: Mon 2 Sep 85 16:15:26-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Report on first annual AAAI-ED meeting
-BODY-
[Copied from AI-ED]

Well it's about time I tell you something about the AI in Education
meeting (AUG. 20TH, 1985) that was held at the IJCAI conference in
L.A.  (For those new to this list and unfamiliar with IJCAI there were
several earlier announcements about a special meeting that WAS held at the
International Joint Conference on AI).

>-- There were at least 50 people at the meeting
>-- Jeff Bonar from LRDC (Learning Research & Development Center,
University of Pittsburgh) led a discussion on Intelligent Tutoring
Systems.
>-- Gary Fine from Intellicorp was supposed to speak about
commercial realities, but couldn't come because of a business meeting
(perhaps that says something about current commercial realities
itself).

>-- Jeff's talk raised a lot of interesting questions and discussion.
It was a lively group with lots of heated debate on several topics:

	--- diagnosis of student errors  (how much diagnosis is
really needed, useful, or practical?; Are bug catalogs sufficient in
most domains?)
	--- what are the relative merits of traditional CAI, ICAI,
other alternatives ("tool kits")
	--- evaluation of AI/Education programs (or lack of evaluation
so far)
	--- what should we be teaching?  how can computers best be used
in education?  where does AI fit into the picture in terms of developing
useful educational programs? Augmented CAI (ICAI), Socratic Tutor
(ITS), microworlds (papert, diSessa, et al.)?
	--- general architectures for AI/Education technology; domain
independent tools; methods for formally specifying a curriculum; tying
instructional actions to diagnosis --- can we develop an ITS Authoring
System?

It seemed that the meeting was a definite success and there was a
consensus that a meeting at AAAI 86 (annual conference of the American
Association of AI) would be a good idea.


IJCAI summary
>---- -------

Advanced Computer Tutoring, Inc. announced a lisp tutor for sale (at
the exhibition hall) which is based on ITS technology developed at
Carnegie Mellon (Anderson, et al.)


The IJCAI 85 proceedings (over two thousand pages) had 6 articles
focusing on AI and Education (28 pages), which is not a very
impressive amount but if you are interested check in your local
library or contact Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 95 First Street,
Los Altos, CA 94022 (415-941-4960) [I don't know the price] Articles
in the proceedings:
(1) the geometry tutor, Anderson, et al.
(2) dynamic student modelling in an int. tutor for LISP pro, Reiser,
et al.
(3) heuristic and formal methofs in automatic pgm debugging, Murray
(4) grammars as user models, Schuster
(5) An ES for understanding expressions from electric circuit
analysis, Joobbani, et al.
(6) Computer assisted reasoning with MIZAR, Trybulec, et al.


mark

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 85 17:53:19 pdt
-FROM-
From: Mark Lentczner <mark%apple.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Smalltalk for the Macintosh
-BODY-
[Copied from INFO-MAC digest]

Just thought I'd clear things up,
Smalltalk is now available for the Macintosh (yes, not "MacLump",
but real honest to god Macintosh, all you need is at least 512k,
and of course it will run on the MacXL too).  It costs only $50.
The correct address to write to for an order form is:

	Smalltalk Request
	c/o Eileen Crombie
	Apple Computer, Inc.
	20525 Marianni Avenue
	Cupertino, CA 95014

Please do not send anything to the other address posted until you
have the order form.  This is very important as the other address
will not be able to send you order forms or send you Smalltalk
without and [sic] order form.

[We are not advertising here!  Since much work on IR has focussed
on browsing and human interfaces, it is important for us to all
be aware of the price and power of current hardware and software. - Ed]

If there is a call for it, I have a 102 line info file that I can
post about Smalltalk on the Macintosh.

>mark lentczner
 Smalltalk Group
 Apple Computer, Inc.
 20525 Marianni Avenue, MS:22Y
 Cupertino, CA 95014

 UUCP: {dual, nsc, voder}!apple!mark
 CSNET: mark@apple

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subject: From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@MARYLAND>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 85 08:22:25 edt
-BODY-
Hello Fox@vpi   -- glad to hear about the idea of IRList.  May I suggest your
adding "Human-Computer Interaction" to your list of topic areas.
[Good idea - I will edit the welcome message.  Thanks, Ed]

Would you like to include our notice about TIES??
   [Sure - here it is in nroff output form. - Ed]



                The Interactive Encyclopedia System (TIES)
                --- ----------- ------------ ------ ------

                Ben Shneiderman, Department of Computer Science
                Janis Morariu, College of Library and Information Services

                University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
                June 1985

The Interactive Encyclopedia System (TIES) has been under development  at  the
University  of  Maryland  since  Fall 1983.  It allows novice users to explore
information resources in an easy and appealing manner. They merely  touch  (or
use arrow keys to move a light bar onto) topics that interest them and a brief
definition appears at the bottom of the screen.  The users may continue  read-
ing  or ask for details about the selected topic. An article about a topic may
be one or more screens long.  As users traverse articles, TIES keeps the  path
and allows easy reversal, building confidence and a sense of control. Advanced
features include the ability to view an index of articles or print  out  arti-
cles of interest.

TIES is attractive for instruction (and entertainment)  because  the  author's
ideas  and  writing  style  are the focus of attention.  Through careful human
factors design, the computer aspects have been trimmed to let the author  com-
municate to the students and to allow the students to control their learning.

TIES consists of:

    - Novice user browsing software
    - Authoring software for composing new articles and editing
    - Databases for browsing.  Databases already created:
        Austria and the Holocaust (109 articles)
        Adele Stamp Student Union (42 articles)
        Introduction to TIES (18 articles)
        Introduction to Authoring on TIES (16 articles)
        FULCRUM Project (30 articles)
        Online Maintenance Manual (52 articles)

TIES is appealing to authors because of the explicit instructional model,  the
reduction  of  computer-related concepts, the focus on content, and the lively
user interface.  It is an engaging challenge to  reformulate  pedagogic  plans
into  the  network  of  related articles that TIES supports.  There is a great
sense of satisfaction in composing articles and seeing the  linkages  come  to
life as they are used by students in novel ways.

TIES allows authors to create a network of conceptual knowledge in which  con-
cepts  are  linked  associatively  and the learner is free to explore pathways
based on their needs and interests.  Potential applications include  tutorials
about  software  products, self-study guides for any discipline, travel guide-
books, annotated Shakespeare or the Bible, and maintenance manuals for  equip-
ment.  Each visitor suggests intriguing and novel applications.


The TIES authoring software guides the author in writing a title, brief defin-
ition  (5-25  words),  text  (50-1000 words, typically), and synonyms for each
article title.  The author marks references in the text by surround them  with
a  pair of tildes.  TIES collects all references, prompts the user for synonym
relationships, maintains a list of articles, and allows editing, addition, and
deletion  of  articles.   A simple word processor is embedded in the authoring
software, but users can create articles on their own word processor,  if  they
wish.  There are no commands to memorize, every operation is done by selection
from options on the screen.

TIES runs on a standard IBM PC (monochrome or color) and on  IBM  PCs  equiped
with  touchscreens.   We  are  attracted to the possibility of eliminating the
keyboard while still providing substantial exploratory power.  TIES was  first
written  in APL and has been rewritten in the C programming language.  A brief
user's guide and a more extensive author's manual are available.  Dan Ostroff,
a  graduate  student  in  computer science, did the implementation and a major
portion of the user interface design.

Three experimental studies have been conducted  to  test  out  certain  design
alternatives (such as demonstrating the advantage of arrow keys over the mouse
for this system) and observe user behavior.  More than 160  subjects  partici-
pated  in  these  controlled  experiments.   In  addition, more than a hundred
novices and experts have tried and commented informally on the current design.

In the study comparing the arrow keys (maybe better termed "jump" keys because
the  cursor  would jump to the closest target in the direction pressed) to the
mouse, the arrow keys proved to be and average of 15% faster and preferred  by
almost  90% of the subjects.  We conjecture that when there are a small number
of targets on the screen and when jump keys can be implemented, they provide a
rapid, predictable, and appealing mechanism for selection.

In a second study using the TIES technique, subjects traversed a database with
42 articles about the University of Maryland Student Union. The embedded menus
technique reduced the number of screens viewed when compared with an  explicit
menu  strategy.   There were significant reductions in the times for task per-
formance, and the subjective preference was strongly for the embedded menus.

The embedded menus idea was also used for two experiments with online  mainte-
nance  manuals for electronic equipment.  A tree structured and linear form of
a 52 page maintenance manual was prepared for screen presentation and in paper
form.  Experimental subjects had to perform 12 tasks using one of the manuals.
Significant differences were found showing that time  was  reduced  using  the
paper  versions.  No  significant  differences were found between the tree and
linear versions for speed or  error  rates.   When  a  pruning  algorithm  was
applied  to  the text to allow users to trim text unrelated to their task, the
time was cut in half.  This latter experiment used only the computer condition
and  demonstrated one of the advantages of screens over printed text.  This is
important, since for many applications printed manuals are still easier to use
and approximately 30% faster to read than computer displays.

TIES is complete, but there are many refinements and many potential extensions
which  we  would  like to pursue. The software needs further documentation and
the authoring guide could be expanded.

Major extensions include support for graphics, videodisc, or integration  with
other  software.   Further testing is needed to select the optimum touchscreen
or other input devices and to test alternate screens. We are  also  interested
in  further testing with the screen mounted horizontally inside a nicely built
wooden table.  We hope to attract the large fraction of the population that is
anxious about using computers and would like to conduct field trials. -------

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@MARYLAND>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 85 10:23:45 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  TIES etc.
-BODY-
Hi again...glad my info was useful.  We did find touchscreen was easier
to teach people than arrow keys, and that arrow keys were a solid winner
against the mouse when there are a small number of large
targets on the screen.

Please let me know what you are up to.

>- Ben Shneiderman

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
9
-FROM-
From: Rabjohns.Henr@XEROX
-DATE-
Date: 4 Sep 85 08:32:07 EDT (Wednesday)
-BODY-
...

	The IRList digest sounds like a good one to me, would it be possible
to become a member of the dl and also could you send me any back issues of
the digest that you might have already generated.

Thanks in advance,
Douglas T. Rabjohns

[Note: Virginia Tech is a member of CSNET, connected through Phonenet.
We are polled twice daily for mail.  We cannot FTP nor can other sites
directly access our computers over Internet.  Would any ARPAnet sites
like to keep an archive of IRList messages so that others can FTP?
It would be much easier for those who missed issues to get them that
way.  Also, at the present time, sending back issues repeatedly is
very expensive for my department.  Thanks, Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Tom Scott <scott@BGSU>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 85 12:32:28 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: The Relationship between Videotex and Information Retrieval
-BODY-
	This month's "Hardcopy" (September 1985, p.18) has a half-page
article on the relationship between videotex and information retrieval
which may be of  interest  to the readers of IRList.   The author, Pam
Jones, quotes Leslie Townsend of International Resource Development as
follows:

	Videotex  has been called   a  technology,  when  it's
	really  not  so much a   technology   as  it   is   an
	information  retrieval method  ....   The line between
	what were software packages for information  retrieval
	and  hardware  for   videotex   systems    are   [sic]
	essentially becoming negligible.

	I'd like to  hear more  about this.     Perhaps someone  would
submit  and article   to IRList, detailing the  relationship   between
videotex and information retrieval.  What  exactly  is videotex?  What
are its  theoretical  basis, practical  applications,  and technology?
How do the theory,  practice, and  technology of videotex compare  and
contrast  to   the  theory, practice,   and technology  of information
retrieval?

	Tom Scott                    CSNET: scott@bgsu
	Dept. of Math. & Stat.       ARPANET: scott%bgsu@csnet-relay
	Bowling Green State Univ.    UUCP: osu-eddie!bgsuvax!scott
	Bowling Green OH 43403-0221  ATT: 419-372-2636

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu 29 Aug 85 13:26:29-CDT
-FROM-
From: Charles Petrie <CS.PETRIE@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Tax Expertise Available for Expert System
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest V3 N 116 - 2 Sept]

Prof. Lewis Solomon is a specialist in tax law and is interested in
working with someone on an expert system in that domain.  He would also
like to hear about existing systems.  His US Mail address is:

  George Washington University
  National Law Center
  Washington, D.C. 20052        Phone #(202)676-6753

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 20 Aug 1985 16:08-EDT
-FROM-
From: AHAAS at BBNG.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminars - Speech Recognition and NL Processing (BBN)
-BODY-
     [Copied from AIList Digest V3 N 117 - 3 Sept, where it was:]
           [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]


  There will be an AI seminar on Monday August 26 at 10:30 in the second floor
conference room at 10 Moulton St. Jean-Francois Cloarec and Michel Gilloux
of Centre Nationale d'etudes des Telecommunications (CNET), Lannion, France
will speak. Their abstract:

  SERAC : An Expert System for Acoustic-Phonetic Speech Recognition

We present a knowledge based approach to speech  recognition  at  the
phonetic  level.  SERAC  is  a  production system generating phonetic
hypotheses for continuously spoken french sentences.
We  give  the  motivations for using such an approach and we describe
the knowledge representation language.
Then  we  present  the  knowledge  base  and  report some preliminary
results.


There will be another talk by Karen Sparck Jones the next morning,
August 27th, at 10:00 in the 2nd floor conference room. Her abstract:

             Natural Language Processing Research
                            at the
         Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge

The talk will outline recent and current work at the
Laboratory. This includes both research with a semantic
stimulus and research driven by parsing issues. The semantic
work is concerned with interpretation problems like reference
resolution, and with techniques for representation and
inference involving general as well as domain knowledge, in
the context of such tasks as database query and construction,
paraphrase, and indexing. The parsing work includes projects
on grammar construction, morphological analysis, and the use
of a large machine-readable dictionary, and research on finite
state techniques for compositional interpretation and on
robust phrase-based parsing strategies.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Henry Nussbacher <vshank%weizmann.BITNET@WISCVM>
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 30 Aug 85 10:39 O
-BODY-
       How does the Inter-Network Database Server Work
                       Henry Nussbacher
 This article  will attempt  to describe  all the  components
 that go into  the database server that  is currently running
 on  host BITNIC  in Bitnet.    The work  on developing  this
 inter-network database server is being  funded by the Bitnet
 Development and Operations Center (BITDOC).
 DATABASE is an information retrieval  system that will allow
 users from  any network to have  access to various  types of
 information contained within a full-blown database system.
 DATABASE is a  server machine (daemon)  that runs  on the VM
 operating system at BITNIC.   It can accept commands in many
 different ways.    Users within Bitnet can  send interactive
 messages,  punch files  (record length of 80),   print files
 (record length  of 133),  and  Note files (IBM  standard for
 electronic mail).   In addition,  users that are not located
 within Bitnet,  but reside in any of the other networks that
 are connected  to the  Internet (Mailnet,   Arpanet,  Csnet,
 UUCP,      etc.)      can    send     RFC822     mail     to
 DATABASE%BITNIC.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA  and   the  server   will
 accept it as a command.
 Language used
 =============
 DATABASE is written  in Rexx (approximately 1600  lines),  a
 high level macro language for VM.   Rexx is a combination of
 Algol  (parsing  capabilities),  C  and  Pascal  (structured
 programming - Do, Do While,  Do Until,  Do Forever,  Select-
 When-Otherwise) and PL/1 (functions - Index, Verify, Substr,
 Translate,  Justify,   etc.).   Rexx  has developed  quite a
 following within  the hackers that  use Bitnet since  it was
 created using  the best  properties of  existing high  level
 languages while  leaving out the  parts that  everyone hates
 (e.g.  declares  - all  Rexx variables  are self  declaring,
 etc.).
 By definition, Rexx has access to the VM file system.   What
 needed to be  created was hooks into the VM  mail system and
 into a VM database system called Spires.
 Interface to Bitnet mail system
 ===============================
 It  was  decided  that  the most  common  aspect  among  all
 computer networks in the world  was RFC822 mail.   Upon this
 basis,  the mail interface was developed.   It is a separate
 subroutine within DATABASE,  so that when X.400 mail becomes
 more  accepted,   additional  coding  can  be  done  without
 affecting any of the other segments of the code.
 Most  Bitnet  sites  run a  package  developed  at  Columbia
 University which  is another  system server  to handle  mail
 files.  It performs all the validity checking and routing of
 mail.  When a mail file arrives at DATABASE, it is parsed to
 find out from where it came.  The first non-blank line after
 the  RFC822 header  starts  the  command stream.    Multiple
 commands can be  coded within one mail file  for delivery to
 DATABASE.   The commands are passed into Spires for handling
 and  the  results  are  stuffed into  the  VM  file  system.
 DATABASE then takes the resultant  file and places it inside
 an RFC822  envelope and  sends it to  the mailer  server for
 handling.   If  the "From:" field  that was sent  is invalid
 (i.e.  xyzzy@Mitre-Bedford  instead of  the correct  form of
 xyzzy@Mitre-Bedford.ARPA)  then the mailer  server will kick
 out the mail since Bitnet cannot determine where to send the
 mail back to.
 The Spires Database System
 ==========================
 There are many  database packages that are  available for VM
 systems:  Focus, SQL, Adabas, etc.   Spires (Stanford Public
 Information  Retrieval  System)   was selected  due  to  its
 functionality and  the its ability  to accept  commands from
 Rexx.
 Spires can locate a single record  within a database of half
 a million records after only 4 disk reads (maximum).  Spires
 is an index based database  system.   The definer can define
 indices for any field that he/she so wishes.   Spires is the
 result  of  over   10  years  of  development   at  Stanford
 University  and  has  such advanced  functions  as  phonetic
 search  capability as  well as  all the  standard items  one
 expects to  find in  a database  package (report  generator,
 sequential processing, etc.)
 Arpanet Digests
 ===============
 One of the first projects  was the incorporation of selected
 Arpanet digests into the  DATABASE system.   The auto-digest
 loader is written in Rexx (approximately 800 lines)  and has
 tables to  control which  digests to  accept and  properties
 they contain.   Certain digests are digested (examples:  Ai-
 List,  Info-Ibmpc)   and some are  rebroadcasted immediately
 (examples: Info-Nets, Security).  Digested digests fall into
 two categories.   Some follow the standard of having exactly
 30 '-' (hyphens) separating individual entries along with 70
 hyphens separating the table of contents from the individual
 entries.   These digests, in addition are sequenced and have
 their  first  line  being  a  title  line  for  the  digest.
 Examples  of these  digests would  be Ai-List,   Info-Ibmpc,
 Info-Kermit,  and  Sf-Lovers.   The  other example  would be
 digested digests that are not sequenced and that do not have
 a title line.   An example of this  style of digest is Info-
 Graphics.
 As  Arpanet  forums  arrive,  they  are  parsed  into  their
 individual  entries and  added to  the appropriate  database
 subfile.   This  process of  database addition  is performed
 independently of the functioning of the DATABASE server.
 Further documentation
 =====================
 To receive a detailed list of the valid command structure as
 accepted by DATABASE,   send an RFC822 piece of  mail to the
 address as stated above with the  single line of HELP.   You
 should  receive  in return  an  RFC822  piece of  mail  with
 introductory documentation on how to use DATABASE.  In order
 to receive further information  on Arpanet digest searching,
 issue the command HELP ARPANET.
 Appendix - HELP ARPANET
 ========   ============
 This service (Arpanet digests) will be available as of mid-October 1985.
 DATABASE - Bitnet Inter-network Database Server  (last updated 08/16/85)
 --------
-END-
-BODY-
 This Inter-network database server is currently under development
 by the Development and Operations Center (BITDOC) of Bitnet.
 Suggestions and comments should be forwarded to:
 Henry Nussbacher
 Bitnet:   HANK@BITNIC
 Internet: HANK%BITNIC.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
                  How to search Arpanet digests
                  =============================
 This document is meant for advanced users who have mastered the beginning
 help file.
 For those who don't know what Arpanet digests are: There are currently
 over 100 discussion forums that are maintained within Arpanet.  These
 range from discussions about the Apple MacIntosh to new standards for
 networks to information about computer security.  Some of these
 discussions appear as a digest; a moderator receives all contributions
 and creates a formatted digest that is sent out to all subscribers.  The
 other form of discussion is an immediate redistribution list, where
 contributions to the discussion are immediately rebroadcasted to all
 individuals who have registered for that discussion.
 DATABASE now has the facility to search various selected Arpanet
 digests.  In order to receive a list of all valid subfiles, issue the
 command 'LIST':
 DRINKS               Demonstration subfile
 EXPLAIN              Database System subfile
 MOVIES               Demonstration subfile
 PATHFINDER           Database System subfile
 PRESIDENTS           Demonstration subfile
 RECIPES              Demonstration subfile
 RESTAURANT           Demonstration subfile
 INFO-GRAPHICS        Arpanet discussion forum (digest)
 AI-LIST              Arpanet discussion forum (digest)
 INFO-NETS            Arpanet discussion forum (digest)
 Arpanet "digested" digests, when loaded into the database, are pulled
 apart into their individual components, so that when you perform a
 search against a particular "digested" digest, you will not receive
 the entire digest but rather just the entry that pertains to your
 search request.
 The following fields are defined as indices for all subfiles that
 arrive from Arpanet:
 Goal Records:  ENTRIES, ENTRY
 Simple Index:  SD, SPIRES-DATE
 Simple Index:  SPIRES-TIME, ST
 Simple Index:  GRANDSEQ, GS
 Simple Index:  SUBJECT, T, TITLE
 Simple Index:  FROM
 Simple Index:  DATE
 Simple Index:  SEQ, SEQUENCE
 Simple Index:  TEXT
 SPIRES-DATE (or SD) allows a user to find entries based upon the
 date it was added.  Examples:
    FIND SD > 08/01/85 (IN AI-LIST
    would find all entries that have been added to Ai-List after 08/01/85.
    FIND SD < 07/01/85 (IN INFO-NETS
    would find all entries that have been added to Info-Nets before July
    1st, 1985.
 SPIRES-TIME (or ST) allows you to refine your search even further when
 wishing to find entries that have been added after (or before) a
 particular day and time.  Note should be taken that these indices of
 date and time are not the date and time fields as mentioned within
 the Arpanet digest but rather the actual date and time that the data
 was loaded into the DATABASE system.
 GRANDSEQ (or GS) is a unique integer number that is given to each
 Arpanet digest as it is added.  Certain immediate redistribution
 digests (like Info-Nets) do not supply any sequencing number.  This
 sequence number is assigned by an alternate conferencing system within
 Bitnet so that duplication of entries will not occur.  This sequence
 number will generally be different than the sequence number as assigned
 by a "digested" digest moderator.  Examples:
    FIND GS 96 (IN AI-LIST
    would find all individual entries from an Ai-List digest that was
    assigned a Grand sequence number of 96.
    FIND GS > 10 (IN INFO-NETS TABLE
    would find all entries that have been assigned a Grand sequence
    number greater than 10.  In addition, since the list may be quite
    long, this example has specified the TABLE option, which will display
    a concise list of which entries have been found.
 SUBJECT (or TITLE or T) is the 'Subject:' header line that generally
 appears on each Arpanet digest entry.  Examples:
    FIND SUBJECT PIXEL (IN INFO-GRAPHICS
    FIND TITLE PROLOG (IN AI-LIST
    FIND SUBJECT WORKST* (IN INFO-GRAPHICS
 FROM is the 'From:' header line that appears on each Arpanet digest
 entry.  Examples:
    FIND FROM STRING DEC (IN INFO-NETS
    would find any entry in Info-Nets that had a 'From:' field with
    the character string 'DEC' anywhere within the field.
    FIND FROM HENRY (IN AI-LIST
    would find any entry in Ai-List that has the word HENRY in the
    'From:' field.
 DATE is the 'Date:' header line that appears on each Arpanet digest
 entry.  Examples:
    FIND DATE EDT (IN INFO-IBMPC
    would find all entries that have the word EDT in the 'Date:' field
    of the entry.
    FIND DATE JUL OR DATE JUN (IN INFO-NETS
    would find all entries that have the word 'JUN' or 'JUL' in their
    'Date:' field.
 SEQUENCE (or SEQ) is only valid for Arpanet "digested" digests.  Each
 "digested" digest is assigned a sequence number by the moderator.
 Examples:
    FIND SEQ 102 (IN AI-LIST
    FIND SEQ > 90 (IN INFO-IBMPC TABLE
 TEXT is the text of the entry.  This is defined as the section of an
 entry that follows a blank line after the 'Date:', 'From:' and
 'Subject:' (optional) fields.  This entire section is keyword searchable.
 Examples:
    FIND TEXT EARN (IN INFO-NETS
    FIND TEXT PROLOG AND TEXT LISP (IN AI-LIST
    FIND TEXT XENIX AND SEQ > 85 (IN INFO-IBMPC
    FIND (TEXT UNIX OR TEXT XENIX) AND DATE PST (IN INFO-IBMPC
>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
10
-FROM-
From: RGARRETT%LAJ.SAINET.MFENET@LLL-MFE
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 85 10:36 PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Books-in-Print type database
-BODY-
I am looking for a "Books - in - Print" style database for use as the
foundation for an expert system retrieval system.  Does anyone know where
such a thing might be available on magnetic media in the public domain
(or otherwise low cost format).  I am aware of some commercial on-line
sources,but these are quite unsuitable for my purposes.  Any help would
be appreciated.

Randy Garrett
(305)626-6700

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox" <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 85 17:15:28 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Preview of upcoming issue of ACM SIGIR Forum - Cover Page
-BODY-
SIGIR NEWS Volume 18 Issues 2-4


Chairman's Message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1
SIGIR Officers' Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
Conference/Workshop Reports
  BCS/IR & SIGIR 1984. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
  RIAO/85 in Grenoble. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
  SIGIR 1985 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
  SIGIR 1985 Panel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
  University of Regina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
News from NSF. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Announcements
  IRList - Electronic Mail Digest  . . . . . . . . . . 21
  CAIS 1986. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Articles
  Online Access Aids for Documentation . . . . . . . . 23
  Some Characteristics of Future Information Systems . 28
Calls for Papers
  JASIS Submissions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
  SIGIR 1986 - Pisa, Italy . . . . . .  inside back cover

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 4 Sep 1985 17:37-EDT
-FROM-
From: AHAAS at BBNG.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar - Constructive Lexicon-Grammar (BBN)
-BODY-
      [copied from AIList Digest V 3 N 121 - 11 Sept; which was]
           [Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]

  The next BBN Artificial Intelligence seminar will be held in the 3rd
floor large conference room at 10 Moulton Street, 10:30 on Friday
September 13.  Bruce Nevins of BBN wil speak on "Constructive
Lexicon-Grammar". His abstract:

Maurice Gross's group in Paris found that, after they had specified
French verbs by their syntactic properties, there was no need for
lexical features to make further semantic distinctions between them.
Because of this perhaps surprising result, they have been able to
develop a highly specific lexical representation, using classifier
words in sentence forms rather than abstract features.  Their
lexicon-grammar replaces most context-free parsing with simple lookup
in 3-dimensional tables of syntactic properties of words.

Constructive grammar, as exemplified by Harris's _A_Grammar_of
_English_on_Mathematical_Principles_ (Wiley, 1984), uses only the
constructive `has-a' relations of dependency and adjunction, limiting
the taxonomic `is-a' relation to classifier hierarchies of words in
the lexicon.  A given input morpheme can only be one of a few kinds of
things: an operator with specified argument requirement, a primitive
argument (roughly, a concrete noun), an argument-indicator like -ing,
the operator-indicator -s, or a product of certain precisely
specifiable reductions of strings to more compact, and more
conventional, form.  Because each morpheme has at most only a very few
possible syntactic roles--frequently, just one--computer analysis of
text has much less structural ambiguity to cope with than in other
approaches.

In this talk, I will show how these two approaches to natural language
processing may be combined in a system for construing (as opposed to
parsing) natural language input that should be readily adaptable to
text generation as well.  I will sketch extensions similar to Naomi
Sager's system for automatically incorporating new text information
into subject-matter specific data bases.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "girill terry%e.mfenet"@LLL-MFE
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 85 10:49 pst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: DOE Forum Session on Online Documentation
-BODY-
     The U.S. Department of Energy is hosting its 2nd Forum on
Computer Systems for Documenation at a conference center in Livermore,
California, from October 29-31, 1985.  One session at this event
has special relevance to IRlist readers, because it concerns the
impact and accessibility of online documentation (i.e., material both
prepared and distributed through computers).
     Below are abstracts for the talks slated for the online-documentation
session.  Whether published versions are prepared depends partly on
reader interest.  Comments or requests can go to me
("girill%mfe"@lll-mfe.arpa) or directly to Carol Tull
("tull#carol%mfe"@lll-mfe.arpa).


                        DOE Documentation Forum
                       Thursday, October 31, 1985
                          Technical Session on
          The Question-Answering Role of Online Documentation
                             T. R. Girill,
                             Session Chair



9:00-10:15 a.m.
Carol Tull, National MFE Computer Center
"The Impact of Online Documentation on Consulting Services"
Commentator: to be arranged
         Abstract: From a consultant's point of view, the key advantages
    of online documentation are (1) rapid access to passages, (2)
    frequent, inexpensive, on-demand updates, and (3) 24-hour/day
    availability.  Active support for the software that distributes
    documentation online is essential to good consulting.  One reason is
    that the user interface to documentation is often among the first
    that a new user encounters.  In addition, a well-designed user
    interface promotes effective information retrieval.  Finally,
    collaboration between editorial and consulting staffs dramatically
    improves the organization and content of online documents, as
    NMFECC's recent experience with drafting topical and task-oriented
    documents reveals.  Future work on an automated consultant system
    will require further close cooperation between the two groups.
10:30-NOON
Vicki Jackson and
Mary Ethel Jae, Fireman's Fund Insurance Companies
"A Practical Inquiry System for Accessing Online Documentation"
Commentator: to be arranged
         Abstract: The Documentation Support System (DSS) developed by
    Fireman's Fund is an online inquiry system containing information
    previously communicated in offline manuals and memos.  Features
    include retrieval via hierarchical subject categories, retrieval via
    search terms and pointers (e.g., business site), and news messages.
    Subject and search-term retrieval have been successfully tested at
    one field location.  This presentation will cover system development
    from design (by an interdisciplinary team) through implementation.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Lowe@NYU-CSD2
-DATE-
Date: 14 Sep 1985 16:07-EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Cooperative structuring of information
-BODY-
Readers of IRList may be interested in research I have been doing on methods
for information retrieval that are not based on the use of keywords.  Most
IR researchers are aware of the many shortcomings of keywords as a method
for accessing useful information:  keywords are ambiguous, have synonyms, do
not specify structured concepts, and make no attempt to evaluate important
attributes of documents such as accuracy, clarity, or currency of
information.  The alternative that I have been working on is to allow many
users of an information system to structure the information themselves.  The
users can create an extensive network of links joining related concepts as
well as providing new information and commentary.  The users can contribute
to areas in which they are knowledgeable, rather than relying upon some
database cataloger who is unlikely to have much knowledge or understanding
of the material that is being indexed.

The obvious problem in allowing a large number of individuals to contribute
to a common database is one of quality control.  This problem can be
partially handled through the use of voting techniques in which material is
structured according to a consensus opinion of the users.  However, simple
voting would be just an opinion poll and does not do enough to assure the
best possible accuracy of information.  Therefore, I have been developing a
structured representation for debate in which the computer maintains a
record of the reasoning behind each decision.  Rather than simply voting on
the correctness of each item in the database, users are required to indicate
which items of evidence support or refute a particular conclusion.  Not only
are users more likely to agree on whether specific evidence supports a
conclusion than they are to agree on the conclusion in the abstract, but the
representation provides a record for each user of what others have
considered to be the best available evidence bearing on each conclusion.
The representation is used not only to debate aspects of presentation and
indexing, but also to represent the content of much of the material in the
database as a snapshot of the reasoning process that links the concepts in
mind of each user.

The specific representation that is used for debate is derived from the
theory of argument developed by the British philosopher Stephen Toulmin.
There is not space here to give a full explanation of the system, but I have
written a fairly detailed paper on the topic.  This paper was published as
"The representation of debate as a basis for information storage and
retrieval" by David G. Lowe, AFIPS Conference Proceedings Volume 53, 1984
National Computer Conference, pp. 595-603.  A more extensive version of this
paper will soon be published in the International Journal of Man Machine
Studies.  I will be happy to mail copies to anyone who sends me their U.S.
mail address.  I can be reached at LOWE@NYU-CSD2 on the ARPANET or the
following address:
    Prof. David Lowe
    Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
    251 Mercer Street
    New York, NY  10012

Finally, let me point out the importance of performing further research in
the area of cooperative information systems as an alternative to current
methods of information access.  The shortcomings of keyword based systems
have already been mentioned.  Another form of information exchange is the
electronic digest, such as the one you are reading.  However, the
information in these digests is seldom retained for further use as there is
just too much junk mixed in with the useful information.  Another potential
solution to the information retrieval problem would be natural language
understanding, in which the computer could access the relevant information
by making use of a representation of its content.  However, natural language
understanding of arbitrary text to the degree that would be required is
still many years or decades away.  My own research background is in
artificial intelligence, but I have come to believe that the best route to
progress lies in having the computer represent the content of information in
the manner of AI systems while leaving the input task up to human users.
This type of system is well within the scope of existing technology and
would greatly increase the range of applications for information retrieval.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
11
-FROM-
From: "Robert B. Allen" <rba%lafite@MOUTON>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 85 15:59:12 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Bruce Croft
-BODY-
do you happen to have an electronic address for
Bruce Croft in Dublin?

[Try bcroft@irlearn on BITNET, or bcroft%IRLEARN.BITNET@csnet-relay - Ed]


Thanks
Bob Allen

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: MARS%red.rutgers.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: 18 Sep 85 15:30:36 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NLP for knowledge acquisition
ReSent-From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI>
ReSent-To: IRList%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
Hi:  I am interested in info about projects which use Natural Language
Processing Techniques to analyse scientific articles or abstracts
with the aim of deriving knowledge bases from them.

I am aware of a few projects in that field (UCLA, IBM
Heidelberg, Leiden University, Chemical Abstracts), but I
would appreciate any further pointers. Please
reply directly to me, and I will summarize to the net. Thanks.
                                    Nicolaas J.I. Mars

[Can anyone at NLM or CMU report on their efforts? Other projects? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subject: From: Michael_Gordon%UB-MTS%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-MULTICS
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 85 11:15:30 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SIGIR Forum, etc.
 ...
-BODY-
  1) I'm submitting a camera-ready article for WInter's
SIGIR Forum (at the request of Vijay Raghaven).  Do you want
it in a special format ("long" paper, two columns) or is a
typo-free laser printer docuemnt OK?

[Since printing many pages is expensive, we ask that people either
 send us fairly closely typed submissions or else provide machine
 readable form (preferably TeX or TROFF so we can reformat). DO NOT
 double space.  Laser printer or typeset originals, single spaced,
 without big margins, is the preferable form.  Long paper, 2 cols,
 is fine since ACM can reduce and we can save costs.
 More comments, Vijay? - Ed]

   2) Do you have Vijay's electronic mail address?
 [I use ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucb-vax which should help people
 on DARPA Internet and using UUCP. - Ed]

   3) I've been performing some (simulated) Cosine-based
retrieval experiments.  I consistently see *extremely* high
COsine scores (often over 0.8) between queries and rel docs.
THe queries are weighted, often employing 10 or more non-0
terms.
     These correleations seem too high.
     I'm wondering what the data for some "typical" Cosine
based retreival experioemts looked like.  I've look in some places
I expected to find such results, but without success.  In particularar,
what I'd like to see are things like this:
    a query that was submitted to the system (all terms, plus weights)
    a rank ordering of documents (including the indexed descriptions,
including weights, if any) plus an indication of if, in fact, the
document was relevant to the query.

    I'm interested in seeing a representative sampling of such
data, for weighted and unweighted queries combined with weighted
and unweighted docs.  Data showing how Cosines seem to vary with
the number of terms used to index a document (and/or query) are of
interest, too.
    If you can point any thing out, or forward any data, I'd appre-
ciate it greatly.
         Thx alot,  Mike

[Similarity depends on the queries and documents, obviously!  Fairly
short queries matched against titles can give many hits with
similarity close to 1.  Has anyone looked at the distributions
of similarities for test collections, in detail?
I do have data that may help and hope others can send some too,
so you can summarize results.- Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Michael Lesk <lesk%petrus@MOUTON>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 85 18:28:58 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SIGIR/SIGDOC Workshop
-BODY-
The following is a proposal for a workshop which, although not yet
formally approved, [Note: Diana Patterson of SIGDOC has signed - Ed]
is very likely to take place in Snowbird, Utah, June 30-July 2, 1986.
Chair: Michael Lesk; Local Arrangements: Lee Hollaar; Treasurer: Karen Kukich.

Attendance will be limited to 75; there will be no formal proceedings,
but a report will be written for some ACM publication; a number of
prominent people (Karen Sparck Jones, David McDonald, Donald Walker,
Patricia Wright, etc.) have indicated interest in attending.  Comments
on the workshop, or indications of interest, are welcome.  Please
notify the chair at: bellcore!lesk, or lesk%bellcore@csnet-relay, or
(if you have current routing tables) lesk@bellcore.  Phone: 201-829- 4070.

NOTE: I will be on vacation Sept 9 - Oct 4; failure to reply
during those dates merely means your message has not been read!! --
Thanks, Michael Lesk


                       Writing to be Searched:
             A Workshop on Document Generation Principles


     As computers learn to write English, and others improve at
searching it, they ought to benefit from people who know how to do
these jobs.  We're proposing a workshop bringing together AI special-
ists in document generation, information retrieval experts, people who
know how to write manuals, and those who write programs to evaluate
writing.

Introduction.

     In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the use of
computer programs that write English.[1,2,3] Expert systems, for exam-
ple, need to explain what they are doing.  Programs are making
increasing strides in fluency, domain coverage, and expressive
power.[4,5] In fact, it is remarkable that there has been a long dis-
cussion over the last ten years about whether or not apes have
mastered language, based on utterances such as ``Please tickle more,
come Roger tickle''[6] while computer programs saying things like
``The market crept upward early in the session yesterday, but stumbled
shortly before trading ended''[7,8] have not impressed the public
nearly as much.  But even supposing that computers can now write
English, what should they write?

     One obvious answer is computer programming manuals (``if X is
good, recursive X is better'').  Today it is more and more important
to have good documentation for the increasingly complex systems, typi-
cally computer based, which now pervade automobiles, airplanes,


                                - 2 -


military systems, hospitals, telephone companies, and many other areas
of life.  The manuals associated with many a microcomputer weigh more
than the computer does.  Worse yet, these manuals vary widely in qual-
ity and good manuals are very important for proper use.  It is partic-
ularly urgent, for example, that operators of complex military systems
or nuclear power plants be able to find out what to do in emergencies
or other unusual circumstances.

     It is also important to consider language generation for other
purposes, such as answering questions or explaining the output of
expert systems.   In fact, we should really be considering the entire
information transfer system, in which English serves to represent
knowledge and deliver it to people.  The use of knowledge representa-
tion formalisms for the first purpose and of graphical interaction for
the second may greatly affect conventional writing.  Indexing tech-
niques, although used now primarily to identify relevant passages, may
also serve the knowledge representation function.  Browsing systems
may well produce a need for new kinds of documents (Hypertext,
Polytext) and thus new kinds of writing.

What We Know Today.

     Reference manuals are not conventional literary works.  Much of
this documentation is never read cover to cover, but is only referred
to as necessary.  Thus the indexing of this material is almost as
essential as its composition.  Again, significant strides in this area
have also been made by researchers.  It is now possible to design
full-text retrieval systems that accept conventional documents and
questions in natural English,[9] and then retrieve documents or pas-
sages from documents that probably answer the questions.  Such systems
are now for sale from several vendors.[10] Meanwhile, the researchers
are exploring the construction and use of thesauri to identify
synonyms and related terms automatically, and the use of feedback to
improve retrieval based on the results of earlier searches.[11] The
introduction of user feedback into retrieval systems and indexing
means that we are moving towards a world in which the process of writ-
ing followed by reading may be replaced with more integrated informa-
tion systems, which respond to questions by generating appropriate
replies on the fly.

     Retrieval studies have indicated that certain kinds of vocabulary
control can improve indexing efficiency.  Avoiding very common and
broad words, for example, or very infrequent words, makes it easier to
find the correct documents in response to queries.  However, this
information is rarely used to affect the writing of documents with the
idea that they can then be indexed more satisfactorily.  When new com-
puter systems are being designed, and names must be given to a collec-
tion of invented objects, nobody bothers to consult retrieval experts
to decide on good names, despite their experience with vocabulary con-
trol.  The choice of names in fact matters, and people don't agree
very much.[12]

     Indexers have, for years, been familiar with the problems of
vocabulary control and choice of words to describe subjects.  The


                                - 3 -


methodologies they use, and the similar expertise of lexicographers,
have implications for natural language generation.  The problems of
the optimum selection of names both with respect to writing descrip-
tions and to designing the systems being described (where possible)
are not often considered and the choices evaluated.  A recent paper
suggesting the use of linguistic principles in designing computer com-
mand languages, however, was greeted with enthusiasm at a meeting of
computer hackers, so that interactions between these fields seem pro-
fitable.[13]

     Some interesting retrieval experiments have been run on unusually
formatted or unusually structured texts.  The National Library of
Medicine, for example, assembled the Hepatitis Knowledge Base to serve
as an on-line encyclopedia of hepatitis information;[14,15] rather
than a conventional monograph or review article, it is a tree-
structured outline of this subject area, with many cross references.
To date, however, no such experimental document architecture has been
widely accepted.  Nor have the more formal AI knowledge representation
languages, despite their obvious promise and their attraction to
information scientists, yet been able to cover a large subject
domain.[16]

     There is, of course, an overall process of information transfer
here.  Somewhere, there is a database of information; and there are
people who need that information.  In between, we produce a document,
which describes the program or the database, and which people can then
refer to.  Note that they rarely read it cover to cover, so that con-
ventional writing rules about plot and characterization are often
inappropriate.  ``Technical manuals are not bedtime reading.''[17]
These are documents typically meant only for retrieval; and yet they
tend to be written in the same way, and in the same form, as documents
written as literary works.  Many of the same problems arise, of
course, with respect to textbooks, handbooks, news articles, and even
ordinary business correspondence.  Again, much of it needs indexing
and retrieval.  And in many cases it doesn't get indexed or retrieved,
because it is too much work when done by hand.

     Using reference manuals as an example, there is no general agree-
ment on the kind of manual that ought to be provided.  Research on the
use of models to teach people about programs has not indicated whether
having a concrete analogy to the program task helps or hinders learn-
ing.[18] The relative value of examples, explanations, and terse
reference summaries is not established by research.  And there are
arguments about how long a manual should be, with some computer scien-
tists believing that longer is better and others believing that
shorter is better.  Much of the discussion eventually comes down to
``I know good writing when I see it,'' a statement that even if valid
gives little guidance to those trying to produce computer-written
documentation.

     Nor are the conventional style checking programs of a great deal
of help.  Too many of the programs now sold to assist writers are
trivial Flesch-type readability indexes, or other very low level style
and spelling checkers.  There is research, but little production, on


                                - 4 -


programs to catch grammatical errors; and the idea of rating English
for any rhetorical quality is impossible today.  We often describe
writing as ``informative,'' ``exciting,'' ``convincing,'' or ``easy to
read,'' but there is no program that can evaluate any of these attri-
butes when given a text.

     It is clear, however, that documentation is very important:
nearly every survey of computer software rates not only the perfor-
mance but also the manual.  Users depend critically on the manual, and
the absence of good documentation will often make an otherwise attrac-
tive service or piece of software unusable.  One experience indicated
that documentation was the most frequent source of trouble in using a
microcomputer system.[19]

     An important avenue now being explored is the use of computers to
generate both their programs and their descriptions from the same for-
mal specification, as in the GIST project of Bill Swartout.[20] This
will at least guarantee the consistency of the program and its manual.
It is important, of course, not to lose more in style and understanda-
bility than is gained in cost and timeliness through the use of
computer-written text.

     Much talk about documentation today concerns format: we should
emphasize that the primary purpose of this workshop is to go beyond
that.  Page layout is not irrelevant, but it is not a substitute for
good English, and it is unfortunate that the ease with which word pro-
cessors can manipulate format has resulted in much experimentation
with appearance, and less with content.  The intent of this workshop
is to deal with rhetoric and semantics, not with page makeup.

Questions.

     Is there a better kind of information transfer system that could
be devised?  How should expert systems explain what they are doing?
What kind of business and military correspondence systems should be
built in the future?  When, as we expect, computer systems will not
only contain but generate their own explanations, should these look
like conventional manuals?[21] Is there a difference, for example,
between the principles of writing documents and writing explanations
for expert systems?  Which is more useful?  Perhaps only a retrieval
system is needed, with an explanation generator; or perhaps conven-
tional manuals should be written, but designed specially to be
searched rather than read.  In practice, the people who produce docu-
mentation are already starting to ask what kinds of formats, and what
kinds of style and typography, are appropriate for documentation any-
way.  We'd like to upgrade this discussion to talk about rhetorical
style.

     In particular, given programs that can produce reasonably well-
phrased English, it should be possible to turn knobs inside the pro-
grams, and see what effects these have on the larger properties of the
text.  This offers the possibility of producing text under very con-
trolled conditions, much better understood than any generation of such
complex material for normal psychological testing.  In addition,


                                - 5 -


merely the presence in a workshop of several different natural
language generation systems, combined with experts in producing actu-
ally useful documents, should be very valuable in discussing what pro-
perties of the systems are connected to what features of the resulting
English.

Workshop Specifics.

     In this workshop we will bring together subject specialists in
four main areas:

*    Artificial intelligence researchers working in natural language
     generation;

*    Documentation specialists interested in writing style and qual-
     ity, and in the definition of a `good' document;

*    Text analysis developers, building programs that analyze text
     automatically and try to make value judgments about it; and

*    Retrieval experts, who know how to build systems for keyword
     matching and retrieval.

Another major area that should be represented, but possibly not until
a later meeting, is computer graphics.  The value of illustrations,
diagrams, and charts is unquestioned but it is not clear how we can
integrate graphics with text today.

     Here are some examples of interesting comments, mostly recent
research results in the above fields:

1.   A high degree of grammatical variation does not seem important to
     produce natural effects in short paragraphs (as evidenced by
     Karen Kukich's stock market report generator).[22]

2.   Structure in queries is not very useful in retrieval; unordered
     lists of keywords do about as well (Ellen Voorhees and Gerard
     Salton).[23]

3.   Checking for hackneyed phrases, although seemingly a trivial
     operation, is perceived as very valuable by many writers (either
     Writer's Workbench, by Nina Macdonald and Lorinda Cherry,[24] or
     Epistle, by Lance Miller and George Heidorn).[25]

4.   Syntax is much less important for retrieval than semantics; you
     need to know what the words mean more than you need to know their
     relationship (Harris, Cowie, and Tuttle).[26,27,28]

5.   People frequently leaf through manuals, even when tables of con-
     tents and indexes are available; documents should be formatted to
     cater for this (Patricia Wright).[29,30]

6.   Editing manuals to make them suitable for machine translation,
     requiring simple language, has turned out to make them better in


                                - 6 -


     the original language as well.

7.   Even humor has its place in documentation.  ``The grace which
     eloquence had failed to work in those men's hearts, had been
     wrought by a laugh.'' (Mark Twain).  Seriously, although the
     point of manuals is not to make the reader laugh, in some com-
     puter manuals anything that would keep the reader awake would be
     valuable.

A possible new strategy might be to bypass the typical indexing step
of making a list of words to represent a document, each with an
assigned weight, by having the generator select these itself, possibly
with greater accuracy.  An improvement in the reverse direction might
be the use of the same vocabulary control data base that is used for
indexing to select the words used in the text.

     Note that for retrieval, what really matters is the choice of
specific words used to name objects and actions.  The structures which
connect these words are less important and have been almost unused in
retrieval systems.  Yet, for those who evaluate English, the specific
word choice is almost ignored!  Instead, the vast majority of the
effort is spent on syntax.  Thus, for documents intended for refer-
ence, almost the entire current literature on automatic checking is
mis-aimed.  Moreover, relatively little effort in document generation
as a whole has been spent on choice of specific words or phrases, and
yet this is the most important aspect for retrieval purposes.

     We hope that by talking to each other, the generators will dis-
cover that they can significantly increase the utility of their output
without increasing the effort of generating it.  And we hope that the
retrieval and analysis experts will learn what it is that they should
be looking for in documents, and increase the performance of their
systems without an increase in cost.

     Our best possible outcome, of course, is that the participants
will find something which is not quite a conventional reference
manual, but serves the same purpose and does it better.  Whether this
will be a structured document still written in English, or a
question-answering database with an explanation generator, it is
impossible to say.  But unless the various groups start talking to one
another, we'll never find out.

Michael Lesk
Bell Communications Research
435 South St., Rm. 2A-385
Morristown, NJ 07960

August 9, 1985


                                - 7 -


References


1.   E. Conklin and D. McDonald, "Salience: The Key to the Selection
     Problem in Natural Language Generation," Proc. 20th Meeting ACL,
     pp. 129-135, 1982.

2.   K. R. McKeown, "The TEXT System for Natural Language Generation:
     An Overview," Proc. 20th Meeting ACL, pp. 113-120, Toronto, Ont.,
     1982.

3.   R. E. Cullingford, M. W. Krueger, M. Selfridge, and M. A. Bien-
     kowski, "Automated Explanations as a Component of a Computer-
     Aided Design System," IEEE Trans. Sys., Man & Cybernetics, pp.
     168-181, 1982.

4.   W. C. Mann, "An Overview of the NIGEL Text Generation Grammar,"
     Proc. 21st ACL Meeting, pp. 79-84, 1983.

5.   A. K. Joshi and B. L. Webber, "Beyond Syntactic Sugar," Proc. 4th
     Jerusalem Conf. on Information Technology, pp. 590-594, 1984.

6.   S. Chevalier-Skolnikoff, "The Clever Hans Phenomenon, Cuing and
     Ape Signing: A Piagetan Analysis of Methods for Instructing
     Animals," in The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with
     Horses, Whales, Apes and People, ed. Thomas Sebeok and Robert
     Rosenthal, vol. 364, pp. 60-93, New York Academy of Sciences,
     1981.

7.   Karen Kukich, Knowledge-Based Report Generation: A Knowledge-
     Engineering Approach to Natural Language Report Generation.  Ph.D
     Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1983

8.   Karen Kukich, "ANA's First Sentences: Sample Output from a
     Natural Language Stock Report Generator," Proc. Nat'l Online
     Meeting, pp. 271-80, 1983.

9.   G. Salton and M. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information
     Retrieval, McGraw-Hill, 1983.

10.  Among sellers of free text retrieval systems are ``Cucumber
     Information Systems'' (5611 Kraft Drive, Rockville, MD 20852) and
     ``Knowledge Systems, Inc.'' (12 Melrose St., Chevy Chase, MD
     20815).

11.  G. Salton, The SMART Retrieval System -- Experiments in Automatic
     Document Processing, Prentice-Hall, 1971.

12.  G. W. Furnas, T. K. Landauer, L. M. Gomez, and S. T. Dumais,
     "Statistical Semantics: Analysis of the potential performance of
     key-word information systems," Bell Sys. Tech. J., vol. 62, no.
     6, pp. 1753-1806, 1983.

13.  Marion O. Harris, "Thoughts on an All-Natural User Interface,"


                                - 8 -


     Proc. Summer USENIX Conf., pp. 343-347, Portland, Oregon, June
     1985.

14.  L. M. Bernstein and R. E. Williamson, "Testing of a Natural
     Language Retrieval System for a Full Text Knowledge Base," J.
     Amer. Soc. Inf. Sci, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 235-247, 1984.

15.  R. E. Williamson, "ANNOD -- A Navigator of Natural-Language
     Organized (Textual) Data," Proc. 8th SIGIR Meeting, pp. 252-266,
     Montreal, Quebec, 1985.

16.  M. E. Lesk, "Programming Languages for Text and Knowledge Pro-
     cessing," Ann. Rev. Inf. Sci. and Tech., vol. 19, pp. 97-128,
     1984.

17.  Janet Asteroff, "On Technical Writing and Technical Reading,"
     Information Technology and Libraries, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 3-8,
     March 1985.

18.  Christine Borgmann, "The User's Mental Model of an Information
     Retrieval System," Proc. 8th SIGIR Meeting, pp. 268-273, Mont-
     real, Quebec, 1985.

19.  Marilyn Mantel and Nancy Haskell, "Autobiography of a First-Time
     Discretionary Microcomputer User," Human Factors in Computing
     Systems: Proc. CHI '83 Conference, pp. 286-290, 1983.

20.  Bill Swartout, "GIST English Generator," Proc. AAAI-82, pp. 404-
     409, Pittsburgh, Penn., 1982.

21.  Ariel Shattan and Jenny Hecker, "Documenting UNIX: Beyond Man
     Pages," Proc. Summer USENIX meeting, pp. 437-454, Portland, Ore.,
     1985.

22.  Karen Kukich, "Design of a Knowledge-Based Report Generator,"
     Proc. 21st Meeting ACL, pp. 145-50, 1983.

23.  E. Voorhees and G. Salton, "Automatic Assignment of Soft Boolean
     Operators," Proc. SIGIR Conf., pp. 54-69, 1985.

24.  L. L. Cherry and N. H. Macdonald, "The Unix Writer's Workbench
     Software," Byte, vol. 8, no. 10, pp. 241-248, Oct. 1983.

25.  G. E. Heidorn, K. Jensen, L. A. Miller, and R. J. Byrd, "The
     Epistle Text-Critiquing System," IBM Systems J., vol. 21, no. 3,
     pp. 305-326, 1982.

26.  M. O. Harris, Howto: An Amateur System for Program Counseling,
     1983.  private communication.

27.  J. R. Cowie, "Automatic Analysis of Descriptive Texts," Conf. on
     Applied Natural Language Processing, pp. 117-123, Santa Monica,
     Cal., Feb. 1-3, 1983.


                                - 9 -


28.  M. S. Tuttle, D. D. Sherertz, M. S. Blois, and S. Nelson,
     "Expertness from Structured Text? Reconsider: A Diagnostic
     Prompting System," Conf. on Applied Natural Language Processing,
     pp. 124-131, Santa Monica, Cal., Feb. 1-3, 1983.

29.  Patricia Wright, "Manual Dexterity: a user-oriented approach to
     creating computer documentation," Human Factors in Computing Sys-
     tems: Proc. CHI '83 Conference, pp. 11-18, 1983.

30.  T. G. Sticht, "Comprehending Reading at Work," in Cognitive
     Processes in Comprehension, ed. M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter,
     Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
12
-FROM-
From: "Edward A. Fox"  <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 85 13:12:34 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Delay in BITNET change at Virginia Tech
-BODY-
As some of you have pointed out, mail over BITNET to fox@vtcs1 does
not work.  The tables at BITNET sites were not changed in time, so the
correct address now is still fox@vpics1 not fox@vtcs1.  This amends
the information given in IRList V1 #7.

Sometime in October, change should occur whereupon I will announce
the fact.  Thank you for your patience. - Ed

PS I have another address as foxea@vpivax3 and may send messages out
from there thru BITNET.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ramesh Astik <rampan%northeastern.csnet@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date:     Wed, 18 Sep 85 09:08 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  query
-BODY-
I was looking for some references in synthetic organic chemistry
on a Chemical Abstract Database system.The first hit was 10,000
followed by narrowing down to 400 ! The same search by an expert
bibliographer or search assistant gave me exactly 23 article list.
This is the difference in eye-balling and machine-search.
We had  a lot of debate on the mental process of the human expert
doing the job and whether that can be mimicked on a computer or
not.
Does any one know of any expert-system which can save us so
much paper work in searching  and retrieving the information?
Our University has access  to approximately 300 databases and
after the Automated search list  is obtained,most of us do
equally long eye-balling!!
Kindly send any information to RAMPAN@NORTHEASTERN.

[You might be interested in looking at "Intro. to Modern Information
Retrieval" by Salton & McGill or other texts about recent advances in
searching methods.  There are now a few commercial systems that will
give you ranked output that will clear up problems like you mention.
There are also some expert system projects underway to yield further
improvements in various ways.  Please, researchers, send me responses so
we can give a picture of what is going on to our readers! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Hans A. ]lien" <hans@OSLO-VAX>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 85 01:55:54 -0100
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList -- add me (& note on archive)
-BODY-
Please add me to your list.
Apart from being a computer science student,
my special interest in information retrieval
stems from my situation as being blind.
Therefore I cannot readily access printed information,
but through my Braille terminal or a speech synthesizer
I can access info available in the various network mailing lists, for instance.

the TIES system for encyclopedia seems interesting,
but I am maybe even more interested in access to machine-readable copies of
printed books in general, and computer books & manuals, on hardware and
software in particular.

One major problem here, of course, is related to copyright,
and besides, experience has shown me that machine-readable copies of books
very often don't contain the complete (and proofread) text of the printed book.

If anyone might have any helpful info on the topics raised above,
please send me a message (or submit to the IRList
when you consider it of general interest).

Finally, I found the back issues of the IRList in the file
PS:<BBOARD>IRLIST.TXT on SUMEX-AIM.ARPA.
Maybe you could make an arrangement so as to announce this source for accessing
IRList archives, accessible via anonymous ftp from ARPA-net hosts.

Lokking forward to future issues of your digest, this is
		Hans A. ]lien (hans@oslo-vax.arpa)
		Institute of Informatics, Univ. of Oslo
		P.O.BOX 1080 -- Blindern
		N-0316  OSLO 3    Norway

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Christopher Schmidt <SCHMIDT@SUMEX-AIM>
-DATE-
Date: Mon 23 Sep 85 15:05:51-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList archives
-BODY-
	FYI for people with arpanet access, all issues of IRList since
volume 1, number 1, are filed in [SUMEX-AIM.arpa]<BBOARD>IRLIST.TXT and
can be retrieved with anonymous FTP.
	At present there are 13 messages (10 issues, I believe) in the
archive.  I expect to let the archive grow unchecked until it has
about 300 messages.  At that time I plan to cut the archive down in
size, but will announce this fact in IRList beforehand so compulsive
savers have a chance at it.
>-Christopher

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: long@CSNET-SH
-SUBJECT-
Subject: archive request
-DATE-
Date: 17 Sep 85 16:05:26 EDT (Tue)
-BODY-
Ed,

    We would be willing to archive mail from your mailing list subject
to some reasonable cap on disk space (e.g. 5 Meg).  Does this sound ok?

Dan
[Do any CSNet members want this too since they cannot FTP? Since I can
 now send messages over BITNET to ARPAnet for free, I will honor
 requests for back issues, within reason. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: leff@SMU
-DATE-
Date: 27 Sep 1985 20:17-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Startext meeting
-BODY-
ACM Dallas Chapter Meeting Notice

Speaker: Gerry Barker, Startext Manager
Topic: Startext: The Evolution of an INformatin Database

Hear about the unlimited usage concept for on-line news, sports,
E-mail, classifed ads, Grolier's Online Encyclopedia, and more!

Place: Mount Whitney Room
       Summit Hotel, 2645 LBJ Freeway
Date: Wednesday, October 2, 1985

Time: 6:15 - 7:15 Attitude Adjustment - Cash Bar in Lobby
      7:15 - 7:45 Full Course Dinner $14.00
      7:45 - 8:00 Brief Business Meeting
      8:00 - 8:35 Speaker

Dinner Reservations 436-0747  Attendees will ge t a free
trial password.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Jim Guyton <guyton@RAND-UNIX>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Electronic Document distribution experiment
-DATE-
Date: 22 Sep 85 13:50:19 PDT (Sun)
-BODY-
			   ARPANET ANNOUNCEMENT

The Rand Corporation is conducting an experiment in electronic publishing.
The documents listed below have been fully reviewed and published as
printed Rand publications.  By making the same document (excluding tables
and graphics) available on the ARPANET, Rand is attempting to assess the
needs of the electronic user.  If you are interested in copying any of the
documents, please contact RAND-DOCS@RAND-UNIX.ARPA.  We will send you an
electronic questionnaire, and as soon as you complete and return it, we
will supply the information you need to access the document.  We may also
send you a follow-up questionnaire to get your reaction to the electronic
document.

If you find that the electronic version doesn't meet your needs because of
the missing illustrations and graphics, you can then contact RAND-DOCS and
order a printed copy of the document which will be sent to you via the
U.S. Post.

We welcome any comments or suggestions on this experiment.  Just send all
correspondence to RAND-DOCS@RAND-UNIX.ARPA.

AVAILABLE TITLES


   R-3283-NSF/RC "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail,"
	     by N.A. Shapiro, R.H. Anderson.  July 1985. (95K bytes)

   R-3160-AF "ROSS: An Object-Oriented Language for Constructing Simulations,"
	     by D. McArthur, P. Klahr, S. Narain, October 1984. (64K bytes)

   R-3158-AF "TWIRL: Tactical Warfare in the ROSS Language," by  P. Klahr,
	     J.W. Ellis, Jr., W.D. Giarla, S. Narain, E.M. Cesar, Jr.,
	     S. Turner, September 1984. (150K bytes)


ABSTRACTS of above documents:


R-3283-NSF/RC.  Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail.  N.A.
Shapiro, R.H. Anderson.  July 1985, 35 pp., $4.00
     This report discusses some important general attributes of electronic
mail and message systems, and the effects of those attributes on the
quality and appropriateness of communication.  The authors discuss the
"etiquette" of sending and receiving electronic mail, drawing on personal
observation of inappropriate and counterproductive uses of these systems.
By presenting some initial guidelines, the authors attempt to accelerate
the process by which social customs and behavior appropriate to electronic
mail become established, and thereby to accelerate the effective use of
such systems.

R-3160-AF.  ROSS: An Object-Oriented Language for Constructing Simulations.
D. McArthur, P. Klahr, S. Narain.  October 1984, 28 pp., Ref., $4.00
     This report provides an overview of ROSS, an object-oriented language
currently being developed at Rand.  The goal of ROSS is to provide a
programming environment in which users can conveniently design, test, and
modify large knowledge-based simulations of complex mechanisms.
Object-oriented programming languages, and ROSS in particular, enforce a
message-passing style of programming in which the system to be modeled is
represented as a set of objects and their behaviors (rules for object
interaction).  This style is especially suited to simulation, since the
mechanism or process to be simulated may have a decomposition that maps
naturally onto objects, and the real-world interactions between the objects
may be easily modeled by object behaviors and object message transmissions.
In addition to describing some of the basic ROSS commands and features,
the report discusses some software that interfaces directly with ROSS,
including a sophisticated screen-oriented editor and a color graphics
package.  Facilities for browsing among objects and their behaviors are
also described, and examples of browsing and editing are presented using
SWIRL, a military combat simulation written in ROSS.

R-3158-AF.  TWIRL: Tactical Warfare in the ROSS Language.  P.Klahr, J.W.
Ellis, Jr., W.D. Giarla, S. Narain, E.M. Cesar, Jr., S.Turner, September
1984, 49 pp., Bibliog., $4.00
     This report describes TWIRL, a simulation of a primarily ground
combat engagement between two opposing military forces.  It was developed
to further experiment with the ROSS language, an object-oriented simulation
language that was successfully used to develop the SWIRL air battle
simulation, and to develop a prototype simulation that could be used to
explore issues in electronic combat.  The authors describe the objects that
comprise TWIRL and provide extensive examples of object behaviors to
explain and illustrate the process of building a simulation in ROSS.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
13
-FROM-
From: Ave decus virginum! <goun%cadlac.DEC@DECWRL>
-DATE-
Date: Monday, 16 Sep 1985 08:03:51-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Extraction from AIList Digest
-BODY-
It occurred to me to wonder what percentage of the IRList Digest readership
also reads AIList Digest.  I bring this up because of the amount of material
you are copying from there for inclusion in IRList.  It may be that most of
your readers, like me, have already seen it.

Do you think a poll to determine reader preference on this subject would be
worthwhile?

					-- Roger Goun
[I would welcome additional comments! Recently, AIList has been
publishing excerpts from IRList too.  I will try to avoid duplication
but feel an obligation to select out items of particular interest.  I
expect that IRList readers and others will gradually submit more directly
to IRList, so probably this situation will take care of itself. - Ed]


ARPA:    goun%cadlac.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
UUCP:    {allegra, decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax}!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-cadlac!goun
USPS:    Digital Equipment Corp., APO-1/B4
         100 Minuteman Road; Andover, MA 01810-1098
Tel:     (617) 689-1675

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 85 10:42 PDT
-FROM-
From: RGARRETT%LAJ.SAINET.MFENET@LLL-MFE.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Books-in-print database
-BODY-
[Copied from PROLOG Digest Wed, 25 Sep 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 38
 and a followup to msg in IRList Issue 10. - Ed]

I assume you are familiar with "Books in Print" , the multi-volume
listing of most of the books currently in print in the USA.  I
would  like something similar but on magnetic media;i.e., mag tape
and hopefully cheap.  The purpose  of this is to serve as the
foundation for an expert system retrieval system to be written in
(what else) PROLOG.  Since this is both an experimental system (how
many other kinds of expert systems are there?) and done as a
graduate student, I am only interested in public domain or very low
cost sources.  I am already familiar with commercial systems such
as DIALOG and with IRList.  I hope this answers your questions, but
if something is still unclear, just drop me a note.

>- Randy Garrett

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 85 22:43:03 +0200
-FROM-
From: Anjo@seismo.CSS.GOV
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Building Large Systems
-BODY-
[Copied from PROLOG Digest Mon, 26 Aug 1985  Volume 3 : Issue 37
 If anyone has an address that works for Anjo, please let us know! - Ed]

   We have had a similar problem with developing a window system
with a large number of utilities on top of Prolog.  As the window
system should have a fast user interface (responding to mouse
clicks immediately), Prolog itself is not the most appropriate
language to use.  Our solution is implement the user interface
and all the windowing stuff in C, along with text-editors, graphics
editors, the mouse-manager etc. (at the moment this is about 300+
pages of C source code).  This package is called PCE.  Obviously
the Prolog programmer wants full access to this package, he wants
to create windows, graphical representations of knowledge inside
his Prolog application and get mouse clicks if he needs them.
This calls for bi-directional interface between PCE and Prolog.
Our solution for this problem is to add a small number of
predicates to Prolog that implement object orientedness, and a
few functions that can asserted information available in PCE in
the Prolog data-base (total source code of these functions is
about 15 pages C).

   The advantages of this approach (in our case) are that the
performance of the user interface doesn't depend on the performance
of the Prolog interpreter, so all I/O functions are as fast as C can
do it.  The small interface assures that PCE can be modified without
also needing to change part in the interface.  For example if we
decide to create another lay-out for a window only PCE needs to be
changed, while both the interface between Prolog and PCE, and the
Prolog applications remain unchanged.

   Whether an approach like this is also feasible for your problem
depends, I think, on how well you succeed in keeping the interface
between Prolog and the "Data Base System (DBS)" simple.  From a
software engineering point of view the saying "small is beautiful"
certainly applies here.  I think that it is possible to build an
object oriented shell around a DBS, in that case the approach we
have used becomes possible.  A dangerous approach is to add
predicates to Prolog for each operation you need, before long the
interface will be large and porting it to another implementation
of Prolog will for sure give problems.  If we need to port PCE
Prolog to another implementation only 15 pages of C-code needs to
be rewritten, which is acceptable.

   The Prolog implementation we use is C-Prolog 1.5 with some local
additions.  If you would like to have more information or technical
details (the predicates used for instance) let me now it.

Greetings,

>- Anjo Anjewierden

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 85 09:06:26 -0200
-FROM-
From: David McKelvie <mcvax!unido!ecrcvax!david@seismo.CSS.GOV>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: User Interfaces - Building Large Systems
-BODY-
[Copied from PROLOG Digest Wed, 25 Sep 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 38
 This refers to message above by A. Anjewierden. - Ed]

We, the ECRC Man-machine interaction group, have had similar
problems with the slowness of Prolog interpreters for handling
interactive graphics, and have come up with a similar solution.
We have split off the user interface part into a seperate
process (we are using UNIX) and communicate to Prolog via a
pipe, rather than a direct connection to the Prolog database
as you seem to have.  However we are having problems in defining
what sort of interface there should be between the UI and Prolog.

Therefore, we would be rather interested in the technical details
of your interface, in particular the Prolog predicates you have
defined, and what you mean by 'object orientedness' ( a horrible
term for a good idea). Does this allow a more declarative than
imperative way of defining pictures from Prolog?

Thank you

>- David Mckelvie

(ECRC stands for European Computer-Industry Research Centre, a
 centre funded by European computer companies, mainly doing work
 on Logic programming and Knowledge bases. A sort of miniature
 version of ICOT or MCC )

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Laurence Leff <leff@SMU>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 85 13:38:21 cdt
-BODY-
I have volunteered to organize an electronic mechanism for the distribution
of technical report lists from Universities and R&D labs.  Some (and
hopefully all) of the people producing technical reports would send a copy
of the list to me.  I would then send these to a moderated group on USENET
as well as a mailing list for those sites on the INTERNET who do not get
news (ARPANET, CSNET, etc.).

I need two things from you:
  1) if your organization prepares technical reports and sends them
      out to interested parties (perhaps for a fee), please arrange
      to have electronically readable copy of your lists sent
      to trlist%smu@csnet-relay.
  2) if people at your organization would like to receive lists
     of tech reports produced by universities and R&D labs, please
     provide me an electronic address to send them to (if you are not
     on USENET).  Send such administrative mail to trlist-request%smu@
     csnet-relay.

Some frequently asked questions:

1. What are the advantages of sending my lists to you?

a. Most of the people to whom you are sending printed lists will
be receiving this list, either through the INTERNET as a mailing list
or as a moderated news group on the USENET distributed bulletin board
system.  Thus you can save the postage and printing costs in mailing
these lists.  I would be happy to provide you with a list of institutions
receiving this list as a mailing list as well as those institutions
on USENET who would be receiving it that way.  You can use this to
prune the mailing list you use to send out printed copies of your
technical report lists.

b. Many people at the Universities are not aware of technical
report lists.  I have been sending out lists of AI tech reports
to the AIList, an electronic newsletter on AI, for some time.
Every time I do so, my electronic mailbox fills up with requests on
how to obtain the tech reports.  Many of these requests come from
the most prestigious AI organizations in the country.

c. Many companies, particularly those on the USENET, would not
otherwise be aware of your research.  There are hundreds of small
companies on USENET who have no other access to the wealth of
information represented by University and other tech reports.

2. What is a technical report?

Most universities and big company R&D labs publish reports about their
research.  Some are higly research oriented (like new results in automata
theory).  Others are manuals for their public domain software or tutorials.
For example NASA/Ames published a tutorial on SETUID programs under UNIX.
These lists are currently sent out by mail to other schools and R&D labs.

Some of the technical reports will later get turned into journal articles
while other items will never be more formally published.  Thus looking at
these lists would give you information on new research results before they
would appear in journals or would let you know of material you would not
otherwise be aware of.

3. What format should the tech report lists be in?

Please see to it that there is some info indicating how people
can order the tech reports (whether sending you a check to
cover costs, requests via electronic mail or the reports can
be electronically available for Arpanet FTP transfer).

If you are already producing the list in some format, feel free to use that
format.  If you are preparing the list just for this purpose, I would prefer
that you use the input format for bib/refer, a common bibliography tool.
This way people can dump the lists into a file on their machine and be able
to do keyword searches.  Also bib/refer will automatically include and
format references in documents to be formatted or typeset.  However, I would
prefer the material in some weird format than not to have it at all!

For those not familiar with bib/refer, here is a brief tutorial.
Each report or other item should be a sequence of records which
are not separated by blank lines.  Each report should be separated
by the others by one or more blank lines.  Each report entry
consists of a label consisting of a % followed by a capital
letter and then a space.  Then include the information.  If the
information for a field (such as an abstract) requires more than one line,
just continue the field on a new line with no initial space.

The labels needed for tech reports are:

%A Author's name  (this field should be repeated for each author).
%T Title of report
%R report number
%I issuer, this will be the name of your institution.   This may
be ommited if implied by the report number
%C City where published (not essential)
%D Date of publication
%X Abstract


Here is an example of some tech report listings in the appropriate
format:

%A D. Rozenshtein
%A J. Chomicki
%T Unifying the Use and Evolution of Database Systems: A Case Study in
PROLOG
%R LCSR-TR-68
%I Laboratory for Computer Science Research, Rutgers University
%K frame control

%A C. V. Srinivasan
%T CK-LOG, A Calculus for Knowledge Processing in Logic
%R DCS-TR-153
%I Laboratory for Computer Research, Rutgers University
%K MDS

4. I already have exchange agreements with other Universities.
How does this affect them?

The only change would be how the information on what technical reports you
have for them to request gets transferred.  Instead of them receiving a
piece of paper by U. S. Mail, they would look at the appropriate notes group
(if this is a USENET site) or at the item received in the mail, request the
reports they want and send the request to you.  You would probably request
that the free technical report order came from a specific person or account
in case some student seeing the list decided to order the tech reports.  You
should do that with the printed lists anyway since at some schools,
technical report lists are frequently left around for graduate students and
faculty to look at and check the ones they want.  Any person could send in
the form themselves if they chose.

5. I need to charge for my tech reports to cover costs.

Fine.  Just include the prices for your reports next to each report (you can
use the %X field for that too).  At the beginning of the list you send me,
state where checks should be sent and to whom they should be made payable.

6. What about non-CS reports?

I am happy to handle reports for other departments.  If the volume of non-CS
reports becomes significant, I will split the list into tr-cs, tr-math,
tr-ee etc.  I would suspect that the majority of the people receiving this
list would be CS researchers since CS departments are quick to join
networks, etc.  However, some CS researchers (myself included) are working
in applications of computers and would like to receive information in
those areas as well.

7. I am already on USENET.  What should I do?

I anticipate a USENET moderated group in a time frame of one to
two weeks which will contain the same information as the
technical report lists.  If you indicate that you will get the
information via USENET, I will remove your name when the
list is established.  If you want to wait a week or two to
see if the list comes up, that is OK too.  I can send back
copies of the TR Lists that get sent out in the first few
batches of the mailing.  I will also send out on the USENET group,
everything that got sent out in the mailing list so you won't
miss anything either way.

8. I am on Arpanet, BITNET, etc.

I can get to Arpanet sites through csnet-relay so there is no problem there.
Otherwise, send me your address as best you know it.  I will
get through to you if at all possible.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Roy Rada CSB <rada@NLM-MCS>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 85 14:16:10 edt
-BODY-
                               Which Way for a
                            Classification Scheme
                          for Computers and Medicine


                                   Roy Rada
The National Library of Medicine supports an extensive  collection  of  online
indexed  document  citations  for  the biomedical field.  The indexing scheme,
although one of the first of its kind, remains one of the  most  sophisticated
in  everyday  usage.   The 14,000 terms of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
are organized in a hierarchy of "is-a" relations that constitute a  very  sim-
plified  knowledge-base of the biomedical literature.  The MeSH classification
of articles seems to provide better support of retrieval than the also popular
string-searching  strategies  of  some document retrieval systems (see D Blair
and M  Maron  "An  Evaluation  of  Retrieval  Effectiveness  for  a  Full-Text
Document-Retrieval System" in Comm ACM, March 1985, p 289-299).  In the inter-
section of computers and medicine MeSH is understandably sketchy.   But as the
progress  in medicine becomes more connected to high-technology the need for a
richer MeSH classification of computer-related medical work increases.  A com-
mittee  of  scholars  could  convene,  study MeSH, and propose amendments that
would refine its coverage of computer-type material.  Alternatively, one could
explore  algorithms for merging the better parts of MeSH's coverage of comput-
ing with the better parts of a classification scheme that  is  richer  in  the
computing domain.  To this end, this article presents a portion of MeSH relat-
ing to computing and a portion of the ACM classification scheme for  computing
literature.   At  the  end of this article are this month's listing in the Na-
tional Library of Medicine computer of articles whose main index terms includ-
ed  those from the computer-branch of MeSH.  If you have any suggestions about
ways to get the best of both of these classification schemes,  please  send  a
note  to the Editor of the SIGBIO Newsletter.  While addressing the problem of
improving classifications, this article primarily serves as a source of infor-
mation  about  recent  articles  and  as  a listing of parts of classification
schemes that might be of interest to SIGBIO members--thus the  length  of  the
remainder  of  this  piece.  The MeSH components here include on each line the
MeSH number followed by the MeSH term.  A term x is "an instance  of"  another
term  y,  when  the  number  of y is a prefix of the number for x.  First some
parts of the anatomy section are given to show the nature of  MeSH  in  normal
biomedical  areas.   Then part of the Information Science component of MeSH is
given.

A01.378 Extremities
A01.378.209 Arm
A01.378.209.235 Elbow
A01.378.209.350 Forearm
A01.378.209.455 Hand
A01.378.209.455.430 Fingers
A01.378.209.455.430.705 Thumb
A01.378.209.749 Shoulder
A01.378.209.906 Wrist
A01.378.592 Leg
A01.378.592.116 Ankle
A01.378.592.350 Foot
A01.378.592.350.377 Heel
A01.378.592.350.792 Toes
A01.378.592.350.792.456 Hallux

L01 Information Science (Non Mesh)
L01.040 Book Collecting
L01.080 Chronology
L01.100 Classification
L01.143 Communication
L01.143.050 Advertising
L01.143.115 Animal Communication
L01.143.230 Communication Barriers
L01.143.283 Cybernetics
L01.143.283.425 Feedback
L01.143.320 Diffusion of Innovation
L01.143.506 Language

a section has been here skipped

L01.210 Computers
L01.210.100 Analog-Digital Conversion
L01.210.190 Computer Programs
L01.210.230 Computers, Analog
L01.210.260 Computers, Hybrid
L01.210.310 Diagnosis, Computer Assisted
L01.210.550 Microcomputers
L01.210.580 Minicomputers
L01.210.690 Online Systems
L01.210.690.250 Computer Assisted Instruction
L01.210.690.630 MEDLARS-MEDLINE Information System
L01.240 Copying Processes

Following is a part of the ACM classification scheme
that is used in indexing articles for ACM.

h.3 information storage and retrieval
h.3.0 general
h.3.1 content analysis and indexing
h.3.1.1 abstracting methods
h.3.1.2 dictionaries
h.3.1.3 indexing methods
h.3.1.4 linguistic processing
h.3.1.5 thesauruses

h.3.2 information storage
h.3.2.1 file organization
h.3.2.2 record classification

h.3.3 information search and retrieval
h.3.3.1 clustering
h.3.3.2 query formulation
h.3.3.3 retrieval models
h.3.3.4 search process
h.3.3.5 selection process

h.3.4 systems and software
h.3.4.1 current awareness systems
h.3.4.2 information networks
h.3.4.3 question-answering systems

[Note: Roy Rada can be contacted directly about this but replies to
 IRList will be collected and issued together when available. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
14
-FROM-
From: Abel.pa@XEROX
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 85 10:25:25 PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: IRList Digest V1 #12
-BODY-
Ed,

In your editorial comment on the query from Ramesh Astik [...]
you mentioned commercial systems and some expert systems which may meet
Ramesh's needs.  I would be interested in pointers to literature about
these systems.  If you feel that there is general interest in the list
of these references, then please post it on the IRlist.  If not, then I
would appreciate your sending it to me.
	Thanks,

	Mark Abel
	System Concepts Laboratory
	Xerox PARC
 [Mark:
     In my earlier comment I mentioned a good reference book on the
   area.  There is a good deal of literature, appearing in Journal
   of the Amer. Soc. of Inf. Science, Journal of Documentation, Inf.
   Proc. and Management, and various ACM publications.  Two of the
   earliest and best know systems are SMART (worked on at Harvard,
   Cornell, VPI, etc.) and SIRE (developed at Syracuse and George
   Mason Univ.).  A new version of SMART is available from Chris Buckley
   or Gerard Salton at Cornell, for UNIX 4.2BSD.  SIRE, marketted by
   KNM, Inc. (contact gmu90x!mkoll@seismo) is similar to SMART.
   AIRS, Inc., in MD, is developing a new product based on some work
   in SMART, which should have a nice user interface.
     The Montreal Conf. in June 1985 led to Proc. of the Eighth Annual
   Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on R&D in Inf.  Ret., ACM Order No. 606850,
   which has some papers of interest.  RUBRIC (p.243-51) is one expert
   system being developed (contact fuzzy1@aids-unix.arpa).  Another,
   CODER, being implemented at Virginia Tech, is previewed (p. 42-53).
   A paper by Wiliamson (p. 252-266) mentions a new commericial system
   derived from the early work on SMART.
     Marcus, at MIT, has worked on CONIT, which gives a uniform interface
   to many information vendors and databases.  Current efforts include
   adding search expertise.  This approach differs from most of the ones
   above, since it is a front-end to existing systems.
     Many of the developers of systems mentioned here, and of others,
   are IRList readers, so I hope there will be more comments! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subject: From: Ellen Voorhees <ellen%gvax.cs.cornell.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 85 14:34:35 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Thesis Abstract
-BODY-
    The following is the abstract of my doctoral dissertation.  The thesis
was written under the direction of Gerard Salton at Cornell University.
It will soon be a technical report;  anyone interested in obtaining
a copy may do so by writing to
     Technical Reports Librarian
     405 Upson Hall
     Department of Computer Science
     Cornell University
     Ithaca, New York 14853.

Ellen Voorhees
ellen@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (arpanet)
{ihnp4,allegra}!cornell!ellen (UUCP)
crnlcs%ellen (BITNET)



  The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Agglomerative Hierarchic Clustering
                        in Document Retrieval

    The major component of a document retrieval system is the component that
searches the document collection and selects the documents to be returned in
response to a query.  Since users wait for the results of the search, the
component must be efficient as well as effective.  The main goal of this thesis
is to compare clustered file searches and inverted file searches in order to
determine under what circumstances one search is to be preferred over the
other.  A preliminary goal is to define a good cluster search.

    Three types of agglomerative clustering strategies, the single link, the
complete link, and the group average link methods, are investigated.  Searches
of the single link hierarchy, the cluster hierarchy used extensively in
previous research, are shown to be inferior to searches of the other hierarchy
types.  Searches of the group average link and complete link hierarchies
perform similarly for small collections; for larger collections, searches of
the complete link hierarchy are more effective.  A top-down search of the
group average link hierarchy is the most time efficient search asymptotically.

    The experimental evidence suggests that the difference in the efficiency
and effectiveness of the complete link and group average link searches is due
to the restricted depth of the complete link hierarchy.  The depth of the group
average link hierarchy increases as the size of the collection increases, but
the depth of the complete link hierarchy does not.  Thus the largest clusters
in the complete link hierarchy are not very large, and the clusters can be
accurately represented by centroids.  Since the depth of the hierarchy does not
increase with collection size, searches of the complete link hierarchy should
remain effective for larger collections.

    The top-down search of the complete link hierarchy is somewhat more
effective than the inverted file search.  The relative efficiency of the two
searches depends on the relative efficiency of accessing a page and computing
a similarity, since the cluster search accesses many more pages but computes
fewer similarities than the inverted file search.  For an inexpensive
similarity measure, the inverted file search is much more efficient.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1985  09:41 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Tuesday  1, October  7:30pm   Room: 34-401 (Grier Conference Room)

            MIT Center For Cognitive Science

           "On the Form of Linguistic Knowledge"

Authors:    Janet Dean Fodor and Stephen Crain
            University of Connecticut

Speaker:    Janet Dean Fodor

Commentary: Professor Howard Lasnik
            Department of Linguistics
            University of Connecticut

            Professor Scott Weinstein
            Department of Philosophy
            MIT

The Center for Cognitive Science is pleased to announce the first
Cognitive Science Seminar of the fall semester.  The seminars will
again be held on Tuesday evenings from 7:30 to 9:30 pm.

Each program will consist of presentations of recent papers in
Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology and Artificial Intelligence;
The format of each program contains commentary, reply, open discussion
and a brief refreshment break.

Copies of the paper are available from Karen Persinger
Room 20B-225  (617) 253-7358

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue 24 Sep 85 11:10:07-PDT
-FROM-
From: Ana Haunga <HAUNGA@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar - KSL/Symbolic Systems Resources Group (SU)
-BODY-
[Note: all of the issues below impact information storage and retrieval
research and practice.  How about some discussion on this now!  Would
someone be interested in running a panel on this topic at some upcoming
conference? - Ed]
		
      [rest of digest extracted from AIList issues]
[Copied from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 131 - Ed]


                     KSL/Symbolic Systems Resources Group

                        Tom Rindfleisch and Bill Yeager
                              Stanford University

This is the first of several SIGLunches this fall that will summarize work in
each of the five sublabs of the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL),
including the Heuristic Programming Project, HELIX Group, Medical Computer
Science Group, Logic Group, and Symbolic Systems Resources Group (SSRG).  This
week's talk will consist of a brief overview of the KSL as an AI laboratory and
a survey of SSRG research and development activities.

Since 1980, the computing environment for KSL research has been moving slowly
away from central time-shared mainframes (like the SUMEX 2060 and VAX) toward
networked Lisp workstations.  Improvements in workstation performance, falling
prices, better packaging, and a wider vendor selection are now accelerating
this transition.  Over the next five years, we are proposing to phase out the
SUMEX research mainframes so that all KSL computing will be workstation-based
>- not only research program development but common tasks like text processing,
mail, file management, and budgeting.  This raises several important issues
that will require a community system software effort comparable to that in the
1970's that led to the current TOPS-20 and UNIX environments.

How can the user computing environment be improved using workstation bitmapped
graphics and AI methods for more intelligent systems/applications programs?

How can user displays connect flexibly to workstations -- from home, over
remote networks like ARPANET, and locally over Ethernet?

How can the considerable computing power distributed among many workstations be
combined to support individual user tasks?

What are the impacts on network protocols and services (file servers, gateways,
printing, etc.) of large numbers of workstations?

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue 24 Sep 85 10:35:38-PDT
-FROM-
From: Terry Winograd <WINOGRAD@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar Series - Software Environments (CSLI)
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 131 - Ed]


New project meeting on environments
Mondays 1-2 in the trailer classroom, Ventura
[Future meetings will be from 12 to 1:15.]

Beginning Monday, Sept. 30 there will be a weekly meeting on
environments for working with symbolic structures (this includes
programming environments, specification environments,  document
preparation environments, "linguistic workstations", and grammar-
development environments).  As a part of doing our research, many
of us at CSLI have developed such environments, sometimes as a matter
of careful design, and sometimes by the seat of the pants.  In this
meeting we will present to each other what we have done, and also look
at work done elsewhere (both through guest speakers and reading
discussions).

The goal is to look at the design issues that come up in building
environments and to see how they have been approached in a variety of
cases.  We are not concerned with the particular details ("pop-up menus
are/aren't better than pull-down menus") but with more fundamental
problems.  For example:

  What is the nature of the underlying structure the environment supports:
  chunks of text? a data-base of relations? a tree or graph structure?
  How is this reflected in the basic mode of operation for the user?

  How does the user understand the relation between objects (and
  operations on them) that appear on the visible representation (screen
  and/or hardcopy) and the corresponding objects (and operations) on
  some kind of underlying structure?  How is this maintained in a
  situation of multiple presentations (different views and/or multiple
  windows)?  How is it maintained in the face of breakdown (system
  failure or catastrophic user error in the middle of an edit, transfer,
  etc.)?

  Does the environment deal with a distributed network of storage and
  processing devices?  If so, does it try to present some kind of
  seamless "information space" or does it provide a model of objects
  and operations that deals with moving things (files, functions, etc.)
  from one "place" to another, where different places have relevant
  different properties (speed of access, security, shareability, etc.)?

  How is consistency maintained between separate objects that are
  conceptually linked (source code and object code, formatter source
  and printer-ready files, grammars and parse-structures generated from
  them, etc.)?  To what extent is this simply left to user convention,
  supported by bookkeeping tools, or automated?

  What is the model for change of objects over time?  This includes
  versions, releases, time-stamps, reference dates, change logs, etc.,
  How is information about temporal and derivational relationships
  supported within the system?

  What is the structure for coordination of work?  How is access to the
  structures regulated to prevent "stepping on each other's toes"? to
  facilitate joint development? to keep track of who needs to do what
  when?

Lurking under these are the BIG issues of ontology, epistemology,
representation, and so forth.  Hopefully our discussions on a more down-
to-earth level will be guided by a consideration of the larger picture
and will contribute to our understanding of it.

The meeting is open to anyone who wishes to attend.  Topics will be
announced in advance in the newsletter.  The first meeting will
be devoted to a general discussion of what should be addressed and to
identifying the relevant systems (and corresponding people) within
CSLI, and within the larger (Stanford, Xerox, SRI) communities in
which it exists.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 27 Sep 1985 20:03-CST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Bibliographies
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 130 - Ed]

You have probably noticed the announcement of the new tech
report list.  [...]  The thing that started me on this
was the response of AIList readers to my lists of tech reports.
>From what filled up my mailbox, it was obvious that many if not
most of your readers were not seeing the tech report lists and
a substantial fraction of those did not even know that tech reports
existed!  Hopefully this list will serve a useful function for
everyone.  It was something that should have been done a long
time ago.  [...]

I have increased the number of magazines from which my bibliographies
(type 1) are drawn.  We now have added ComputerWorld as well as a
few minor magazines.  ComputerWorld did a very good job on IJCAI-85
and I found material there that was no place else.  [...]

According to bib, we now have 430 documents sent to you since I
changed formats to machine readable.  This does not include
information sent to you in other formats.


  [I would like to thank Laurence for providing his services to
  AIList and the net community.  It's a heck of a hobby, but he
  does a great job.  -- KIL]
  [We are also grateful!  In IRList I will copy only those items
  I think will be of interest to IRList readers. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed 25 Sep 85 16:54:08-PDT
-FROM-
From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: New CSLI Reports
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 129 - Ed]

                             NEW CSLI REPORTS

      Report No. CSLI-85-31, ``A Formal Theory of Knowledge and Action''
   by Robert C. Moore, and Report No. CSLI-85-32, ``Finite State
   Morphology: A Review of Koskenniemi'' by Gerald Gazdar, have just been
   published.  These reports may be obtained by writing to David Brown,
   CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305 or Brown@SU-CSLI.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 27 Sep 1985 19:49-CST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Technical Reports
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 129 - Ed]

Addresses for requests:

Carnegie Mellon University, CS Department, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Stanford University, Department of Computer Science, Stanford, CA 94305

%A Anne von der Leith Gardner
%T An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning
%R STAN-CS-85-1045
%I Stanford University Department of Computer Science
%D JUN 1984, 205 pages (microfiche only $2.00_

%A Masaru Tomita
%T An Efficient Context-free Parsing Algrithm for Natural Languages
and its Applications
%D MAY 1985
%I Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

%A Gary L. Bradshaw
%T Learning to Recognize Speech Sounds: A Theory and Model
%D JUN 1985
%I Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

%A Masaru Tomita
%T Feasibility Study of Personal/Interactive Machine Translation
Systems
%D JUL 1985
%I Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

%A Jaime G. Carbonnell
%A Masaru Tomita
%T New Approaches to Machine Translation
%D JUL 1985
%I Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

%A Robert E. Frederking
%T Syntax and Semantics in Natural Language Parsers
%D MAY 1985
%I Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

%A Jeannette M. Wing
%A Farhad Arbab
%T Geometric Reasoning: A New Paradigm for Processing Geometric Information
%D JUL 1985
%I Carnegie Mellon Computer Science

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 27 Sep 1985 20:02-CST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Articles
-BODY-
[Copied from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 129 - Ed]

%A Elain Marsh
%A Carol Friedman
%T Transporting the Linguistic String Project from a Medical
to a Navy Domain
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Jonathan Slocum
%A Carol F. Justus
%T Transportability to Other Languages: The Natural Language
Processing Project in the AI Program at MCC
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Samuel S. Epstein
%T Transportable Natural Language Processing Through Simplicity
%J ACM Transactions on Office  Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Bozena Hernisz Thompson
%A Frederick B. Thompson
%T ASK is Transportable in Half a Dozen Ways
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Fred J. Damerau
%T Problems and Some Solutions in Customization of Natural Language Database
Front Ends
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Carole D. Hafner
%A Kurt Golden
%T Portability of Syntax and Semantics in Datalog
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

[Note: Thanks to Bruce Ballard for editing this special issue of
TOOIS, and to the authors for giving a nice rounded presentation. - Ed]

%A Appelbaum
%A Ruspini
%T ARIES: A Tool for Inference Under Conditions of Imprecision and
Uncertainty
%J BOOK15

%A Klinger
%T Search Processes for the Application of Artificial Intelligence
%J BOOK15

%A Rosenberg
%T ERIK, An Expert Ship Message Interpreter: New Mechanism for Flexible
Parsing
%J BOOK15

%A Obermeier
%A de Hilster
%T DIID -- A Data-independent Interface for Databases -- The
AI Perspective
%J BOOK15

%A Roger Schank
%A Steven Shwartz
%T The Role of Knowledge Engineering in Natural Language Systems
%J BOOK17

%A Jaime Carbonnel
%T The Role of User Modeling in Natural Language Interface Design
%J BOOK17

%A Gerald Hice
%A Stephen Andriole
%T Artificial Intelligent Videotex
%J BOOK17

%A Dexter Fletcher
%T Intelligent Instructional Systems in Training
%J BOOK17

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 27 Sep 1985 20:00-CST
-FROM-
From: leff%smu.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Recent Articles
-BODY-
[Extracted from AIList Digest Sunday, 29 Sep 1985  Volume 3 # 130 - Ed]

%A A. Lansner
%A O. Ekeberg
%T Reliability and Speed of Recall in an Associate Network
%J IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
%V PAMI-7
%N 4
%D JUL 1985
%P 490-498

%A Sol Libes
%T Bytelines
%J Byte
%D SEP 1985
%P 420
%V 10
%N 9
%X Kurzweil Applied Intelligence speech recognition KVS-3000
%X Kurzweil has introduced a KVS-3000 that can handle 1000 words
continuous speech with 100 per cent accuracy.  It is selling at
$3000.00 in quantity and comes in PC, multibus and RS232C versions.
It is speaker adaptive and its performance increases the more
it talks with the same user.

%A Jean Renard Ward
%%A Barry Blesser
%T Interactive recognition of Handprinted Characters for Computer
Input
%J IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
%V 5
%N 9
%P 24-37
%K Character Recogniton Pencept
%X discusses the human interface issues once you have character
recognition on your computer; i. e. how best to interface handwritten
character recognition with your product.

%A S. Jerrold Kaplan
%T Designing a Portable Natural Language Database Query System
%J ACM Transactions on Database Systems
%V 9
%N 1
%D MAR 1984
%P 1-19

%A C. Hornsby
%A H. C. Leung
%T The Design and Implementation of a Flexible Retrieval Language
for a Prolog Database System
%J SIGPLAN
%V 20
%N 9
%D SEP 1985
%P 43-51
%X implementation of a database management system in PROLOG

%A Jeffry Beeler
%T Symantec package out
%J ComputerWorld
%V 19
%N 38
%P 12
%D SEP 23, 1985
%K Symantec natural language microcomputer data base system interface
%X a new product which uses natural language to interface with a
database

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
15
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 85 18:36:27 edt
-FROM-
From: vpivx3::foxea@vpics1.VPI
-SUBJECT-
Subject: address changes at VPI
-BODY-
This time for real!  On October 20, the BITNET node tables will change
and addresses VPIVAX3 or VPICS1 will no longer work.

For those on BITNET, my preferred address is
	fox@vtcs1
and alternates are
	foxea@vtvax3
        fox%vpi@csnet-relay.arpa

For those on Internet or connecting through it, the preferred address is
        fox%vtcs1.bitnet@csnet-relay
and alternate is
        foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@csnet-relay

Our CSNet connection is via the Phonenet service.  Only here can the
IRList and IRList-Request addresses be used instead of fox. To
Internet users, you can hence send to
	fox%vpi@csnet-relay  (so I can still be reached in CSNet as fox@vpi)

Many thanks for your willingness to change! - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 85 12:40:56 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Electronic mail problems
-BODY-
A funny story!  When IRList issues are about to be distributed, the
'send' command under VMS is invoked so PMDF can queue and post the
message to people on the distribution list.  The alias for the
distribution list is 'irdis' and when the message is submitted,
our VAX-11/785 sits for sometimes 30 minutes checking and transforming
addresses.

Seeing 'irdis' in the To: field, one contributor sent a message to
irdis@vpi.  The CSNET relay machine connected, our system tried to
check the recipient list, and began expanding 'irdis' whereupon
the relay timed out!  This event occurred a number of times until
wise watchers at CSNET-CIC noticed something amiss.  The contributor
was sent back the message with suggestion to use 'irlist@vpi' and I
ws told to alert other would-be contributors.

So, there is a happy ending and we have all learned about another
pitfall in working with network distribution lists!

Looking foward to many submissions to IRList%vpi@csnet-relay.arpa, Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Hibbert.pa%xerox.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 85 17:43:31 PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: IRList Digest V1 #14
In-Reply-To: "fox@vpi.CSNet's message of Thu, 10 Oct 85 12:55:00 EST"
-BODY-
Please stop excerpting stuff from AIList to IRList.  I get that as well,
and it is not at all usefull to have to read stuff twice.  If you
absolutely need to re-send that stuff, please segregate it into separate
digests, and label them as "containing no new content".

Thanks,
Chris
[Reply:  Chris - I will stop direct extracting but will reprint
submissions sent from others to both AIList and IRList. I will also
reprint  excerpts selected by IRList readers and sent to AIList.
Thanks for your suggestion - it will make life easier for me! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft@LSU>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 85 08:56:43 cdt
-TO-
To: IRlist@VPI
-BODY-
 >From LAWS@SRI-AI.CSNET  Wed Oct  9 19:59:04 1985
 Date: Tue 1 Oct 85 13:50:21-CDT
 From: ICS.DEKEN@R20.UTEXAS.EDU
 Subject: Information Science Program at NSF - Staffing Changes

Beth Adelson has been appointed to the position of Associate Program Director,
Information Science Program, effective August 15, 1985. Dr Adelson has been at
Yale University since 1983, as a Research Associate in the Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory.  She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.  Dr.
Adelson has published numerous articles in the areas of cognitive science and
artificial intelligence.  Recent works include papers on software design <<IEEE
Transactions on Software Engineering>> and the acquisition of categories for
problem solving <<Cognitive Science>>.

Joseph Deken has been appointed to the position of Program Director,
Information Science Program, effective September 3, 1985.  Dr. Deken was most
recently Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, with a
joint appointment in the Department of Business and the Department of Computer
Sciences, and taught from 1976 to 1980 at Princeton University.  His Ph.D. in
mathematical statistics is from Stanford University.  Dr. Deken is the author
of several books on computing, the most recent of which is <<Silico Sapiens:
The Fundamentals and Future of Robotics>>, which will be Published by Bantam
books in January 1986.  His other writing includes <<Computer Images: State of
the Art>> (Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1983), <<The Electronic Cottage>>
(William Morrow, 1981), and numerous articles on statistics and statistical
computing.

Program announcements and other information about the Information Science
and Technology programs at NSF are available from:

             Division of Information Science and Technology
             National Science Foundation
             1800 G St. NW
             Washington, D.C. 20550


Correspondence may be addressed to the attention of Dr. Adelson or
Dr. Deken as appropriate.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Henry Nussbacher <HJNCU%CUNYVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Return-path: HJNCU%CUNYVM.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 11 Oct 85 09:13 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Announcement of expanded inter-net Database services
-BODY-
This is to announce that some new services have been added to the
inter-network server running at Bitnic.  Certain selected Arpanet
digests are now being loaded into a Spires database and are therefore
searchable from anywhere as long as you can send RFC822 mail.

If you are interested in using this service, send a piece of mail to:
DATABASE%BITNIC.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA
or
DATABASE%BITNIC.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU

and have as the first 3 lines of your file (case does not matter):
help
help arpanet
help design

The server will send back to you 3 help files describing how to use the
internet server, how to search Arpanet digests and how the whole thing
was designed.  Read over the section on "Signup" carefully before making
further use of the Database server.

Presently, the following 5 Arpanet forums are being loaded into the
Database:

Name           Retention Period
=============  ================
Ai-List        2 months
Info-Ibmpc     2 months
Info-Mac       2 months
Info-Graphics  3 months
Info-Nets      3 months

The retention period is set for a short duration in order to see if
Bitnic can handle the volume of data that needs to be stored in Spires.
This service was initialized on October 4th, 1985 so currently there
are just a few items available in the Database.

Example of search command:
FIND TEXT UNIX (IN INFO-IBMPC TABLE
would find all entries in Info-Ibmpc that contain the word UNIX.
An entry is just the section within a "digested" digest that makes
reference to the word UNIX.  For further details read over the
help files.

Henry Nussbacher (Hank@Bitnic.Bitnet)
Bitnet Development and Operations Center

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ed Fox <fox@vpi>
-DATE-
Date:     Sun, 6 Oct 85 13:46 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  ER Approach Advance Program
-BODY-
The 4th International Conference
Entity-Relationship Approach
October 28-30, 1985  Chicago, Illinois
Major Theme:  The Use of ER Concept in Knowledge Representation

Here are some highlights ...
Tuesday, Oct. 29
 9-10am keynote address, Roger C. Shank
10:30-12 session IA. Knowledge Representation
 1:30-3  sesion IIB. Query and Manipulation Lanaguages I
 3:30-5:30     IIIC. Panel - Knowledge Engineering and its Implications
 7:30-10    Evening. Micro Databases: How Far Do They Go

Wedn., Oct. 30
 8:15-10 invited addresses
        Eugene Lowenthal, Future Directions on Knowledge-Based Management
        Donald Walker, Knowledge Resource Tools for Information Access
 10:30-12:30 session IVA. Expert Systems
 1:30-3:30   session VA.  Query and Manipulation Languages II

For further information contact Prof. Kathi Davis (815) 753-0378

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1985  09:45 EDT
-TO-
To:   Cog-Sci%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Monday  7, October  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor playroom

                         VISION SEMINAR

	Recognition Algorithms for the Connection Machine

                           Anita Flynn
                               MIT

  Many problems in early vision appear to be inherently local and
exploitble on parallel computer architectures.  This talk describes a
problem in late vision, that of recognizing an unknown object and
matching it to a data base model given only sparse sensory data
points.  The algorithm presently used on a sequential machine is first
explined, and then various algorithms for parallel computation are
explored.  Tradeoffs in space-time efficiency are discussed in terms
of implementation on a Connection Machine.  The parallel version is
shown to run three to four orders of magnitude faster than the
sequential one.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ken Laws <Laws%sri-ai.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Thu 10 Oct 85 22:44:52-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Summary of the CSLI Environments Meetings
-BODY-
  Date: Wed 9 Oct 85 16:51:08-PDT
  From: Emma Pease <Emma@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
  Tel:  497-3479

     [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter (10.49) by Laws@SRI-AI.]


                       ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
           Monday, October 14, noon, Ventura Trailer Classroom

      David Levy (Xerox PARC and CSLI) will continue to describe his work
   on a theoretical foundation for document preparation environments.
   Specifically, he will describe in some detail the theory of marking
   itself, and its relevance to various computer systems.  We will
   discuss some points that came up in questions, such as the relation of
   ``indirect marking'' to different kinds of tools, the contrast between
   a psychological theory (how people think when they use a system) and
   an ontological account (of the basic objects, actions, and
   relationships that are available for them to work with), and the
   problems of multiple levels of representation (e.g., a macro command
   stands for a sequence of ``characters'' which in turn represent
   various ``figures'', etc.).
      See the summary of the meeting on October 7 (later in this
   newsletter) for more information.


                  SUMMARY OF ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
                           September 30, 1985

      At the first meeting of the environments group we set out the
   general directions for our discussions.  We identified some major
   dimensions along which to compare and examine environments and made an
   initial list of examples that might be presented.  This list is very
   sketchy---the random result of what happened to come up in
   conversation.  We are eager for further details and suggestions
   (either systems for general consideration, or about which specific
   people would like to talk):

   Programming environments: Interlisp, Smalltalk, Cedar, [all 3 Xerox],
      (Linton) [Berkeley/Stanford], Gandalf [CMU], Mentor [INRIA],
      ZetaLisp [Symbolics], Kee [Intellicorp], HPRL, HPLisp [last 2
      Hewlett-Packard]

   Grammar development environments: LFG [CSLI], HPSG [HP], BLT [CSLI],

   Specification environments: Aleph [CSLI], (Balzer)[ISI]

   Language development environments: MUIR [CSLI]

   Document preparation environments: (Levy) [CSLI], Notecards [Xerox]

   Data access and manipulation environments:

   Mathematical and logical deduction environments: MACSYMA [MIT], FOL
      [Stanford]

      There is a variety of application areas not as central to CSLI
   concerns, but in which environments are built.  These include VLSI
   design, CAD/CAM, image manipulation, mail systems, etc. In addition,
   most operating systems take on the functions of an environment, either
   for use outside of applications programs or as a base within them.
   So-called ``intelligent agents'' are one attempt to provide a uniform
   environment for a particular user interacting with multiple systems.
      For each kind of environment there are specific problems dealing
   with the particular structures being worked with (programs, proofs,
   grammars, formatted documents, etc.).  There is also a framework of
   common problems having to do with the basic structure of items being
   manipulated (text, trees, databases, etc.), their representation on a
   screen or hardcopy, interfaces for operating through that
   representation, storage on one or more devices, consistency between
   aspects (e.g., source and compiled code, specifications and proofs),
   change over time (versions, releases, etc.), coordination of access
   among a group, etc.
      Our plan is to address the basic conceptual issues by looking at
   one particular environment or group of related environments in each
   session.


                  SUMMARY OF ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
                             October 7, 1985

      David Levy gave an overview of his work on a theoretical basis for
   document preparation environments.  He demonstrated the problems with
   existing ``marking environments'' which combine conflicting approaches
   to text layout, drawing, and window placement.  The failure to
   generalize the common elements in all of these leads to greater
   complexity and to blind spots that create difficulty in maintaining,
   documenting, and using such systems.  Many of the relevant issues
   apply to older marking technologies, but the computer has two novel
   properties that demand a clear and explicit theory. First, marking is
   indirect---the linkage between human physical action and what appears
   on the screen (or paper) is mediated by linguistic or quasi-linguistic
   commands.  Second, there is a clear distinction between the surface
   presentation (what you see) and the internal representation (its
   underlying structure).  The computer, unlike earlier forms, lets you
   manipulate the underlying structure directly, with possibly complex
   and distributed consequences to the surface presentation.
      He then showed how we might begin to develop a theory of marking
   with a coherent ontological basis.  For example, we need to look at
   something as mundane as the ``carriage return'' as having distinct and
   sometimes confused aspects: it is a character (in the standard
   representation), it denotes an area of non-marked space on a page, it
   indicates a possible place to split a line in normal formatting, etc.
   By carefully delineating the concepts involved in these different
   aspects, we can produce systems that are simpler, easier to
   understand, and more amenable to generalization.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Derek Sleeman <SLEEMAN%sumex-aim.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sat 12 Oct 85 14:10:29-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Faculty & research openings
-TO-
To: ai-ed%sumex-aim.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
	COME TO BONNIE SCOTLAND FOR A WHILE......!!!


		Univerity of ABERDEEN (Scotland)
		DEPARTMENT of COMPUTING SCIENCE

A major new initiative results in the following posts:
	1 Senior Lecturer/Reader
	3 or 4 Lecturers
	4 or 5 Research Fellowships/Research Assistants/Programmers

Majority of appointments to be made in the area of AI/Knowledge
Engineering/Cognitive Science. Candidates from other areas are invited
to apply.

Further the department is anxious to receive applications for
Visitors (at all levels) and postgraduate students - primarily in these
areas. We expect to be able to provide financial support for both
visitors and postgraduate students.

The initial closing date is in October - but interested persons are
encouraged to apply at any stage as it is not anticipated that all
the advertized posts will be filled immediately. Interested persons
are encouraged to get in touch with Derek Sleeman (SLEEMAN@SUMEX,
+1 415 497 3257) who can also provided a set of further particulars.
(Sleeman will be head of Computing Science at Aberdeen from summer '86.)
Completed applications should be returned to the Personnel Officer,
University Office, The University, Old Aberdeen, Scotland AB9 1FX.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
16
-FROM-
From: Mark Richer <RICHER%sumex-aim.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon 14 Oct 85 09:31:39-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: electronic books article
-BODY-
October 1985 issue of IEEE Computer is on MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS
(e.g., electronic mail, teleconferencing with mixed text, graphics, sound)
and there is an article that might be of interest to many of you:

Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
	Yankelovich, Meyrowitz, van Dam  (Brown University)
	p. 15-30

mark

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft@LSU>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 85 11:45:13 cdt
-BODY-
     LSU
                 Department of Computer Science
                   LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
                   BATON ROUGE, LA  70803-4020
                         (504)-388-1495
                  CSNET: kraft%lsu@csnet-relay

                              October 17, 1985


     Dear World:


     I have just received the news from the National Science
     Foundation,  Division  of Information Science and Tech-
     nology, about the travel grant to the ACM Conference on
     Research  and  Development  in  Information  Retrieval.
     This conference will be held in  Pisa,  Italy  on  Sep-
     tember 8-10, 1986.

     The news is good.  We have been given fifteen  stipends
     covering airfare to the meeting.  The selection for the
     awarding of the stipends will be made by the  ACM/SIGIR
     executive  officers, the U.S. members of the conference
     program  committee,  and  the  travel  grant  principal
     investigator  (me).   Criteria for selection include i)
     acceptance of a paper to be presented  at  the  confer-
     ence, ii) participation in the conference program, iii)
     value of the attendee to the conference, and iv) poten-
     tial for professional growth of the attendee by attend-
     ing the conference.  Other considerations include being
     a  U.  S. resident and geographical dispersion.  Anyone
     interested in receiving a travel stipend should contact
     me.   It  is  not  too  early  to  begin  planning now,
     although the deadline is June 1, 1986.

     The conference is sponsored  by  the  Italian  National
     Research   Council,   in  cooperation  with  ACM/SIGIR,
     AICA/GLIR, BCS/IRSG, and IDI.  The topics to be covered
     at  the  conference  include  theory,  methodology, and
     applications of information  retrieval;  system  model-
     ling,   development,   and   evaluation;   storage  and
     retrieval techniques; hardware developments; complexity
     problems;  cognitive  and semantic models; mathematical
     and linguistic models; user interfaces; knowledge-based
     and expert systems; natural language processing; office
     information systems;  mutimedia  information;  database
     management  systems  --  retrieval  relationships;  and
     artificial  intelligence  and  information   retrieval.
     U.S.  members  of the program committee include Michael
     Lesk, W. Bruce Croft, Clement T. Yu, Tamas Doszkocs, R.
     Allen,   and  G.  Salton.   Other  members  include  P.
     Bollmann, J. Schek, J.  Tait,  P.  Willet,  C.  J.  van
     Rijsbergen, Y. Chiaramella, F. Naldi, M. Agosti, and F.
     Rabitti.

     Submission of papers (four copies of a  full  paper  of
     3000-5000  words)  is due by January 15, 1986; and they
     should be sent to Professor Gerard  Salton,  Department
     of  Computer  Science,  Cornell University, Upson Hall,
     Ithaca, NY  14853.  Final copy is  due  May  15,  1986,
     with acceptance notification coming by March 31, 1986.

                              Sincerely yours,


                              Donald H. Kraft
                              Professor and Chairman


     DHK:unix

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Michael Lesk <lesk%petrus%mouton.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 85 10:11:31 edt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Submission for IR List.
-BODY-
(the sooner this gets out the better, since the conference is Nov. 7-8!
Sorry for not sending this in earlier, but publicity for this wasn't
my job).

Subject: Conference on the computerized Oxford English Dictionary
From: lesk@bellcore (Michael E. Lesk)

The University of Waterloo Centre for the New OED is starting research
projects using the machine-readable form of the OED now being prepared.
The plan is to have not just typesetting tapes, but an electronic database
representing the history and use of the English language, as shown in
the dictionary.  A one-day meeting at Waterloo, from 7pm Thursday Nov. 7
through 4:30pm Friday Nov. 8, 1985, will examine research areas related
to the OED and machine-readable dictionaries.  The program is:

Introduction
  John Simpson, Oxford University Press, "The New OED Project"
  John Stubbs, University of Waterloo, "The UW Centre for the New OED"

Using On-Line Dictionaries (Michael Lesk, session chair)
  Henry Kucera, Brown University, "The Problem of Structural Ambiguity
                   in the Lexicon"
  Donald Walker, Bell Communications Research, "Knowledge Resource Tools
                   for Accessing Large Text Files"
  George Miller, Princeton University, "Wordnet: A Dictionary Browser"

The Use and Misuse of Dictionaries (Neil Hultin, session chair)
  Gisele Losier, U. Waterloo, "Using the OED for the Study of Loan Words"
  Christopher Dean, U. Saskatchewan, "The OED: The Study of Local Regional
                    Dialects and Historical Dialet Dictionaries"

Knowledge Databases (Robin Cohen, session chair)
  Randy Goebel, U. Waterloo, "What is a Knowledge Representation System?"
  John Sowa, IBM, "Using Knowledge Representation to Capture the Semantic
                   Information of a Lexicon"

Summary (Frank Tompa, U. Waterloo, plus other session chairs)


Those interested in attending should send $25 US or $35 Canadian, along
with their name, address and phone numbers, to:
    Centre for the New OED
    Dana Porter Library, rm 105
    University of Waterloo
    Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 1985  16:53 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Thursday 17, October  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom

		    The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series


			 "The Information Lens:
	   An Intelligent System for Finding, Filtering, and
		      Sorting Electronic Messages"


			    Thomas W. Malone

		     MIT Sloan School of Management



This talk will describe an intelligent system to help people share,
filter, and sort information communicated by computer-based messaging
systems.  The system exploits concepts from artificial intelligence such
as frames, production rules, and inheritance networks, but it avoids the
unsolved problems of natural language understanding by providing users
with a rich set of semi-structured message templates.  A consistent set
of "direct manipulation" editors simplifies the use of the system by
individuals, and an incremental enhancement path simplifies the adoption
of the system by groups.

The talk will also include an overview of the other projects and
research goals in the Organizational Systems Laboratory at MIT.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1985  18:25 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Wednesday  16, October  12:00pm  Room: E25-401

      CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION PROCESSING

"Towards the Neural Circuitry Underlying Motion Discrimination in the
Retina:  A Film"

                   Christof Kock
                   Whitaker College

In this talk, I will discuss recent advances towards understanding the
biophysical mechanisms and the anatomical pathways underlying the
computation of the direction of a moving stimuli in the rabbit retina.
I will show detailed computer simulation--including a color film-- of
the change in intracellular potential within a reconstructed direction
selective rabbit ganglion cell in response to massive distributed
synaptic input.  These simulations also clearly show the functional
differences between two major types of synaptic induced inhibition:
silent or shunting inhibition--mediated by a GABA(a) receptor--and
hyperpolarizing inhibition--mediated by a GABA(b) receptor.

Current experimental evidence favors our veto-scheme, whereby
direction selectivity is computed at many independent sites within the
dendritic tree.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Susan Gere <M.SUSAN%su-sierra.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Thu 17 Oct 85 15:19:35-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Stanford Computer Systems Seminar 10/23
-BODY-
	 	 EE380---Seminar on Computer Systems


 Title:  Fast Data Finder - a VLSI Check Search Machine
 Speaker:  Dr. Kwang-I Yu
 From:     TRW  Redondo Beach
 Time:   Wednesday, October 23  at 4:15 p.m.
 Place:  Terman Auditorium

			    Abstract

The Fast Data Finder (FDF) is a text-search engine based on a typelined
VLSI processor.   It has a comprehensive set of search functions and is
able to search up to 500 queries, containing up to 8,000 characters,
simultaneously at a sustained system-level search speed of 7.8 million
characters per second.  This makes it by far the most powerful text search
system in the world.  Architecturally, the interesting features are that
all search functions are implemented within a single VLSI processor, that
the algorithm is single pass and requires no pauses or iterations, and
that very high bandwidth storage devices are employed.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1985  17:31 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Note: The date of the following entry has been changed from Monday to
Tuesday.


Tuesday  22, October  11:00am-12:30pm  Room: Millikan Room, E53-482

           Computational Discourse Analysis Using DEREDEC:
                  An Analysis of Balzac's Sarrasine


                Jaqueline Leon and Jean-Marie Marandin

             Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
                            Paris, France



We present research in computational discourse analysis and discuss an
example for the case of Balzac's Sarrasine.  We use P. Plante's
DEREDEC programming system in this work because of its suitability for
natural language processing.  After a bottom-up syntactic parser for
French grammar produces a syntactic derivation, we perform pattern
matching on the output to acheive a linguistic and literary
interpretation.  We describe how we use these programs to capture two
different aspects of a text: the thematic segmentation and density.

Host: Professor Hayward R. Alker, Jr., Department of Political Science, MIT

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1985  13:33 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Monday  21, October  4:00pm  Room: NE43-8th floor playroom

     SEMINAR ON VISUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING

           "Structure from Motion"

           Shahriar Negahdaripour

There are several techniques proposed in the literature for recovering
the motion of objects as well as their 3D structure from a sequence of
time-varying imagery.  These include determining motion and structure
from point or line correspondence, tracking contours, or using the
optical flow field.  The underlying mathematics, as well as the
advantages/disadvantages of these methods will be discussed.  Some
recent results based on using the intensity gradients will also be
presented.

 -------------------------------------------------------------------
-END-
Note: the following announcement is repeated from the previous calendar
with the date corrected.
-BODY-
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -


Thursday 24, October  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom

		    The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series


    "Perceptual Organization And The Representation Of Natural Form"


			    Alex P. Pentland

		AI Center, SRI Int'l and CSLI, Stanford



To understand both perception and commonsense reasoning we need a
representation that captures important physical regularities and that
correctly describes the people's perceptual organization of the
stimulus.  Unfortunately, the current representations were originally
developed for other purposes (e.g., physics, engineering) and are
therefore often unsuitable.

We have developed a new representation and used it to make accurate
descriptions of an extensive variety of natural forms including people,
mountains, clouds and trees.  The descriptions are amazingly compact.
The approach of this representation is to describe scene structure in a
manner similar to people's notion of ``a part,'' using descriptions that
reflect a possible formative history of the object, e.g., how the object
might have been constructed from lumps of clay.

For this representation to be useful it must be possible to recover such
descriptions from image data; we show that the primitive elements of
such descriptions may be recovered in an overconstrained and therefore
reliable manner.  An interactive ``real-time'' 3-D graphics modeling
system based on this representation will be shown, together with short
animated sequences demonstrating the descriptive power of the
representation.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
17
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@UCB-VAX>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 85 16:02:23 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conf. '85
-BODY-
[This year's Montreal Conference on IR had many interesting papers.
 A file, in "SMART" form, of the abstracts, was typed in at Univ.
 of Regina and edited at Virginia Tech.  Order info for proceedings is:
   Proc. of the Eighth Annual Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. on R&D in Inf.  Ret.,
   ACM Order No. 606850  -- Ed]

.I 1
.T
Graphical Information Resources: Maps and Beyond
.A
MICHAEL LESK
.W
The rise of computer graphics offers a new challenge for information
retrieval: how to search and retrieve information which is partly or
wholly graphical.  As an example, procedures for handling geographical
information, such as street maps and directories, are explained.  With
this data, it is possible to find routes on maps, retrieve locations
and names of people or businesses, and draw maps.  But a comparision
of these programs with programs for face processing or computer
typesetting makes clear how far we are from general purpose routines.
Today, successful graphics routines contain a great deal of local
domain knowledge.  There is no analog of the simple keyword systems
that handle textual documents in any subject area.  Just as
computational linguists have found that subject matter expertise is
nessary to do really sophisticated processing of English, it seems
also necessary for sophisticated processing of pictures; the difference
is that we don't know how to do unsophisticated processing of graphics.
.I 2
.T
Implications of Boolean Structure for Probabilistic Retrieval
.A
ABRAHAM BOOLSTEIN
.W
The purpose of an information retrieval system is to retrieve documents
in response to a request.  However, there are many strategies as to how
this can be accomplished.  Most popular are the Boolean systems attached
to the commercial on-line database systems.  Less conspicuous are a number
of approaches being developed in university research laboratories and
which are the object of this paper.

This paper is divided into two parts:  The first wil be a more or less
nontechnical overview of research in IR over the last ten to fifteen
years.  The second part, which is a bit more technical and a lot more
speculative, will cover some interesting questions that are now being
studied.
.I 3
.T
Generalized Vector Space Model In Information Retrieval
.A
S. K. M. WONG
WOJCIECH ZIARKO
PATRICK C. N. WONG
.W
In information retrieval, it is common to model index terms and documents
as vectors in a suitably defined vector space.  The main difficulty with
this approach is that the explicit representation of term vectors is not
known a priori.  For this reason, the vector space model adopted by
Salton for the SMART system treats the terms as a set of orthogonal
vectors.  In such a model it is often necessary to adopt a separate,
corrective procedure to take into account the correlations between terms.
In this paper, we propose a systematic method (the generalized vector
space model) to compute term correlations directly from the automatic
indexing scheme.  We also demonstrate how such correlations can be
included with minimal modification in the existing vector based
information retrieval systems.  The preliminary experimental results
obtained from the new model are very encouraging.
.I 4
.T
Handling Multiple Data Bases in Document Retrieval
.A
IAN A. MACLEOD
.W
There is no such thing as a standard document.  Bibliographic information
comes in a wide variety of formats.  Existing retrieval systems handle
different document styles either by creating an artificial document type
or by providing different and independent data bases.  Neither approach
seems satisfactory.  In this paper we describe a data model which we feel
is more appropriate for document representation and show it can handle the
multiple document type problem quite naturally.
.I 5
.T
Theoretical Measures in P/Q Document Spaces
.A
ROBERT R. KORFHAGE
.W
Early work on the use of profiles to aid in the interpretation of queries
in an information retrieval system developed the concepts of retrieval
subspaces that are either ellipsoids or Cassini ovals.  This report extends
the theoretical basis of these models, exploring other models and the
effect of different metrics on the conceptual retrieval subspace.
.I 6
.T
Composite Document Extended Retrieval - An Overview
.A
EDWARD A. FOX
.W
'Composite document' is the name given herein to items which possess
some complex internal structure and are made up of a variety of types
of data, including a significant amount of textual material.  Examples
are: elaborate bibliographic records, office correspondence or reports,
electronic mail, digests from computer bulletin boards, entries in online
name servers for network users, books, and parts of some expert system
knowledge bases.  Investigation of composite documents is being done in
connection with research in passage retrieval, database management, office
modeling of documents, natural language analysis, and information retrieval.
Preliminary results indicate that extending the vector space model leads to
better document representation, and that extending standard Boolean logic
query capabilities results in more effective searches.  Further study with
a variety of specially prepared test collections will aid evaluation of the
several models and methods proposed.
.I 7
.T
Automatic Assignment of Soft Boolean Operators
.A
GERARD SALTON
ELLEN VOORHEES
.W
The conventional bibliographic retrieval systems are based on Boolean
query formulations and inverted file implementations.  Such systems
provide rapid responses in answer to search queries but they are not
easy to use by uninitiated patrons.  An extended Boolean retrieval
strategy has been devised in which the Boolean operators are treated
more or less strictly, depending on the setting of a special parameter,
known as the p-value.  The extended system is much more forgiving than
the conventional system, and provides better retrieval effectiveness.
In this study various problems associated with the determination of
appropriate p-values are discussed, and suggestions are made for an
automatic assignment of p-values.  Evaluation output is included to
illustrate the operations of the suggested procedures.
.I 8
.T
Output Ranking Methodology for Document-Clustering-Based
               Boolean Retrieval Systems
.A
TADEUSZ RADECKI
.W
During the last two decades or so several alternative approaches to
document clustering have been introduced, each of which constitutes
a basis for a number of various clustering methods.  Unfortunately,
these methods are limited in many ways.  In particular, most of the
available document clustering procedures have been designed to be
applicable in the cases where both documents and user queries are
represented by sets of weighted or unweighted index terms.  However,
in commercial document retrieval systems queries are usually
characterized by Boolean expressions of variables corresponding to
the index terms of interest to the system's users.  Therefore, it
would be desirable to extend the conventional approaches to document
clustering with the aim of implementing them in operational
environments.  In developing these extended approaches, one of the
most important problems to be solved appears to be related to the
system's adaptation to individual users.  More specifically, in the
course of such an adaptation the system should utilize all the
information available about the user's needs, and document and query
representations should be modified accordingly, so that the most
relevant documents could be retrieved.  This paper presents an
an account of the author's most recent research along these lines.
After providing a background for widely known approaches to
document clustering, rigorous reasoning for extending these
approaches to a conventional Boolean retrieval framework is given.
.I 9
.T
The New Oxford English Dictionary and its Potential Users:
               Some Preliminary Comments
.A
JOHN STUBBS
.W
On May 15, 1984, the Oxford University Press formally announced its
intention to computerize the Oxford English Dictionary.  The OED and
its Supplement, which comprise approximately 60 million words, will
be entered into a computer; a database design will be created for this
integrated version of the Dictionary; and, in addition to its printed
form, the Dictionary will be available in electronic form.
.I 10
.T
Processing Free-Text Input to Obtain a Database of Medical Information
.A
EMILE C. CHI
CAROL FRIEDMAN
NAOMI SAGER
MARGARET S. LYMAN
.W
The Linguistic String Project of New York University has developed computer
programs that convert the information in free-text documents of a technical
specialty into a structured form suitable for mapping into a relational
database.  The processing is based upon the restrictions on the use of
language that are characteristic of the subject matter and the document type.
These restrictions are summarized in a "sublanguage grammar" that provides a
set of word classes and formulas corresponding to the objects and relations
of interest in the domain.  The programs are independent of the particular
sublanguage grammar employed.  The application to narrative patient records
will be described and the applicability of the methods to other domains
discussed.
.I 11
.T
An Approach to Multikey Sequencing in an Equiprobable Keyterm
		    Retrieval Situation
.A
B. G. T. LOWDEN
.W
We present a simple generalized technique, for sequencing a multi-
attribute file, which can be used in a situation where the query
pattern is unknown and the term content equiprobable.  The method
is based on constructing a short spanning path through the records
thereby minimizing the sum of the Hamming distances between them.
Retrieval performance is simulated over a range of query expressions
and results suggest a significant reduction in the number of block
accesses using this technique as compared with records randomly
distributed over the file space.
.I 12
.T
Optimization of Inverted Vector Searches
.A
CHRIS BUCKLEY
ALAN F. LEWIT
.W
A simple algorithm is presented for increasing the efficiency of
information retrieval searches which are implemented using inverted
files.  This optimization algorithm employs knowledge about the
methods used for weighting document and query terms in order to
examine as few inverted lists as possible.  An extension to the
basic algorithm allows greatly increased performance optimization
at a modest cost in retrieval effectiveness.  Experimental runs are
made examining several different term weighting models and showing
the optimization possible with each.
.I 13
.T
P-Trees: Storage Efficient Multiway Trees
.A
DAVID M. ARNOW
AARON M. TENENBAUM
CONNIE WU
.W
A new variation of high order multiway tree structures, the P-tree, is
presented.  P-trees have average access costs that are significantly
better than those of B-trees and are no worse (and often better) in
storage utilization.  Unlike compact B-trees, they can be maintained
dynamically, and unlike dense multiway trees and B-trees, their
associated insertion algorithm, which is also presented, is cheap and
involves (at most) a very localized rearrangement of keys.
.I 14
.T
Efficient Variants of Huffman Codes in High Level languages
.A
Y. CHOUEKA
S. T. KLEIN
T. PERL
.W
Although it is well-known that Huffman Codes are optimal for text
compression in a character per character encoding scheme, they are
seldom used in practical situations since they require a bit-by-bit
decoding algorithm, which has to be written in some assembly language
and will perform rather slowly.  A number of methods and some slight
variants are here presented that avoid these difficulties.  The decoding
algorithms efficiently process the encoded string on a byte-per-byte
basis, and can be programmed in any high level language.  This is achieved
at the cost of reducing the net compression savings by a negligible amount,
and storing some tables in the internal memory.  Experimental results are
presented.
.I 15
.T
Optimization of a Hierarchical File Organization for Spelling Correction
.A
TETSURO ITO
CLEMENT T. YU
.W
The application of a hierarchically organized file to spelling check and
correction problems seems to be promising, since it can correct more than
the common typing mistakes.  However, the speed of retrieving the exactly
matched records to the input is rather slow, and the time for computing
similarity values is not negligible.  Here some techniques to overcome
these defects are presented along with the approximate estimation of the
improved file search time.
.I 16
.T
Designing an Information Retrieval Interface Based on User Characteristics
.A
CHRISTINE L. BORGMAN
DONALD O. CASE
CHARLES T. MEADOW
.W
With the increasing number of information retrieval systems and databases
available and the increasing demand of end users to utilize the system,
a need exists for improved training mechanisms.  This paper reports on a
project to develop an integrated online instruction and assistance system
to be used as a "front end" to the U.S. Department of Energy's RECON
retrieval system.  The conceptual framework for the interface design will
be based on individual characteristics of its current and prospective
users, predominantly scientists conducting energy research.  We will
build a prototype based on information gained from interviews with
scientists using the system (either directly or through a search
intermediary) and interviews with search intermediaries.  In addition, we
will outline a separate interface tailored to search intermediary needs,
based on interviews and on known differences between end users and
intermediaries in information seeking behavior and conceptual views of
information systems.  The paper reports on research in progress through
the initial interviews.  The remaining parts of the project are outlined.
.I 17
.T
Different levels of expertise for an expert system in information retrieval
.A
B. DEFUDE
.W
The aim of this article is to describe the specifications of an Information
Retrieval Expert System (IRES).  The resort to expert systems is a recent
way which seems to be very convenient to realize performant and convivial
systems.  In fact the capabilities allowed by classical Information Retrieval
Systems (IRS) are not adequate.  This inadequacy comes from some important
restrictions :
	- limited indexing vocabulary, very often designed a priori.
	- the search terms have to belong to this vocabulary and there
	are just some simple semantical relations (as synonymy for example)
	which can be used during the search.
Consequently, if the terms used in the query are not those used for indexing
we do not have a good answer.
.I 18
.T
One-Time Complete Indexing of Text: Theory and Practice
.A
RAYMOND J. D'AMORE
CLINTON P. MAH
.W
N-gram indexing provides a significant alternative to the keyword indexing
and full text scanning methods.  N-grams are sets of overlapping word
fragments selected for indexing according to information-theoretic
considerations.  They provide complete, fixed indexing of all words, numbers,
and special terms in text.  The behavior of such an n-gram system can be
statistically modeled and validated over a wide range of text.  The model
provides a descriptive and predictive tool for controlling precision and
recall during retrievals and scaling estimates of relevance to an adaptive,
reference noise distribution for a given collection.  Partial inversion of
and simple data compression are some of the capabilities which make n-gram
systems performance-competitive with other approaches.
.I 19
.T
Experiments with cited titles for automatic document indexing and similarity
measure in a probabilistic context
.A
K. L. KWOK
.W
Most people will agree that the ultimate goal of an information retrieval
(IR) system would be to incorporate as many artificial intelligence
techniques as possible so that the system would be able to reply to queries
with specific answers (so called fact retrieval).  Current capabilities for
large scale general purpose retrieval however is still at the stage of
document retrieval level, namely retrieving documents that most probably
contain answers to a query.  This may not necessarily be a transient stage
at all, as has been pointed out that document retrieval capability may serve
as a pre-processing stage to the more detailed fact retrieval, even if the
problems associated with the latter are assumed solved.
.I 20
.T
A Learning Algorithm Applied to Document Redescription
.A
MICHEAL D. GORDON
.W
Relevance feedback in document retrieval usually involves an inquirer
revising a query to obtain better retrieval effectiveness [Rocchio] and
[Salton].  The revised query is adjusted to correspond to the descriptions
of known documents which the inquirer has found relevant.  Several problems
exist with such methods, however, and will be described in this paper.
.I 21
.T
The Cluster Hypothesis Revisited
.A
ELLEN M. VOORHEES
.W
A new means of evaluating the cluster hypotheses is introduced and the
results of such an evaluation are presented for four collections.  The
results of retrieval experiments comparing a sequential search, a cluster-
based search, and a search of the cluster collection in which individual
documents are scored against the query are also presented.  These results
indicate that while the absolute performance of a search on a particular
collection is dependent on the pairwise similarity of the relevant documents,
the relative effectiveness of clustered retrieval versus sequential retrieval
is independent of this factor.  However, retrieval of entire clusters in
response to a query usually results in a poorer performance than retrieval
of individual documents from cluster.
.I 22
.T
C. T. YU
Y. T. WANG
C. H. CHEN
.W
It is well known [Salt, LaYu] that the retrieval of documents stored in
clusters allows queries to be answered efficiently.  Furthermore,
clustered retrieval may sometimes gain in retrieval effectiveness over
relevance term weighting [Crof].  It has also been showm [VanR] that
clustering of terms, when used properly (e.g. in tree dependence model
[HaVa]) will gain significant improvement over retrieval processes based
on the independence of terms [RoSp, YuSa].  Although numerous clustering
algorithms [Salt, VanR, Ever] have been proposed and tested, the
following problems remain.
        1) the clustering algorithms are extremely expensive to use, if
	   the number of objects (documents or terms) is large;
	2) when the user enviroment changes, it is necessary to perform
	   reclustering;
	3) most clustering algorithms cluster objects based on syntactic
	   relationships between the objects only.  Information which
	   is extractable from previous users is ignored.
.I 23
.T
Concepts of the Cover Coefficient-Based Clustering Methodology
.A
FAZLI CAN
ESEN A. OZKARAHAN
.W
Document clustering has several unresolved problems.  Among them are high
time and space complexity, difficulty of determining similarity thresholds,
order dependence, nonuniform document distribution in clusters, and
arbitrariness in determination of various cluster initiators.  To overcome
these problems to some degree, the cover coefficient based clustering
methodology has been introduced.  The concepts used in this methodology
have created certain new concepts, relationships, and measures such as the
effect of indexing on clustering.  These new concepts are discussed.  The
result of performance experiments that show the effectiveness of the
clustering methodology and the matching function are also included.  In
these experiments, it has been also observed that the majority of the
documents obtained in a search are concentrated in a few clusters
containing a low percentage of documents of the database.
.I 24
.T
The LIVE Project - Retrieval Experiments Based on Evaluation Viewpoints
.A
P. BOLLMANN
F. JOCHUM
U. REINER
V. WEISSMANN
H. ZUSE
.W
The LIVE-project (Leistungsbewertung von Information Retrieval VErfahren) at
the Technische Universitaet Berlin, West Germany concerns with the evaluation
of information retrieval systems.  Two fields are mainly under investigation.

One area is about the investigation of methodological foundations of retrieval
experiments.  Results of the LIVE-project can be seen on three different areas:
on the one hand measurement-theoretical criteria for the application of simil-
arity and evaluation measures in retrieval experiments have been considered
and developed.  Further work has been done in the application of statistical
principles of experimental design in information retrieval.  Especially control
structures of factors in retrieval tests have been investigated and some
aspects of statistical models for experimentation in information retrieval.

The other topic in the LIVE project is the conduction of a retrieval experiment
in cooperation with FIZ4 which is an information service center for mathematics
physics and energy in Karlsruhe, West Germany. Amongst the many databases which
FIZ4 is offering, the LIVE-project used the database about physics in their
retrieval experiment.
.I 25
.T
On Retrieval Tests with an Inhomogeneous Query Collection
.A
FRIEDBERT JOCHUM
.W
Retrieval tests are often performed with an inhomogeneous query collection,
that means certain properties of queries vary within the collection.  The
presented paper investigates under which conditions this inhomogeneity may
lead to a loss of validity of retrieval tests and should be controlled by
an experimental design.  In particular the interrelationship between
experimental design of a retrieval test,  inhomogeneity of the used query
collection and measurement theoretical properties of the used evaluation
measure will be discussed.
.I 26
.T
The Impact of VLSI Generalized Associative Memory Devices on the Intelligence
and Architecture of Computer Systems
.A
D. R. MCGREGOR
J. R. MALONE
M. HENNING
.W
An intelligent system requires to function at different time-scales:
	- fast associative recall of previously encountered information
	- more complete, but slower search for hypotheses, checks for
	  consistency and so on.  We must not expect automatic systems
	  to do these in seconds.

This paper describes a novel database system which used a new type of
associative memory (now being implemented in VLSI) to improve its speed
of response.
.I 27
.T
A Testbed for Information Retrieval Research:
The Utah Retrieval System Architecture
.A
LEE A. HOLLAAR
.W
The Utah Retrieval System Architecture provides an excellent testbed for
the development and testing of new algorithms or techniques for information
retrieval.  URSA is a message-based structure capable of running on a
variety of system configurations, ranging from a single mainframe processor
to a system distributed across a number of dissimilar processors.  It can
readily support a variety of specialized backend processors, such a high-
speed printers.

The architecture divides the components of a text retrieval system into
two classes: servers and clients.  A triple of servers (index, search, and
document access) for each database provide the capabilities normally
associated with a retrieval system.  Possible clients for these servers
include a window-based user interface, whose query language can be easily
modified, a connection to a mainframe host processor, or Al-based query
modification programs that wish to use the database.

Any module in the system can be replaced by a new module using a different
algorithm as long as the new module complies with the message formats for
that function.  In fact, with some care this module switch can occur while
the system is running, without affecting the users.  A monitor program
collects statistics on all system messages, giving information regarding
query complexity, processing time for each module, queuing times, and
bandwidths between every module.

This paper discusses the background of URSA and its structure, with
particular emphasis on the features that make it a good testbed for
information retrieval techniques.
.I 28
.T
An Integrated Hierarchical File Organization For Data Selection and Retrieval
.A
SAU-LAN LEE
.W
This paper presents an approach, the IHF approach, of organizing data of a
hierarchical structure into one single file, maintaining adequate represen-
tation of the relationships among the data.  The IHF approach requires each
data item be stored in the basic form of name-value pair and consists in
assigning each data item with identifier which provides not only the data
item identification but also an implicit identification of the hierarchical
structural relationships among groups of data items.  Data selection and
retrieval operations are effectively implemented with the concept of masking
of relevant identifier bits, without resorting to any linking devices.
Application of the IHF technique on CAFS is examined.
.I 29
.T
RUBRIC:  An Environment for Full Text Information Retrieval
.A
RICHARD M. TONG
VICTOR N. ASKMAN
JAMES F. CUNNINGHAM
CARL J. TOLLANDER
.W
This paper describes an ongoing research project that is concerned with
developing a computer-based aid for retrieval from unformated full text
databases.  Unlike other attempts to improve upon Boolean keyword retrieval
systems, our research concentrates on providing an easily used rule-based
language for expressing retrieval concepts.  This language draws upon work
both in artificial intelligence and the theories of evidential reasoning to
allow the user to construct queries that have better precision and recall
than more traditional forms.  The paper includes a discussion of our formal
model of retrieval, the rule language, and some comparative performance
results.
.I 30
.T
ANNOD - A Navigator of Natural-language Organized (Textual) Data
.A
ROBERT E. WILLIAMSON
.W
ANNOD is the name of a system developed at the National Library of Medicine
(NLM), which implements a set of linguistic and empirical techniques that
permit retrieval of natural language information in response to natural
language queries.  The system is based on Dr. Gerard Salton's SMART document
retrieval system and is presently implemented on a mini-computer as part of
an Interactive Text Management System, ITEMS.  Actual experience with
retrieval of information from NLM's Hepatitis Knowledge Base (HKB), an
encyclopedic hierarchical, full-text file, is presented.  The techniques
used in ANNOD include: automatic stemming of words, common word deletion,
thesaurus expansion, a complex empirical matching (ranking) algorithm
(similarity measure), and techniques expressly designed to permit rapid
response in a mini-computer environment.  Preliminary testing demonstrates
high efficiency in identifying portions of a text which are relevant to users.
.I 31
.T
The User's Mental Model of an Information Retrieval System
.A
CHRISTINE L. BORGMAN
.W
An empirical study was performed to train naive subjects in the use of a
prototype Boolean logic-based information retrieval system on a bibliographic
data-base.  Subjects were undergraduates with little or no prior computing
experience.  Subjects trained with a conceptual model of the system performed
better than subjects trained with procedural instructions, but only on complex,
problem-solving tasks.  Performance was equal in simple tasks.  Differences in
patterns of interaction with the system (based on a stochastic process model)
showed parallel results.  Most subjects were able to articulate some
description of the system operation, but few articulated a model similar to
the card catalog analogy provided in training.  Eleven of 43 subjects were
unable to achieve minimal competency in system use.  The failure rate was
equal between training conditions and genders: the only differences found
between those passing and failing the benchmark test were in academic major and
frequency of library use.
.I 32
.T
A Study of the Relationship Between User Profiles and User Queries
.A
MICHAEL A. SHEPHERD
.W
This research investigates the relationship between a user profile and a
user query by examining the degree of similarity of a user profile and a
query and the degree of similarity between the sets of documents retrieved
by the profile and the query, respectively.  This relationship will form
the basis for the integration of a profile and a query into a single
enhanced query to retrieve a set of documents that reflects the similarity
between the sets of documents retrieved by the profile and by the query.
Such an integration will permit the development of an expert search
intermediary in which the user profile acts as a knowledge base in providing
a context for the interpretation of the query to the database.
.I 33
.T
A Conceptual Model and Experiments on How People
Classify and Retrieve Documents
.A
ALBERTO J. CANAS
FRANK SAFAYENI
DAVE W. CONRATH
.W
In other words, a better understanding of the way in which people classify
and search for information may be instrumental for designing more effective
automated systems.  Cognitive psychologists have dealt with the problem of
categorization for many years (e.g. Rosch, 1978) but not within the context
of storage and retrieval.  Their work has been based on the categorization
of simple stimuli (e.g. geometric shapes) and has not addressed the problem
of retrieval after categorization.

The purpose of this paper is twofold:
	1) To present a conceptual model of the cognitive processes in the
	   storage and retrieval of documents.
	2) To describe ongoing experiments and their potential implications
	   in the design of automated systems.



>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
18
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft@LSU>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 85 09:17:10 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: pisa travel grant announcement
-BODY-
when will IRlist print my Pisa travel grant announcement?

[Note: On Oct. 19 issues 15 and 16 of IRlist were both sent out.
Unfortunately, they were dated Sep instead of Oct, so people may
have been confused, or may have missed one of the two.  In any case
in Issue 16 the second entry published is classified as
	Call for Papers - Applications for NSF funds to Pisa Conf.
which is a message from Don Kraft of LSU to "Dear World:"
Please note that papers are due Jan 15, 1986. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Mark Zimmermann <zimmer%lll-tis-a.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed Oct 30 04:26:42 1985
-SUBJECT-
Subject: interactive index-in-context queries?
-BODY-
Summary:  I want a fast, simple, interactive browsing tool, and something like
an extended index-in-context (where the full text of the document is available
instantly when requested from an index item) seems to have a lot of potential.
Questions:  --what are the difficulties with this approach?
            --do products exist to do this (esp. on Macintosh or Sun)?
            --are there good places to read about this in the literature?

Appended below is part of a message I sent out to a friend recently,
describing in more detail the background of the above task.  If anybody can
help, please send mail to me here ("zimmer@lll-tis") or at "zim@mitre".  Tnx!
 ^z
**************
 Here's my current project -- I want to create a fast, interactive, index-in-
>context (maybe this is called a "KWIC" = "Key Word in Context"?) to handle
multi-megabyte data files (e.g., my collection of 3000 msgs from the past
year).  I'll describe what I fantasize having on the Mac (which will be
limited to 200K or so files) -- and maybe you can comment or help, if you
like.  I think that it's a pretty trivial project on a Mac or Sun (maybe
a few days work, plus time to improve the user interface?).  Very tough to
do the user interface on a non-bit-mapped-screen such as our standard dumb
terminals hooked up to the mainframe at work ....
  What it looks like:  system has a window with scroll bars that shows a
chunk of the index-in-context -- the alphabetized (ignoring case) words that
are indexed are all lined up in the middle, like:
  ...azilians have domesticated the aardvark and are using it to ...
  ...common to be using a pine wood abacus for rapid calculations...
  ...have domesticated the aardvark and are using it to perform a...
  ... domesticated the aardvark and are using it to perform a var...
etc.  (index words are right here   ^^^, of course)
  User scrolls around the index, and when something looks potentially
interesting/relevant, clicks on that item and another window opens up
showing a big chunk of text (several dozen lines, at least) around that
point, also in a scrollable window.  Everything happens instantly....
  One might also be able to edit, in a very simple way, the index -- besides
having a predetermined list of words to ignore (a, an, the...) one might let
the user click on an index entry and then hit backspace, or "cut", to delete
it....
  Implementation:  I would preprocess the document to remove tabs,
replace <crlf>s with spaces, etc.  Then scan through the document and
build up a list (linear array, really) of pointers to the first letter of
each word to be indexed (an address, maybe relative to the first entry
in the document).  Then sort that list so that the 10 (or so) letters
after the pointed-to locations come in alphabetical order (ignore case).
NOTE:  we ignore word boundaries to save time and simplify.  We ignore
"record" boundaries, to save time and simplify.  We probably put a bunch
of spaces at the beginning and end of the file, to simplify/eliminate
end effects.
  So, we now have our document (minus <crlf>s) and our sorted index of pointers
into that document.  As the user scrolls around in the index, we fetch each
line to be displayed by subtracting 40 or so characters around the pointed-to
character, then typing out 80 characters or so.  Show result in a window.
Hold everything in memory at once ... if that's not possible, we have
to have some pre-fetching (paging?) set up to get all the text surrounding
the areas being viewed in the index into fast memory before user clicks on
an item to be fetched.  If an item is selected, open another window and print
out the pointer location contents +-1000 or so bytes.
  DQW suggests perhaps showing in the index only the index word plus a count
of how many occurrences it has, i.e.:
   aardvark   1
   abacus     2
   and    12345
   Akhiezer  17
etc., and then with a click expanding a chosen word into its full list of
index items.   Might be useful as an option, but I'd delay it until we see
how unwieldy the full way is (with scroll bars, you can skip over dull
zones easily).  CS suggests that we could use the above idea to get into
sub-indices -- that is, if one clicked on "Akhiezer" above, one might get
into an index which was sorted by all the words within 100 (or so?) characters
of the occurrence of Akhiezer -- a rather different idea, that might require
more pre-processing or auxiliary index files than I want to tackle right now.
  The index should only take up 1/2 or so the size of the whole document
(4 bytes/pointer, and the average indexed word is probably at least 4 letters
long, so there should be little chance of the index exceding the size of
the document).
  A left parenthesis is a good delimiter to use, in addition to a space.
  So, any comments?  If this already exists commercially, please give me a
pointer to it, so I don't reinvent the whole thing ... I'm told that a KWIC
index is a "standard student project", but that it tends not to be too
useful ... but with the speed and scrollability that I envision, I think
it would be a tremendous tool for me to have a hand in browsing through my
mountains of files.
  I'm going to try to do something quick and dirty in MacFORTH to prove
the concept out for this index-context thing ... have discussed it with
a variety of friends, and gotten various responses....  Will forward an
edited excerpt from this note to IRList and info-mac, and see if there is
any help there ....
 (zim@mitre or zimmer@lll-tis)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Don Walker <walker%mouton.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 85 16:47:40 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS; ACL 1986 Annual Meeting
-BODY-
CALL FOR PAPERS
24th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
10-13 June 1986, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
SCOPE:   Papers are invited on all aspects of computational linguistics,
including, but not limited to, pragmatics, discourse, semantics, and
syntax; understanding and generating spoken and written language;
linguistic, mathematical, and psychological models of language;
phonetics and phonology; speech analysis, synthesis, and recognition;
translation and translation aids; natural language interfaces; and
theoretical and applications papers of every kind.

REQUIREMENTS:   Papers should describe unique work that has not
been submitted elsewhere; they should emphasize completed work rather
than intended work; and they should indicate clearly the state of
completion of the reported results.  Authors should send eight copies
of an extended abstract up to eight pages long (single-spaced if
desired) to:
	Alan W. Biermann
	ACL86 Program Chair
	Department of Computer Science
	Duke University
	Durham, NC 27706, USA
	[919:684-3048; awb%duke@csnet-relay]

SCHEDULE:   Papers are  due by 6 January 1986 .  Authors will be
notified of acceptance by 25 February.  Camera-ready copies of final
papers prepared on model paper must be received by 18 April along with
a signed copyright release statement.

OTHER ACTIVITIES:   The meeting will include a program of tutorials and
a variety of exhibits and demonstrations.  Anyone wishing to arrange an
exhibit or present a demonstration should send a brief description to
Alan Biermann along with a specification of physical requirements:
space, power, telephone connections, tables, etc.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION:   Local arrangements are being handled by Kathy
McKeown and Cecile Paris, Department of Computer Science, Columbia
University, New York, NY 10027; 212:280-8194 and 8125; mckeown and
cecile @columbia-20.arpa.  For other information on the conference and
on the ACL more generally, contact Don Walker (ACL), Bell Communications
Research, 445 South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960;
201:829-4312; walker@mouton.arpa or walker%mouton@csnet-relay or
bellcore!walker@berkeley.

Program Committee:  Alan W. Biermann, Duke University
		    Kenneth W. Church, AT&T Bell Laboratories
		    Michael Dyer, University of California at Los Angeles
		    Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University
		    George E. Heidorn, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
	 	    David D. McDonald, University of Massachusetts
		    Fernando C.N. Pereira, SRI International
		    Candace L. Sidner, BBN Laboratories
		    John S. White, Siemens Communication Systems

LSA SUMMER LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE:   ACL-86 is scheduled just before the
53rd LSA Institute, which will be held at the Graduate School and
University Center of the City University of New York from 23 June to 31
July.  The 1986 Institute is the first to focus on computational
linguistics.  During the intervening week, a number of special courses
will be held that should be of particular interest to computational
linguists.  For further information contact D. Terence Langendoen, CUNY
Graduate Center, 33 W. 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036; 212:921-9061;
tergc%cunyvm@wiscvm.arpa.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Werner Uhrig <CMP.WERNER%r20.utexas.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sat 2 Nov 85 14:13:34-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: COMPUTERISED ARCHIVES - MUSEUMS ON DISC
-BODY-
[ from "The Economist", Oct 26, 85. page 100 ]

    COMPUTERISED ARCHIVES - MUSEUMS ON DISC

Museums and libraries face a dilemma. They wish to preserve their treasures but
they must allow the public access to them.  The two jobs are oftenincompatible.
...
Microfilm provides one answer, but it is inadequate for several reasons.  The
film itself is as perishable as paper, while the film-reading machines are
bulky and expensive.

  The Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum in Washington (the world's
busiest museum, with 12m visitors last year) thinks it has a better way.  Mr.
Hernan Ottano, head of the Smithsonian's "advanced projects" division, has
developed a way of recording digitised images of documents that makes them easy
to record and retrieve.  It is having a test run on more than 50,000 documents
that make up the archives of Wernher von Braun, the rocket pioneer.  By the
middle of next year, you will be able to walk into the Smithsonian and buy one
video disc on which are copies of all von Braun's papers.

The Air and Space Museum has already recorded its collection of nearly 1m
photographs on video discs using a simple analog system, where the photograph
is filmed by a video camera and the image transferred to a video disc ....
....
The handling of originals decreased by 50% in a year after the first disc was
made available.  The discs sell for $30 each.

But the Otano project is more ambitious.  By turning the images into digital
information, you can transmit them over telephone lines and simultaneously
index the text.  It begins with a digitising video camera, which automatically
focuses, adjusts for things like light and paper colour, zooms in or out to
captuere the whole document and then makes a black-and-white image consisting
of 4m spots, or pixels, digitally stored.  Unlike microfilm the image being
recorded is displayed on a screen so it can be checked.  It is then compressed
by a personal computer into 50 kilobytes of imformation per image by ignoring
large uniform areas.

Mr. Otano's group added software, that in the case of printed documents, can
turn any text into an ASCII text string - meaning that a computer can then
recognise the words (it can read 2,000 different typefaces). By looking for
words, it can then make an automatic index of the text in the documents
themselves.
...
And, to give an idea of the scale, Encyclopaedia Britannica could go on a
double-sided disc, as could the contents of 33 filing cabinets.  With a
video-disc player and a printer, a museum can have, for a few thousand dollars,
a system that can produce indexed, word-perfect and effectively indestructible
copies of its collection to which anybody can have access merely by buying a
disc.
...
The idea is so simple that museum directors the world over will be kicking
themselves that they did not think of it (the Smithsonian has applied for a
patent).  And eventually, enthuses Mr. Otano, colour photographs and paintings
as well as three-dimensional objects (fossils, coins) could be photographed and
digitally stored in the same way.  The gargantuan collections of the great
museums - the Smithsonian alanoe holds 100m items - will then be safe.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Henry Nussbacher <HJNCU%CUNYVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date:         Mon, 21 Oct 85 10:49 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Ir-List now abstracted into Internetwork Database server
-BODY-
As per a recent announcement in Ir-List, the Ir-List digest has now been added
to the Database server at node Bitnic in Bitnet.  Refer back to Issue #15
(listed as September 19th - but should have been October 19th) for further
details.

Hank

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
19
-FROM-
From: Bernard Silver <SILVER%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 85 23:44:39 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar - Learning From Multiple Analogies (GTE)
-BODY-
			GTE LABS INCORPORATED
			MACHINE LEARNING SEMINAR

Title:                 Learning from Multiple Analogies

Speaker:                      Mark H. Burstein
	                         BBN Labs.

Date:			Monday October 21, 10am

Place:			GTE Labs
			40 Sylvan Rd, Waltham MA 02254


Students learning about an unfamiliar new subject under the guidance
of a teacher or textbook, are often taught basic concepts by analogies
to things that they are more familiar with.  Although this seems to
be a very powerful form of instruction, the process by which students
make use of this kind of instruction has been little studied by AI
learning theorists.  A cognitive process model of how students make
use of such analogies will be presented.  The model was motivated by
examples of the behavior of several students who were tutored on the
programming language BASIC, and focusses in detail on the development
of knowledge about the concept of a program variable, and its use in
assignment statements.  It suggests how several analogies can be used
together to form new concepts where no one analogy would have been
sufficient.  Errors produced by one reasoning from one analogy can
be corrected by another.

As an illustration of the main principles of the model, a computer
program, CARL, is presented that learns to use variables in BASIC
assignment statements.  While learning about variables, CARL generates
many of the same erroneous hypotheses seen in the recorded protocols
of students learning the same material given the same set of analogies.
The learning process results in a single target model that retains
some aspects of each of the analogies presented.

For more information, contact Bernard Silver (617) 576-6212

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Tim Finin <Tim%upenn.csnet@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 85 22:07 EDT
-BODY-
                       USER INTERFACE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

                                  MARK GREEN
                        DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTING SCIENCE
                             UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA

The  user interface is the part of the program that stands between the user and
the  other  components  of  the  program.    Experience  has  shown  that   the
construction  of  good  user inter- faces is both expensive and time consuming.
It has also been observed that the basic structure of user interfaces does  not
change  radically over a wide range of applications.  Recently there has been a
trend towards isolating the user interface in a separate component designed  by
an  expert  in  human-computer  interaction.   This leads to the idea of a user
interface management  system.    A  user  interface  management  system  (UIMS)
facilitates the design, implementation and maintenance of user interfaces.  The
main goal of UIMSs is to reduce the amount  of  time  and  effort  required  to
produce a user interface.

In  this  talk  the  basic  principles of user interface management systems are
presented along with a discussion of the University of Alberta UIMS.  This UIMS
is   based   on   the  Seeheim  model  of  user  interfaces  developed  at  the
EUROGRAPHICS/IFIPS Workshop on User Interface Management in November 1983.  The
University  of  Alberta  UIMS  supports  the interactive design of the physical
representation of the user interface, three notations for defining the dialogue
structure,  and  a  flexible interface between the user interface and the other
components of the program.

                         3pm Tuesday, October 22, 1985
                         Alumni Hall - Towne Building
                          University of Pennsylvania

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: meltsner%athena.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Scheme for Thermo.
-DATE-
Date: 21 Oct 85 14:22:51 EDT (Mon)
-BODY-
This is both a request and an announcement:

I have been working on a "microworld" for thermodynamics.  The world
would support common thermodynamic objects like gases and solids, and would
allow objects to be interconnected, and equilibriums found with a variety
of constraints on mass, energy, volume, etc. transfer.  ("would" because
not all features have been implemented)

It has proved to be useful in an introductory (graduate) level thermo course,
and I am currently planning to rewrite it to remedy a number of deficiencies.

Questions:

1)  Would you prefer an english-language (command-driven) interface or a
windowed one?  Does "make an gas with 10 moles of neon temperature 298" make
more sense than a dialog box after one has selected a menu item "Make Gas"?

2)  Are windowed graphics useful?  What sort of graphics?(x-time, x-y, contour,
dials, gauges, empty/full bar indicators)

3)  Would you sacrifice speed for numeric accuracy? (1% accuracy vs. .01% might
triple the iteration time)

4)  How important are on-line help, explanations of internal processes,
examples?

5)  What would you like to have it run on?  (4.2 Unix, Macintosh, IBM, ??)

6)  What would it have to run on to be useful for use in a class at your
institution?

The program is currently written in T, and will be moved to Cscheme (MIT
Vax 4.2 Unix Scheme in C).

The program is available for trade or (in a few months) for a nominal
fee from our group at MIT.  Planned expansions include the ability to
change thermodynamic state variables, a thermo methods database
(rule-driven thermo), and a clock for kinetic problems.

Please send all answers and questions to:

meltsner@athena.MIT.EDU

or Ken Meltsner
   MIT Room 13-5142
   Cambridge, MA 02139         617-253-3139


				Ken

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Dave Taylor <hpcnou!dat%hplabs.csnet@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 85 11:07:38 MDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Tutorial Dialog Systems wanted
-BODY-
I'm working on a paper that is a summary of current systems available
for tutorial-style dialogs and would like to get information on languages
that I haven't come across yet.

	Before I list them, though, I've already ruled out most of the
AI natural language pre-processors since they are all too formalized
and one of the goals of the paper is to show what the best language
would be for non-programmers to use.  The application is very simple
CAI stuff - dialogs like:

	Computer: What is your name?

	Person: joe

	Computer: hello joe.

	Computer: please tell me your name again

	Person: jack

	Computer: last time you said 'joe'.  I don't understand!


(quite rudimentary).

  Anyway, the languages that I've looked at so far are:

     Pilot, Basic, Lisp, Prolog, Snobol, Bourne Shell (suprisingly lucid)
     Pascal, Ada, Icon, Mesa and a language from IBM called "Rexx".

 and, still queued to be looked at:

    Logo, the Berkeley Learn system (with the help from someone in AI-ED!)

	Thanks a lot for any help you can offer!

					-- Dave Taylor

					hpcnof!dat@HPLABS.CSNET

				   or   ihnp4!hpfcla!d_taylor

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Mark Richer <RICHER%sumex-aim.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri 25 Oct 85 13:40:35-PDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: Request for Information (CAL in Medicine)
-BODY-
Here's some information on the GUIDON project, including references:

Mark Richer, Oct. 25th, 1985

The GUIDON project is an applied AI research project at the Knowledge
Systems Laboratory, Computer Science Department, Stanford University.
This project is investigating strategies for teaching diagnostic
reasoning (specifically, medical diagnosis) using computers and
knowledge-based systems technology. Part of the effort in this project
has been to extend the capabilities of KB systems technology for the
purpose of explanation and instruction.  NEOMYCIN, a knowledge-based
diagnostic consultation system, has been implemented and is the
foundation for a new series of instructional programs, collectively
called GUIDON-2.  These programs are substantially different in design
than the original GUIDON tutoring system that worked in conjunction
with EMYCIN (e.g., MYCIN) systems.  The director of the project is
William J. Clancey, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate, Computer Science
Department, Stanford University.  There are about a dozen people
associated with this project at present including a physician.  Below
is a list of references that might be of interest to people doing work
in computer-based instruction.  Papers that are listed as HPP or KSL
technical reports are available by writing or calling Knowledge Systems
Laboratory, 701 Welch Road, Bldg. C, Palo Alto, CA 94304, (415)
497-3444.  STAN-CS papers (I think) are available through the Computer
Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305.

WARNING:  Do not send requests for papers to me; I'm afraid I will get
swamped. Try to find the reference yourself if it was published,
otherwise request it directly by calling or mailing to KSL or Stanford
CS. (KSL is part of the CS Dept, but we are  housed in a separate
building at present and we maintain our series of technical reports.)
Thank you.

References:  [these are not in any particular order]

Clancey, W.J. (1979) Transfer of rule-based expertise through a
tutorial dialogue. Computer Science Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford
University, NOT Available as a tech report. Revised version, MIT
Press, in preparation.

Clancey, W.J. (1979) Tutoring rules for guiding a case method
dialogue. Int J of Man-Machine Studies, 11, 25-49. Also in Intelligent
Tutoring Systems, eds. Sleeman and Brown, Academic Press, London,
1982.

Clancey, W.J.  (1982) 	Overview of GUIDON.
	Journal of Computer-Based Instruction,
	Summer 1983, Volume 10, Numbers 1 & 2, pages 8-15.
	Also in The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 2,
	eds. Barr and Feigenbaum, Kaufmann, Los Altos.
	Also STAN-CS-93-997, HPP-83-42.

Richer, M. and Clancey, W. J. (1985)
	GUIDON-WATCH: A graphic interface for browsing and viewing a
	knowledge-based system.  To appear in IEEE Computer Graphics
	and Applications, November 1985, Also KSL 85-20.

Clancey, W.J., Bennett, J., and Cohen, P.  (1979)
	Applications-oriented AI Research: Education.
	In The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Chapter IX,
	Volume 2, eds. Barr and Feigenbaum, Kaufmann, Los Altos.
	Also STAN-CS-79-749, HPP-79-17.

Clancey, W.J., Shortliffe, E.H., and Buchanan, B.G.  (1979)
	Intelligent computer-aided instruction for medical diagnosis.
	In Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: The First
	Decade, eds. W.J. Clancey and E.H. Shortliffe, Addison-Wesley, 1984.
	Also Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium on
	Computer Applications in Medical Care,
	Silver Spring, Maryland, October 1979, pps. 175-183.
	Also HPP 80-10.

Clancey, W.J. and Letsinger, R. (1981)
	NEOMYCIN: Reconfiguring a rule-based expert system for
	application to teaching.  In Readings in Medical Artificial
	Intelligence: The First Decade,
	eds. W.J. Clancey and E.H. Shortliffe, Addison-Wesley, 1984.
	Proceedings of Seventh IJCAI, 1981, pps. 829-826.
	Also STAN-CS-82-908, HPP 81-2.

Clancey, W.J. (1981)
	Methodology for Building an Intelligent Tutoring System.
	In Method and Tactics in Cognitive Science,
	eds. Kintsch, Miller, and Polson, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
	Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1984.
	Also STAN-CS-81-894, HPP 81-18.

Clancey, W.J. (1984)
	Acquiring, representing, and evaluating a competence model of
	diagnosis.
	In Contributions to the Nature of Expertise, eds. Chi,
	Glaser, and Farr, in preparation.
	Also HPP-84-2.

Clancey, W.J. (1979)
	Dialogue Management for Rule-based Tutorials.
	Proceedings of Sixth IJCAI, 1979, pps. 155-161.

London, B. & Clancey W. J. (1982)
	Plan recognition strategies in student modeling: Prediction
	and description.
	Proceedings of AAAI-82, pps. 335-338.
	Also STAN-CS-82-909, HPP 82-7.

Clancey, W.J. (1983)
	Communication, Simulation, and Intelligent Agents:
	Implications of Personal Intelligent Machines for Medical
	Education.
	Proceedings of AAMSI-83, pps. 556-560.
	Also HPP-83-3.

Many people have influenced our thinking, but in particular the
following paper may be helpful to understand our current thinking with
regard to computer-based learning:

@Inproceedings[BROWN83,
	key="Brown"
	,Author="Brown, J.S."
	,title="Process versus product--a perspective on tools for
communal and informal electronic learning"
	,booktitle="Education in the Electronic Age"
	,note="Proceedings of a conference sponsored by the
	Educational Broadcasting Corporation, WNET/Thirteen Learning
	Lab, NY, pp. 41-58 ."
	,month=July
	,year=1983]

	The work described in this paper has its home at the XEROX
Palo Alto Reasearch Center (PARC).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Stuart Crawford <GA.SLC%su-forsythe.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 85 15:16:37 PDT
-BODY-
  I am interested in obtaining pointers to recent references regarding
  the known pros and cons of using pure statistical approaches to
  medical diagnosis (such as the use of classification and regression
  trees) as opposed to expert systems approaches.  In particular, I
  am interested in any literature discussing the possible use of
  the combined use of such approaches.  For example, using
  classification trees to help with the fine tuning of production
  rules, or using classification rules to augment current knowledge
  bases.  I know much more about the statistical approaches than the
  ai approaches, but it seems that some interdisciplanary technique
  might be fruitful.

                                 Stuart Crawford

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1985  12:44 EDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-REPLY:TO-
Reply-to: Cog-Sci-Request%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
           -------------------------------------------------
Monday  28, October  2:15pm (refreshments 2:00pm) Room: NE43-512A


                 TWO APPLICATIONS OF THE IFO DATABASE MODEL

                                RICHARD HULL
                         Computer Science Department
                      University of Southern California
                         Los Angeles, CA 90089-0782

                                  ABSTRACT

The IFO database model, recently introduced by the speaker, provides
a clean, modular synthesis of many of the basic ideas found in the
object-based, semantic database models.  The IFO model supports the
fundamental constructs of  ISA relationships, functional relationships,
and object construction; and ensures good schema design through a
small set of restrictions on how these constructs are combined.

The talk will focus on two applications of the IFO model.  The first
is SNAP, an interactive, graphics-based system currently under develop-
ment, which provides natural mechanisms for schema design, schema
browsing, and for querying the database.  SNAP has several advantages
over other interactive interfaces for schema access because of unique
features of the IFO model.

The second application focusses on update propagation in semantic
database models.  This is of particular interest because of the
complex interconnections between data which can be represented by
schemas from these models.  A mathematical result characterizing
the propagation of atomic update requests to IFO schemas will be
presented


HOST:  Professor Rishiyur Nikhil

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

Wednesday  30, October  4:00pm  Room: 405 Robinson Hall
                                      Northeastern University
                                      360 Huntington Ave.
                                      Boston MA


                        Northeastern University
                College of Computer Science Colloquium


          Brittleness, Tunnel Vision, Machine Learning and
                      Knowledge Representation

                          Prof. Steve Gallant
                        Northeastern University


A system is brittle if it fails when presented with slight deviations from
expected input.  This is a major problem with knowledge representation schemes
and particularly with expert systems which use them.

This talk defines the notion of Tunnel Vision and shows it to be a major
cause of brittleness.  As a consequence it will be claimed that commonly
used schemes for machine learning and knowledge representation are pre-
disposed toward brittle behavior.  These include decision trees, frames,
and disjunctive normal form expressions.

Some systems which are free from tunnel vision will be described.


INFO: Carole D Hafner <HAFNER%northeastern.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>

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

Wednesday  30, October  4:00pm  Room: 20E-207 (Philosopy Lounge)

            A Government-Binding Parser

           Steven Abney and Jennifer Cole
          Department of Linguistics, MIT

We report on work in progress in the development of a model
of natural language parsing which incorporates the Government-Binding
theory of grammar.  The computational model we adopt is the Actor
theory of distributed computation, which is being developed by the
Apiary project of the MIT AI Laboratory.  We contrast parsing in a
principle-based framework such as that of Government-Binding theory,
and parsing in a rule-based framework such as Context Free Grammar.
We discuss how the Actor model provides a natural way of approaching
the parsing problem in a principle-based theory, and present our model
in moderate detail.  Issues such as the relation between parser and
grammar are also addressed.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1985  09:55 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Friday  1, November  10:30am  Room: BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street,
                                    3rd floor large conference room

               BBN Artificial Intelligence Seminar

        "A Knowledge-Based Approach to Language Production"

                        Paul Jacobs

The development of natural language interfaces to Artificial
intelligence systems is dependent on the representation of knowledge.
A major impediment to building such systems has been the difficulty in
adding sufficient linguistic and conceptual knowledge to extend and
adapt their capabilities. This difficulty has been apparent in systems
which perform the task of language production, i. e. the generation of
natural language output to satisfy the communicative requirements of a
system.

The problem of extending and adapting linguistic capabilities is
rooted in the problem of integrating abstract and specialized
knowledge and applying this knowledge to the language processing task.
Three aspects of a knowledge representation system are highlighted by
this problem: hierarchy, or the ability to represent relationships
between abstract and specific knowledge structures; explicit
referential knowledge, or knowledge about relationships among concepts
used in referring to concepts; and informity, the use of a common
framework for linguistic and co ceptual knowledge. The knowledge
based approach to language production addresses the language
generation task from within the broader context of the representation
and application of conceptual and linguistic knowledge.

This knowledge based approach has led to the design and
implementation of a knowledge representation framework, called Ace,
geared towards facilitating the interaction of linguistic and
conceptual knowledge in language processing. Ace is a uniform,
hierarchical representation system, which facilitates the use of
abstractions in the encoding of specialized knowledge and the
representation of the referential and metaphorical relationships among
concepts. A general purpose natural language generator, KING
(Knowledge INtensive Generator), has been implemented to apply
knowledge in the Ace form. The generator is designed for knowledge
intensivity and incrementality, to exploit the power of the Ace
knowledge in generation. The generator works by applying structured
associations, or mappings, from conceptual to linguistic structures,
and combining these structures into grammatical utterances. This has
proven to be a simple but powerful mechanism which is relatively easy
to adapt and extend.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1985  11:11 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Monday  4, November  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor playroom

               SEMINAR IN VISUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING

                  "Edge Detection: Two New Approaches"

                           Michael Gennert


The detection of edges in images is a 30 year old problem that has still
not been completely solved.  There have been many attempts made to
solve it, ranging from the ad hoc to methods based on information theory.
In this talk I will review the theory of edge detection, mention some
of the better methods of edge detection, and propose two new classes
of edge detector.

For simplicity I will consider only the detection of step edges.
Step edges can be detected by convolving the image with a smoothing
filter (such as a Gaussian)  and identifying points in this
image where the gradient is large.   This can be done either by
finding points where the first derivative is high or the second
derivative is zero.  These smoothing and differentiating operations
can be combined into a single convolution operation.  This is the
general approach taken by Marr and Hildreth, Modestino and Fries,
Canny, and others.

Canny developed his edge detector by suggesting several performance
criteria, and solving the resulting difficult optimization problem.
Unfortunately, he carried out his analysis in only one dimension,
whereas the problem is inherently two-dimensional. I will discuss
extending Canny's analysis to two dimensions.  The two-dimensional
extension requires solving fourth-order nonlinear partial differential
equations, showing that Canny was right not to consider doing it.

Another approach results from looking at the detection of half-edges
rather than edges. This leads to a generalization of the derivative of
a Gaussian operator. This operator is capable of detecting changes in
image intensity even when the usual assumptions of image analyticity
do not apply, such as at corners and vertices.  The main drawbacks are
the increased computational requirements of the operator, and its lower SNR.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1985  09:15 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Sunday  3, November 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room
                                      Harvard
                                   5:30 dinner [can be purchused]
                                   6:00 talk.

          HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY

           "Why is short term memory so accurate"

                  Professor Mary Potter
                  Psychology Department
                          MIT


info: ETZI@OZ

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

Monday  4, November  10:30am  Room: BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street,
                                    3rd floor large conference room

                         BBN Laboratories
                    Science Development Program
                            AI Seminars

    Generic Tasks in Knowledge-Based Reasoning:  Characterizing
    and Designing Expert Systems at the "Right" Level of Abstraction

                    Prof. B. Chandrasekaran
                    Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
                    Department of Computer and Information Science
                    The Ohio State University


   We outline the elements of a framework for expert system design that
we have been developing in our research group over the last several
years. This framework is based on the claim that complex knowledge-based
reasoning tasks can often be decomposed into a number of generic tasks
each with associated types of knowledge and family of control regimes.
At different stages in reasoning, the system will typically engage in
one of the tasks, depending upon the knowledge available and the state
of problem solving.  The advantages of this point of view are manifold:
(i) Since typically the generic tasks are at a much higher level of
abstraction than those associated with first generation expert system
languages,  knowledge can be represented directly at the level
appropriate to the information processing task.  (ii) Since each of the
generic tasks has an appropriate control regime, problem solving
behavior may be more perspicuously encoded.  (iii) Because of a richer
generic vocabulary in terms of which knowledge and control are
represented, explanation of problem solving behavior is also more
perspicuous.  We briefly describe six generic tasks that we have found
very useful in our work on knowledge-based reasoning: classification,
state abstraction, knowledge-directed retrieval, object synthesis by
plan selection and refinement,  hypothesis matching, and assembly of
compound hypotheses for abduction.

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

Tuesday  5, November  10:30am  Room: BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street,
                                     2nd floor large conference room

                         BBN Laboratories
                    Science Development Program
                            AI Seminars

      The Next Generation of Language Lab Materials:  Developing
      Prototypes at MIT

                     Prof. Janet Murray
                     Dept. of Humanities, MIT


   MIT's Athena Language Learning Project is a five-year enterprise
whose aim is to develop prototypes of the next generation of
language-lab materials, particularly conversation-based exercises using
artificial intelligence to analyse and respond to typed input.  The
exercises are based upon two systematized methods of instruction that
are specialties at MIT:  discourse theory and simulations.  The project
is also seeking to incorporate two associated technologies:  digital
audio and interactive video.  The digital audio sub-project is
developing exercises for intonation practice, initially focusing on
Japanese speakers learning English.  The interactive video component of
the project consists of preparation of a demonstration disc which
features a variety of interactive video approaches including enhancement
of the text-based simulations and presentation of dense conversational
material in natural settings.  The project is being developed on the
Athena system at MIT, and is based upon the model of a near-future
language lab/classroom environment that will include stations capable of
providing interactive video, digital audio, and AI-based exercises.

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

Friday  8, November  10:30am    Room: BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street,
                                      3rd floor large conference room

                         BBN Laboratories
                    Science Development Program
                            AI Seminars

            Correcting Object Related Misconceptions

                     Prof. Kathleen F. McCoy
                     University of Delaware


  Analysis of a corpus of naturally occurring data shows that users
conversing with a database or expert system are likely to reveal
misconceptions about the objects modelled by the system.  Further
analysis reveals that the sort of responses given when such
misconceptions are encountered depends greatly on the discourse context.

  This work develops a context-sensitive method for automatically
generating responses to object-related misconceptions with the goal of
incorporating a correction module in the front-end of a database or
expert system.  The method is demonstrated through the ROMPER system
(Responding to Object-related Misconceptions using PERspective) which is
able to generate responses to two classes of object-related
misconceptions:  misclassifications and misattributions.

  The transcript analysis reveals a number of specific strategies used
by human experts to correct misconceptions, where each different
strategy refutes a different kind of support for the misconception.  In
this work each strategy is paired with a structural specification of the
kind of support it refutes.  ROMPER uses this specification, and a model
of the user, to determine which kind of support is most likely.  The
corresponding response strategy is then instantiated.

  The above process is made context sensitive by a proposed addition to
standard knowledge-representation systems termed "object perspective."
Object perspective is introduced as a method for augmenting a standard
knowledge-representation system to reflect the highlighting affects of
previous discourse.  It is shown how this resulting highlighting can be
used to account for the context-sensitive requirements of the correction
process.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
20
-FROM-
From: krovetz@UMASS-CS
-DATE-
Date:     Tue, 5 Nov 85 12:00 EST
cc:       zimmer%lll-tis-a.arpa%csnet-relay.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  index-in-context (KWIC)
-BODY-
Mark,
  The program you describe is called a KWIC index and is available
under Unix.  The program is called ptx (permuted index).  Does
anyone know of one available under VMS?

Thanks,
Bob

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 85 07:34:55 PST
-FROM-
From: co175fag%sdcc3@SDCSVAX.ARPA (Melissa O'Neill)
-BODY-
     Students at UCSD are currently involved in a number  of
networking  projects  which  may  be of interest to those on
IRlist.  For example, there in one group working on  a  net-
work  to  assist  the hearing impaired and deaf.  Code named
DEAFNET, they are working with several schools  in  the  San
Diego area to find out the potential for computers for these
people.
A group is trying to organize an  international  interactive
computer  group,  while still another group is interested in
forming "after school schools" for children  utilizing  com-
puter networks, where children can message children at loca-
tions other than San  Diego.   Several  other  projects  are
underway as well.
     The success of networking projects is of great interest
to  these students, and they would like to connect with oth-
ers who have similar interests, or can offer some pearls  of
wisdom  as to how to "make the system work,".  I am involved
with a project regarding CRTNET, and want  to  discuss  with
interested  parties the benefits of networking.  Any discus-
sion with regards to networking would be welcome.
     -Melissa O'Neill  co175fag@sdcc3

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 85 16:37:19 cst
Subject: Report



		 Report on SIGIR Business Meeting

      A meeting of the ACM-SIGIR executive was held at Denver Radisson
Hotel, where the 1985 ACM annual conference took place. The meeting was
at 5:00 p.m. on October 15 th. In attendance were Clement Yu, Gerry
Salton, Mike McGill, Donna Williamson, Tomas Doszkocs, Roy Rada and
myself.
      Some of the areas that were considered to need the immediate atten-
tion of the executive were membership improvement, publicity activities
and financial status.

      From two years ago the membership has dropped from about 2000 to
little over 1800. While this is not a big concern, it was felt some
actions are needed to maintain this level and, gain if possible.
Clement suggested that each of us try to canvass in our own institu-
tions and get colleagues and students to join. Gerry explained the
importance of making sure that the SIGIR Forum gets out regularly.
It was mentioned that Fall issue is about to be mailed (all must have
received it by now). Clement indicated that Forum is in good hands
and that he is not concerned about the Forum getting out every 3
months. I pointed out that we are in good shape for the Winter '86
issue. (Naturally, we are looking for more contributions from all inte-
rested folks out there.) Donna brought many ideas for improving the Forum,
some of which she had picked up from attending meetings of other SIGs.
In particular the following ideas were noted:

       * publishing special purpose issues with a guest editor appoin-
	 ted (I liked that),
       * having reports from different groups engaged in IR research.
	 Perhaps, one such report in each issue,
       * publish invited columns on "bridge" areas( eg. AI and IR),
       * having different people responsible for submitting abstracts
	 of recent material published in journals, etc. The idea is
         to have someone who is in hardware, for example, to provide
	 abstracts of interest to IR and hardware, someone else for
	 another area, etc.
  Clement suggested that we plan to print a brochure explaining
Sigir objectives, etc. and distribute them widely to attract new
members. Tomas agreed to think about this and see if such brochures
could be printed at NLM. The question of distributing proceedings
of SIGIR annual conference was raised. In particular, why 1985
proceedings were not distributed as an issue of Forum. Clement
mentioned that the finacial position is such that we cannot
afford to do that. At the time of original printing, enough
copies were not ordered. However, several hundred copies are
available at the ACM head quarters. Order number can be found
in Fall '85 issue of SIGIR. Clement also pointed out that the
projection of SIGIR's finances suggests that we will have a deficit
at the year end (or in two years' time?). He proposed that the member-
ship fee to SIGIR be increased from $6 to $10 or $12. Mike felt
that the current bank balance is good and that we should not raise
the fee until  SIGIR becomes more active and the image of SIGIR
is enhanced. He also suggested that we consider other money making
ventures, such as cosponsoring conferences with other societies.
It was decided to leave the membership fee at current level for
the moment.

  Other publicity ideas such as representation in conferences of other
groups (eg. SIGMOD, ASIS, OA, ACM annual), display of SIGIR related
material at these conferences and so on were put forward. I am working
with Prof. C. Davis in having a SIGIR session at ASIS '86. Clement and
other members of the executives will pursue this kind of work with
other groups. Efforts such as that of M.Lesk (He is planning a joint
workshop in '86 with SIGDOC.) is  something we would like to see more
of.

  Gerry wondered about the SIGIR's "Distinguished Service" award that
was established some years ago. It has not been awarded for two years.
Clement reported that Prof. Don Kraft is the chairman of the selection
committee and that he is looking after the matter. It is hoped that
some prominent person will be selected for this award in time for the
next SIGIR conference in Pisa.

  There was some discussion about locations of future conferences. The
conference will be in New Orleans in 1987 (Chairman: Don Kraft, Program
Chairman: Clement Yu). It is not clear where the conference will be in
1988. There has been some correspondence with Prof. Fraenkel, who is
willing to have it Isreal, as well as some people in Grenoble. Bruce
Croft agreed to host the conference in or around Amherst in 1989.

  The meeting adjourned around 7:00 p.m.

					       Vijay Raghavan.
					       (Forum Co-Editor)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 10 Nov 85 16:23:26 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ASIS Annual Meeting Report and Request for Other Reports
-BODY-
October 20-4, 1985    -     Las Vegas, Nevada   -    48th Annual Mtg ASIS

Saturday, 19 Oct: Continuing Education Courses on
	Seminar in User Surveys
	Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence: A Primer
	Management Skills for the Information Profession
	PRECIS: Preserved Cintext Index System
Sunday, 20 Oct: Continuing Education Courses on
	Stess Management for the Information Professional
	Information Age Economics
	Information Centers and Record Centers
	Marketing Information Services
	Money, Planning and Entrepreneurship
Exhibits throughout the Week:
	There was equipment of many varieties, book displays, and many posters.
  Demonstrations used micros or online services.  It was clear that the
informa-
  tion producers (ex. book publishers) are now trying to enter the field with
  new services, but are still watching thfor ways and consumer needs.
	Information providers were showing micro systems and front-ends,
  and some optical disk equipment.  There was an air of expectation for
  new approaches, but no revolutionary announcements.

Program:
	1985 is the 20th year for the "Annual Review of Information
Science and Technology" (ARIST) and so the program was structured in
five tracks based on themes of that publication -
		Distribution, Communication, and Hardware
		Databases: Organization and Access
		Information Products and Services
		Management, Policy and Politics
		Human Factors/Man-Machine Interface
I found this differentiation to be interesting, but not binding
regarding what talks were given when.  In a little over two days, I
was only able to get a glimpse of what went on, and so can share but a
fragment of the totality - I hope others will send in other partial
reports too!

Monday 21 Oct:
  Keynote Address - Dr. William F. Marovitz - "The Information
   Industry: Its Development and Integration within a Corporate Organization"
   Clearly, our field is becoming of interest to large corporations.  Future
   developments, investments for research, timing of new services, will all
   be partially supervised by large holding companies now buying up information
   providers and suppliers.  With micros, networks, and information all
   being integrated, companies are creating and/or capturing key markets.
  Human Factors/Man-Machine Interfaces (Session 7)
   Christine Borgman reviewed how to use specialized tests to measure
    abilities of individuals in a number of areas which might relate to use
    of information services.  These tests may also help in designing new
    systems better suited to individual needs.
   Richard Veith commented on experimentation with spatial orientation
    in display systems, esp. use of multiple planes of hierarchy.
 "As We May Learn" - William Paisley, Knowledge Access Inc.
     This veteran of ERIC & communication science traced history, including
     technological stagnation of 1975-80, emergence of 2-tiered society
     of uninformed and informed, and recent developments (micros, broadband
     networks, cognitive engineering).  He challenged us with social and
     technical problems yet to be resolved.
  Optical Disk and Electronic Publishing (Session 15)
   Chuck Goldstein of NLM rescued the session as 2 of 4 speakers no-showed.
   The Library of Congress pilot project is behind schedule and so the
     evaluation effort is still being planned.
   InfoTrac, described by Brett Butler, uses video disks for conventional
     browsing of publications.
   Michael Adams of Digital Equipment stole the show with his standing-room
     only presentation on CD-ROM.  He explored Myths and Realities of
     this media, which stirred the imaginations of all attendees.

Tuesday 22 Oct:
  Keynote Address - Judith Wanger - "The Online Database Industry:
     A Midlife Crisis Coming?"  She explored types and growth in online
     services, use of gateways to connect networks and providers, use
     of micros, growth of full text databases, optical disks.
  Designing Databases for Searchers (Session 24)
   Raya Fidel explored "Individual Variability in Online Searching Behavior"
     by describing preliminary research.  10 experienced searchers verbalized
     though processes in handling 2 very different types of search requests.
     A large number of variables that may relate were discussed.
   Several speakers from AT&T Communications gave an overview of Videotex
  Design Considerations for Electronic Publishing (Session 31)
   Victor Rosenberg appealed to designers to preserve the aethetics via fonts.
   Bob Barnes of Drexler captivated audience with potentials of optical cards
     which will soon store 2M bytes in billfold-size cards.
   Sam Betty explained the magnitude of publishing field and its potentials.
 "Information Products and Services - Coming of Age" (Session 35)
     Herbert Brinberg of Aspen Systems traced history of the field.
  Using Computers for Engineering Data (Session 40)
   John Rumble of NBS wove together talks with questions and comments:
   Susan Harvey explained the need, opportunities, and considerations.
   Gary Craig of Wiley indicated how publishers are involved.

Wednesday 23 Oct:
  Research in Electronic Conferencing (Session 45)
   Trudi Bellardo gave a comprehensive overview on conferencing systems.
   Edward Fox described international standards for mail systems, and
     several research efforts underway.
   Manfred Kochen provided a stimulating review of the emergence of computer
     conference systems, focusing especially on models for group formation,
     esp. evolution categorized by structure and participation distributions.

(Unfortunately, this conference overlapped with the Expert Systems in
 Government Symposium in Washington, so I missed the rest of ASIS 85.
 Please, other attendees - send in your summaries of subsequent interesting
 sessions! - Ed)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1985  12:50 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Tuesday  12, November  7:30pm  Room: 34-401 (Grier Conference Room)


                MIT CENTER FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE

       "The Linguistic Relevance of Tree Adjoining Grammar"

Speakers:   Professor Aravind Joshi
            Department of Computer and Information Science
            University of Pennsylvania

            Professor Anthony Kroch
            Department of Linguistics
            University of Pennsylvania

Commentary: Professor James Higginbotham
            Department of Linguistics
            MIT

            Steven Abney
            Department of Linguistics
            MIT

copies of papers are available from Karen Persinger, Room 20B-225,
253-7358

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

Wednesday  13, November  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor playroom

                "Prescriptive Introspection"

                   Michael R. Genesereth
                   Logic Group
                   Knowledge Systems Laboratory
                   Stanford University

Introspection is a significant part of human mental activity.  We
introspect whenever we think about how to solve problems, whenever we
decide what information we need to solve a problem, whenever we decide
that a problem is unsolvable.

By its nature, the process of introspection involves the manipulation
of knowledge about knowledge.  Over the past years, logicians and AI
researchers have devoted considerable attention to self-descriptive
sentences (involving autoepistemic terms like KNOW).  By comparison,
little attention has been paid to self-prescriptive sentences
(involving terms like OUGHT).

This talk introduces a semantics for prescriptive metaknowledge in
the form of constraints on the process of problem solving.  It
demonstrates the computational advantages of introspection and
analyzes the computational fidelity and cost of various introspective
architectures.  It also discusses the potential for practical
application in logic programming and building expert systems.

Refreshments will be served

Host: Randall Davis

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

Thursday  14, November  12:00pm  Room: E25-401

               VISION LUNCH

 "Type Recognition Without Token Individuation"

               Dr. Nancy Kanwisher
               MIT - Psychology Department

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
21
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 10 Nov 85 18:00:11 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SIGIR Forum Fall 85 - List of 1984 Information Awards of NSF
-BODY-
		I. INFORMATION SCIENCE PROGRAM
Bolt Beranek & Newman
 User Goals as a Basis for an Intelligent System's Ability to Understand  Ill-
Formed Input--Weischedel, Ralph

Brandeis Univ.
 Information Structure of a Natural Language Lexicon--Jackendoff, Ray

Brown Univ.
 Cognitive Applications of Matrix Memory Models--Anderson, James A.

Univ. of CA-Berkeley
 Evaluating a Knowledge  Representation  for  Planning  and  Natural  Language
Understanding--Wilensky, Robert

Univ. of CA-Berkeley
 Management of Uncertainty in Expert Systems--Zadeh, Lotfi

Univ. of CA-Los Angeles
 Studies in the Organization of Information Structures--Pearl, Judea

Carnegie-Mellon Univ.
 Structures for Plan-based Tutoring:  Applications to Geometry--Anderson, John

Carnegie-Mellon Univ.
Optimal Query Processing in a Distributed Data  Base  Management  System  with
Data Fragmentation--Kellner, Marc

Colgate Univ.
 Knowledge-Based Multilingual Machine Translation--Tucker, Allen B.

Columbia Univ.
 Conjunction-Hierarchies in Structures of Arguments--Harris, Zellig S.

Columbia Univ.
 The Structure of Information in Science:  Fact Formulas and Discussion Struc-
tures in Related Subsciences--Parsons, Charles

Columbia Univ.
 Information and Complexity--Traub, Joseph F.

Cornell Univ.
 Advanced Models for Information Retrieval--Salton, Gerard

Univ. of Denver
 A New Data Structure for Text Processing and Pattern Recognition--Blumer, An-
selm

Duke University
 Workshop on Transportable Natural Language Processing,  Durham,  NC,  October
1984--Ballard, Bruce W.

 Florida State Univ.
 Analysis and Modeling of Imprecise Information  in  Uncertain  Environments--
Kandel, Abraham

Georgia Inst. of Tech.
 Extracting  Information  from  Experience:    Experience-Driven   Incremental
Learning--Kolodner, Janet L.

Georgia State Univ.
 An Intelligent Index of Problem-Solving Tools--Whalen, Thomas H.

Harvard Univ.
 Studies on Natural and Artificial Visual Categories--Herrnstein, Richard J.

Harvard Univ.
 A  Comparative  Approach  to  Natural  and  Artificial   Visual   Information
Processing--Herrnstein, Richard J.

Harvard Univ.
 Fundamental Information Issues in the Theory of Measurement--Luce, R. Duncan

Univ. of Ill.-Urbana
 Explanatory Schema Acquisition--DeJong, Gerald

Indiana Univ. Foundation
 Value and Effectiveness of Information as Related to Decision-Making--Yovits,
Marshall C.

Iona College
 Dynamic Theory of Expertise:  Multimodel Approach--Nowakowska, Maria

Univ. of Kansas
 Belief Functions and Fuzzy Sets--Shafer, Glenn

Lehigh Univ.
 Computer Selection of Search Words for  Text  Searching  Retrieval--O'Connor,
John J.

Louisiana State Univ.
 Travel to the International Conference on Research and Development in  Infor-
mation Retrieval:  Cambridge, England on July 2-6, 1984--Kraft, Donald H.

Univ. of Maryland
 Knowledge Representation and Measures for Relational Experiential Data  Base-
>Ligomenides, Panos A.

Univ. of Maryland
 Artificial  Intelligence,   Parallel   Logic   Programming,   and   Deductive
Databases--Minker, Jack

Univ. of Maryland
 Workshop on Human and Machine Vision, Montreal, Canada,  August  1-3,  1984--
Rosenfeld, Azriel

MIT
 Information-Preserving Dynamics--Fredkin, Edward

MIT
 Natural  Computation:   A  Computational  Approach  to   Visual   Information
Processing--Richards, Whitman A.

Univ. of MA-Amherst
 Heuristic Reasoning about Uncertainty:  An Artificial Intelligence  Approach-
>Cohen, Paul

Univ. of MA-Amherst
 Presidential Young Investigator Award--Lehnert, Wendy G.

Univ. of MA-Amherst
 Information Representations for Text Summarization--Lehnert, Wendy G.

Univ. of Miami
 Workshop on the Application of Supercomputers to  Information  Science,  Dec.
5-7, 1984--Hertz, David B.

NLM/SRI
 Natural Language Access to Text--Hobbs, Jerry

U.S. Naval Academy
 Joint Applications of the Theory of Semi-groups and the Theory of Fuzzy  Sets
to Problems in Computerized Pattern Recognition--Lerner, Bao-Ting

Office of Naval Research
 Committee on Human Factors--Maleck, Gerald S.

Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln
 The Processing  of  Visual  Information  from  Displays  Containing  Multiple
Elements--Flowers, John H.

New Mexico State Univ.
 Analysis of Uncertainty in Knowledge Representation--Nguyen, Hung T.

New York Univ.
 Language as a Database Structure--Sager, Naomi

Ohio State Univ.
 Application of the Knowledge Based System Approach to Operational Problems of
Engineering--Miller, Don W.

Oregon Graduate Center
 Presidential Young Investigator Award--Maier, David

Penn. State Univ.
 Computer Assisted Studies of Structure-Property Relationships--Jordan, Joseph

Univ. of PA
 Extended Natural Language Interaction with Database  Systems--Webber, Bonnie
L.

Purdue Univ.
 Research on Inference Procedures with Uncertainty--Fu, King Sun

Rutgers Univ.
 Toward a Flexible User Interface to Relational Database Systems--Rozenshtein,
David

Rutgers Univ.
 Information Processing Analysis of Human Understanding  of  Action  Sequences
and Computational Traces--Schmidt, Charles

San Francisco State Univ.
 A  Normative  Approach  to  Some  Issues  in  the  Theory  of   Computational
Linguistics--Ovchinnikov, Serge

Univ. of South Carolina
 Information Retrieval from Normal Mixtures--Bezdek, James C.   Univ.  of  So.
Calif.
 Research on Constructive Characterization  of  Text--Mann,  William  C.   SRI
International
 Research   Toward   Computer   Implemented   Natural    Language    Systems--
Configurational Variation--Robinson, Jane

Stanford Univ.
 Representation and Use of Causal Relationships for Inference from  Databases-
 Blum, Robert L.


Stanford Univ.
 Information Structure and Use in  Knowledge-Based  Expert  Systems--Buchanan,
Bruce G.

Stanford Univ.  fR Toward Automated Natural Language Processing:  Phrase Link-
ing Grammars for Syntax and Semantics--Peters, Stanley

SUNY at Binghamton
 Possibilistic Information:  Theory and Applicability--Klir, George J.

Syracuse Univ.
 Impact of Anaphoric Resolution in Information Retrieval--Katzer, Jeffrey

Syracuse Univ.
 Research  on  Information  Retrieval:   Document  Representation  Information
Systems---Katzer, Jeffrey

Tantalus, Inc.
 Application of the Maximum Entropy Principle to Optimal Retrieval  from  Very
Large Databases--Kantor, Paul B.

Univ. of TX-Arlington
 Collabor. Resarch:  Development of Retrieval  Principles  and  Languages  for
Fuzzy Databases--Buckles, Billy

Univ. of TX-Arlington
 Travel to Sino-American Conference on Fuzzy Sets, July  14-21,  1984,  Peking
PRC--Buckles, Billy P.

Univ. of TX-Austin
 Representation and Query Logic for a Text Knowledge  System--Simmons, Robert
F.

Thinking Machines Corp.
 Workshop on Theories of Complexity:  Common Frontiers  of  Physics,  Biology,
and Computation--Wolfram, Stephen

Tulane University
 Collabor. Resarch:  Development of Retrieval  Principles  and  Languages  for
Fuzzy Databases

Tulane Univ.
 Methodology and Evaluation of Specialized Information Extraction from  Scien-
tific Texts--Reeker, Larry H.

Yale Univ.
 Problem Solving Strategies in Computer Program Generation and  Comprehension-
 Adelson, Beth

Yale Univ.
 Mapping Between  Programmer's  Conceptualizations  and  Programming  Language
Constructs--Soloway, Elliot M.


                            II. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Aerodyne Research
 Holographic Display-Phase II--Caulfield, H. John

Univ. of Calif-LA
Computer-Based Systems for Problem Structuring--Pearl, Judea

U/CA-Santa Barbara
 Constructing  a  Self-Modifying  Knowledge-Based   Geographical   Information
System-Smith Terence R.

Carnegie-Mellon Univ.
 Experiments on Interactive Exploration and Modification  of  Data  and  Model
Structrures--Morgan, M. Granger

Dartmouth College
 Acquisition of Expertise in the Revision of Written  Texts--Beal,  Carole  R.
Univ. of Florida
 Advanced Information  Technology  for  Document  Processing--Tou,  Julius  T.
Lehigh Univ.
 Novel-Purpose Retrieval from Administrative Archives--Hillman, Donald J.

MIT
 Guided Computing and Graphics for Modeling in the Social Sciences--Kuh, Edwin

Nat. Acad. of Sciences
 Partial Support of the Numerical Data Advisory Board and  the  U.S.  National
Committee  for  the Committee on Data for Science and Technology USSC/CODATA--
Carter, Gesina C.

Perceptronics, Inc.
 Decision Making in Information Retrieval--Fischoff, Baruch

Relational Tech., Inc.
 Managing Text as Data--Kooi, Robert

 Resources Planning Assoc.
 Low-Cost Digitizing of Color  Imagery  for  Cartographic  Analysis  Systems--
French, Peter N.

Rutgers Univ.
 Exploration of Problem  Reformulation  and  Strategy  Acquisition--Sridharan,
Natesa S.

So. Methodist Univ.
 Interaction of Queries with  User  Profiles--Korfhage,  Robert  R.   Stanford
Univ.

Stanford Univ.
Information Processing of Graphic Displays--Bower, Gordon H.

Stanford Univ.
 Theoretical Basis for the Development of Document Preparation Systems--Knuth,
Donald E.

SUNY-Buffalo
 Selection of Image Features for Machine Vision-Walters, Deborah K.

Va. Poly. Inst.
 Structure of Human-Computer Interaction--Hartson, H. Rex



                          III. INFORMATION IMPACT PROGRAM
Univ. of Arizona
 The Role of Expertise in Human Information Processing and Decision  Behavior-
>Northcraft, Gregory B.

Calif. Inst. of Tech.
 A Laboratory Experiment of Investigation of Institutional Influence on Polit-
ical Economic Processes--Plott, Charles P.

 Univ. of Calif.-Berkeley
 Information and Incentive Issues in the Theory of Iterative Resource  Alloca-
tion Mechanisms--Marschak, Thomas A.

Univ. of CA.-Berkeley
 Occupational Segregation Among Information Professionals--Van House, Nancy


Univ. of Calif.-Irvine
 A Longitudinal Analysis of the Social  Impact  of  Computing  in  the  Home--
Vitalari, Nicholas P.

Carnegie-Mellon Univ.
 Oligopoly with Private Information--Palfrey, Thomas

Cornell Univ.
 Transactions, Intermediaries, and the  Transmission  of  Information--O'Hara,
Maureen

CUNY
 Micro-Computers and Social Networks--Kadushin, Charles

Georgetown Univ.
 Support of Twelfth Annual Telecommunications Resarch Conference, Airlie,  VA,
April 23-26, 1984--Cooke, Wilhelmina R.

Univ. of Hawaii
 Tracking and Optimality in Managerial Decision Making--Remus, William

Univ. of Hawaii
 Research Workshop on Economics of Telecommunications, Information  and  Media
Activities  in  Industrial  Countries April 30 through May 2, 1984--Snow, Mar-
cellus S.

Hofstra Univ.
Studies in Orbit Spectrum Economics--Levin, Harvey J.

Univ. of Houston
Information Impact and Information Processing in Common Value  Auctions:   Ex-
perimental and Theoretical Investigations--Kagel, J.H.

King Research, Inc.
 Statistical Indicators of  Scientific  and  Technical  Communication  in  the
U.S.--King, Donald W.

MIT
 The Determinants of Information Technology Standards--Sirbu, Marvin A.

Univ. of Mich.-Ann Arbor
 The Demand for Information by Rational Agents and  the  Information  Market--
Blume, Lawrence E.

Univ. of Minnesota
 Comparison and Analysis of Systems and Techniques of Economic  Organizations-
>Hurwicz, Leonard

Univ. of Minnesota
 Information Flows Intrinsic to the Stability of Economic  Equilibria--Jordan,
James S.

New York Univ.
 A  Study  of  Productivity   Performance   and   Scientific   and   Technical
Information--Baumol, William J.

Northwestern Univ.
 Computational Complexity of Resource Allocation Mechanisms--Reiter, Stanley

Univ. of Pennsylvania
 Alternative Representations of Information in  Microeconomic  Systems--Allen,
Beth E.

Univ. of Pennsylvania
 Studies in the Economics of Asymmetric  Information  in  Financial  Markets--
Kihlstrom, Richard E.

Univ. of Pennsylvania
 Industrial Robots in Japan and the United States:  The Diffusion  and  Impact
of a Major Application of Information Technology--Mansfield, Edwin

Univ. of Pennsylvania
 Optimal Contracting with Asymmetric Information--Riordan, Michael H.

Univ. of Pennsylvania
 Collabor. Research:   Information,  Decentralization  and  Expertise  in  the
Multi-Agent Organization--Sappington, David

Princeton Univ.
 Information, Innovation, and Market Structure--Stiglitz, Joseph E.

Stanford Univ.
 Collabor. Research:   Information,  Decentralization  and  Expertise  in  the
Multi-Agent Organization--Demski, Joel S.

Stanford Univ.
 Strategic Analysis of Markets Under Incomplete  Information--Roberts, Donald
J.

SUNY-Stony Brook
  The New Uses of Information:  Impacts in Organizations --Rule, James B.

Texas A&M Univ.
 Price  Dispersion  and  Information  Aggregation  in  Experimental  Markets--
Battalio, Raymond C.

Yale Univ.
 On the Role of Information in a Production Organization--Milgrom, Paul

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
26
-FROM-
From: "Leonard N. Foner" <FONER%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: 7 Dec 1985  18:40 EST (Sat)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Videodisc juke-box?
-BODY-
I'm looking for a strange item, upon request from a friend.  He wants
to know who makes juke-box-like mechanisms for standard videodiscs.
The intended application is a device which selects one of many such
discs and plays an hour or so of video (some segment of the disc).

The higher the capacity of the device, the better.  He is also
secondarily interested in what technologies exist to pack more video
onto a disc (my ideas run to recording only the differences between
frames, rather than the whole frame, etc).  What ideas are being
bandied about?  Are there any that the industry might be doing or
about to do?  [Seems to me that the industry is not likely to make
more expensive players in order to sell a $1K videodisc with 200 hours
of programming on it (the expensive part being, of course,
copyrights), but who knows...]  His application calls for 144 hours of
video to start with, with another 100-200 hours/year of add-on
capacity, so he really wants to minimize discs if possible.  How much
can be put on a disc now?  With what image quality?  Is it possible to
trade off quality for capacity with standard disc-making plants and
players?

Note that he's interested in video---moving images---not CD-ROMs and
other digital media.  Please send replies to me, unless you think the
list(s) above are interested in this information as well.  If you
possibly can (barring internetworking difficulties), please CC a copy
directly to me even if you do reply to the whole list.

Thanx much, folks!
						<LNF>
>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date:    Wed, 11 Dec 85 23:22 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Documentation style for QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH
-BODY-
Perhaps readers of IRLIST can give me some practical advice.  I have
been elected editor of THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH (1987-1989).
The journal, founded in 1915, publishes essays in speech,communication,
and rhetoric.  For many years it has used the footnote/endnote system
of the Modern Language Association.  But last year MLA abandoned the
footnote, recommending instead a parenthetical reference in the text
to a "List of Works Cited" arranged alphabetically at the end of the
text.  So, I am inheriting a journal without a status quo insofar as
a documentation system is concerned.  We seem to face three general
solutions.

(1) We could stay with a footnote/endnote system.  To do this, we
would either retain the style used for the past decades, or adopt
the slight modifications that would be required to be consistent
with what is now a not-recommended but still described part of the
MLA Style Manual.  Or, we could switch to the Chicago Manual of
Style, which describes footnote usage in detail, and which is
widely used by book publishers, and by journals in history.
This solution has the advantage of continuity with our past
and some alleged technical advantages for scholars who do classical
and historical work.

(2) We could switch to the new MLA parenthetical style. This would
be consistent with many journals in the humanities, most notably
PMLA, the major journal in literary criticism.  Many printers and
publishers think that parenthetical systems are more economical
and easier to use than footnotes.

(3) We could switch to the APA (American Psychological Association)
style guide, which is also a parenthetical, author/date system.
The main advantage of this solution is that it would make QJS
consistent with three other journals published by the Speech
Communication Association, all of which use APA.  Further, it
has been argued that this would have big advantages in information
storage and retrieval, since if all four journals used one style
sheet, the printer (Science Press, Ephrata PA) could store all
the journals on a single tape, where they could be accessed as
a data base, and from which they could be conveniently indexed
with a key word system.

I need expert advice, and concrete facts, about two sorts of
issues: (1) What are the relative merits of the 3 major citation
systems open to us as information retrieval devices in themselves?
(2) Are the alleged advantages of APA usage real, in terms of
where computer technology is, and is going in the near future?
That is, is a single format for these journals a short-term or
long-term constraint for information storage and retrieval?

Sorry to burden the list with such a long note, but this is
a complicated problem, and I want to get beyond merely polling
the world for its opinion about footnotes vs. parenthetical
references.  Thanks for any help you can offer.

   Tom Benson
   Department of Speech Communication
   The Pennsylvania State University
   227 Sparks Building
   University Park, PA 16802
   814-238-5277


     {akgua,allegra,ihnp4,cbosgd}!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!t3b   (UUCP)
     t3b%psuvm.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa (ARPA)
     T3B@PSUVM    (BITNET)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: scott%truth.uucp.uchicago.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Tue Dec 10 11:41 CST 1985
-BODY-
 ...
What would be really nice is if I could see a raw query,
a processed query, and the results of a retrieval.
Has anything like that ever been published?
[Note: it is not hard to produce this - does anyone know of something
already published? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: scott%truth.uucp.uchicago.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Tue Dec 10 11:41 CST 1985
-BODY-
 ...  I've got two things for IRList.
One is that the University of Chicago is initiating
an information science program within the Graduate
Library School, leading to an M.A with a concentration
in information science.  I'm pretty excited about
it.  The other thing is that the research group
that started recently here, TIRA, is really gathering
steam.  I'll write a blurb about both sometime soon.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1985  12:52 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
  From: nikhil at MIT-NEWTOWNE-VARIETY.MIT.EDU (Rishiyur S. Nikhil)
  Friday  6, December  2:15pm (refreshments 2:00pm) Room: NE43-512A

             Inheritance, Data Models and Data Types

                     Peter Buneman
                University of Pennsylvania

The notion of type inheritance (subsumption, ISA hierarchies) has long been
recognised as central to the development of programming languages, databases
and semantic networks.  Recent work on the semantics of programming languages
has shown that inheritance can be cleanly combined with functional
programming and can itself serve as a model for computation.

Using a definition of partial functions that are well behaved with respect to
inheritance, I have been investigating a new characterization of the
relational and functional data models.  In particular, I want to show the
connections of relational database theory with type inheritance and show how
both the relational and functional data models may be better integrated with
typed programming languages.

Host: Prof. Rishiyur Nikhil

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1985  11:53 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
   From: ELIZABETH%MIT-OZ at MIT-MC.ARPA
   Subject:   9.382 --- Seminar in Visual Information Processing
   Monday  9, December  4:00pm  Room: NE43-8th floor playroom

        MASSIVELY PARALLEL NETWORKS THAT LEARN REPRESENTATIONS

                           Geoffrey Hinton
                      Carnegie-Mellon University

I shall describe a new learning procedure for massively parallel
networks of neuron-like processing elements.  The procedure adjusts
the connection strengths in a multi-layered network so as to make it
give the correct output vector when given an input vector.  The units
in the intermediate layers come to represent important implicit
features of the task domain that generates the pairs of input/output
vectors.  As a result, the network can generalise appropriately to new
cases.  I shall describe a pattern recognition example in which the
network constructs a balanced ecology of feature detectors, and a
higher level task in which the network learns a set of relationships.
The second example illustrates the ability of the network to recognize
isomorphisms and make use of them in encoding and generalizing
knowledge.

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

  Thursday 12, December  6:30pm  Room: Intermetrics Atrium, 733 Concord Avenue
                                      Cambridge, Ma.

          "English Dialogue with Computer Databases"
              Prof. Carole Hafner

        Host: GBC/ACM  For Info:(617) 444-5222

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
23
-FROM-
From:	FOX             5-DEC-1985 17:45 *
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	more downtime
-BODY-
Ugh!  The machine normally used for creating IRList has been down for 3 weeks,
this machine was down for 2 weeks, we were unable to receive CSNET for 1 week,
and the BITNET addresses I use have also been down about a week.  So, please
bear with the delays - I will try to get everything received out soon and
then ask that people resubmit if things were lost.  Thanks! - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Werner Uhrig <CMP.WERNER%r20.utexas.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon 25 Nov 85 03:24:23-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: [Werner Uhrig  <CMP.WERNER@R20.UTEXAS.EDU>: querry for help files]
-BODY-
Ed,
	I sent the querry below in response to an October issue of IRLIST
(at least, that's where I think I had read about it) - and never got a
reaction.
have you ever tried?  if not would you mind asking in the next IRLIST issue
if anyone has been successful - and maybe, post instructions again, given that
we can't FTP back-issues ...

	thanks ,		Werner

   Date: Sun 27 Oct 85 13:20:38-CST
   From: Werner Uhrig  <CMP.WERNER@R20.UTEXAS.EDU>
   Subject: querry for help files
   To: DATABASE%BITNIC@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
   help
   help arpanet
   help design

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: ICS.DEKEN%r20.utexas.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Thu 21 Nov 85 12:35:33-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Bibliography of Information Retrieval
-BODY-
If you have any kind of an online listing of recent articles in the
area of information retrieval, I'd greatly appreciate your e-mailing
it to me.  ...

[See last item in this issue. Does anyone else
 have a collection of such a form? - Ed]

Best regards,
	Joe Deken

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:
"V.J.Raghavan"<ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan%ucbvax.berkeley.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 85 23:12:40 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: corrections to report [in IRList #20]
-BODY-
Dear readers,
   If you received the report on SIGIR business meeting prior to
November 18th, you should take note of the following corrections
or clarifications:

   1. The deficit mentioned is as of June end, 1986 and is simply the
      difference between expected income and expenses. SIGIR has more
      than adequate reserves to cover the deficit.
   2. The chairman of SIGIR Award committee is Prof. Maron; not
      Prof. Kraft.
   3. The mentioned award is not for "service" as my earlier report
      suggested. Rather it is for "Important Contributions to the
      field". Nomination forms are available through Prof. Maron
      and Prof. Yu.

  I hope the above clears up any concerns.

                                     Vijay Raghavan
                                     (Co-editor, SIGIR Forum)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date:    Thu, 21 Nov 85 14:58 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER #15 [extract - Ed]
-BODY-
     +----------------------------------------------------------+
     |                                                          |
     |                                                          |
     |                                                          |
     |            HOW TO JOIN A CONVERSATIONAL RELAY            |
                  ___ __ ____ _ ______________ _____
     |                                                          |
     |                                                          |
     +----------------------------------------------------------+
     |    If you  are on  a BITNET  machine that  allows the    |
     |    TELL command, try the following:                      |
     |                                                          |
     |    TELL FORUM AT BITNIC /HELP                            |
     |    TELL RELAY AT BITNIC /SERVER                          |
     |    TELL RELAY AT BITNIC /HELP                            |
     |    TELL RELAY AT BITNIC /INFO                            |
     |                                                          |
     |    These  commands  should provide  you  with  enough    |
     |    information to get started.                           |
     +----------------------------------------------------------+
[Note: this leads to personalized IR! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1985  12:31 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [extracts - Ed]
-BODY-
Monday  25, November  10:30am  Room: 2nd Floor Large Conference room
                                     BBN Laboratories Inc.
                                     10 Moulton Street
                                     Cambridge, MA.

            BBN Labs SDP AI Seminars

          "Explanation Based Learning"

          Professor Gerald DeJong
          Coordinated Science Laboratory
          University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


    Machine learning is one of the most  important  current
areas  of artificial intelligence.  With the trend away from
"weak methods" and toward a more knowledge intensive approach
to  intelligence,  the  lack of knowledge in an AI system becomes
one of the most serious limitations.

    This talk advances a technique called explanation based
learning.   It  is  a  method  of learning from observation.
Basically, it involves endowing  a  system  with  sufficient
knowledge  so  that  intelligent planning behavior of others
can be recognized.  Once recognized, these observed plans are
generalized as far as possible while preserving the underlying
explanation of their success.  The approach supports one trial
learning.  A new general concept can be acquired from an observation
of just one observed example.  The  approach  has  been  applied
to  three  diverse areas:  natural language processing, robot
task planning, and proof of propositional calculus theorems.  The
approach holds promise for solving the knowledge collection
bottleneck in the construction of current knowledge-based systems.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Charles M. Goldstein" <chuck%nlm-vax.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 85 20:57:37 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: IRList Digest V1 #20
Organization: National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md
-BODY-
Ed, here is a more detailed summary of the session that I have prepared for
the SIG/SRT Newsletter.


                       RESUME: ASIS SIG/SRT Session on
                    Optical Disk and Electronic Publishing

         The session was very well attended.  A capacity crowd.  Unfor-
    tunately the speaker from the Library of Congress was able to attend
    ASIS this year, and the speaker from Silver Platter recently left the
    firm and no substitute was available.  To the gratitude of all, Nancy
    Roderer, evaluation consultant to LC, pitched in at the final hour and
    gave the presentation for the Library of Congress.  Brett Butler,
    President of InFour, and former President of IAC, described the IAC
    InfoTrak videodisc product, gave a general introduction to optical
    disks from the publishers viewpoint, and also substituted for the
    speaker from Silver Platter by giving a brief overview of that pro-
    duct.  Mike Adams, Project Manager for CDROM Publishing Services at
    DEC, gave a provocative presentation of the prospects and realities of
    CD-ROMs and their use a publication medium.  Following is a brief
    resume of some of the salient points from each of the presentations.


    Library of Congress
         Since system problems at LC have delayed the actual user evalua-
    tion, Nancy gave an overview of the LC prototype optical disk system
    and discussed the planned evaluation criteria.  Initially, the docu-
    ment images of articles from a selection of current journals are being
    captured and stored on optical digital disk.  Each disk is presently
    holding approximately 10,000 pages.  LC is utilizing a juke-box which
    allows random selection from 100 optical disks.  While the storage per
    disk and juke-box may appear very large by present storage standards,
    Nancy pointed out that it would, nevertheless, require on the order of
    4,000 juke boxes to hold the LC collection.  For purposes of evalua-
    tion, terminals and printers  will be available in the Reading Rooms
    at LC.  Access to items will be via the LC SCORPIO System which will
    allow the patron to locate the articles available as online documents.
    The documents will then be displayed on a separate high resolution
    display screen.  There will be terminals available for both staff and
    public use.
         The overall purpose of the evaluation is to compare the system
    with available alternatives such as access to the actual journals or
    interlibrary loan.  The data collection will include transaction
    analysis, online questionnaire, and user interviews.  Nancy presented
    and discussed three questions being addressed: What materials should
    be included in the LC optical disk system from the perspectives of
    user, library, and cost?  How do patrons respond to the optical disk
    system in terms of SCORPIO access, system availability, and image
    quality?  How does the system compare with the patron alternatives in
    terms of cost, convenience, and added access?


    InfoTrak
         The InfoTrak 12 inch videodisk product has a storage capacity of
    800 megabytes.  The database presently contains approximately 500,000
    citations from over 1000 publications with a coverage extending back
    to 1982.  Each videodisc interface marketed by InfoTrak will support
    up to 4 microcomputer search stations sharing one videodisc player.
    Access to the citations is via word or phrase appearing in an index of
    LC Subject Headings, corporate and personal names, authors, and
    titles.  Subscribers receive a monthly, cumulative, updated videodisc.
    Major advantages cited are cost and ease of use.
         Brett emphasized that the optical disk and CD-ROM products will,
    in the near future, complement the online services and will be of spe-
    cial importance in areas where telecommunications are still prob-
    lematic and/or very expensive such as in under-dveloped countries.
    Other areas within the library enviornment wherein optical disks and
    CD-ROM's are making inroads include Cataloging Workstations and Public
    Access Catalogs (PAC's).  The former are exemplified by MiniMARC and
    Bibliophile while the latter are exemplified by the LePac CD-ROM Pub-
    lic Catalog offered by Brodart.


    CD-ROM: Prospects and Realities
         Mike first presented a vu-graph listing a number of popular myths
    about CD-ROM (note that DEC calls it CDROM, no hyphen; most others use
    the hyphen - will be interesting to see which prevails).  Myths
    explored included: CD-ROM will replace online access; CD-ROM will be
    replaced by Write-Once optical technology; mastering costs $1-2,000;
    disks will cost $10-25;different disks can be used on the same player.
    Under realities he identified the following: CD-ROM is real and it is
    here now; popular database titles are now available [almost]; elec-
    tronic publication on CD-ROM represents a major shift in the economics
    of information; big players [e.g., DEC] have entered the marketplace;
    internal applications are emerging; and disk production capacity has
    been established.
         Mike then gave an interesting overview of the very aggressive
    marketing effort of DEC in the CD-ROM area.  DEC has announced a CD-
    ROM player that can presently be interfaced to both DEC and IBM micro-
    computers.  Each CD-ROM provides approximately 600 megabytes of
    storage and two players may be attached to one system to support up to
    120 MB of total online storage.  A given database may be stored across
    the two players.  DEC has already started marketing subsets of exist-
    ing databases on CD-ROM.  To date, 5 CD-ROMS have been announced: 2
    from COMPENDEX (Electrical & Computer Engineering; Aerospace Engineer-
    ing), 2 from NTIS (Computers, Communication & Electronics; Environmen-
    tal Health & Safety), and one from Chem Abstracts (Health & Safety in
    Chemistry).  The full-text retrieval system, MicroBASIS from Battelle,
    along with the appropriate operating system is included on each disk.
    Mike left no doubt in anyone's mind regarding the commitment of DEC to
    both the technology and to electronic publications on this media.
         In considering the future for CD-ROM, Mike was optimistic with
    regard to the following prospects: standardization of file formats;
    mastering improvements in terms of time and cost; hardware improve-
    ments in terms of features and cost; improvements in retrieval
    software; effective database searching by end users; and the promise
    of access to database searching among the less developed countries
    (LDC's).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: leff@SMU
-DATE-
Date: 24 Nov 1985 19:58-CST
-BODY-
I believe you requested from me a list of references related to
info retrieval.  I did a search of my bib database for information
retrieval stuff and for natural language stuff and here is what was returned.
This covers everything submitted to AIList in the new bib format.

There is a good possibility that some general mechanism might be set up
so that people can query this database by electronic mail.  I will let
everyone know when this happens.
[Note: Many thanks for this!  I hope you can continue to supply us,
and that others will join in with comments on articles of interest. - Ed]

____________________________________________________________________________


%A B. P. McCune
%A R. M. Tong
%A J. S. Dean
%A D. G. Shapiro
%T RUBRIC: A System for Rule-Based Information Retrieval
%J IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
%V SE-11
%N 9
%D SEP 1985
%P 939-944

%A Janet L. Koldoner
%T Indexing and Retrieval Strategies for Natural Language Fact Retrieval
%J ACM Transactions on Database Systems
%V 8
%N 3
%P 434-464
%D SEP 1983
%K Cyrus information retrieval


____________________________________________________________________________

I also ran a search on "natural language" since you sometimes post
some of that stuff in your electronic newsletter:  A lot more stuff
but not all that relevant.

____________________________________________________________________________

%A Katthleen R. McKeown
%T The Text System for Natural Language Generation
%R CUCS-23-82
%I Columbia University

%A Kathleen R. McKeown
%T Natural Language Systems: How are They Meeting Human Needs?
%R CUCS-76-83
%I Columbia University

%A Kathleen R. McKeown
%T Natural Language For Expert Systems: Comparisons with Database Systems
%R CUCS-91-84
%I Columbia University

%A Kenneth Wasserman
%T Physical Object Representation and Generalization A Survey of Natural
Language Processing Programs
%R CUCS-62-83
%I Columbia Univeristy

%A Fernando Gomez
%T TQ: A specification Language Based on Conceptualizations Underlying Natural
Language
%R CS-TR-83
%I University of Central Florida

%A Fernando Gomez
%T Prepositions and Participles in LLULL
%R CS-TR-62
%I University of Central Florida
%K natural language

%A K. Marik
%T Customers Requirements of Natural Language Systems
%J International Journal of Man-Machine Stuides
%V 21
%N 5
%D NOV 84
%P 401

%A Tim Johnson
%T Natural Language Computing: The Commercial Applications
%I Ovum Ltd
%C London
%X Price $395.00

%A I. Peterson
%T Conversing with Computers Naturally
%J Science News
%V 128
%D JUL 27, 1985
%N 4
%P 53
%K microcomputers natural language database Bozena H. Thompson
Frederick B. Thompson Microrim Savvy Caltech Natural Access System
%X discusses Intellect Microrim, and Savvy and a Natural Language System
developed by Bozena H. Thompson and Frederick B. Thompson for IBM PC's

%T Updates
%J Datamation
%P 117
%D AUG 1, 1985
%V 31
%N 15
%K Gary Moskowitz, Xerox, natural language, office systems
%X says that AI should be aim to proofread documents for grammar errors;
and to help collaboration between humans

%A Jonathan Slocum
%A Carol F. Justus
%T Transportability to Other Languages: The Natural Language
Processing Project in the AI Program at MCC
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Samuel S. Epstein
%T Transportable Natural Language Processing Through Simplicity
%J ACM Transactions on Office  Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Fred J. Damerau
%T Problems and Some Solutions in Customization of Natural Language Database
Front Ends
%J ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
%D APR 1985

%A Roger Schank
%A Steven Shwartz
%T The Role of Knowledge Engineering in Natural Language Systems
%J BOOK17

%A Jaime Carbonnel
%T The Role of User Modeling in Natural Language Interface Design
%J BOOK17

%A S. Jerrold Kaplan
%T Designing a Portable Natural Language Database Query System
%J ACM Transactions on Database Systems
%V 9
%N 1
%D MAR 1984
%P 1-19

%T Frey Associations to Exhibit Enhanced Version of Themis
%J DEC HARDCOPY
%V 14
%N 5
%P 94
%D MAY 1985
%K natural language database
%X this is one of those systems that allow the user to give his queries
in English t0o the database.  It supports 1000 word vocabulary which
can be expanded by the user.  It works with Oracle's Relational
Database Managmenet System and VaX Datatrieve.  It sells for $24,000.

%T Natural Language Software Builds Mainframe Databases
%J ElectronicsWeek
%D JAN 7, 1985
%V 58
%N 2
%P 49
%K Artificial Intelligence Corporation Intellect
%X They announced Intellect/SX which allows users to set up their own
lexicons, databases and manipulate their own databases.

%A Janet L. Koldoner
%T Indexing and Retrieval Strategies for Natural Language Fact Retrieval
%J ACM Transactions on Database Systems
%V 8
%N 3
%P 434-464
%D SEP 1983
%K Cyrus information retrieval

%A David Matthew Dahlbacka
%T An ATN-Based Restricted Natural Language
Front End for A Data-Flow Design Aid
%R Department of Computer Science File No. 944
%I University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
%D JUL 1985
%K software engineering

%A Roger Schank
%A Larry Hunter
%T The Quest to Understand Thinking
%J MAG1
%P 143
%K scripts   natural language   conceptual dependency
%X discusses natural language reading including the famous restaurant
script.  Also discusses models of memory and "What is AI?"

%A Jerome A. Feldman
%T Connections
%J MAG1
%P 277-284
%K Necker cube  semantic nets connectionist  natural language

%J InfoWorld
%D July 1, 1985
%P 55
%K Microcomputer Data Base Systems MDBS GURU natural language Knowledgeman
database systems
%X An ad which says "Isn't it time you had a Guru?  Artificial
Intelligence From MDBS. Coming Soon.  MDBS is the company which makes
knowledgeman, a relational data base management system for micros.
I would suspect this would be a product to compete with CLOUT from RBASE

%J InfoWorld
%D July 1, 1985
%P 55
%K Microcomputer Data Base Systems MDBS GURU natural language Knowledgeman
database systems
%X An ad which says "Isn't it time you had a Guru?  Artificial
Intelligence From MDBS. Coming Soon.  MDBS is the company which makes
knowledgeman, a relational data base management system for micros.
I would suspect this would be a product to compete with CLOUT from RBASE

%J InfoWorld
%D July 1, 1985
%P 55
%K Microcomputer Data Base Systems MDBS GURU natural language Knowledgeman
database systems
%X An ad which says "Isn't it time you had a Guru?  Artificial
Intelligence From MDBS. Coming Soon.  MDBS is the company which makes
knowledgeman, a relational data base management system for micros.
I would suspect this would be a product to compete with CLOUT from RBASE

%T Nanobytes
%J BYTE
%D JUL 1985
%P 10
%K natural language translation linguistic products  English Spanish
%X "Lingusistic Products: The Woodslands, TX announced two
language-translation programs for the IBM PC.  English/Spanish and
Spanish/English programs are $490 each or $790 together."

%A Koji Kobayashi
%T Computers and Communcations: Toward Peace and Prosperity
%J High Technology
%D AUG 1985
%P 10-11
%K natural language machine translation voice recognition NEC
%X discusses activities of NEC in computers and communications including
a proposed system that will translate voice input from one language
to another in real time to be readied by year 2000.

%A Henry Beechold
%T File Gateway Adds to Clout
%J Infoworld
%D APR 22, 1985
%P 48-49
%K database query natural language microcomputer microrim rbase
%X review of Clout, a natural language interface to microcomputers
sold by Microrim for $249.00
two out of a possible four disks (due to overpriced support plan)
performance: excellence
documenation: good
ease of use: excellent
error handling: excellent
support: fair

%

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
25
-DATE-
Date: 26 Nov 1985 09:30-EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: request for dict info
-FROM-
From: BATES@BBNG.ARPA
-BODY-
I would be very interested in complete citations for the Laffal "Concept
Dict of English" and the thing you referred to in the AIList as the
"Collins and Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionaries".  Why are these
particular dictionaries useful for NL lexicons?
  Thanks very much,
     Lyn Bates (BATES@BBNG.ARPA)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	VTVAX3::FOXEA        15-DEC-1985 13:54
-TO-
To:	ARPA%"bates@bbng.arpa"
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	Dictionaries
-BODY-
Hi!
   Sorry for taking so long to answer your question.  I was going to do
it in IRList, but the machines I use for that have been down most of the
time since you sent your message.  So, here is a direct reply:
1) The dictionary that John Roach wanted is, according to him, one that
  defines words using a relatively small set of concepts.  I have not seen
  it.  He feels that a small number of concepts would make processing
  easier.  I have heard the same comment in connection with Longman's.
2) Citations on the other two are -
  Collins English Dictionary, ISBN 0 00 433078-1 (std), 433080-3 (thumb indx)
  Patrick Hanks, Ed.; Collins; London; 1979.
    Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English,ISBN 0 19 431101 5
    A S Hornby, Ed.; Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 1974.
3) Both are available from Oxford Text Archive for researchers at a nominal
  fee.  This in itself is enough - I strove for a year to obtain some
  dictionary to no avail until Mike Lesk suggested this source.  Noone
  I know of has used Collins; we have spent months trying to decode the
  typesetting and cleaning things up and will give the final result back
  to the Archive for redistribution.  Roger Mitton in UK has worked on
  the OALDCE and cleaned it up; we will do more work reorganizing it for
  our purposes.  We will extend work of Evens, Ahlswede and others to
  parse the dictionary entries as best as we can.
4) Here are some excerpts from Collins:
This major new dictionary contains more vocab. references (over 162,000) and
more text (over 3 million words) than any comparable one-volume dictionary.  It
sets new standards in the extent of its coverage and the clarity of its presen-
tation.
In-depth coverage of contemporary English. ... over 200 fields of knowledge ...
Excellent coverage of science and technology ...
Most important current meaning comes first.
Preferred hyphenation points (or their absence) are indicated ...
Examples in context ...
Geographical and biographical names and a variety of proper nouns are included
(over 14,000 of them), ...
5) Some excerpts from OALDCE:
This is a completely revised, up-dated and re-set impression of the 3rd ed.
It provides the student or teacher of the English language with the most
practically useful and comprehensive record of the language as it is spoken
and written today.
This is a Dictionary that has been specially prepared for the learner of the
English language.  ... give the learner the most practical help ...
It is for the learner who wants to develop further his knowledge of how
English words, compounds, and idiomatic expressions are used, what they mean...
... particular attention to verb patterns.
... kinds of context in which the headword is normally used.  The example
phrases and sentences ...
... the Dictionary gives the specialist English area ...
Proverbs ...
... taboo words ...

So, Collins gives broad coverage of contemporary English, with science
and technology, and was recently done, using modern lexicographic methods.
The definitions are full and yet seem amenable to futher computer analysis.
OALDCE is for those learning English, and has fewer entries but has
idioms, compounds too. It uses simple language in definitions, and has
verb patterns and numerous example phrases.  Again, these should also
be of value when automatically analyzed.

Our aim is to build a lexicon to use in our retrieval work, and to be of
use for other NL workers.  Any suggestions would be welcome!

Whereas work on Longman's and Webster's has gone on for a while, those
publishers have prohibited access by other researchers, so we hope to
provide an alternative.  Eventually we hopeto analyze the dictionary
definitions and examples to pull out even more than what we will learn
directly.

I hope this answers your question - sorry for being so long-winded!
Regards, Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	FOX            15-DEC-1985 17:02
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	Tutorials on GenCode/SGML
-BODY-
Dec. 2-4 at The Four Seasons Hotel in Phil.
GCA (Graphic Communications Assoc.) in conjunction with MARKUP USA, sponsored
      GenCode(Reg.)/SGML Tutoria Series
Monday - GenCode/SGML Orientation Tutorial
Tuesday- TechPub Implementation Training Session (Technical Manuals)
Wedn.  - AAP Implementation Training Session (Book Publishing)

GCA is at 1730 N. Lynn St., Suite 604, Arlington VA 22209 2085 (703)841-8160

Excerpts from Announcement:
Generic coding ... each text element is identified ... categorically, e.g., as
a heading ..., as a paragraph ..., a footnote, a reference, etc.

X3J6 Committee of ... ANSI ... developed a Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML) ... SGML describes both the syntax and grammar for developing document
structure to express the relationships between the various elements of the doc.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is engaged in a $250,000,
two-year project to develop a standard set of Author Guidelines specifically
aimed at the book publishing industry.  Code use conforms to SGML.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Richard (Dick) Marcus" <Marcus%mit-multics.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date:  Thu, 5 Dec 85 14:48 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Seminar Announcement
-BODY-
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Seminar

Title:  EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEM FOR DOCUMENT PAGE IMAGE FILING AND
        COMMUNICATION
Time:  2 PM, Thursday, December 12, 1985
Location:  Room 36-839
Speaker:  Ryuichi Ogagwa
         C&C Systems Research Laboratories
         NEC Corporation, Japan

Abstract:
     An experimental image system, which provides a document page filing
and communication facility in a high resolution image format, has been
developed.  System design emphasizes rapid access (within a few seconds)
and ease of use.
     The system has been operated in an experimental environment for one
year.  Rapid response time has proven to be essential for user
acceptance of the image services.  A common file facility and a data
presentation facility for meetings ("electronic viewgraph" with
magnification) have proven to be suitable application areas.
Requirements to make a personal filing facility useful have been
elucidated.

Host:  Richard Marcus

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date:    Tue, 10 Dec 85 15:52 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER 17 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
             JOBS AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

     The  Department  of  Communication   at  the  University  of
     California,   San  Diego  is  recruiting  for  one  or  more
     permanent faculty positions beginning 1986-87.  In addition,
     one year temporary position may also become available at the
     Lecturer to Acting/Visiting Professor levels.

             SPECIFIC AREAS IN WHICH WE WISH TO RECRUIT:
     1)    Communication  and   the  Individual.    Developmental
     psychology and linguistics, concepts of mind,  impact of the
     new  communication  technologies  on   cognition  and  human
     development; communication issues in the international/Third
     World area.
     2)   Social/political impact or context of new communication
     technologies.   Impact  of the computer;   communication and
     education; history of communication technologies.
     3)   History  of Communication/Media.   Social  and cultural
     history of  communication in  Europe and  the United  States
     with expertise in at least one non-European/U.S. area.
     4)    Theories of  interpretation.    Familiarity with  both
     semiotic  and historical  approaches  to  verbal and  visual
     forms of communicationist theories of communication.
     5)    Drama   and  Communication.    Text   to  performance.
     Performance   as   communication;     audience;    political
     communication through TV,  live  performance,  visual media,
     community and street theater.
     6)   Bilingual Communication.   Courses in Communication and
     Community; Language and Society; bi-lingualism.

     Candidates  must have  Ph.D or  equivalent and  demonstrated
     research  and  teaching ability.    Significant  publication
     record required at senior levels.  Salary dependent on level
     of appointment.   Send vita, statement of interests, and the
     names of three  references by March 1,   1986 to Recruitment
     (MES/SYS) Dept.  of Communication (D-003), UCSD La Jolla, CA
     92093 EOE/AAE

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	FOX            15-DEC-1985 17:29
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	UW Center for the New OED Newsletter 7, Nov. 1985 [Extracts]
-BODY-
Information in Data, Centre's 1st annual workshop, Nov. 7-8
   95 registrants from Canada, US, Europe, UK
   Package of papers and tech. aids presented during 3 sessions available
     early 1986, $10 Canadian (plus $2 if mailed outside Canada).  Checks
     payable to Univ. of Waterloo.  Send payment to UW Centre for the New
     OED, Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1

Application Workshops
   Weekly, began in Sept., good for interdisciplinary exchange, well attended.

New OED Seminars
   Oct. 30, New Words editor John Simpson, "Some Editorial Problems in
     Revising the New OED"
   Nov. 12, Prof. Nicoletta Calzolari, Dept. Ling. Univ. Pisa and Inst. of
     Comp. Linguistics, "The Italian Lexical Database"
   Nov. 13, Visiting Fellow Sylvia Osborn, Univ. W. Ontario Dept of CS,
     Database Modelling and the New OED
   Last seminar of term, Prof. William Cameron, Chrm. Dept. Mod. Lang. and
     Literature and former Dean of School of Lib. and Inf. Sci (SLIS) at
     Western Ontario, "Research Opportunities in a Collection of Early
     Dictionaries"

Visiting Fellows
   Reinhard Hartmann returned Nov 17 to Univ of Exeter, resuming as Director
     of Language Centre and the Dictionary Research Centre
   Dr. Sylvia Osborn returned end of Nov. to W. Ontario

SPIRES Database
   Work is in progress to establish a small database using SPIRES, with
     a bibliography of "core" reference materials.  Later, may add info.
     about dictionary and related projects and research centres, utiliza-
     tion of lexical databases, names and interests of researchers, loca-
     tions and descriptions of major dictionary collections and of machine
     readable reference texts, etc.  Donna Lee Berg, the Centre's librarian,
     would appreciate receiving any info, descriptive material, papers
     relating to these interests.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
24
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 85 22:32:48 EST
-BODY-
announcement of lectures for ... inclusion in IRList ...

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

                        A. F. Norcio and L. J. Chmura
                          Naval Research Laboratory

 Since 1978, the goal of the Software Cost Reduction (SCR) project  has been
to redevelop the operational flight program  for  the  A-7E  aircraft  and  to
demonstrate  the  use  of  certain  software engineering techniques in complex
software. Also since then, the Software Technology  Evaluation  (STE)  project
has  been  monitoring  SCR  project activity in order to  provide an objective
evaluation of the SCR methodologies. Project activity data are  collected from
SCR  personnel  on a weekly basis. Over 55000 hours of SCR  design, code, test
and other activity data have been captured and recorded  in  a  computer  data
base.  Analyses  of  module design data show that the ratio between cumulative
discussing and cumulative creating activities correlates highly  with  cumula-
tive  total design activity. Thus, this ratio is in one sense a lead indicator
of surges and levelings of design activity. This  and  other  results  suggest
that  discussion  activity among software engineers may be a leading indicator
of design activity progress.  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  Electri-
cal Engineering and Computer Sciences.



          Woodrow Barfield, Department of Engineering Administration
                       The George Washington University

  The rotation transformation is used primarily to assist the computer aided
    design user in visualizing graphics figures on a CRT screen.  Spatial
 reasoning, the ability to make inferences based on the information contained
within a spatial representation, is an important aspect of the perceptual pro-
cessing task for CAD.

This research effort investigated human spatial and cognitive abilities for  a
figure  rotation  task.   Two  competing  models  of  the  underlying internal
representation of visual information were experimentally tested.  The frequen-
cy of rotation errors (axes, angle) are analyzed from an information theoretic
framework in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the  rotation  transforma-
tion for the split vs. single screen CAD options.



                   Rose Oldfield Hayes, U S Postal Service
                  Frederick R. Glickman, U S Postal Service
            Key Dismukes, Air Force Office of Scientific Research

       The Human Factors Society has established a committee to develop
       technical standards for acceptable human factors principles and
     practices in the design and use of display terminals, workstations,
keyboards, and their environment.  The committee operates under the rules  and
procedures  of the American National Standards Institute. A set of recommended
standards have been distributed for comments and voting by committee members -
copies will be available.

The standards cover the working environment, visual display  design,  worksta-
tion  design,  keyboard design, and measurement techniques.  This seminar will
present a walkthrough of the proposed standards. Dr. Hayes will  provide  com-
ments as a reviewer of the standards for the HFS and as Program Manager of En-
gineering Psychology for the U S Postal Service Office of Safety  and  Health.
Dr.  Glickman  will provide comments as Program Director of Ergonomics Systems
Research for the U S  Postal  Service  Office  of  Advanced  Technology.   Dr.
Dismukes  will  act  as  a  discussant  in his role as the National Academy of
Science's Study Director for the report on Video Displays,  Work  and  Vision,
and  as  Director  of  Life  Sciences  at  the  Air Force Office of Scientific
Research.

Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology So-
ciety, c/o Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rock-
ville, MD 20851.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 85 16:35:16 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cornell Tech. Reports
-BODY-
           Abstracts of Recent Technical Reports from
                Computer Science, Cornell Univ.,
         on Information Retrieval (from Carolyn Crouch)


84-588
     Salton,  G. The Use of Extended Boolean Logic in Information
     Retrieval. Jan. 84.
An  extended  Boolean  retrieval  strategy  has  previously  been
introduced  in  which  the individual Boolean  operators  can  be
treated  more  or  less  strictly,  depending  on  the  perceived
strength of association of the query terms.  The extended Boolean
system  is illustrated by examples and evaluation output is  used
to demonstrate the effectiveness of the operations.

84-608
     Salton,  G.  and Voorhees,  E.  Automatic Assignment of Soft
     Boolean Operators. May 84.
The  conventional  bibliographic retrieval systems are  based  on
Boolean  query  formulations and inverted  file  implementations.
Such  systems provide rapid responses in answer to search queries
but they are not easy to use by uninitiated patrons.  An extended
Boolean retrieval strategy has been devised in which the  Boolean
operators  are  treated more or less strictly,  depending on  the
setting  of  a special parameter,  known  as  the  p-value.   The
extended  system  is  much more forgiving than  the  conventional
system,  and  provides better retrieval effectiveness.   In  this
study  various  problems  associated with  the  determination  of
appropriate p-values are discussed,  and suggestions are made for
an  automatic  assignment  of  p-values.   Evaluation  output  is
included   to   illustrate  the  operations  of   the   suggested
procedures.

84-609
     Salton,  G.  Some  Notions  about Information  Retrieval  in
     Automated Office Environments. May 1984.
A substantial portion of the work required in office environments
involves  the processing of natural language  texts.   This  note
contains some ideas relating to the structure of natural language
texts  in  office  environments.   Certain  approaches  are  also
outlined concerning the analysis,  storage, search, and retrieval
of such items.  Attention is paid in particular to the processing
of  items with mixed representations and the handling of  complex
information specifications.

84-633
     Salton,  G. A Note about Information Science Research. Sept.
     84.
This note deals with the relationship between information science
research and practice.  The impression that the field is moribund
and  that  the  research  output is  uniformly  inferior  is  not
supported   by  an  examination  of  the  information   retrieval
literature.


84-655
     Crouch,  C.  and  Nance,  R.  An Approach to the  Functional
     Description  of  an Information Retrieval Ssytem Based on  a
     Generalized Model. December 84.
In  this  paper,  the authors present a  high  level,  functional
approach   to  the  description  of  a  generalized   information
retrieval  system.   The  description is based  on  the  top-down
decomposition  of the system into modules and processes and on an
appropriate data abstraction.
     The purpose of this paper is to describe the behavior of the
system  in terms of the component processes and the  interactions
of  these  processes  in  terms  of  inputs,   outputs,  and  the
associated transformations.   It allows one to view the system as
a  collection of abstract processes,  each of which is  concisely
defined  via a notation that describes what is  accomplished  but
not  how  such  a process is  to  be  implemented.   Semantically
irrelevant details are removed, thereby producing a nonprocedural
description  which not only elucidates system behavior but serves
as a basis for subsequent formal specification.

85-658
     Voorhees, E. The Cluster Hypothesis Revisited. Jan. 85.
A  new means of evaluating the cluster hypothesis  is  introduced
and  the  results  of such an evaluation are presented  for  four
collections.   The  results of retrieval experiments comparing  a
sequential search,  a cluster-based search,  and a search of  the
clustered  collection  in which individual documents  are  scored
against  the  query are also presented.   These results  indicate
that  while the absolute performance of a search on a  particular
collection  is  dependent  on  the  pairwise  similarity  of  the
relevant  documents,  the  relative  effectiveness  of  clustered
retrieval  versus  sequential retrieval is  independent  of  this
factor.   However,  retrieval of entire clusters in response to a
query  usually results in a poorer performance than retrieval  of
individual documents from clusters.

85-686
     Buckley,   C.   Implementation   of  the  SMART  Information
     Retrieval System. May 85.
                     Abstract not available.
[Note: this partially documents the current version of SMART running
under 4.2bsd UNIX at Cornell.  It is an experimental system with many
capabilities but requires a considerable investment of time to work
with.  Contact chrisb@cornell for info. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1985  09:49 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Monday  25, November  4:00pm  Room: NE43-8th floor playroom

           9.382 Seminar on Visual Information Processing (A)

                    PROPOSAL FOR AN EXPERT SYSTEM


                              Don Geman
               Department of Mathematics and Statistics
                University of Massachusetts at Amherst


I will describe a model for decision-making under uncertainty in
situations in which prior knowledge can be expressed in the form of
conditional expectations.  Appealing to a maximum entropy rationale, a
Gibbs distribution is defined over all features of interest.
Decisions and hypotheses are formed by sampling at low and nominal
temperatures, respctively, from the distribution.  Experiments are
under way.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1985  11:07 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extracts - Ed]
-BODY-
Monday  2, December  4:00-6:00pm  Room: E25-117

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY-MIT DIVISION OF HEALTH SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY

   "The Categorical Organization of Semantic Knowledge Systems"

                 Elizabeth K. Warrington
                 Professor of Neurology
                 The National Hospitals for Nervous Diseases
                 Queen Square, London

Patients with cerebral lesions provide an important source of evidence
about the organization of semantic systems.  Striking instances of the
selective preservation and selective impairment in the comprehension
of particular categories of verbal and visual stimuli have long been
reported in the neurological literature and more recently such
dissociations have been investigated and assessed using experimental
methods.  The issue of modality specificity will be discussed and it
will be argued that there are at least partially independent systems
that subserve verbal and visual semantics.  Evidence for both broad
category specific impairments, such as knowledge of concrete and
abstract concepts, and more fine grain category impairments such as
knowledge of animate and inanimate objects  will be reviewed.  It will
be argued that there  are modality specific semantic systmes and that
these are categorised in their organization.

Host: Lucia Vaina

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

Thursday  5. December   4:00pm   Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom


		    The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series

				 CAKE:
	    An Example of a Hybrid Knowledge Representation
			  and Reasoning System

			      Charles Rich
			       MIT AI Lab

Cake is a knowledge representation and reasoning system being developed
to support automated programming (the Programmer's Apprentice).  The
first part of this talk describes the architecture of Cake, which is
divided into the following nine layers, each with associated
representations and reasoning procedures:

		      Plan Synthesis
		     Plan Recognition
		      Plan Calculus
                          Frames
			  Types
			Algebraic
			  Demons
			 Equality
		    Truth Maintenance

The second part of the talk takes a look at some of the issues in the
design of hybrid systems generally, such as

	        What is a hybrid system?
		Why would you want one?
	        Who is developing them?
		Where do we go from here?

Nelson & Oppen's cooperating decision procedures, KL-Two, Krypton, and
Cake will be discussed as examples of hybrid systems.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 1985  10:25 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extracted and edited - Ed]
-BODY-
  Thursday, 5 December 1985  4:00pm  Part 1
  Friday, 6 December 1985  4:00pm    Part 2
  Harvard University, Lecture Hall 101, Aiken Computation Laboratory
      33 Oxford St, Cambridge

   "On Computational Linguistics I.
    Discourse Structure and Intentions"
   "On Computational Linguistics II.
    The Design of a Transportable Natural Language Interface"
                  Dr. Barbara J. Grosz


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
22
-FROM-
From:	FOX            25-NOV-1985 11:02
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	delay in IRlist
-BODY-
Sorry folks, but machines do break down!  We have had a series of hardware
problems since the last issue.  The VAX I usually compose issues on is
still down, so please bear with the current layout.

Please keep submitting articles - eventually they will get out! - Ed

PS Since PSUVM will be down 8pm Nov. 27 to 8pm Nov. 29, some BITNET
messages may not get through from up north at that time.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Stavros Macrakis <macrakis%harvard.harvard.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 14:12:40 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Keyword in context
-BODY-
Krovetz suggests using the Unix `ptx' command for generating KWIC
indices.  Unfortunately, ptx (Unix 4.2) does not solve the problem:
ptx only provides the context on the same source line; both
pre-formatting and post-formatting are in general needed to deal with
punctation and layout gracefully; it does not give an error indication
for over-long input lines.

In short, ptx is fine for generating the index to the Unix manual, but
not sufficiently robust or general-purpose for KWIC indexes of
continuous texts.
	-s

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	ROACH          16-NOV-1985 16:00
-TO-
To:	FOX
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	do you know whether Concept Dictionary of English is available?
-BODY-
Ed,
  Julius Laffal wrote a book called, "The Concept Dictionary of English,"
Do you know whether that is available in machine readable form?  How
could I find out?  Is there an index available of machine readable
texts?
		John Roach (roach%vpi@csnet-relay.arpa)
[Note: The Oxford Text Archive has an index of its holdings but they
do not have that particular dictionary.  They do have the Collins and
Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionaries - I am working now on building
a NL lexicon from them.  Does anyone have a pointer to the above
mentioned dictionary or index? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Stavros Macrakis <macrakis%harvard.harvard.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 85 12:36:03 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar announcements
-BODY-
I am writing all of you because you have been kind enough to
contribute seminar announcements to various mailing lists recently.  I
find these announcements to be very valuable, and I appreciate your
efforts in publishing them.

A suggestion I should like to make, however, is that these
announcements could be even more useful if an electronic as well as a
mailing address could be provided for the speakers.  I have often
wanted to get in contact with the speakers, and in general have had to
guess at a net address (the Arpanet registry is far from complete and
I know of no systematic directory on other networks).

I realize that this is not in general easy--ideally, those organizing
the practical aspects of the seminar could collect this information
and include it in their announcements. (Do departmental adminstrators
currently recognize the value of asking for electronic addresses?)
But until that happy day, we can only hope for partial information
when it is easy to come by.

Thanks again for your efforts.

	-s
[Note: please do, at the bottom of all submissions, give one or more
 electronic mail addresses.  If possible, do so in relation to BITNET,
 the Internet, and UUCPnet since it is sometimes hard to figure out
 proper return addresses. Thanks! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 85 07:21:57 PST
-FROM-
From: co175fag%sdcc3@SDCSVAX.ARPA (Melissa O'Neill)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Discussion topics
-BODY-
As moderator of IRList you offer a number of interesting topics for
discussion.  How about discussion regarding the principles of communication?
Our course in experimental networking would benefit from such a topic - -
know of any interested parties?
Melissa at UCSD   CO175FAG@SDCC3

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Tom Benson 814-238-5277 <T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date:    Tue, 12 Nov 85 16:20 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER #14 [following is an extract only - Ed]
-BODY-
                              ANNOUNCEMENT
                                  OF A
                      GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION


                          Department of Communication
                       University of California, San Diego


The faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of California,
San Diego invites applications from students wishing to pursue a Ph.D. in
Communication.

As a faculty we seek to combine previously separate modes of analysis from the
humanities and social sciences to explore the structure, content and methods
of the new discipline of communication.  The graduate program is conceived as
a blending of the critical tradition of European communication research with
the empirical tradition of American scholarship.

The study of communication at UCSD is unique in several ways.  The program
places major emphasis on historical and comparative approaches to
mediated human activity in all its manifestations.  The graduate curriculum
is organized around an explicit framework for understanding communicative
phenomena.  This framework is comprised of three perspectives:
1) communication as a social force, 2) communication and culture, and
3) communication and the individual.  The first concentrates on the
increasing importance of information and information technologies in
American society and on the global political-economic consequences of media
practices.  The second involves the analysis of culture, using traditions
from literature, folklore, and anthropology to focus on questions of
interpretation and meaning.  The third involves examination of the individual
as socially constituted through language and other media.  The program also
emphasizes problems of methodology including offers a production component
in which students and concretize and evaluate this theoretical work.

The deadline for receipt of applications is February 1, 1986 for those
seeking financial assistance.  Final application deadline for all others
is March 1, 1986.  If you are interested, please contact Gregory Griffin,
Department of Communication (D-003), University of California, San Diego,
La Jolla, CA 92093, or call (619) 452-2379 for an application.  Three
letter of recommendation will be required as well as Graduate Record
Examination scores.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: ICS.DEKEN%r20.utexas.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Thu 14 Nov 85 06:14:45-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information Science and Technology at NSF
-BODY-
The 1983-1984 book of NSF awards, with short descriptions, is now
available.  We also have a less formal and complete, but official
listing of the awards in Information Science and Technology for
FY '85  (ended September 30, 1985).  People who wish to receive
this or other information can obtain printed copies by writing
to:

	Joseph Deken, Director
	Information Science Program
	National Science Foundation
	1800 G Street N.W.  Rm. 336
	Washington, D.C.  20550
[Note: both of these are very interesting.  There is also a new
'Guide to Programs' for Fiscal Year 1986; the cover shows lighting
flashes caused by an undersea volcanic eruption! - Ed]

Researchers in information science and technology who are
willing to serve as reviewers for the Information Science
Progam may also wish to send a brief description of their
areas of interest and/or a recent list of publications.


>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Mark Richer <RICHER%sumex-aim.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Thu 14 Nov 85 08:46:11-PST
-BODY-
[Following ai-ed message has been edited. - Ed]
I am forwarding this message about Plato from Brodie Lockward, an experienced
user and programmer:


  Date: Mon 4 Nov 85 22:16:44-PST
  From: Brodie Lockard <I.ISIMO%LOTS-B@LOTS-B>
  Subject: Re: ai-ed, plato

  Mark--
  Here's some info on publications concerning PLATO's authoring language (I
hate
  that term).  Hope it's some help.    -Brod
  . . .

    PLATO Author Language Reference Manual
    This manual describes the PLATO author language and is
    intended as a detailed reference source.  It is designed
    as a reference for the experienced author who is familar
    with the fundamentals of the CDC PLATO author language.
    publication number:  97405100
    PLATO Author Language Instruction Formats
    This pocket-sized manual provides PLATO authors with a
    complete summary of author language instruction formats,
    keyboard formats, and a summary of Author Mode page
    options.
    publication number:  97406600
  The TUTOR Language, by Bruce Sherwood (June 1977).
  This book is a comprehensive illustrated textbook on
  the TUTOR language.
  publication number:  76360692
>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 1985  10:16 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar	
-BODY-
Friday  15, November  2:30 (2:15 Refreshments)  Room: NE43-512A


                        "CommonLoops"

                        Gregor Kiczales

                 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center


CommonLoops is a merger of Object Oriented Programming and Lisp.  It
has a unique combination of features:

1) No special syntax:  Most attempts to add object-oriented programming
to Lisp have resulted in special syntax for message sending.  In
CommonLoops, there is no syntactic difference between calling a function
and "invoking a method."

2) Method Specification: In object oriented programming, methods are
specified in terms of the class of the object being sent the message.
One can think of this as specifying the type of one argument of the
method.  In CommonLoops,  one can specify the type of any number of
arguments to a method.

3) Type space:  The "object" space is an extension of the normal Lisp
type space, not a separate space as in Loops or Flavors.

4) Metaclasses:  The implementation of a type (determined by the
"metaclass") is independent of the type description.  This allows
tradeoffs between early binding and ease of exploratory programming.

Host: Hal Abelson

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

Sunday  17, November 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room
                                      Harvard
                                   5:30 dinner [can be purchused]
                                   6:00 talk.

          HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY

           "Processing Deficits in Aphasia"

                  Bill Milberg
           Veteran's Administration Hospital


 info: ETZI@OZ

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 1985  11:55 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
Monday 18, November  4:00pm  Room: E43- 8th floor Playroom

     9.382 -- Seminar in Visual Information Processing (A)


                      Recovering Surface Shape
			     from an
		      Extended Gaussian Image

			 James J. Little

		   Artificial Intelligence Laboratory


The Extended Gaussian Image (EGI) of an object records the variation
of surface area with surface orientation.  When the object is polyhedral,
the EGI takes the form of a set of vectors, one for each face, parallel
to the outer surface normal of the face.  The length of each vector is the
area of the corresponding face.

The EGI uniquely represents convex objects and is easily derived from
conventional models of an object.  The EGI of a sensed object can be computed
directly from photometric stereo, or by differentiating depth maps from
binocular stereo or laser ranging. It can be used both in recognition tasks
and in determining the attitude of objects.

Here the representational power of the EGI is explored.
There are two aspects to describing shape for polyhedral objects: first, the
way in which faces intersect, termed the adjacency structure, and, second,
the location of the faces in space.  The adjacency structure describes
the combinatorial properties of the object.  An iterative algorithm is
described which converts an EGI of a polyhedron into an object model in terms
of coordinates of vertices, edges, and faces. The algorithm converges to
a solution by constrained optimization.

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

Wednesday  20, November  4:00pm (4:15 Refreshments) Room: NE43-512A

"MED2: An Expert System Shell for Diagnosis and Therapy in Complex Domains"

                   Frank Puppe
               Kaiserlautern University
                   Germany

Concentrating on the medical domain, MED2 is a shell combining a wide
variety of important aspects of clinical reasoning.  It's
"Working-Memory" control structure involves investigating a set of
hypotheses simultaneously, avoiding the shortcomings of focussing on
the top-hypothesis only.  This concept allows using differential
diagnosis techniques and exploiting relationships among patho-concepts
in an efficient manner.  Other interesting features of MED2 include
separation of database and diagnostic reasoning, temporal reasoning,
and belief revision.

HOST: Prof. Peter Szolovits

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

Thursday  21, November  7:30pm  Room: Wellesley College
                                      377 Science Center

         LUCE LECTURES ON LANGUAGE AND MIND
      "Some things Children Learn from and about Language"

                 Virginia Valian
                 Wellesley College

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

Friday  22, November  2:00pm  Room: Main Seminar Room (2nd floor)
                                    Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.
                                    50 Moulton Street
                                    Cambridge, MA.

               BBN Labs SDP AI Seminars

   "Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory: A RIACS Project"

          Dr. Michael R. Raugh
          Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science
          NASA Ames Research Center


  An exciting new concept in which information is stored in a large number
of neighboring addresses determined by "content," produces a memory
that retrieves causal relationships as well as sequences of episodes and
is sensitive to similarity.  It is also forgetful and reinforcable:  a
memory much like yours and mine.

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

Sunday  24, November 6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room
                                      Harvard

          HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY

      "The flow of Information through Cortical Circuits"

                  Terry Deacon
              Anthropology Department
                  Harvard

 info: ETZI@OZ

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
28
-FROM-
From:	FOX            31-DEC-1985 19:02
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	E-Mail, Machines, and New Year
-BODY-
Our machines are up again and so CSNET mail should begin flowing.
Please resend any messages that were returned to you over the period
since 19 December.  I will process mail sent during that time as soon
as possible.  This machine may go down again on Saturday, but we hope
to have an alternate CSNET link up by then.

Happy New Year! - Ed Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Michael Lesk at petrus.UUCP" <lesk%petrus%mouton.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 85 21:41:34 est
Message-Id: <8512190241.AA01618@petrus.UUCP>
-BODY-
Ed, here is the writeup of the Waterloo conference for the SIGIR newsletter ...
Mike
[Note: the original had all sorts of fine use of troff and -ms macro
calls, which were removed for readibility here.  The typeset form should
appear in an upcoming issue of ACM SIGIR Forum. - Ed]

                             Information in Data:
              Using the Oxford English Dictionary on a Computer

                              November 13, 1985


     The recorded history of the English language, the OED,  is  going  to  be
available in machine-readable form in a few years.  How should it be arranged,
and what will be it used for?  The University of Waterloo's Centre for the New
OED  is  studying  these questions, and the Centre ran its first conference on
Nov. 7-8, 1985, entitled ``Information in Data.'' The conference was  attended
by  about  95 people, split between linguists, English literature experts, and
computer types.  Major issues are: should the dictionary  be  delivered  as  a
text stream, with some associated indexing, or as a database, in which some of
the fields are character strings?  What are the major applications  for  which
the computer form of the OED will be used?  How will be it be used by computer
people, and how by linguists?

     Understandably, but perhaps regrettably, the conference contained a large
number of talks in which people described what else they would like to have in
a dictionary.  The OED is not intended as the only reference  work  a  library
needs  to  acquire, and the most rewarding talks were those that described the
richness of the OED and the complexity of this project, rather than those that
asked for still more data.  The OED describes the history and the potential of
the English language, but leaves the statistics of current use and the  ephem-
era  of  current names to others.  There should be quite enough in it for many
interesting projects.

     The conference opened Thursday evening with a  welcome  from  Tom  Brzus-
towski  of  the University of Waterloo, which has strongly supported this pro-
ject, thanks to the personal interest of the President, Douglas Wright.   John
Simpson  (New  Words  editor  of the OED) gave the main introductory talk.  He
described the goals of the Supplement: to broaden coverage both geographically
and  by  types  of  source  work, as well as to bring the dictionary up to the
1980s.  As an example of the broader coverage of the new OED, the final volume
of  the Supplement will contain wysiwyg (non-hackers may not recognize this as
a kind of text formatting program, an acronym for ``what you see is  what  you
get'').

     Once finished, the Supplement is to be merged with the old volumes,  pro-
ducing a 15-20 volume cumulated work.  To accomplish this, the entire diction-
ary is being converted to machine readable form, and it is intended to  update
the  machine-readable  version  continuously.  At present Waterloo has on line
only the letter M, which was done first.  The remainder  of  the  keystroking,
which  is  being  done  in alphabetical order, is now up to the letter I, with
proofreading and corrections done through the letter E.   All  input  will  be
finished  in mid 1986, and the merging process completed later that year.  The
size of the OED project can best be appreciated from the phrase used  by  John
Simpson  to describe recent activity: ``the headlong rush to complete the Sup-
plement over the last ten years.''

     Many have asked why the dictionary was not scanned, rather than  rekeyed.
Although it is now possible to scan the OED, it is not simple, and in addition
it was desirable to label the information in  the  dictionary  at  least  with
typesetting codes.  Adding these codes could not be done mechanically, and the
work of doing this during OCR scanning makes  total  rekeying  as  simple  and
cheap  as  scanning.   The full dictionary will contain about 350M characters,
and with format information added the whole computer file will  be  about  500
Mbyte.   OUP intends to make the dictionary available in machine-readable form
at a quite reasonable price for researchers, and is  contemplating  CD-ROM  as
the medium.

     John Stubbs described Waterloo's role: they  have  a  Centre,  and  offer
visiting  scholar positions plus part time student help.  Prof. Stubbs (of the
History department) and Prof. Tompa (of CS) are co-directors  of  the  Centre.
Waterloo is designing a database structure for the OED, collecting information
on the kinds of questions linguists ask of the OED, and helping Oxford  format
the typesetting tapes for assistance in printing the merged new edition of the
dictionary.  J. Howard Johnson of the  Waterloo  CS  department  wrote  a  new
translator from regular grammars to finite state machines, which has been used
to analyze the typesetting format produced by the keystrokers and translate it
into  a more readable and more easily processed representation.  Gaston Gonnet
(also a Waterloo CS professor) recently provided a new query language, GOEDEL,
which  can  be  used  to  ask questions of the dictionary file.  The Centre is
accumulating queries linguists present to the OED, to see what other  software
tools are needed to answer them.

     Friday morning, the  first  session  dealt  with  uses  of  on-line  dic-
tionaries.   The  speakers  generally wanted more information in dictionaries:
semantic markers and frequency data.  For modern texts, some of  this  can  be
accumulated  automatically;  but  it is not clear how an historical dictionary
such as the OED is to determine the relative frequencies of word sense in ear-
lier centuries.

     Prof. Henry Kucera of Brown University reminded us of the flood of  spel-
ling  checkers, including one that accepted unbearing having stripped off both
the -ing and the un-.  He also discussed the use of dictionaries  in  parsing,
and  the  need  to do more than local disambiguation of noun/verb ambiguities,
quoting some familiar garden-path sentences (Can covers thrown overboard  from
Russian  submarines  have  been  recovered).  Most of his talk, however, urged
that dictionaries give subentries of a given word in  order  of  frequency  of
use.   Of  the  5000  most  frequent verbs in English, 3000 can also be nouns.
Data from the Brown corpus, for example, show that spring is more often a noun
(the  season)  than a verb; yet most dictionaries list the verbal sense first.
Other words often given in the wrong  order  include:  address,  aid,  attempt
(noun more common) and affect, bet (verb more common).

     Donald Walker of Bell Communications Research followed, reviewing the use
of  reference works to help analyze the text of news stories.  A comparison of
the New York Times with the Merriam-Webster 7th New Collegiate shows that  2/3
of  the  words  in  the  dictionary  are  not  used in the Times, probably not
surprising, but also that about 2/3 of the word forms in the Times are not  in
the  dictionary!   Many  of  those are inflected forms, but a large number are
proper nouns, hyphenated forms, and incorrect spellings.  Work  is  proceeding
on  finding  a  list of proper nouns; 42,000 isolated from the Times were com-
pared with 46,000 isolated from the World Almanac and 4,000  were  in  common.
In  addition,  a  list  of  260,000 noun phrases has been accumulated from the
times, and they are looking to see which should be  in  the  dictionary.   Dr.
Walker also reminded us of the FORCE4 program, which disambiguates word senses
by assuming that the sense coming from the  sublanguage  domain  that  predom-
inates  in the article is probably the right one (work with Bob Amsler).  This
program required a list of semantic markers on each word sense indicating  the
subject  area  with  which  that  sense  is  used; such a list is in Longman's
machine-readable dictionary.

     Prof. George Miller of Princeton University, who is studying how children
learn  vocabulary,  explained  some  traditional  mistakes children make using
words from a dictionary, e.g. the child who wrote My family erodes a lot  hav-
ing seen erode defined in a dictionary as eat out, eat away, wear away.  Chil-
dren are good at learning words (they pick up 22 a day from 6 years to 8 years
of  age),  but  dictionaries don't help them.  Prof. Miller was now building a
matrix of words vs. senses; effectively, definitions are listed down the  left
margin,  and  words  across  the  top.   To  get a dictionary, read the matrix
columnwise; to get a thesaurus, read it rowwise.  He is building synonym  sets
as  well,  in which related words such as {abandon, forsake, desert, abdicate}
are grouped, and would like a machine-readable source  of  such  data.   Other
modes  of  access  to words he is exploring are psychological sense relations,
such as contrasts, similars, class inclusion, case relations, and  part-whole.
He  has found that the dictionary browsing programs that result from this work
are sufficiently enjoyable even to qualify as games, as well as their expected
uses in word processing and education.

     The second session of the  conference  featured  several  linguists,  and
focussed  more  on the OED itself.  These speakers also wanted additional data
in the dictionary, but this time they wanted linguistic data about  word  ori-
gins and word uses rather than semantic data.

     The session started with Gisele Losier's talk on studying loan  words  in
the  OED.   Most  of her talk dealt with the development of words that changed
from imperative verbs to nouns with similar meanings, e.g.  cease-fire.   This
has  happened in other languages (Latin, Greek and French examples were given)
and sometimes the word has come into English already converted, e.g. permit or
quibble.   Other, more obvious instances are farewell, encore, go-between, and
has-been.  There is no easy way  to  find  such  words  automatically,  unfor-
tunately.

     Prof. Christopher Dean, of the University of Saskatchewan, then described
the  problems  of compiling an historical dictionary of local dialects.  Basi-
cally, this is an almost impossible problem.  For his  special  interest,  the
dialect  of  Yorkshire,  there  are no adequate texts before the 17th century.
Worse yet, what texts there are tend to represent  educated  usage,  and  thus
standard  English.   As  a result, an historical dialect dictionary can not be
made, and the only hope for tracing the history of a dialect is to work  back-
wards  from  present  day speech, using phonological rules.  If the variations
among national versions of English  (e.g.  Canadian,  Australian,  etc.)  ever
reach  the status of separate dialects, perhaps the OED could be used to track
the history of these; although that much divergence seems unlikely in our  era
of world-wide communications.

     The last linguistic speaker was Neil Hultin, who gave an interesting  but
long  description of Murray's attitude towards word development in the context
of Victorian thought.  Murray assumed that words developed from concrete mean-
ings  to abstract meanings, and from simple use to complex use, whether or not
the historical evidence supported this.  For example, ardor is given first  as
meaning heat and only later as passion even though the latter meaning is three
hundred years earlier.  When studied, primitive languages have not turned  out
to  consist  of  monosyllables representing only concrete objects, as the Vic-
torians believed.  The OED, despite its protestations of  experimental  basis,
is  following  a  19th-century  view  of  progress when it arranges words in a
``logical'' order that goes from concrete and simple to abstract and complex.

     As an aside of intellectual history, the reverse assumption is  now  com-
mon:  spider  webs  were commonly assumed by modern scientists to have evolved
from the messy and irregular forms to the  neat  and  elegant  orb  webs  with
radial  and  concentric  strands.  Now evidence is showing that the simple and
elegant forms are the older, and the irregular forms are the newer, which con-
founds our twentieth century expectations.

     The last session was devoted to  artificial  intelligence  and  knowledge
bases.   Randy  Goebel  began with a tutorial talk on knowledge representation
and the design of expert systems.  The talk was rather vague.  John Sowa  fol-
lowed  with  a  list  of  puzzling  phenomena that a lexicon should be able to
explain, e.g. recognizing an instrument even when  the  word  is  used  as  an
object,  so that a pair of utterances such as The janitor opened the door with
an old key. and The janitor opened the door.  He used an old key. are  treated
similarly.  Other  curiousities  included the need to understand that although
musician is a subclass of man (and of woman), bad musician does not imply  bad
man.   And  why  can one say former pet but not former cat?  Sowa's conceptual
graphs, which look like Fillmore case grammar extended, can provide  solutions
to  some of these problems, but not to everything.  Exactly what would need to
be added to the OED to permit computer disambiguation of such phrases is still
a research project.

     Frank Tompa ended the conference, alluding to the use of  the  dictionary
as  a knowledge repository but not really describing how such a database might
be built.  Most of the discussion revolved around the use of  the  dictionary,
e.g. the possibility of gathering statistics on users and what they did (R. R.
K. Hartmann).  But the most common suggestion was to arrange the dictionary in
some kind of importance hierarchy, so that simpler questions could be answered
with an excerpted dictionary.  Those more familiar with  the  dictionary  were
disturbed  by  these suggestions; some of the computer scientists in the audi-
ence did not seem to  realize  that  Oxford  publishes  several  smaller  dic-
tionaries, including the Concise, Shorter, Little and Pocket dictionaries, not
to mention the line of Learner's dictionaries.  These are  edited  separately;
OUP rejects the idea that you can convert an unabridged dictionary to a colle-
giate dictionary by crossing out the last half of each definition.  Availabil-
ity of the OED for research is actually dependent on the special nature of the
OED; Oxford considers it unlikely that others will abuse the  availability  of
the  OED  by  trying  to  publish a similar dictionary, and is being more cir-
cumspect about the availability of the Concise dictionary.  (The generosity of
OUP  in  making  the  Learner's dictionary available today, and the OED in the
future, however, should be praised by all working computer linguists).  A more
serious  problem with the complexity of the OED is that there are many closely
related senses for some words, and for some computer applications it might not
be  interesting  to distinguish these while the more contrasting senses should
still be separated.  No one addressed this question, however, despite the gen-
eral  interest in automatic simplification.  One hopes at least that the meet-
ing taught the computer people a better appreciation of the size and  complex-
ity  of  the  OED.  Once ``to crack a nut with a steam-hammer'' was a standard
metaphor for overkill; this conference provided ``to  use  the  OED  to  spell
cat'' (Diana Patterson).

     Perhaps the most interesting discussion of all  took  place  outside  the
conference,  in  an attempt to decide what should be in an electronic database
of the OED.  Should it be a text stream, with some added indexes, or should it
be a data structure, in which some fields happen to be character strings?  The
text stream is simplest to build, and makes fewer decisions in  advance,  thus
foreclosing the fewest options.  A data structure, however, offers the ability
to connect (with some kind of  pointer  structure)  citations  from  the  same
author, derivations from the same foreign language, and other relationships of
interest to the users.  Frank Tompa has done considerable work designing  such
a  possible data structure, although it's not implemented yet.  There are some
places where additional knowledge could profitably be inserted in the OED; for
example,  work is underway in Edinburgh on a program to convert OED pronuncia-
tions to IPA.

     This discussion may be moot, however, since Oxford needs to  be  able  to
regenerate the exact page images from whichever representation is chosen.  For
example, within the quotations even the end-of-line hyphenation matters, since
it  may  reflect  hyphenation  practices of an earlier century.  Thus any data
structure must have a procedure for regenerating the text stream; and it  will
undoubtedly  be  made  mechanically  from the text as it comes from the pages.
Either representation could then be chosen  for  distribution,  and  sent  out
along  with  the  programs to convert to the other one.  The danger, to me, is
that in the process of constructing  the  data  base  some  information  would
either be discarded or made more difficult to access.  The computer types kept
thinking that they could rationalize some of the inconsistencies in  the  OED,
and  the lexicographers kept pointing out that these were not inconsistencies,
but carefully thought-out choices (e.g. whether an etymological  note  appears
before  the  sense  definitions or between two of them).  One Waterloo staffer
finally said that ``there are no inconsistencies, only rules  we  haven't  yet
discovered.''

     I was also left with a strong wish that further progress could be made on
text  archives.  To study the English language, we would like not only the OED
in machine-readable form, but also the standard works of  English  literature.
Although  some  efforts in this direction have been made (e.g. the Oxford Text
Archive), much more is needed.   Part  of  the  problem  is  the  disagreement
between the many scholars who would want a first edition of each work, and the
computer types who might be satisfied with modern editing (i.e. twentieth cen-
tury  spelling,  grammar  and punctuation, not to mention page layout).  It is
substantially more expensive to get an early  edition  into  machine  readable
form,  since  it  probably can not be read by an OCR scanner.  One can imagine
the OED citations containing cross references to a standard  archive;  and  it
would certainly be undesirable to define an OED database in such a way that it
could not be extended to reference other lexicographic data  files,  and  also
bibliographical,  textual, geographical, and biographical files (consider, for
example, connecting OED author references to the DNB entries for  those  writ-
ers).

     To summarize, why is this project so interesting and exciting?  As a com-
puter  scientist,  the  availability  of  the  OED is of particular importance
because of the rise of lexicon-based parsers and natural language  understand-
ing  programs.  Twice recently I have had major computational linguistics pro-
jects explain to me that their grammars have only a few (less than  5)  rules,
with  nearly  all grammatical information stored with the words rather than by
using syntactic rules.  Yet, comparing even an  ordinary  desk  dictionary  to
most  computer lexicons, it is amazing how much more information there is in a
dictionary.  The OED, as the largest source  of  information  about  words  in
English,  offers  the possibility of greatly augmenting our computer lexicons,
exactly when such lexicons are believed to be essential  for  developing  pro-
grams that understand language.

     The conference was generally successful.  It brought together specialists
in  English  and  specialists in computers, without a violent clash of the two
cultures, and with mutual benefits to both sides.  I look forward to the avai-
lability  of  the  full  machine-readable OED, and I think it will be of great
benefit to both the computer and the linguistic community.


 - Michael Lesk, Bellcore (bellcore!lesk, lesk@bellcore.csnet)

PS: Further information about the Centre for the New OED is available from the
administrative  director,  Gayle  Johannesen,  519-885-1211,  ext.  6200.  Her
address is: UW Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, 105  Dana  Porter
Library, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
1

-N-
27
-FROM-
From:	FOX            18-DEC-1985 19:06
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	E-Mail, machines down, end-of-year
-BODY-
Hi!  A few points of information:
1) Please do not mail to irdis@vpi - it chokes our CSNET connection.
  Send to fox, not irdis.
2) BITNET access to me as foxea@vtvax3 and fox@vtcs1 will be down 21,22 Dec
3) Our CSNET host, 'vpi', which is also 'vtcs1' on BITNET, will be down
  19,20 Dec. and maybe through 23 Dec.  It will again be down 30Dec. for
  possibly a few weeks.  We are trying to make alternate arrangements
  for CSNET mail but cannot do so for BITNET.
4) I will not be sending any msgs between 22 and 29th Dec., and may
  not be able to for a while after that if machines stay down.
5) Please do continue to send to IRList but do not be disappointed if
  you do not hear back till next year.
Season's greetings - Ed Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Martha Morgan <AI.MORGAN%mcc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri 13 Dec 85 17:38:07-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Pointer to Oxford Text Archive
-BODY-
Recently John Roach enquired of IRLIST,
"Is there an index available of machine readable texts?"

You replied, "The Oxford Text Archive has an index of its holdings..."

I would like to get in touch with the Oxford Text Archive and become
aware of what is contained in the index of their holdings.  Can you
give me an address, name, whatever?

[Note: The Oxford University Computing Service Text Archive was
established in 1976 as a repository of machine-readable texts to serve
the research needs of scholars working with one of many different
languages.  It is one of the largest such collections.  Texts are in
many different formats and some are cleaner than others.  Enquiries
about texts held at Oxford or about the Archive can be sent to
ARCHIVE at UK.AC.OX.VAX3, via the British Joint Academic Network.
Address is Oxford Text Archive, Oxford Univ. Computing Service,
13 Banbury Rd, Oxford OX2 6NN.  A modest payment and signed declara-
tion form indicating that tapes will only be used for research is
required.  The Archive will send you forms and a list of holdings,
indicating size of each item (which suggests how much tape is needed.)
Be aware that many items are direct from the typesetter, without much
information to help in decoding them. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben%mimsy.umd.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 85 08:52:36 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  IRList Digest V1 #24
-BODY-
The titles and dates of the Software Psychology Society lectures were
somehow removed from the distributed announcement.
[Note: sorry - I trusted nroff to format but not edit! - Ed]

We meet the second Friday of each month...so December 13, January 10,
and February 14 are the dates...attached is the original announcement.
[Note: dates are given just with titles and authors. See Issue 24. - Ed]

SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY - POTOMAC CHAPTER - VOLUME 10 NO. 2 - WINTER 1986

December 13 - Room 413-414
DESIGN ACTIVITY IN DEVELOPING A COMPLEX PROGRAM
A. F. Norcio and L. J. Chmura
Naval Research Laboratory

January 10 - Room 413-414
PERCEPTUAL AND COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL FIGURE ROTATIONS FOR
COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN
Woodrow Barfield, Department of Engineering Administration
The George Washington University

February 14 - Room 413-414
AMERICAN NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING OF
VISUAL DISPLAY WORKSTATIONS
Rose Oldfield Hayes, U S Postal Service
Frederick R. Glickman, U S Postal Service
Key Dismukes, Air Force Office of Scientific Research


Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology Society, c/o
Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD
20851.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	FOX            18-DEC-1985 19:15
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	6th Int'l Workshop on Expert Systems and Their Applications
-BODY-
Avignon 86 will be April 28-30, 1986.  Call for Papers has deadline 15 Jan
(not exceeding 20 pages of 8x11 camera ready).

Conference will be at prestigious 14th century fortress Palace of the Popes
in Avignon, France.

Papers desired on tools and techniques - including knowledge rep., learning,
inference techniques, ... - and applications.  Real-life implementations on
topics such as ... computer-aided instruction ... office automation ...
applied linguistics ...

Submissions need page with title, author, author address, phone&ext, telex
number, 10 line abstract, list of keywords.

Conf. Chairman: Jean-Claude RAULT, Agence de l'Informatique,
Tour Fiat - Cedex 16, 92084 Paris-La Defense, FRANCE

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	FOX            18-DEC-1985 19:20
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	Electronic Manuscript Project
-BODY-
Association of American Publishers, Inc.
2005 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 232-3335

The new standard will be done by year end.  Those who have contributed
to the effort will receive copies.  Others can obtain them for a fee.
(This is because of cost involved and cost for continuing, since there
are many modules, not all of which are complete).

Author guideline should be finished in 1st quarter, 1986

This is an international effort and will help all authors and aid
many working with document processing.

[Above gleaned from EMP Status Reports and conversation with C. Risher
of AAP. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 85 00:11:33 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: abstracts
-BODY-
             Selected Abstracts from the Proceedings
            of the third joint BCS and ACM Symposium,
             Kings' College, Cambridge, 2-6 July 84
                          by G. Salton
    (Proceedings published by Cambridge Univ. Press, Editor:
     C.J. van Rijsbergen)


EVALUATION OF ACCESS METHODS TO TEXT DOCUMENTS IN OFFICE SYSTEMS

F. Rabitti
Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione,  Consiglio Nazionale
delle ricerche, Via S. Maria 46, 56100 Pisa, Italy

J. Zizka
Visitor from the Technical University of Brno, Czechoslowakia

          This   paper  compares  two  different  approaches  for
indexing archived text documents.  The first approach is based on
inversion  of words in the text,  the second on the  content.   A
system reflecting the word inversion approach is compared against
two systems reflecting the signature scanning approach and using,
alternatively,  superimposed coding and the concatenation of word
signatures.   Performances are estimated using analytical  models
of  these systems.   Characteristics are evaluated in function of
office environment requirements.   The evaluations derive from  a
model for estimating the statistical parameters of text archives.
     This  work has been partially developed as part of  the  EEC
ESPRIT  project  on  "Mixed-Mode Message Filing  System"  in  the
Office Systems area.


NESTED TRANSACTIONS IN A COMBINED IRS-DBMS ARCHITECTURE

Hans-Joerg Schek
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

          The  possibility to put an Information Retrieval System
(IRS)  on  top  of  a  Data  Base  Management  System  (DBMS)  is
investigated  with respect to concurrency control  and  recovery.
The simple mapping of one IRS transaction to one DBMS transaction
is analyzed and found to be unsatisfactory.   Therefore, the idea
of  generating  a sequence of DBMS transactions for a single  IRS
transaction is discussed.   This notion of "nested"  transactions
assumes  standard  concurrency control technology but is  applied
twice:   in the underlaying DBMS layer and in the IRS layer.  The
consequence  is  that  multi-user control and  recovery  is  also
necessary  in  the  IRS layer but  it  utilizes  the  concurrency
control and recovery function of the DBMS.
.pa
A  SEMANTIC MODEL AND SCHEMA NOTATION FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC RETRIEVAL
SYSTEMS

J. Tague
School of Library and Information Science,  University of Western
Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada  N6G 1H1

          Logical  models  or  schema are used to  represent  the
entities,  relationships,  and transformations of an  information
system.   The  relational  model and the relational algebra  have
been developed to perform this function for database systems, but
until  recently  only a few  writers  (e.g.,  Crawford,  MacLeod,
Schek)  have studied logical models for  bibliographic  retrieval
systems.   This  paper  examines an extension of  the  relational
model,  called  a semantic model,  as a schema for  bibliographic
systems.   An  alternative notation is suggested for the semantic
model,   based  on  the  Warnier/Orr  diagram.   An  experimental
semantic  model user interface,  which has been developed for  an
experimental  microcomputer  information  retrieval  system,   is
briefly described.

THE USE OF ADAPTIVE MECHANISMS FOR SELECTION OF SEARCH STRATEGIES
IN DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

W. Bruce Croft
Roger H. Thompson

Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Massachusetts,  01003

          A document retrieval system can incorporate many  types
of  flexibility.   One example of this is the ability to choose a
search  strategy  that is appropriate for a particular  user  and
query.  This paper investigates the use of adaptive mechanisms to
control  the selection of search  strategies.   The  experimental
results indicate that,  although an adaptive mechanism is capable
of learning the appropriate response in simple situations,  there
are serious problems with using them to make complex decisions in
a document retrieval system.

VECTOR SPACE MODEL OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL - A REEVALUATION

S.K.M. Wong
Vijay V. Raghavan
Department of Computer Science, University of Regina
Regina, Sask.  Canada, S4S 0A2

          In  this  paper  we,  in essence,  point out  that  the
methods used in the current vector based systems are in  conflict
with the premises of the vector space model.  The considerations,
naturally,  lead  to how things might have been done differently.
More importantly, it is felt that this investigation will lead to
a  clearer understanding of the issues and problems in using  the
vector space model in information retrieval.
RETRIEVAL  TEST  EVALUATION OF A RULE  BASED  AUTOMATIC  INDEXING
(AIR/PHYS)

N. Fuhr
G.E. Knorz
TH Darmstadt, Dept. of Computer Science, Darmstadt, Germany

          The   automatic  indexing  system  AIR/PHYS   and   its
evaluation  by  means of a retrieval test with 309  requests  and
15,000 documents is described.   First, the underlying conception
of  a rule based approach is given which is suited to the task of
a  controlled-vocabulary indexing of even large  subject  fields.
Preconditions,  performance and results of the retrieval test are
described,   including  first  results  of  retrieval  runs  with
weighted  automatic indexing.


DEVELOPMENT OF THE BDS ONLINE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

Zeng minzu
Beijing Document Service, P.O. Box 167, Beijing, China

          Beijing   Document   Service   (BDS)  is   a   new-type
information   service  providing  online  information   retrieval
service mainly in Beijing and other cities besides.   This  paper
presents the background,  goals, design considerations of the BDS
system  and what have been done in achieving the goal of  loading
the  NTIS  Bibliographic Data Base into the system and  providing
its  online service to the public.   System appraisal is  covered
and in light of problems experienced by BDS,  possible approaches
of   how  modernized  information  retrieval  systems  might   be
developed in China are also discussed.

A GLOBAL APPROACH TO RECORD CLUSTERING AND FILE REORGANIZATION

Edward Omiecinski
and Peter Schueurmann
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois  60201  USA

          We  present an integrated method for record  clustering
and  reorganization  which can be applied to any set  of  queries
whose frequencies of request are known.  The clustering algorithm
works by splitting and merging current clusters and, furthermore,
produces a new assignment of these clusters to pages in secondary
storage.  The reorganization algorithm is an on-line, incremental
procedure  for  allocating  the records  to  their  new  physical
locations such that the number of pages swapped in and out of the
memory buffer is as small as possbile.
.pa
A  DOCUMENT-DOCUMENT SIMILARITY MEASURE BASED ON CITED TITLES AND
PROBABILITY  THEORY,  AND ITS APPLICATION TO  RELEVANCE  FEEDBACK
RETRIEVAL

K.L. Kwok
Computer Science Department, Queens College, CUNY,
Flushing, NY  11367, USA.

          The  use of cited title terms of a scientific  document
for  automatic indexing is explored.   It offers a means of index
term  selection  as well as term relevance  weighting,  based  on
author-provided  relevance  information and Bayes Theorem  as  in
probabilistic retrieval.   The latter quantitative  consideration
leads  to  a new measure of document-document similarity  measure
which is shown to have importance both for initial search and  in
relevance  feedback retrieval,  by offering a choice of iterative
strategies.
     Extension  of  the  concept of cited title terms  to  citing
title  terms shows that these two approaches are compatible  with
the current two competing models of probability of relevance  for
document  retrieval (Robertson et al.  1982),  if a document  can
also  be  regarded as a query.   Their term usage  may  therefore
provide the necessary statistics for parameter estimation to test
both theories.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN AI AND IR

W.S. Cooper
School of Library and Information Studies
University of California
Berkeley, California  94720

     Information  retrieval,  in the broadest sense of the  term,
includes a conern with 'expert' or 'knowledge-based' systems  and
their   potential  future  successors.    It  is  unlikely   that
sophisticated systems of this sort can be developed in such a way
as to use an entire natural language without the assistance of an
advanced, unified theory of language and logic.  The need for and
probable character of such a theory are discussed.

.pa
KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS VERSUS THESAURUS: AN ARCHITECTURE PROBLEM
ABOUT EXPERT SYSTEMS DESIGN

Mr. B. Defude
Equipe Systemes intelligents de recherche d'information
Laboratoire Genie Informatique (IMAG)
BP 68 38402 St. Martin D'heres Cedex
FRANCE

The  use  of  expert systems (ES)  within  information  retrieval
systems  (IRS) seems to be an interesting way,  particularly  for
the query process.  Nevertheless we must examine what kowledge we
need.   We  think  that the thesaurus may be the kernel of  which
knowledge:  for this,  we must define it larger than in classical
IRS.
     After  some recalls about what may be the principal features
of  a  query  ES,  we  discuss  about  the  relationship  between
thesaurus and a query expert system.  The problem is to determine
if the thesaurus must be integrated within the knowledge base.
     In fact this choice is an architecture problem of the ES.
     We analyze,  in parallel,  the effects of this choice  about
thesaurus representtion, ES functionnalities, ES architecture.
     The  choice of an architecture depends on the goal searched:
i.e.  a general IR expert system able to handle a set of thesauri
(independent  thesaurus) or a specialized IR expert system  which
can  be  very  performant but strongly tied to  a  specific  area
(integrated thesaurus).


MARS:  A RETRIEVAL TOOL ON THE BASIS OF MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

G. Th. Niedermair
G. Thurmair
I. Buttel
Siemens AG, Zentrale Aufgaben Informationstechnik, Muenchen

          In this paper we present the system MARS which has been
designed  for  potential database users  working  with  retrieval
systems.   It is an instrument that is to assist the retriever in
specifying  the  search queries.   MARS is an aid for  increasing
term  precision as well as for finding previously  unknown  terms
which are morphologically related to user search terms.   This is
achieved   by   way  of  linguistic  procedures  as  opposed   to
conventional mechanical operations such as truncation  etc.   The
morpheme  lexicon and the morphological decomposition  procedures
are described briefly.   MARS was put to the test in a real-world
situation the results of which will be presented.
.pa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%MIT-OZ%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1985  09:37 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
     From: Brad Goodman <BGOODMAN at BBNG>

Tuesday, 17 December  2:00pm  Room: BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street,
                                    3rd floor large conference room

                      BBN Laboratories
                 Science Development Program
                       AI Seminars

 "Cognitive Aspects of Spoken and Written Language Production"
                 Professor Wallace Chafe
       Berkeley (currently at SUNY, Albany for the semester)


The talk will explore the consequences for language production of the
hypothesis that information in the mind may be in one of three states of
activation:  active, semi-active, and inactive.  The general nature of
these states will be described, with particular attention to
quantitative and temporal limitations on active information.  The
"intonation units" of spoken language will be seen as expressions of
information that is currently active for the speaker, and that is being
made active for the hearer at the same time.  The several types of
concepts that may be expressed within an intonation unit will be
described, and the varied activation histories of these concepts will be
seen as reflected in linguistic phenomena traditionally associated with
given and new information, subjects, and the like.  The interaction
between activation states and clauses, sentences, and paragraphs will
also be discussed, as will the hypothesis that a speaker can attend to
and verbalize only one previously inactive concept at a time.  The talk
will conclude with some observations on how these constraints are
modified in written language, which is produced and received under quite
different circumstances.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
1
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 86 11:56:32 est
-FROM-
From: fox@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Query on Text for Natural Language Processing Course
-BODY-
For a 1 semester course on Natural Language Processing, are there any
single texts, or pairs of texts, that people have found to work well?

One suggestion has been to use either
a) Simmons, Computations from the English   - or
b) Schank & Riesbeck, Inside Computer Understanding

and a general book like
Tennant, Natural Language Processing

Does that sound reasonable?  Any other suggestions?  Have I missed
some new book that would be ideal?  Thanks for your comments, Ed Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: James Peterson <peterson%mcc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 85 07:51:17 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Collins dictionary
-BODY-
Your recent note in IRList indicated

                              "we have spent months trying to decode the
  typesetting and cleaning things up and will give the final result back
  to the Archive for redistribution."


Can you tell us when the cleaned up version will be available, and is there
a "faster" way to get it than going thru the Archive.  I am thinking about
the postage and shipping delays in dealing with the UK mainly.

jim

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox@vtcs1.VT
-DATE-
Date:     Sun, 5 Jan 86 14:38 EST
-TO-
To:       peterson at mcc
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Collins
-BODY-
Jim - I appreciate your report earlier on your dictionary work and understand
your desire for haste.  Actually the processing time for us for Oxford
files has been very good - biggest delay is on this end getting check
in pounds and all the related paperwork.
   I have a student working on this and he should be finished by April
at which time we can send it to Oxford.  You can contact them to get
permission for me to send it directly to you if you like, but the
arrangement with them is to use it for research here so I can't
do otherwise without authorization.
  Regards, Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::"fraenkel@wisdom"@vtcs1.VT
-FROM-
From: Aviezri Fraenkel <fraenkel@wisdom>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 86 16:17:09 -0200
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Full text retrieval
-BODY-
    Remember the Blair & Maron CACM paper and your inquiry of me about our
tests of full text systems?
[Note: I was wondering about similar experiments to that described in
March 85 CACM. - Ed]
    I suppose you know of the Lexis and Nexis full text systems (70 billion
characters or so). Perhaps they ran some tests...
    Sorry for being so slow with this information.
    Best,  Aviezri Fraenkel
[Question: Does anyone know of results by these organizations or others to
share? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 86 17:41:12 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList archives, FTP, BITNET searching for ARPANET digests
-BODY-
There appears to be some confusion on IRList archives and on search access.
First, in Vol 1 Issue 12, 20 Sept., Christopher <schmidt@sumex-aim>
announced that anonymous FTP will give access to IRList archives in
[SUMEX-AIM.arpa]<BBOARD>IRLIST.TXT

Second, I keep archives here and will be happy to mail missing issues
on request.  Vol. 1 had issues 1-28.

Third, there are archives on BITNET.  In IRList V1 Issue 15 of 19 Oct
(sorry, but it was labeled Sep in hdr), Henry Nussbacher
<hjncu%cunyvm.bitnet@wiscm.arpa> announced that there is a Spires
database that can be searched by submitting queries, for several
ARPAnet digest including IRList.  If one sends a msg to
database%bitnic.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa (or wiscvm.wisc.edu if you can)
with 1st 3 lines as follows:
help
help arpanet
help design
you will get back 3 files explaining further.

In IRList issue 23, Werner Uhrig asked how to get back files since
his attempt to use the BITNET system did not succeed.  I don't know if
Henry and Werner have been in touch, but did send the 3 line msg and
received instructions, without a hitch, so I trust things do work.
Please let me know if there are any problems for questions.
Regards, Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date:    Fri, 3 Jan 86 10:07 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER 20  [edited extract - Ed]
-BODY-
                The Abstract SEARCH Program
         A 'Freeware' Information-Retrieval System

                     Gerald M. Santoro
                      December - 1985


 The Abstract  SEARCH Program is a simple information-retrieval
 system for  the IBM-PC microcomputer and close compatibles.  I
 developed SEARCH  last year  to  keep  track  of  articles  in
 microcomputer journals,  file drawer contents and the contents
 of ad-hoc notebooks.

 The operating  theory behind SEARCH is quite simple.  The user
 uses a file editor (one is provided with SEARCH) to create one
 or more  files containing  abstracts.   Each abstract contains
 text describing  the item  in question.  The text may be up to
 18 lines  long. In the case of a journal article this text may
 contain the  subject, author  and some  descriptive  keywords,
 along with a page reference.

 All abstracts  are grouped  under one-line  text strings which
 serve as  locators.   In the  case  of  journal  articles  the
 locator may  be the volume, date and issue of a given journal.
 Whever an  abstract is selected by SEARCH as meeting the users
 retrieval criteria,  its corresponding  locator line  is  also
 presented.   The locator  then provides  the necessary link to
 the actual article.

 To retrieve information, the user runs SEARCH and provides the
 program with  a search domain and a search object.  The search
 domain is the names of all files to be searched.  (SEARCH will
 accept up to 50 files)  The search object is a list of strings
 which define  the criteria to be met by the desired abstracts.
 The individual  strings must match exactly with strings in the
 abstracts, and  may be  related  by  Boolean  'AND'  and  'OR'
 operators.  (SEARCH will accept up to 10 strings in the search
 object)

 The output  generated by  SEARCH will contain the locators and
 abstracts for  all abstracts  in the  search domain which meet
 the criteria  established by  the search  object.  This output
 may be  directed to an attached printer or to a disk file.  If
 it is  directed to  a disk  file it is written in a form which
 allows it  to be  subsequently read  as an abstract file. This
 allows 'subset'  files to  be created  from 'master'  abstract
 files.

 SEARCH has  one major drawback: since it reads all of the text
 in all  of the  abstracts it  can be  rather slow.   For  that
 reason I built 3 operating modes into SEARCH.  The simplest is
 interactive mode.   In interactive mode SEARCH will display an
 abstract 'hit'  and wait for the user to indicate whether this
 abstract is  to be  saved to the output or ignored.  This mode
 may be useful for quick searches of small files.

 The second  operating mode  is batch  mode.  In batch mode the
 user specifies  the search  domain, search  object and  output
 destination.   SEARCH then  saves all  'hits'  to  the  output
 destination while  the user  does  something  supposedly  more
 constructive than watching the PC juggle bytes.

 The third  operating mode  is command file mode.  In this mode
 the user creates a file (using a file editor) which contains a
 number of search problems.  Each problem is a specification of
 search domain,  search object  and output  destination.   When
 SEARCH is  put into  this mode it will ask for the name of the
 command file.  It will then open this file and work on each of
 the problems  until  the  command  file  has  been  completely
 processed.

 To illustrate  the utility of this system, I will describe how
 it is used at the Microcomputer Information and Support Center
 at Penn  State.   Over the  past year we have created abstract
 files  containing  references  to  articles  in  a  number  of
 microcomputer-related journals.  We have also created abstract
 files containing  references to  vendor literature in physical
 filing cabinets.

 When a  client comes  in with  a consulting  need we  can  use
 SEARCH and  our abstract files to quickly access the technical
 information cross-referenced by the system.  For example, if a
 question arises  regarding ink-jet  printers we can run SEARCH
 and in  a few  minutes have  a list  of journal  articles  and
 vendor literature relating to ink-jet printers.

 Since our  master abstract files are organized by journal, and
 since  they  have  grown  rather  large,  a  command  file  is
 periodically run to create subset abstract files for printers,
 modems, displays  and various  types of  application software.
 This provides  for topic-oriented  domain files  at the  users
 discretion.

 Although SEARCH  is not  a general-purpose database management
 system, it  does have  some applicability  to simple  database
 problems.  I am aware of users maintaining databases of potato
 seedlings, criminal  sentencing reports  and private  business
 referrals under SEARCH.

 SEARCH is  distributed  as  a  'Freeware'  package.    I  have
 copyrighted the  system and  allow anyone  to copy, distribute
 and use  it as  long as  2 rules  are always observed: (1) the


 copyright notice shall not be removed from the software or the
 documentation, and  (2) the software and documentation may not
 be distributed  in modified  form  without  my  prior  written
 permission.

 I do  include the  BASIC source files for the program, in case
 any users  want to  make modifications.   However  I will  not
 provide programming  assistance to  those wishing to do so.  I
 also ask  for a  $10 donation  in case the user feels that the
 software is  worth it.  However, a donation is not required to
 use the program.

 Anyone wanting to obtain a copy of SEARCH should contact me by
 electronic mail or US Mail at the address below.

                                                       *******
 Gerry Santoro                                       ********  *
 Microcomputer Information & Support Center        ***********   *
 Penn State University                           ********   ***    *
 101 Computer Building                         **********   ***      *
 University Park, PA  16802                   ***************         *
 (814) 863-4356                               ************            *
                                              *********               *
 GMS @ PSUVM   (bitnet)                        *******   **          *
 santoro @ penn-state  (csnet)                   *****   **        *
 ...!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!gms   (uucp)             ****          *
 gms%psuvm.bitnet@wscvm.arpa    (arpa)               ***       *
                                                       *******

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Bob Keller <keller%utah-cs.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 86 20:33:58 MST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Symposium on Logic Programming
-BODY-
                                    '86 SLP
                                Call for Papers
                     Third Symposium on Logic Programming

                    Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society
                             September 21-25, 1986
                               Westin Hotel Utah
                              Salt Lake City, UT

The conference solicits papers  on all areas  of logic programming,  including,
but not confined to:

        Applications of logic programming
        Computer architectures for logic programming
	Databases and logic programming
	Logic programming and other language forms
        New language features
        Logic programming systems and implementation
        Parallel logic programming models
        Performance
        Theory

Please submit full papers, indicating accomplishments of substance and novelty,
and including appropriate citations of related work.  The suggested page  limit
is 25 double-spaced pages.  Send eight copies of your manuscript no later  than
15 March 1986 to:

                        Robert M. Keller
                        SLP '86 Program Chairperson
                        Department of Computer Science
                        University of Utah
                        Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Acceptances will be mailed by 30 April 1986.  Camera-ready copy will be due  by
30 June 1986.

Conference Chairperson                  Exhibits Chairperson
Gary Lindstrom, University of Utah      Ross Overbeek, Argonne National Lab.

Tutorials Chairperson                   Local Arrangements Chairperson
George Luger, University of New Mexico  Thomas C. Henderson, University of Utah

                          Program Committee

Francois Bancilhon, MCC                 William Kornfeld, Quintus Systems
John Conery, University of Oregon       Gary Lindstrom, University of Utah
Al Despain, U.C. Berkeley               George Luger, University of New Mexico
Herve Gallaire, ECRC, Munich            Rikio Onai, ICOT/NTT, Tokyo
Seif Haridi, SICS, Sweden		Ross Overbeek, Argonne National  Lab.
Lynette Hirschman, SDC, Paoli           Mark Stickel, SRI International
Peter Kogge, IBM, Owego			Sten Ake Tarnlund, Uppsala University

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
2
-DATE-
Date:    Thu, 16 Jan 86 14:40:23 GMT
-FROM-
From:    Bran Boguraev <bkb%computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: machine-readable dictionaries
Acknowledge-to:bkb@uk.ac.cam.cl
-BODY-
Hello,
Somewhat belatedly [post Xmas vac] I came across your message on the
IRList to Lynn Bates re machine-readable dictionaries. I have been working
with Longman's dictionary of contemporary English for about a year and a half
now, and feel that it is possibly the best of existing dictionaries in
machine-readable form. Among other nice features [like the limited, and
relatively small, set of basic defining words, together with guaranteed
non-circularity in the word sense definitions], it utilises a very elaborate
system of grammar codes, which defines idiosyncratic syntactic behaviour of
individual word senses; in addition the dictionary contains semantic tagging
[independent of, and in fact orthogonal to, the word sense definitions] and
subject coding. An awful lot of stuff [some of it only available on the tape],
potentially very useful to computational linguists and IR types [I am guessing
about the IR applications, which will bring me to the point of this message].
Incidentally, the grammar codes in the Longman dictionary are a rational
reconstruction / redesign / elaboration of the more rudimentary coding system
employed by OALDCE; also the typesetting tape is in a considerably cleaner and
more directly usable form than the OALDCE [we didn't have to do the massive
editing and proof-reading, for example, that Roger Mitton will have spent a
whole year on by the end of this spring].
I am working on a paper for a forthcoming workshop on "automating
the lexicon"; it will look at the relevance and use of dictionary entries
[from existing machine readable dictionaries] for computational linguistics
research.  I am planning to do a survey of how information available in
machine-readable form is used, directly or indirectly, to perform a variety of
tasks in different application environments - parsing within strict
grammatical frameworks, (robust) semantic interpretation, phrasal analysis,
information retrieval, and so forth...  I would also like to look at the ways
people use more or less "raw" dictionaries to build customised lexicons for
their particular application. I would be happy to post the paper, in a month's
or so time, if anyone out there is interested.
You mention in a different message to John Roach that you are working on
building a NL lexicon from Collins and OALDCE. I would greatly appreciate any
material - notes, comments, papers and/or drafts - which address or even touch
upon these and related issues. I would also appreciate some sort of indication
how the IR community uses, and would like to use, information obtained from
MRDs for IR research --- where / how can I get pointers to this?. You also
mention work by Evens, Ahlswede and others to parse the dictionary entries.
Could you point me at some references for this or put me in touch with them?
Here in Cambridge we have a set of programs to analyse word sense definitions
and extract their meaning in the form of small semantic networks; these are
subsequently used for building sort hierarchies and applied to various NL
[front end] applications.
I apologise for a long-winded request for information; I know very little
about IR work and have been following the IRList only for the last couple of
months. Please post all or subset(s) of this message to the list, if you think
anyone would be interested, or it will get a response. I have papers
describing our work with the Longman's tape here in more detail.
Thanks for your help,
Bran Boguraev
University of Cambridge
Computer Laboratory
Corn Exchange Street
Cambridge CB2 3QG
England
[Bran:  Thank you for your very humble message!  I would welcome
papers on your work, which I see relates well to a number of U.S.
activities.  To address some of your comments:
1) I have heard about the Longman's tapes but alas they rejected my
  request for permission to use a copy for research.
2) The Virginia Tech effort has just been written up for some
  conferences and will be described later this winter in some
  technical reports.  I can add you to distribution list if you like.
3) Some references follow.
Regards, Ed]
    ----- references that may be of interest -------
   %A Thomas Ahlswede
   %D 1981
   %T A Linguistic String Grammar for Adjective Definitions from Webster's
   Seventh Collegiate Dictionary
   %I Illinois Inst. of Tech.
   %R MS Thesis
   %C Chicago, IL
   %A T. Ahlswede
   %A M. Evens
   %D April 1983
   %T Generating a Relational Lexicon from a Machine-Readable Dictionary
   %J Proceedings SRI Workshop on Machine-Readable Dictionaries
   %C Menlo Park, CA
   %A Thomas Ahlswede
   %A Martha Evens
   %T A Lexicon for a Medical Expert System
   %J Proceedings Workshop on Relational Models of the Lexicon
   %C Stanford Univ.
   %D June 29, 1984
   %O To appear as chapter in book ed. by Martha Evens.
   %A Thomas E. Ahlswede
   %D July 1985
   %T A Tool Kit for Lexicon Building
   %P 268-276
   %J Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for
   Computational Linguistics
   %C Chicago, Illinois
   %A Robert Amsler
   %D 1980
   %T The Structure of the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary
   %R Dissertation
   %I Univ. of Texas at Austin
   %C Austin, TX
   %A Robert A. Amsler
   %T Machine-Readable Dictionaries
   %P 161-209
   %E Martha E. Williams
   %B Annual Review of Inf. Science and Tech. Volume 19
   %I Knowledge Industry Publications
   %D 1984
   %C White Plains, NY
   %A Martha W. Evens
   %A Raoul N. Smith
   %D 1978
   %T A Lexicon for a Computer Question-Answering System
   %J Amer. J. Comp. Ling.
   %V 4
   %N 83 (Microfiche)
   %A Martha W. Evens
   %A Bonnie E. Litowitz
   %A Judith A. Markowitz
   %A Raoul N. Smith
   %A Oswald Werner
   %T Lexical-semantic relations: a comparative survey
   %I Linguistic Research, Inc.
   %C Carbondale, Ill.
   %D 1980

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Stavros Macrakis <macrakis%harvard.harvard.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 86 13:17:33 EST
In-Reply-To: Ed Fox's message of Sun, 15 Dec 85 18:13 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Oxford Text Archive
-BODY-
Thanks again for the information on the Oxford Text Archive.  I just
received their information packet.  By the way, you might want to
mention to others that their net address from Arpanet is
	Archive%uk.ac.ox.vax3@ucl-cs.arpa
			     @cs.ucl.ac.uk

	-s

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: WALLFESH%UCONNVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1986  09:19:34 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  Text for NLP course
-BODY-
"Strategies for Natural Language Processing", by Wendy Lenhert,
might be an ideal text.  I think its published by LEA.

Last sping, the grad NLP course here used "In-Depth Understanding"
by Michael Dyer and "Dynamic Memory" by Roger Schank.  The course
was directed toward students with some NLP background.  This spring,
"Inside Computer Understanding", and possibly another book, will be
used.  I'm not sure whether the focus of the course has changed.

Sande Wallfesh

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Robert B. Allen at petrus.UUCP" <rba@petrus>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 86 15:08:37 est
-BODY-
The January, 1986 issue of the ACM Transactions on Office
Information Systems has several papers which may be of interest
to readers of irlist:

R.H. Trigg and M. Weiser
	TEXTNET: A Network-Based Approach to Text Handling
W.P. Jones and S.T. Dumais
	Spatial and Symbolic Filing
J. Donahue and J. Widom
	Whiteboards: A Graphical Database Tool
S. Hudson and R. King
	A System for Constructing Semantically Knowledgeable Editors
P. Martin and D. Tsichritzis
	Complete Logical Routings in Computer Mail Systems

I also have the pleasure of announcing that Bruce Croft has joined
the Editorial Board.

Bob Allen

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 86 15:58:13 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: North-Holland 1985/6 Catalog - some entries of interest
-BODY-
%E Rickheit, G.
%E Strohner, H.
%T Inferences in Text Processing (Advances in Psychology, 29)
%D 1985
%Z This volume critically evaluates the present state of research in the
domain of inferences in text processing and indicates new areas of research.
   The books is structured around the following theoretical aspects:
 ... representational
 ... procedural
 ... contextual

%E Le Ny, J.-F.
%E Kintsch, W.
%T Language and Comprehension
%D 1982
%Z The study of language comprehension and production has become the
focus of much recent work in psychology.  This book presents and overview
of current developments in this area. ... cognitive (lexical, conceptual,
imaged) structures, importance attached to syntactic versus semantic
processing, emphasis on reading activity or on pragmatics, modelization and
simulation ...

%E Flammer, A.
%E Kintsch, W.
%T Discourse Processing (Advances in Psychology, 8)
%D 1982
%Z ... 46 selected and edited contributions from the Intl Symp, held in
Fribourg in 1981, and represents a truly international overview of the
developments in research on written and oral discourse.
  The main themes are: text structure, coherence, inference, memory processes,
attention and control, goal perspectives, and educational implications

%E Bara, B.G.
%E Guida, G.
%T Computational Models of Natural Language Processing (Fundamental
    Studies in Computer Science, 9)
%D 1984
%Z ... illustration of models for natural language processing, and the
discussion of their role in the development of computational studies o
language.  ... intended for scholars acquainted with natural language
research, but not necessarily specialists in all the disciplines included
in the area of natural language processing

%E Charniak, E.
%E Wilks, Y.
%T Computational Semantics (Fund. Studies in Comp. Sci., 4)
%D 1976
%Z ... frank discussion of the fundamental disputes  ... by a number of
expersts
 ... alternative approaches to computational semantics ... links ... to
discussions in linguistics, philosophy, and psycholinguistics

%E Dahl, V.
%E Saint-Dizier, P.
%T Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming
%D 1985
%Z ... most recent developments in computational linguistics as viewed from
a logic programming standpoint.
   ... Topics covered include formal representations of natural language,
(logic) grammar formalisms, methods for analysis, specific linguistic problems
such as coordination, and questions such as the convenience of programming
in natural language.

 ******************************and many others************************

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
3
-FROM-
From: Werner Uhrig <CMP.WERNER%r20.utexas.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Tue 14 Jan 86 16:30:12-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: RE: IRLIST 2-1
-BODY-
Ed,

RE: CRTNET NEWS 20: The Abstract SEARCH Program

	I never heard of CRTNET NEWS and wonder if you could add any
	additional information about it (either to me or to IRLIST for
	the enlightenment of all).

RE: BITNET searching for ARPANET digests

	yes, I've been in touch with Henry, and it seems that my several
	attempts found Murphy at work, so that all failed.  But after
	Henry got in touch with me, all worked great ever since.  Murphy
	always manages to make people feel foolish ...

Cheers,		---Werner

[Note:  Regarding BITNET searching, I am glad all is now straightened
out.  Regarding CRTNET, following is info that will get you started. - Ed]
    -------- info on CRTNET extracted from recent issue --------

From: Tom Benson 814-238-5277 <T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY>

 -- A NEWSLETTER OF THE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND THEORY NETWORK --

  Send articles for the next issue of CRTNET NEWSLETTER to:

   Tom Benson
   Penn State University
   227 Sparks Bldg., University Park, PA 16802
   814-238-5277 (ATT)

     {akgua,allegra,ihnp4,cbosgd}!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!t3b   (UUCP)

     T3B@PSUVM    (BITNET)


Subscriptions to CRTNET NEWSLETTER are free, and you are encouraged
to inform students, faculty, and others of its availability. We welcome
articles, correspondence, queries, and announcements having to do with
human communication -- subject matter is not limited to computers.

Back issues of the newsletter are available from LFCNET AT ICNUCEVM
(Pisa University).  For assistance, type TELL LFCNET AT ICNUCEVM /HELP
if you are at a Bitnet node that allows interactive messaging.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Geri Pinkham <geri%gvax.cs.cornell.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 86 09:18:44 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Smart Collections
-CC-
Cc: gs%gvax.cs.cornell.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
[Note: in an outside discussion, it was noted that Cornell has several
test collections which I used and have copies of here:
   ADI - 82 documents, 35 queries, from Amer. Doc. Inst. papers
   CACM - 3204 documents, 52 queries, from CACM 1958-79
   MEDLARS - 1033 documents, 30 queries, from Cornell study reported by 1971
   ISI - 1460 documents, 76 queries, built at Cornell based on list
      provided by ISI of highly cited information science books/articles
I will be happy to distribute copies if so requested, as will Cornell.
Note following excerpt from message by G. Salton through his secretary. - Ed]

 ...

In addition to the 5 collections you used, we have two more available:

   1.  Cranfield  1398 documents, 225 queries
   2.  NPL       11429 documents,  93 queries

The latter is available only in indexed form and not in the original
natural language.  We are glad to make these 2 collections available also
to anyone who wants them.
                         Regards,  Gerry Salton

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 86 16:06:28 est
-BODY-
ACM NEWS - January 2, 1986
     ACM OFFERS SPRING SERIES OF TUTORIALS FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The ACM will sponsor a full week of Tutorials for Professional
Development, May 5-9, 1986 in Palo Alton, CA.  The program, to be held
at Hyatt Rickeys Hotel, will feature a 3-track series of all-day
seminars on 1) Logic and Expert Systems, 2) Software Engineering, and
3) Computer Graphics.

The Logic and Expert Systems Track provides seminars on Issues in
Expert Systems, Prolog and Parallel Execution Models for Prolog,
Knowledge-Based Software Environments and Expert Systems in Health
Care.  ...

A complete program announcement giving course outlines, registration
fees and hotel information is available from Gerry Segal, Educational
Manager, ACM, 11 West 42nd Street, NY, NY 10036. (212) 869-7440

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 86 16:16:25 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACM request for recommendations for accreditation visitors
-BODY-
The following is an excerpt of request to appear in ACM SIG newsletters:

RECOMMMENDATIONS FOR VISITORS FOR THE COMPUTING SCIENCE ACCREDITATION COMMITTEE

The Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) has completed its first year
of evaluating Computer Science Programs in schools for the 1985-6 Academic
year.  Over 30 campuses were visited this year with an anticipated increase
in applications for the second round 1986-7 Academic year.  In order to
maintain this effort the board will continue to need the support of the recog-
nized leaders in the computer profession to nominate colleagues to act on
a team of visitors to schools requesting computer science accreditation.

Campus visiting teams are made up of a Team Chair and two visitors. ...

It is important that each visitor be an experienced computer professional with
recognized stature in the computer area.  The CSAB board would like help in
identifying senior people in Computing who would assist as team members.
Please forward your suggestion to: Dr. John Dalphin, VPAA, Norwich Univ.,
Northfield VT 05663

The board is aiming for a balance of people from industry, government and
academia. ...

Each person nominated will receive a packet ... with an invitation to submit
their name ... Visitors will be selected from among those persons nominated
and willing to serve.  [... visitors inst. should pay for travel to 1 day
training course but visit costs are covered]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: DEKEN%nsf@csnet-relay.arpa
-DATE-
Date: Tue 14 Jan 86 09:11:26-CST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NSF Award List
-BODY-
..........................
                     National Science Foundation
                     Information Science Program
                        1800 G St. NW, Rm. 336
                       Washington, D.C.  20550

                        Joseph Deken, Director
                          CSNET: deken@nsf
                          BITNET:deken@nsfvax

                          AWARDS for FY '85
                  (list ordered by expiration date)
This is an informal listing.  The official printed list of awards
may be obtained by writing to the Program at the above address.

	    ------------------------------------------------------------
Prop No Principal Investigator Name   AWARD-TITLE AWARD-TITLE-2
AWARD-TITLE-3 EFFECT-DT EXPIRE-DT NAME
	    ------------------------------------------------------------
8501161 Bookstein Abraham Travel to the International Conference on Computer
Assisted Information Retrieval, Grenoble, France: March 18-20, 1985
(Information Science) 85/02/15 85/08/31 University of Chicago

8512693 Peters Stanley Workshop on Information and Representation; Washington,
DC; Spring 1985 85/04/15 85/09/30 Stanford University

8500502 Petry Frederick E International Group Travel to the First
International Fuzzy Systems Association Congress: Palma de Mallorca, Spain
July 4-6, 1985 (Information Science) 85/06/15 85/11/30 Tulane University

8444246 Soloway Elliot M Mappings Between Programmers' Conceptualizations and
Programming Language Constructs (Computer Science and Information Science)
83/06/01 85/11/30 Yale University

8413837 Brodie Michael L Research Directions Workshop on Large Scale Knowledge
Base and Reasoning Systems, February 25-27, 1985 84/12/15 85/12/31 Computer
Corporation of America

8541467 Herrnstein Richard J A Comparative Approach to Natural and Artificial
Visual Information Processing (Information Science) 84/08/15 86/01/31 Harvard
University

8505593 Malecki Gerald S Committee on Human Factors 84/03/01 86/02/28 Naval
Weapons Center Office of Naval Research

8420941 Miller Les Investigations into Parallel File Organizations
(Information Science) 85/02/01 86/04/30 Iowa State University of Science &
Technology

8540763 Samet Hanan Hierarchical Data Structures For Image Processing
(Computer Research) 83/09/01 86/06/30 University of Maryland College Park

8541596 Fredkin Edward Information-Preserving Dynamics (Information Science)
83/02/01 86/07/31 Massachusetts Institute of Tech

8445264 Katzer Jeffrey Impact of Anaphoric Resolution in Information Retrieval
(Information Science) 84/02/01 86/07/31 Syracuse University

8511588 Buchanan Bruce G Information Structure and Use in Knowledge-Based
Expert Systems (Information Science) 84/03/15 86/08/31 Stanford University

8505411 Saracevic Tefko Cognitive Aspects of Information Seeking and
Retrieving (Information Science) 85/09/01 86/08/31 Case Western Reserve
University

8544150 Traub Joseph F Information and Complexity (Computer Research and
Information Science) 83/03/01 86/08/31 Columbia University

8519255 Adelson Beth IPA Mobility Assignment 86/08/15 86/09/14 Yale University

8541215 Anderson James A Cognitive Applications of Matrix Memory Models
83/04/01 86/09/30 Brown University

8543633 Zadeh Lotfi A Management of Uncertainty in Expert Systems (Information
Science) 84/04/01 86/09/30 University of California Berkeley

8542811 Kashyap Rangasami L Research on Inference Procedures With Uncertainty
(Information Science) 84/05/01 86/10/31 Purdue University

8543520 Richards Whitman A Natural Computation: A Computational Approach to
Visual Information Processing (Information Science and Computer Research)
84/05/01 86/10/31 Massachusetts Institute of Tech

8544192 Pearl Judea Studies in The Organization of Information Structures
(Information Science) 84/06/15 86/11/30 University of California Los Angeles

8421162 Seth Sharad C Decoding Substitution Ciphers Using a Spelling
Dictionary with an Application to Unsupervised Character Classification
(Computer Research & Information Science) 85/06/15 86/11/30 University of
Nebraska Lincoln

8542431 Bezdek James C Information Retrieval from Normal Mixtures (Information
Science) 84/07/01 86/12/31 University of South Carolina at Columbia

8544193 Cohen Paul R Heuristic Reasoning about Uncertainty: An Artificial
Intelligence Approach (Information Science) 84/07/15 86/12/31 University of
Massachusetts Amherst

8544191 Klir George J Possibilistic Information: Theory and Applicability
(Information Science) 84/07/01 86/12/31 SUNY at Binghamton

8544248 Lehnert Wendy G Presidential Young Investigator Award (Information
Science) 84/07/01 86/12/31 University of Massachusetts Amherst

8544920 Lehnert Wendy G Presidential Young Investigator Award (Information
Science) 84/07/01 86/12/31 University of Massachusetts Amherst

8418164 Luce R.Duncan A Theory of Informational Structure (Information
Science) 85/07/01 86/12/31 Harvard University

8544188 Luce R.Duncan Fundamental Information Issues in the Theory of
Measurement (Information Science) 83/06/15 86/12/31 Harvard University

8544247 Maier David Presidential Young Investigator Award (Information
Science) 84/05/01 86/12/31 Oregon Graduate Center

8451438 McKeown Kathleen R Presidential Young Investigator Award (Information
Science) 85/07/01 86/12/31 Columbia University

8543551 Nowakowska Maria Dynamic Theory of Expertise: Multimodel Approach
(Information Science) 84/07/15 86/12/31 Iona College

8543297 Rozenshstein David Towards a Flexible User Interface to Relational
Database Systems (Information Science) 84/07/01 86/12/31 Rutgers University

8542873 Tucker Allen B Knowledge-Based Multilingual Machine Translation
84/07/01 86/12/31 Colgate University

8418863 Yu Po-Lung Habitual Domain Analysis for Effective Information
Interface and Decision Support (Information Science) 85/07/15 86/12/31
University of Kansas Main Campus

8504191 Austing Richard H Group Travel for U.S. Participants in the 1986
Congress of the International Federation for Information Processing, September
1-5, 1986, Dublin, Ireland 85/08/01 87/01/31 Amer Federation of Info Process
Soc Inc

8500615 Conant Roger C Heuristic Methods in Dependency and Reconstructability
Analysis (Information Science) 85/08/15 87/01/31 University of Illinois
Chicago

8544190 DeJong Gerald F Explanatory Schema Acquisition (Information Science)
84/08/01 87/01/31 University of Illinois at Urbana

8511606 Herrnstein Richard J A Comparative Approach to Natural and Artificial
Visual Information Processing (Information Science) 85/08/15 87/01/31 Harvard
University

8543612 Ligomenides Panos A Knowledge Representation and Measures for
Relational Experiential Data Base (Information Science) 84/08/01 87/01/31
University of Maryland College Park

8544189 Salton Gerard Advance Models for Information Retrieval (Information
Science) 84/02/01 87/01/31 Cornell University - Endowed

8503841 Yager Ronald R Specificity Measures of Information in Possibility
Distri- butions (Information Science) 85/08/15 87/01/31 Iona College

8544154 Minker Jack Artificial Intelligence, Parallel Logic Programming, and
Deductive Databases (Computer Research) 83/09/01 87/02/28 University of
Maryland College Park

8510999 Porter Bruce W Using and Revising Learned Concept Models (Information
Science) 85/09/01 87/02/28 Univ of Texas at Austin

8451430 Reggia James A Presidential Young Investigator Award: Abductive
Inference Models in Artificial Intelligence (Information Science) 85/07/01
87/02/28 University of Maryland College Park

8543519 Weischedel Ralph M User Goals As a Basis For an Intelligent
Information System's Ability to Understand Ill-Formed Input (Information
Science) 84/09/15 87/02/28 Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc

8544493 Kandel Abraham Analysis and Modeling of Imprecise Information in
Uncertain Environments (Information Science) 84/10/01 87/03/31 Florida State
University

8411688 McAllister Marialuisa Fuzzy Graphs: Theory and Applications
(Information Science) 84/10/15 87/03/31 Moravian College

8413050 Ralescu Dan A Statistical Analysis of Imprecise Information
(Information Science) 84/10/15 87/03/31 University of Cincinnati

8412406 Robinson Vincent Specification of Natural Language Concepts For
Spatial Information Retrieval (Information Science) 84/10/15 87/03/31 CNYU
Hunter College

8408551 Salveter Sharon C Transportable Natural Language Database Update
(Information Science) 84/10/15 87/03/31 Boston University

8418853 Durso Francis T An Investigation of Lexical Structures (Information
Science) 85/05/15 87/04/30 University of Oklahoma Norman Campus

8412791 Ullman Jeffrey D Implementation of Logical Query Languages For
Databases (Information Science) 84/11/01 87/04/30 Stanford University

8445151 Miller Don W Application of the Knowledge Based System Approach to
Operational Problems of Engineering Systems 84/07/15 87/06/30 Ohio State
University

8540101 Parsons Charles D The Structure of Information in Science: Fact
Formulas and Discussion Structures in Related Subsciences (Information
Science) 83/11/01 87/06/30 Columbia University

8418862 Robertson Scott P Errors, Explanation, and Plan Modification in
Cognitive Skill Learning (Information Science) 85/01/15 87/06/30 The Catholic
University of America

8541597 Sager Naomi Language as a Database Structure (Information Science)
84/03/01 87/08/31 New York University

8543327 Kolodner Janet L Extracting Information From Experience:
Experience-Driven Incremental Learning (Information Science) 84/06/15 87/11/30
Georgia Institute of Technolgy Main Campus

8508406 Omiecinski Edward R Incremental File Recorganization Schemes
(Information Science) 85/08/15 88/01/31 North Dakota State University Main
Campus

8505019 Soloway Elliot M The Cognitive Processes Underlying Design
(Information Science) 85/08/15 88/01/31 Yale University

8511538 Vianu Victor Dynamic Aspects of Databases (Information Science)
85/08/01 88/01/31 University of California San Diego

8511542 DeJong Gerald F A Computer Model of Learning Classical Mechanics
(Informa- tion Science) 85/09/01 88/02/29 University of Illinois at Urbana

8510894 Derry Sharon J Training Arithmetic Problem-Solving Skills: A Prototype
Model Utilizing Intelligent CAI (Information Science) 85/09/01 88/02/29
Florida State University

8510069 Evens Martha W Automatic Construction of Lexicons with Relational
Primitives (Information Science and Computer Research) 85/09/01 88/02/29
Illinois Institute of Technology

8511167 Lansky Amy L Behavioral Planning for Multiagent Domains (Information
Science) 85/09/15 88/02/29 SRI International

8509180 Nemes Richard M Modular Verification of Strong Correctness of
Communicating Sequential Processes (Information Science) 85/09/01 88/02/29
Rutgers University

8504713 Rapaport William J Logical Foundations for Belief Representation
(Information Science) 85/09/01 88/02/29 State University of New York System
Office

8511170 Stepp Robert E Discovering Underlying Concepts in Data Through
Conceptual Clustering (Information Science) 85/09/01 88/02/29 University of
Illinois at Urbana

8418860 Falmagne Jean-Claude Assessment and Measurement of Knowledge - Theory
and Algorithms (Information Science) 85/05/15 88/04/30 New York University

8511176 Beeson Michael J Advances in Computer-Assisted Instruction
(Information Science) 85/08/01 89/01/31 San Jose State University

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
4
-FROM-
From: Don Saklad <dws%mit-eddie.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 86 11:51:48 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: library services and systems
-BODY-
Forming a library systems interest group, meeting by the revolving door
at the Copley Square Boston Public Library, Sundays, 1:30 pm.

The purpose of this activity is to organize a group for persons interested
in library services and systems.  Library users as well as those merely
interested are encouraged to contact Boston library users, tel. 617-661-9650
or 617-876-2789.

Don Saklad
2 Linwood Place
Cambridge, MA 02139
dws@eddie

>----------------------------
-END-
>From fox Wed Jan 29 17:11:43 1986
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 86 17:11:41 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Job Opening at Columbia University
-BODY-
There is a full time position that would be especially appropriate
for someone interested in information retrieval at Columbia.  The
opening is in the Library School, and there may be possibility of
joint appointment or work with the Computer Science Department.

For more information contact
   Dean Robert Wedgeworth
   School of Library Science
   Columbia University
   NY, NY 10027

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 86 14:21:41 est
-FROM-
From: vtvax5::foxea@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Preview of next SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
[Here is a sneak preview of the upcoming issue.  If you or a colleague are
not yet members of ACM SIGIR, the current YEARLY fee is only $6! - Ed]


Table of Contents for ACM SIGIR Forum Winter 1986 Vol. 19 Issues 1-4
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Report on SIGIR Business Meeting
>From the Forum Editor
>From the Book Review Editor
Procedures for the SIGIR Award
>From the Headquarters --
      Extended Terms for SIG Officers
      Recommendations for the Visitors for the CS Accreditation Comm.
SIGIR/SIGDOC Workshop --
      Writing to be searched: A Workshop on Document Creation Principles
Information Retrieval Research at the National Library of Medicine
Short Communication --
     Which Way for a Classification Scheme for Computers and Medicine
Book Review --
     Database: A Primer, by C.J. Date
Abstracts of Articles in IR Area
     Selected from Recent Issues of Journals
     Selected from SIGIR-84 Conference at Cambridge
     Selected from 1983 Issues of Journals
NSF Funding for Participants to SIGIR-86 Conference in Pisa, Italy
Merger of Information Technology and Information Processing and Mgmt.
Call for Papers
     INFOR SID-86
     49th Annual Meeting of ASIS
     43rd FID Conference and Congress
Canadian Journal of Information Science

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 86 14:21:41 est
-FROM-
From: vtvax5::foxea@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Presentation Abstracts of Interest
-BODY-
Extracts from CSLI Newsletter - Dec. 5, 1985 -- Vol. 3, No. 4



A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing - by Carolyn R. Miller

    This paper is typical of a number  of recent articles by sociologists,
rhetoricians, and humanistically-trained writing specialists, that insist
that scientific writing is no less rhetorical in its means and effects than
is writing of an explicitly belletristic sort.  Whether or not we find their
arguments compelling, these articles raise interesting questions for
producers and consumers of technical prose, especially in intellectually
self-conscious disciplines like philosophy, AI, and linguistics.  For
example: What is the common understanding of the research enterprise
that underlies the linguistic conventions characteristic of scientific
prose, such as the avoidance of "I" and the unusual uses of "we," the
frequent use of impersonal constructions, the numbering of paragraphs,
and so on?  Can we apply the apparatus of traditional rhetoric to the
evaluation of the expository usefulness of particular formal languages and
notational conventions?  Is there grounds for distinguishing between a
"rhetoric of information," concerned with the selection and arrangement of
factual observations, and a "rhetoric of description," concerned with the
linguistic means used to report such observations?




Spatial Parsing for Visual Languages -- Fred Lakin

    Graphics are very important in human/computer interaction.  To
participate effectively in this kind of interaction, computers must be able
to understand how humans use graphics to communicate.  When a person
employs a text and graphic object in communication, that object has
meaning under a system of interpretation, or "visual language."  A first
step toward computer understanding of the visual communication objects
used by computers is computer parsing of such objects, recovering their
underlying syntactic structure.  The research described in this paper
combines computer graphics, symbolic computation and textual linguistics
to accomplish "spatial parsing" for visual languages.

    Parsing has been investigated in four visual languages: VennLISP (a
visual programming language based on LISP), VIC (a visual communication
system for aphasics), FSA (finite state automaton) diagrams, and SIBTRAN
(graphic devices for organizing textual sentence fragments).  A parser has
been written which can recover the structure for graphic communication
objects in the different visual languages.  In addition, interactive visual
communication assistants utilize modules from the parser to actively
assist humans using two of the visual languages.

>----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Hewitt%mit-mc.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Postponement in OIS-86 paper submission deadline
-TO-
To: AIList-Request%sri-ai.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
ReSent-date: Wed 22 Jan 86 13:03:53-PST
ReSent-From: Ken Laws <Laws%sri-ai.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
ReSent-To: IRList%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-BODY-
Because of the delay in the distribution of the call for papers for OIS-86 in
the Newsletter, we have decided to postpone the deadline for paper submission
from February 1 to March 1, 1986 in order to satisfy the requirements for
broad distribution of the call.

Enclosed please find the updated call for papers which reflects this change:

*******************       C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S
*                 * ----------------------------------------------
*                 *          Third ACM Conference On
*                 *        OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
*     OIS-86      *
*                 *            October 6-8, 1986
*                 *           Biltmore Plaza Hotel
*                 *              Providence, RI
******************* -------------------------------------------------


General Chair:  Carl Hewitt,          Topics appropriate for this
                MIT                   conference include (but are not
                                      restricted to) the following as they
Program Chair:  Stanley Zdonik,       relate to OIS:
                Brown University
                                         Technologies including Display, Voice,
Treasurer:  Gerald Barber,               Telecommunications, Print, etc.
            Gold Hill Computers
                                         Human Interfaces
Local Arrangements: Andrea Skarra,
                    Brown University     Deployment and Evaluation

An interdisciplinary conference on       System Design and Construction
issues relating to office
information systems (OIS) sponsored      Goals and Values
by ACM/SIGOIS in cooperation with
Brown University and the MIT             Distributed Services and Applications
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Submissions from the following           Knowledge Bases and Reasoning
fields are solicited:
                                         Distributed Services and Applications
   Anthropology
   Artificial Intelligence               Indicators and Models
   Cognitive Science
   Computer Science                      Needs and Organizational Factors
   Economics
   Management Science                    Impact of Computer Integrated
   Psychology                            Manufacturing
   Sociology

The program committee includes:

Bob Allen                       Ray Panko
   Bellcore                         University of Hawaii
Guiseppe Attardi                Robert Rosin
   University of Pisa               Syntrex
James Bair                      Erik Sandewall
   Hewlett Packard                  Linkoping University
Gerald Barber                   Walt Scacci
   Gold Hill Computers              USC
Peter de Jong                   Andrea Skarra
   MIT                              Brown University
Irene Greif                     Susan Leigh Star
   MIT                              Tremont Research Institute
Sidney Harris                   Luc Steels
   Georgia State University         University of Brussels
Carl Hewitt                     Sigfried Treu
   MIT                              University of Pittsburgh
Heinz Klein                     Dionysis Tsichritzis
   SUNY                             University of Geneva
Fred Lochovsky                  Eleanor Wynn
   University of Toronto            Brandon Interscience
Fanya Montalvo                  Aki Yonezawa
   MIT                              Tokyo Institute of Technology
Naja Naffah                     Stanley Zdonik
   Bull Transac                    Brown University
Margrethe Olson
   NYU

Professor J.C.R. Licklider of MIT will be the keynote speaker.

Unpublished papers of up to 5000 words (20 double-spaced pages) are
sought.  The first page of each paper must include the following
information: title, the author's name, affiliations, complete mailing
address, telephone number and electronic mail address where
applicable, a maximum 150-word abstract of the paper, and up to five
keywords (important for the correct classification of the paper).  If
there are multiple authors, please indicate who will present the paper
at OIS-86 if the paper is accepted.  Proceeedings will be distributed
at the conference and will later be available from ACM.  Selected
papers will be published in the ACM Transactions on Office Information
Systems.

Please send eight (8) copies of the paper (which must arrive by March
1, 1986) to:

       Prof. Stan Zdonik
       OIS-86 Program Chair
       Computer Science Department
       Brown University
       P.O. Box 1910
       Providence, RI  02912

DIRECT INQUIRIES TO:   Margaret H. Franchi (401) 863-1839.


                            IMPORTANT DATES
     Deadline for Paper Submission (postponed 1 mo.)  March 1, 1986
     Notification of Acceptance:                      April 30, 1986
     Deadline for Final Camera-Ready Copy:            July 1, 1986
     Conference Dates:                                October 6-8, 1986


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
5
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 86 14:21:41 est
-FROM-
From: vtvax5::foxea@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: AAP Author's Guide Available
-BODY-
[Extract from Newsletter of:
 Electronic Manuscript Project -- January 7, 1986 (202) 232-3335 -- Ed]

AAP through its Electronic Manuscript Project has been developing a
Standard for the preparation, markup and exchange of electronic
manuscripts since 1983. ...  The project results are now ready for
distribution.  ...  An Author's Guide and other reference documents will be
announced during the next few months.

The Standard is the technical reference manual.   ...   is an application of a
draft international standard known as the Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML).  The AAP Standard applies to the descriptive markup of
the type of materials AAP members publish.

This first document provides information for:
   Technical specialists ... implementing the AAP Standard ...
    Developers and vendors of SGML processing tools.

...  shipment in February 1986  ... single copy is $100 ...

[Note:  form describing price options, copies of AAP Standard are available
from Carol Risher, AAP, 2005 Mass. Ave., NW, Washington DC 20036 - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 86 20:36:45 est
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 19:21:25 cst
-SUBJECT-
Subject: submission to IR list [Part 1 of retrieval abstracts - Ed]
-BODY-
.op
.pl75                                             blurbs2.vr

                            ABSTRACTS
(Chosen  by  V.  Raghavan from recent issues of journals  in  the
retrieval area)


1.   REQUIREMENTS  FOR  QUERY EVALUATION IN WEIGHTED  INFORMATION
     RETRIEVAL

     Martin Bartschi
     Department   for   Scientific   and   Engineering   Computer
     Applications
     BBC Brown Boveri & Company, Limited
     CH-5401  Baden, Switzerland

          In  this article,  a general mathematical framework for
     information  retrieval  models  is  presented,  giving  more
     insight  into the evaluation mechanisms that may be used  in
     IR.    In  this  framework  a  number  of  requirements  for
     operators  improving recall and precision are  investigated.
     It  is  shown that these requirements can  be  satisfied  by
     using  descriptor weights and one combination operator only.
     Moreover,  information  items and queries - virtual items  -
     can be treated in exactly the same way, reflecting the fact,
     that  they  both are descriptions of a number  of  concepts.
     Evaluation   is   performed   by   formulating    similarity
     homomorphisms  from  query descriptions to retrieval  status
     values  that  allow ranking  items  accordingly.   For  good
     comparisons,  however,  ranking must be done by the achieved
     proportion  of  perfect similarity rather than  by  similary
     itself.   In  term independence models,  this  normalization
     process may satisfy the homomorphism requirement  of algebra
     under certain conditions, but it contradicts the requirement
     in  the term dependence case.   Nevertheless,  by  demanding
     separability  for  the unnormalized part of  the  evaluation
     measure, it can be guaranteed that the query is evaluated to
     each  item descriptor by descriptor,  and the  normalization
     value  must  be  calculated only once for the  whole  query,
     using the query as a whole.   Also,  for each real item, the
     normalization  value  must have been calculated  only  once,
     using the item as a whole.

     INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol 21, No. 4, pp. 291-
     303, 1985)

2.   A  METHOD OF MEASURING INFORMATION IN LANGUAGE,  APPLIED  TO
     MEDICAL TEXTS

     Daniel B. Gordon and Naomi Sager
     Linguistic String Project
     New York University
     251 Mercer Street
     New York, NY 10012
          In this study, quantitative measures of the information
     content  of textual material have been developed based  upon
     analysis of the linguistic structure of the sentences in the
     text.   It  has ben possible to measure such properties  as:
     (1)  the amount of information contributed by a sentence  to
     the discourse;  (2) the complexity of the information within
     the  sentence,  including the overall logical structure  and
     the  contributions  of local modifiers;  (3) the density  of
     information  based on the ratio of the number of words in  a
     sentence   to   the   number   of   information-contributing
     operators.
          Two contrasting types of texts were used to develop the
     measures.   The  measures were then applied  to  contrasting
     sentences within one type of text.  The textual material was
     drawn  from  narrative patient records and from the  medical
     research  literature.    Sentences  from  the  records  were
     analyzed  by  computer and those from  the  literature  were
     analyzed manually,  using the same methods of analysis.  The
     results  show  that quantitative measures or  properties  of
     textual  information  can  be developed  which  accord  with
     intuitively   perceived  differences  in  the  informational
     complexity of the material.

     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  21, No. 4., pp.
     269-289, 1985)

3.   A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MULTIPLE ATTRIBUTE TREE AND  INVERTED
     FILE STRUCTURES FOR LARGE BIBLIOGRAPHIC FILES

     S. V. Nageswara Rao and S. Sitharama Iyengar
     Department of Computer Science
     Coates Hall,
     Louisiana State University,
     Baton Rouge, LA 70803, U.S.A.

     C. E. Veni Madhavan
     School of Automation,
     Indian Institute of Science,
     Bangalore - 560012, India

          A  variety  of data structures such as  inverted  file,
     mulit-lists,  quad tree, k-d tree, range tree, polygon tree,
     quintary tree,  multidimensional tries, segment tree, doubly
     chained  tree,  the grid file,  d-fold tree,  super  B-tree.
     Multiple  Attribute Tree (MAT),  etc.  have been studied for
     multidimensional searching and related  problems.   Physical
     data base organization, which is an important application of
     multi-dimensional  searching,  is  traditionally and  mostly
     handled by employing inverted file.  This study proposes MAT
     data   structure   for  bibliographic   file   systems,   by
     ilustrating  the  superiority  of MAT  data  structure  over
     inverted  file.   Both the methods are compared in terms  of
     preprocessing,   storage,   and  query  costs.    Worst-case
     complexity analysis of both the methods, for a partial match
     query,  is  carried  out in two cases:  (a)  when  directory
     resides  in  main  memory,  (b) when  directory  resides  in
     secondary  memory.   In both cases,  MAT data  structure  is
     shown  to  be more efficient than the inverted file  method.
     Arguments  are  given to illustrate the superiority  of  MAT
     data  structure  in  an average  case  also.   An  efficient
     adaptation of MAT data structure,  that exploits the special
     features  of  MAT  structure  and  bibliographic  files,  is
     proposed   for   bibliographic  file   systems.    In   this
     adaptation,  suitable  techniques for fixing and ranking  of
     the   attributes  for  MAT  data  structure  are   proposed.
     Conclusions and proposals for future research are presented.

     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  21,  No. 5, Pp.
     433-442, 1985)

4.   TOWARD RELATIONSHIPS-QUERYING IN DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

     Henryk Rybinski, Janusz Rolecki, Januez Getta
     and Hanna Popowska
     Institute for Scientific, Technical and Economic Information
     00-926 Warszawa, ul. Zurawia 3/5, Poland

          A concept of end-user query language with facilities of
     expressing relationships between objects kept in a data base
     is  presented.   The  idea of nesting  these  facilities  in
     typical  document system query language is  shown.   Special
     kinds of referring terms are designed.  Examples of usage of
     the new facilities are attached.

     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  21,  No. 5, pp.
     419-431, 1985)

5.   ON RELATIVE INDEXING IN FUZZY RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

     Ronald Rousseau
     Katholieke Industriele Hogeschool,
     Zeedijk 101,
     8400 Oostende, Belgium

          In  their  study  on  relative  indexing,   Choros  and
     Danilowicz  give  a  modifiation  function  for  weights  of
     dexcriptors of documents.   We show that this function lacks
     some   desirable   properties  and  we  give   a   different
     modification function which does not have these drawbacks.

     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  No.  21,  No.  5, pp.
     415-417, 1985)

6.   COMPUTER-AIDED SEARCHING OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC DATA BASES: ONLINE
     ESTIMATION OF THE VALUE OF INFORMATION

     David R. Morehead and William B. Rouse
     Center for Man-Machine Systems Research,
     Georgia Institute of Technology,
     Atlanta, GA  30332,  U.S.A.

          The  study  presents and synthesizes the results  of  a
     series  of  five experiments  on  human  information-seeking
     behavior     in    three    different    information-seeking
     environments.    The  first  three  experiments  utilized  a
     highly-controlled,    simulated   information-seeking   task
     developed  to  study  human search  strategies  in  citation
     networks.   Emphasis in the fourth and fifth experiments was
     placed  on assessing the value of information for humans  in
     realistic search environments.   Subjects search on a  topic
     of  their own choice in a data base of fiction in Experiment
     Four  and a data base of technical literature in  Experiment
     Five.    After  summarizing  the  experimental  results,   a
     conceptual   model  of  how  humans  value  information   is
     presented.   The  model is then used as a basis for a  broad
     interpretation  of the empirical results.   Implications  of
     both  the empirical and modeling results are considered  for
     the   areas   of   information   retrieval   logic,   system
     flexibility,  retrieval  methods,  types of  aiding,  online
     estimation  of information value,  and computerizing  versus
     computer-aiding.

     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  21,  No. 5, pp.
     387-399, 1985)

7.   BRIEF  COMMUNICATION:  A  NOTE  ABOUT  INFORMATION   SCIENCE
     RESEARCH

     Gerard Salton
     Department of Computer Science,
     Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

          This   note   deals  with  the   relationship   between
     information  science research and practice.   The impression
     that  the field is moribund and that the research output  is
     uniformly inferior is not supported by an examination of the
     information retrieval literature.

     (JASIS, 36(4): 268-271; 1985)

8.   A  PROBABILISTIC THEORY OF INDEXING AND  SIMILARITY  MEASURE
     BASED ON CITED AND CITING DOCUMENTS

     K. L. Kwok
     Computer Science Department,
     Queens College, City University of New York,
     Flushing, NY 11367

          A  new model of viewing a document based on the citing-
     cited realtionship between documents is  introduced.   Using
     Bayes'  decision theory,  it is shown how a source  document
     may  be indexed and weighted by its set of relevant cited or
     citing  document  features,  corresponding  to  a  one  pass
     relevance feedback Model 1 (Probabilistic indexing) or Model
     2  (probabilistic  retrieval) system  of  [8].   Once  every
     document in a collection has been so indexed,  various forms
     of  similarity  measures  based on  probability  of  topical
     relevance   between  documents  are   derivable,   including
     asymmetric,  symmetric, and the relationship with Model 3 of
     [8].  Application to retrieval and document clustering  are
     also discussed.

     (JASIS, 36(5): 342-351; 1985)


9.   A BIBLIOMETRIC DISTRIBUTION WHICH REALLY WORKS

     H. S. Sichel
     Department of Statistics,
     University of the Witwatersrand,
     Johannesburg, South Africa

          The  Generalized Inverse Gaussian-Poisson  Distribution
     is  suggested  as an all-embracing  mathematical  model  for
     bibliometric  frequency distributions.   Twelve examples are
     given  which show that the new model cannot be  rejected  by
     virtue of an objective chi-squared test.

     (JASIS, 36(5): 314-321; 1985)
[rest of the abstracts submitted will be in Issue 6 - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
6
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 86 14:21:41 est
-FROM-
From: vtvax5::foxea@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: New Journal on Applied AI
-BODY-
New Journal: Applied Artificial Intelligence, An International Journal

exchange information about advances and experiences in this field among
AI researchers.  Furthermore, it will aid decision makers in industry and
management to understand the accomplishments and limitations of the
state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence.
   Research to be presented will focus on methodology, time-schedules,
problems, work force strength, new tools, transfer of theoretical
accomplishments to application problems, information exchange among
concerned AI researchers and decision makers about the potential impact

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: vtvax5::foxea@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Listing of a Continuing Ed. Program on Information Systems
-BODY-
    The Catholic University of America


[List of Courses Now Offered]
Managing Information Resources in Large Organizations
Records Management
OCLC Laboratory
Indexing and Abstracting
Information Technology
Retrieval Systems
Information Retrieval System Design
Online Search Laboratory
Systems Design Application and Project Management

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 86 14:21:41 est
-FROM-
From: vtvax5::foxea@vtcs1.VT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: biblio. refs. for interesting Office Information Systems articles
-BODY-
%T Editorial: Processing Manuscripts Electronically
%A Robert B. Allen
%P 233
%J ACM Trans. Office Inf. Systems
%D July. 1985
%V 3
%N 3
%Z TOOIS manuscripts may now be submitted electronically....
Once most articles are available on line and software has been developed
to manipulate and present manuscripts electronically, ...

%T A Prototype System for the Electronic Storage and Retrieval of
Document Images
%A G. R. Thoma
%A S. Suthasinekul
%A F. L. Walker
%A J. Cookson
%A M. Rashidian
%J ACM Trans. Office Inf. Systems
%D July 1985
%V 3
%N 3

%T An Imperative Sentence Processor for Voice Interactive Office
Applications
%A Alan W. Biermann
%A Linda Fineman
%A Kermit C. Gilbert
%P 321-346
%J ACM Trans. Office Inf. Systems
%D Oct. 1985
%V 3
%N 4
%Z  An imperative sentence processor that enables a user to manipulate
text with connected speech and touch-graphics is described.  The
processor includes capabilities to follow dialogue focus, execute a variety
of imperative commands, and handle nested noun groups, pronouns, and
aplication are given.  The system has been implemented in PASCAL and can

%A Arno J. H. M. Peels
%A Norbert J. M. Janssen
%A Wop Nawijn
%P 347-369
%J ACM Trans. Office Inf. Systems
%D Oct. 1985
%V 3
%N 4
%Z The formalization of the architecture of documents and text formatting
are the central issues of this paper.  Besides a fundamental and
theoretical approach toward these topics, an overview is presented of the
available.
advantage of the implicit structure of text.  A predefined layout for each
type of text element then opens the way for a fully automatic
text-processing system in which user control information can be reduced
to an absolute minimum.
   Discusses physical and logical document architecture.  Logical structure
has three information streams: primary, illustrative, and secondary.  BNF
grammars for each are given.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 86 20:36:45 est
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan" <ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 19:21:25 cst
-BODY-
.op

retrieval area)


     J          Scientific  publishing has evolved over three centuries
     of technological change.  It now faces problems that include
     rapid  growth,  literature scatter,  increasing  costs,  and
     excessive  delays  in publication.   This  article  examines
     applications, the author contends that the widespread use of
     electronic publishing.




     functions  have been suggested for the frequency of words in
     text.   Some  of these models have also been applied to  the
     proposed,  which  uses  both  a rank function for  the  high


12.  A FUZZY K-NEAREST NEIGHBOR ALGORITHM

     James M. Keller, Michael R. Gray, and James A. Givens, Jr.
     Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
     University of Missouri
     Columbia, MD  65211

          Classification  of  objects  is an  important  area  of
     research  and  application in a variety of fields.   In  the
     of classification.  The K-nearest neighbor decision rule has
     often been used in these pattern recognition problems.   One
     of   the  difficulties  that  arises  when  utilizing   this
     counterpart  in terms of a lower error  rate,  the  resuting
     memberships give a confidence measure of the classification.

13.  RUBRIC: A SYSTEM FOR RULE-BASED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

     Brian P. McCune,
     Richard M. Tong,
     Jeffrey S. Dean,
     Daniel G. Shapiro
     Advanced Information & Decision Systems
     Mountain View, CA 94040

          A  research  prototype software system  for  conceptual
     information retrieval has been developed.   The goal of  the
     system,  called  RUBRIC,  is  to provide more automated  and
     documents  for  presentation  to  the  user,   and  detailed
     explanation  of  how  and  why  a  particular  document  was
     information   retrieval  systems,   or  real-time   document
     filtering and routing.

     (IEEE TRANS.ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING,  Vol. SE-11, No. 9, PP.
     939-945,  September 1985)

14.  AN  ASPECT  OF AESTHETICS IN HUMAN-COMPUTER  COMMUNICATIONS:
     PRETTY WINDOWS

     Jason Gait,
     Computer Research Laboratory
     Tektronix, Inc.
     Beaverton, OR 97077

          Aesthetics   in   user   interfaces   addresses    font
     definitions,  type-setting conventions,  color combinations,
     graphics   design   considerations,   high  resolution   for
     viewscreens,   and   the  shapes   of   windows.    Computer

     (IEEE TRANS.  ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING,  Vol.  SE-11,  No. 8,
     PP. 714-717, August 1985)

15.  A  PROTOTYPE SYSTEM FOR THE ELECTRONIC STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
     OF DOCUMENT IMAGES

     G. R. Thoma, S. Suthasinekul, F. L. Walker,
     J. Cookson, and M. Rashidian
     National Library of Medicine

          A prototype system hass been implemented for electronic
     scanning,  digitization,  storage, retrieval, and display of
     (pels)  per  inch by either a high-speed loose-leaf  scanner
     digitized   images  are  stored  on  magnetic  disks  to  be
     processed  and will eventually be transferred  onto  optical
     disks for archival storage.   Existing on-line bibliographic
     databases  developed by the National Library of Medicine are
     forms.
          This prototype system,  developed as part of a research
     library documents.

     (ACM TRANS.  ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS,  Vol.  3, No. 3,
     July 1985, pp. 279-291)


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
7
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Changing of site of origin of IRlist
-BODY-
Dear IRList Subscribers,

In the interest of reliability and cost savings, IRlist will be sent from
   seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
instead of
   fox%vpi@csnet-relay

To be sure there is no mishap, Issue 7 is being sent from irlistrq with
this message, and Issue 8 is being sent from the CSNET address above.  If
you receive one issue but not the other, please notify me at one of the
addresses given below. Also, if you are missing any issues (V1 1-28, V2 1-8),
feel free to contact me if you can't get a copy from another user or site.

I hope this works smoothly! - Ed
 __________________________________________________________________
UUCP: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
ARPA: vtisr1!irlistrq@seismo foxea@vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm
      fox@vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm fox%vpi@csnet-relay
CSNET:fox@vpi
BITNET:foxea@vtvax3 fox@vtcs1

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date:    Sat, 1 Feb 86 14:30 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER 24 [extract - Ed]
-BODY-
              -- NANCY WYATT QUERY ON ONLINE RESEARCH

 From   NJW at PSUVM
      I recently picked up a book  in my local library titled
 ONLINE RESEARCH AND RETRIEVAL WITH MICROCOMPUTERS,
 written by Nahum  Goldmann and published by  TAB Books (who
 publish various computer related  books).   Goldmann pointed
 out that online information services vary widely in cost and
 usefulness and  most of  them are  set up  so only  computer
 experts can use them effectively.    On the other hand,  the
 specialists who do computer searches  are seldom equipped to
 discriminate which information  is useful and which  is not.
 In response to  this need he has developed  a system whereby
 experts can develop  research strategies that can  be run by
 experts but will net more useful information for less money.
 The  book is  very clearly  written  and contains  a lot  of
 illustrations from actual computer searches.
      The examples  used in the  book were from  medicine and
 biology.    I  am  interested in  what  applications  online
 research and retrieval may  have for communication research.
 I  wonder if  any other  readers have  experience with  such
 research and would be willing  to share their knowledge with
 us.    I'd like  to know  which services  would have  useful
 information, how much such services might cost,  and how one
 goes about learning to use the services.  There are probably
 a lot of other questions I haven't thought of, since I don't
 have any experience of the beast.

 Nancy Wyatt, Penn State

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1986  10:58 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
   Date: Friday, 31 January 1986  10:00-EST
   From: etzi%oz.ai.mit.edu@mc.lcs.mit.edu
   Subject: Harvard-Radcliffe Cognitive Sciences Society

   Sunday,  2  February  6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room
                              Harvard 5:30 dinner [can be purchused] 6:00 talk.

          HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY

            "Understanding Spoken Language"

                 Bill Woods
                 Applied Expert Systems
                 Harvard Computer Science Department

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subject: From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1986  09:51 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
   Date: Friday, 31 January 1986  10:00-EST
   From: etzi%oz.ai.mit.edu@mc.lcs.mit.edu
   Subject: Harvard-Radcliffe Cognitive Sciences Society
   Sunday,  2  February  6:00 pm Room: Dunster House Small Dining Room
                 Harvard 5:30 dinner [can be purchused] 6:00 talk.

          HARVARD-RADCLIFFE COGNITIVE SCIENCES SOCIETY

                 Bill Woods
                 Applied Expert Systems
                 Harvard Computer Science Department


   Date: Friday, 31 January 1986  10:00-EST
   Subject: Syntactic Categories and Semantic Types
   Thursday, 6 February  10:30am  Room: BBN Labs
               10 Moulton Street,Cambridge 3rd Floor Large Conference Room

                 BBN Labs SDP AI Seminar

        SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES AND SEMANTIC TYPES

          Professor Barbara H. Partee
          Linguistics and Philosophy
          Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

There is a tension between the uniform, systematic syntax-semantics
connection imposed by a strongly typed system like Montague's and the
apparent flexibility and versatility of natural languages.  Words and
phrases can easily shift their meanings within or across types, but
not in arbitrary ways. I am searching for a characterization of
"natural" families of meanings and "natural" meaning-shifting
operations, focussing on type-shifting operations.  The examples I
will discuss in greatest detail involve type-shifting among three
types of noun phrase interpretations: 'referential' or e-type,
'predicative' or <e,t>-type, and 'quantificational' or <<e,t>,t>-type.
I suggest that all NP's have meanings of the quantificational type,
and that we can formulate quite general principles for predicting
which ones will also have meanings of one or both of the other types.
If there is time I will briefly discuss type-shifting among adjective
and adverb interpretations.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan"<raghavan%uregina1.bitnet@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 19:20:08 cst
-TO-
To: IRList%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject: submission to IR list [long set of abstracts - part 1 of 3, Ed]
-BODY-
.op
.pl75
                                                         blurbs.vr

                            ABSTRACTS

(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1983 issues of journals
 in the retrieval area)

1.   BASICS OF VIDEODISC AND OPTICAL DISK TECHNOLOGY

     Judith Paris
     Advanced Information Management Technology, Inc.,
     1311A Dolley Madison Blvd., McLean, VA 22101
          This  article outlines basic videodisc and optical disk
     technology.    Both   optical  and   capacitance   videodisc
     technology are described.  Optical disk technology as a mass
     digital image and data storage device is defined and briefly
     compared  with  other established information storage  media
     including  magnetic  tape  and  microforms.    The   article
     includes  a  look into the future of videodisc  and  optical
     disk.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(6): 408-413; 1983)

2.   RESPONSE TIME VARIATIONS IN AN ONLINE SEARCH SYSTEM

     Michael D. Cooper
     School of Library and Information Studies,
     University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

          The  response  time  characteristics  of  the  National
     Library  of  Medicine's  (NLM) ELHILL  bibliographic  search
     system  are examined in this article.   Transactions  for  a
     five-week period are analyzed and average response times are
     calculated for typical search commands, by times of day, and
     by file being searched.   Overall,  the response time of the
     system was found to be 2.1 seconds, a very low value.  Based
     on statistical tests of signifcance applied to the data,  it
     was   concluded  that  response  time  differences  can   be
     explained  in terms of the number of users on the system and
     not  the  command issued by the user nor the file  the  user
     searched.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(6); 374-380; 1983)

3.   AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPUTERS
     AND HUMANS AS SEARCH INTERMEDIARIES

     Richard S. Marcus
     Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems,
     Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139

          An  experimental computer intermediary  system,  CONIT,
     that  assists users in accessing and searching heterogeneous
     retrieval  systems  has been enhanced  with  various  search
     aids.  Controlled experiments have been conducted to compare
     the  effectiveness  of the enhanced CONIT Intermediary  with
     that of human expert intermediary search specialists.   Some
     16  end users,  none of whom had previously operated  either
     CONIT  or  any  of the  four  connected  retrieval  systems,
     performed  searches on 20 different topics using CONIT  with
     no  assistance  other  than that provided  by  CONIT  itself
     (except to recover from computer/software bugs).  These same
     users  also  performed searches on the same topics with  the
     help  of human expert intermediaries who searched using  the
     retrieval  system directly.   Sometimes CONIT and  sometimes
     the  human  expert were clearly superior in  terms  of  such
     parameters as recall and search time.   In general, however,
     users  searching  alone with CONIT achieved somewhat  higher
     online  recall at the expense of longer session  times.   We
     conclude that advanced experimental intermediary  techniques
     are   now  capable  of  providing  search  assistance  whose
     effectiveness   at   least  approximates   that   of   human
     intermediaries in some contexts.   Also analyzed is the cost
     effectiveness  of  current intermediary  systems.   Finally,
     consideration  is  given  to the  prospects  for  much  more
     advanced  systems  which  would perform  such  functions  as
     automatic  database  selection and the simulation  of  human
     experts,   and   thereby  make  information  retrieval  more
     effective for all classes of users.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(6): 381-404; 1983)

4.   CODING   METHODS  FOR  TEXT  STRING  SEARCH  ON   COMPRESSED
     DATABASES

     P. Goyal
     Dept. of Computer Science, Concordia University,
     Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H4B 1R6

          A method for the partitioning of a compressed  database
     is  presented.   The  partitioned  database is  held  as  an
     inverted  list for ease of string searching.   An  algorithm
     for  mapping  the  string  onto  the  search  keys  is  also
     presented.  The analysis shows that it is possible to hold a
     database  as  an inverted list and still  obtain  reasonable
     compression.

     (INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 231-233, 1983)

5.   COMPARISON    OF   DATABASE   INTERFACES   FOR   APPLICATION
     PROGRAMMING

     M. Lacroix and A. Pirotte
     Philips Research Laboratory, Av, Van Becelaere,
     2 box 8, B-1170 Brussles, Belguim

          The historical evolution of interfaces to databases  at
     the application programming level is analyzed.   Emphasis is
     put  on  aspects of the data manipulation operations  rather
     than on the data model that they address.
          Four phases are distinguished in this evolution: "call"
     interfaces,   simple  language  extensions,   non-procedural
     languages  embedded  in  general  purpose   languages,   and
     integrated languages.
          The  evolution  is  explained in terms of  the  growing
     needs  for  more  reliable programs written  in  high  level
     languages, for which programmer efficiency is more important
     than machine efficiency.

     (INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 217-229, 1983)

6.   A  DYNAMIC  MODEL  FOR THE OPTIMAL  SELECTION  OF  SECONDARY
     INDEXES

     M. Hatzopoulos
     Dept. of Mathematical and Computer Sciences,
     Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931

     J.G. Kollias
     Dept. of Computer Sciences,
     National Technical University of Athens, 9 Heroon Polytechniou
     Ave., Zografou, Athens 621, Greece

          A  model  is  presented which  determines  the  optimal
     degree of secondry indexing for data processing requirements
     which  follow  variations over different time periods  in  a
     manner  known  in  advance.   The paper proves a  number  of
     properties  which  characterize the model  and  develops  an
     algorithm  which  greatly reduces the solution space  to  be
     searched.  The algorithm uses dynamic programming techniques
     and  it may be used by Database Administrators to  determine
     the  time  at which the entering and dropping  of  secondary
     indexes to and from the database should take place.

     (INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 159-164, 1983)

7.   LINGUISTIC MEANING AND LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

     Richard L. Derr
     Matthew A. Baxter School of Information and Library Science,
     Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH  44106

          Recent  developments in cognitive science are  assessed
     as a challenge to the well established view in philosophy of
     language   and  linguistics  that  meaning  is  inherent  to
     language and is relatively fixed.   It is concluded that the
     challenge   is   unsuccessful.     Current   activities   in
     information  retrieval which presuppose  linguistic  meaning
     are  well  founded,   in  that  regard.    Furthermore,  one
     potential obstacle to the development of information systems
     which  seek  to  produce  comprehension  of  text  has  been
     removed.

     (INFORMATION  PROCESSING  &  MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  19,  No.  6,
     pp.369-380, 1983).

8.   AUTOMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF INFORMATION QUERIES

     Hanna Grzelak
     16, Rue Du Xon, Lesmenils, 54700 Pont-A-Mousson, France

     Kazimierz Kowalski
     Main Library and Scientific Information Centre,
     Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland

          The methods of information queries building in the  SDI
     systems   on  the  basis  of  the  user's  publications  are
     presented in this paper.  In most cases the users of the SDI
     system  are scientists whose work is marked by  publications
     resulting from the research they do.   It was found that the
     users'   publications   may  constitute   input   data   for
     information queries building.
          The  examination  of the possibile compability  between
     the   user's  information  queries  and   his   publications
     consisted  of determining the similarity between of a set of
     keywords  indexed  from the information query and a  set  of
     keywords indexed from the user's publications.
          Two   methods   of  information   query   constructions
     determined by logical operators AND,  OR,  NOT and a set  of
     weighted keywords are described.

     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 19, No. 6, pp.381
      1983).

9.   BIOMEDICAL CITING STATEMENTS COMPUTER RECOGNITION AND USE TO
     AID FULL-TEXT RETRIEVAL

     John O'Connor
     Center for Information and Computer Science,
     Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA  18015

          Citing  statements  can be used to  aid  retrieval,  to
     increase  the  efficiency  of citation indexes and  for  the
     study  of  information flow and use.   These uses  are  only
     feasible  on a large scale if computers can identify  citing
     statements  within  the texts of documents  with  reasonable
     accuracy.
          Computer    recognition   of   multi-sentence    citing
     statements is not easy.   Procedures developed for chemistry
     papers  in an earlier experiment were tested  on  biomedical
     papers  (dealing  with various aspects of cancer)  and  were
     almost as successful.  Specifically, (1) 78% of the words in
     computer-recognized   citing   statements   were   correctly
     attributable to the corresponding cited papers;  and (2) the
     computer  procedures  missed 4% of the words in  the  actual
     citing statements.  When the procedures were modified on the
     basis  of those results and tested on a new sample of cancer
     papers the results were comparable: 72 and 3% respectively.
          In an earlier experiment in use of full-text  searching
     to  retrieve answer-passages from cancer papers,  recall  in
     the  "test phase" averaged about 70% and the false retrieval
     rate  was thirteen falsely retrieved sentences  per  answer-
     paper   retrieved.    Unretrieved   answer-papers  in   that
     experiment's  "development  phase",  and  citing  statements
     referring  to  them,   were  studied  to  develop   computer
     procedures  for using citing statements to increase  recall.
     The   procedures  developed  only  produced  slight   recall
     increases for development phase answer-papers, and similarly
     for  the  test phase papers on which they were then  tested.
     Specifically,  the  test phase results were  the  following:
     recall  was  increased  from 70 to 74%,  and  there  was  no
     increase in false retrieval.  This contrasts with an earlier
     experiment in which 50% recall of chemistry papers by search
     of index terms and abstract words was incrased to 70% by the
     addition  of words from citing statements.   The  difference
     may  be  because  the average number of  citing  papers  per
     unretrieved  cancer  paper  was  only  six  while  that  for
     chemistry papers was thirteen.

     (INFORMATION  PROCESSING  &  MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  19,  No.  6,
     pp.361-368, 1983).

10.  A  PROPOSAL  FOR  AN ASSOCIATIVE FILE  STORE  WITH  RUN-TIME
     INDEXING - PART 1:  SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

     E.J. Schuegraf
     Dept. of Mathematics and Computing Sciences,
     St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia B2G 1C0

     R.M. Lea
     Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Electronics,
     Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UK

          Information  retrieval systems are described and  their
     relation  to  associative  processing  is  established.   An
     overview of present associative hardware is given,  followed
     by a proposal for an Associative File Sotre (AFS) for online
     information   retrieval   systems.    Its  advantages   over
     conventional file stores in maxi-,  mini- and  microcomputer
     systems    are   outlined.     The   AFS   incorporates    a
     microprogrammed  Associative Processor.   It is dedicated to
     high-speed fragment processing, to support file compression,
     run-time indexing and calculations of storage addresses  for
     records,  and  file  indexing  and calculations  of  storage
     addresses  for records,  and  file  searching.   Performance
     estimates  indicate  that  compared with  conventional  file
     stores  the AFS could achieve a speed advantage of over  two
     orders  of  magnitude.   Use of  fragments  for  compression
     approximately  doubles  the  storage capacity;  the  use  of
     fragments  for run-time indexing reduces the volume of  data
     to be searched,  but it retains the full flexibility of free
     text retrieval on variable-length records.

     (INFORMATION  TECHNOLOGY:  RESEARCH &  DEVELOPMENT,  Vol. 2,
     No. 2/3  pp. 73-88, 1983)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
8
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Changing of site of origin of IRlist (repeat of msg in Issue 7)
-BODY-
Dear IRList Subscribers,
In the interest of reliability and cost savings, IRlist will be sent from
   seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
instead of
   fox%vpi@csnet-relay
To be sure there is no mishap, Issue 7 is being sent from irlistrq with
this message, and Issue 8 is being sent from the CSNET address above.  If
you receive one issue but not the other, please notify me at one of the
addresses given below. Also, if you are missing any issues (V1 1-28, V2 1-8),
feel free to contact me if you can't get a copy from another user or site.
I hope this works smoothly! - Ed
 __________________________________________________________________
UUCP: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
ARPA: vtisr1!irlistrq@seismo foxea@vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm
      fox@vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm fox%vpi@csnet-relay
CSNET:fox@vpi
BITNET:foxea@vtvax3 fox@vtcs1
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: KJP%ibm-sj.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
Date: 4 Feb 86 13:50:36 EST
 ...
   [...]   just completed her MLIS degree in
Library and Information Scienece from Berkeley.  She concentrated in
Information Systems (i.e., took several programming, data-base, etc. courses)
and is now looking for a job in the New York City area.  Her ultimate
goal is to go into MIS or become a data-base administrator.  The problem
that she is encountering is that, on the East Coast, people look at an
MLS degree and conclude that you are able to do only library work.  On
the other hand, had she remained in the San Francisco area where companies
know about Berekeley's MLIS program, she could have had two job offers:
as a programmer with [...], or as a data-base administrator with a
[...] company.  So, my question for you is: Do you know of any
companies in the NY area which look beyond the "MLS" label to see that
this degree is well-suited for non-traditional "library" jobs?  Any help
would be appreciated.
  Thanks,
   Ken Perry
[Note: Information Science is indeed an area where employers must really
look at the individual's background and gauge ability for the task at hand!
The person mentioned might try the Information Industry Association, 316
Penn. Ave., SE, Ste. 400, Washington D.C. 20003 (202) 544-1969 or
JOBLINE at American Society for Information Science, 1424 Sixteenth St., N.W.,
Suite 404, Washington D.C. 20036 (202) 462-1000 to file a resume and ask to
be listed in announcements.
    Readers - send suggestions to Ken or me to forward if you have other
suggestions. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         3-FEB-1986 16:20:31
From:        ARCHIVE%vax3.oxford.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
...
I'd be interested in IRList - I do a lot of work at present in that area
using special architectures to give content addressing capabilities. Use my
personal account LOU @ OX.VAX1 rather than ARCHIVE tho.
...
Incidentally, a company called Sydney has been showing a CD-ROM version of the
Library of Congress Catalogue around here lately; also word has reached us
from California of a CD-ROM version of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Is there
any central place where information about these evolving technologies can be
obtained?
Best wishes, Lou Burnard
[Note: There is an annual publication of the Amer. Society of Inf. Science
called ARIST.  Volume 20 is the next due.  They have good surveys on many
topics
such as one in Vol. 19 by Chuck Goldstein on Storage Technology.  ASIS has
numerous special interest groups to try to cover the field.  [Too] many
conferences are being held -- March 4-7 in Seattle will be the 1st Int'l Conf.
on CD ROM.
    Does anyone have other comments on information sources? - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: "V.J. Raghavan"<raghavan%uregina1.bitnet@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 19:20:08 cst
To: IRList%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
Subject: submission to IR list [long set of abstracts - Ed]
.op
.pl75
                                                         blurbs.vr
                            ABSTRACTS
(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1983 issues of journals
 in the retrieval area)
11.  INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AT THE SEDGWICK MUSEUM
     M.F. Porter
     Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge,
     Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK
          The Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge  now
     has  a  high  quality  and comprehensive  online  IR  system
     covering   its  collection  of  450,000  catalogued   fossil
     objects.    The   indexing  process,   and   the   retrieval
     capabilities  are  described in detail,  and an  example  is
     given  of  how  the  IR  system is  used  with  real  museum
     enquiries.  It is also shown how the IR system is used as an
     aid  in many different apsects of data management,  such  as
     catalogue  updating and editing,  and dealing with loans  of
     specimens and movements of specimens between drawers.
     (INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 2, No.
     4, pp. 169-186, 1983)
12.  THE UTAH TEXT RETRIEVAL PROJECT
     L.A. Hollaar
     Dept. of computer Science, University of Utah,
     Salt Lake City, UT 84112
          The  Utah Text Retrieval Project seeks  well-engineered
     solutions to the implementation of large (over 50 x 10**9)
     characters), inexpensive (less than a dollar a query), rapid
     (average  response  time  of 10  seconds)  text  information
     retrieval  systems.   It  was  established in  1980  in  the
     Department  of  Computer Science at the University of  Utah,
     and  is an outgrowth of a similar project at the  University
     of Illinois with which the author was associated.
          At  the  present  time,  the project  has  three  major
     components.   Perhaps,  the  best known is the work  on  the
     specialized   processors,   particularly   search   engines,
     necessary to achieve the desired performance and cost.   The
     other  two concern the user interface to the system and  the
     system's  internal  structure.   The work on user  interface
     development  is  not only concentrating on  the  syntax  and
     semantics  of  the query language,  but also on the  overall
     environment the system presents to the user.   Environmental
     enhancements  include  convenient ways to  'browse'  through
     retrieved documents,  access to other information  retrieval
     systems   through  gateways  supporting  a  common   command
     interface,  and interfaces to word processing systems.   The
     system's  internal  structure is based on a high-level  data
     communications  protocol linking the user  interface,  index
     processor, search processor, and other system modules.  This
     allows  them  to  be  easily  distributed  in  a   multi- or
     specialized-processor  configuration.   It  also allows  new
     modules, such as a knowledge-based query reformulator, to be
     added.
     (INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 2, No.
     4, pp. 155-168, 1983)
13.  A GENERALIZED TERM DEPENDENCE MODEL IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
     C.T. Yu
     Dept. of Information Engineering,
     University of Illinois-Chicago Circle, Chicago, Illinois, 60680
     C. Buckley
     Dept. of Computer Science, Cornell Univesity, Ithaca, NY 14853
     K. Lam
     Dept. of Statistics, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong
     G. Salton
     Dept. of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
          The tree dependence model has been used successfully to
     incorporate  dependencies between certain term pairs in  the
     information retrieval process,  while the Bahadur Lazarsfeld
     Expansion  (BLE)  which specifies dependencies  between  all
     subsets  of  terms  has  been used  to  identify  productive
     clusters of items in a clustered database environment.   The
     successes of these models are unlikely to be accidental;  it
     is of interest therefore to examine the similarities between
     the two models.
          The  disadvantage  of the BLE model is the  exponential
     number  of terms appearing in the full expression,  while  a
     truncated  BLE  system  may  produce  negative   probability
     values.   The  disadvantage of the tree dependence model  is
     the  restriction to dependencies between certain term  pairs
     only  and  the exclusion of  higher-order  dependencies.   A
     generalized  term  dependence model is  introduced  in  this
     study  which does not carry the disadvantages of either  the
     tree  dependence  or  the  BLE  models.   Sample  evaluation
     results  are  included to illustrate the operations  of  the
     generalized system.
     (INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 2, No.
     4, pp. 129-154, 1983)
14.  FULLY AUTOMATIC BOOK INDEXING
     Martin Dillon
     School of Library Science, University of North Carolina
     Laura K. McDonald
     Information Systems, Blue Corss-Blue Sheild of North Carolina
          The  Fully  Automatic Syntactically-based  Indexing  of
     Text  (FASIT)  system represents the contents of a  document
     without  a  full  parse or semantic analysis  of  the  text.
     Content-bearing  units  are isolated and then  grouped  into
     quasi-synonymous  classes  whose main term is used to  index
     the document.   Previous experiments with FASIT demonstrated
     its  usefulness in an associational  retrieval  environment;
     the  experiment  described here explores FASIT's value as  a
     book-indexing  system.    It  is  difficult  to  avoid   the
     conclusion that this indexing approach offers the promise of
     being practical and effective.
     (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 135-154, 1983)
15.  EXTENDED BOOLEAN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
     Gerard Salton
     Cornell University
     Edward A Fox
     International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, Nigeria
     Harry Wu
     ITT Programming Technology Center
          A new, extended Boolean information-retrieval system is
     introduced  that is intermediate between the Boolean  system
     of  query processing and the vector-processing  model.   The
     query structure inherent in the Boolean system is preserved,
     while  at the same time weighted terms may  be  incorporated
     into both queries and stored documents; the retrieved output
     can  also be ranked in strict similarity order with the user
     queries.  A conventional retrieval system can be modified to
     make use of the extended system.   Laboratory tests indicate
     that  the extended system produces better  retrieval  output
     than either the Boolean or the vector-processing system.
     (ACM COMMUNICATIONS, Vol. 26, No. 11, pp. 1022-1036, 1983)
16.  HIERARCHICAL   FILE  ORGANIZATION  AND  ITS  APPLICATION  TO
     SIMILAR-STRING MATCHING
     Tetsuro Ito and Makoto Kizawa
     University of Library and Information Science,
     Ibaraki, Japan
          The  automatic  correction  of  misspelled  inputs   is
     discussed from a viewoint of similar-string matching.  First
     a  hierarchical file organization based on a linear ordering
     of  records  is  presented  for  retrieving  records  highly
     similar  to any input query.   Then the spelling problem  is
     attacked  by constructing a hierarchical file for a  set  of
     strings  in  a dictionary of English  words.   The  spelling
     correction  steps proceed as follows:   (1) find one of  the
     best-match  strings which are most similar to a  query,  (2)
     expand the search area for obtaining the good-match strings,
     and  (3) interrupt the file search as soon as  the  required
     string  is displayed.   Computational experiments verify the
     performance  of  the  proposed  methods  for  similar-string
     matching under the UNIX time-sharing system.
     (ACM TRANSACTIONS ON DATABASE SYSTEMS,  Vol.  8,  No. 3, pp.
     410-433, 1983)
17.  INDEXING AND RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE  FACT
     RETRIEVAL
     Janet L. Kolodner
     Georgia Institute of Technology
          Researchers  in  artificial intelligence have  recently
     become   interested  in  natural  language  fact  retrieval;
     currently,  their research is at a point where it can  begin
     contributing to the field of Information Retrieval.  In this
     paper,  strategies  for  a natural language  fact  retrieval
     system  are  mapped  out,  and  approaches to  many  of  the
     organization  and  retrieval problems  are  presented.   The
     CYRUS system,  which keeps track of important people and  is
     queried  in  English,  is presented and used  to  illustrate
     those solutions.
     (ACM TRANSACTIONS ON DATABASE SYSTEMS,  Vol.  8,  No. 3, pp.
     434-463, 1983)
18.  PARTIAL MATCH RETRIEVAL USING HASHING AND DESCRIPTORS
     K. Ramamohanarao, John W. Lloyd, and James A. Thom
     University of Melbourne
          This  paper  studies a partial-match  retrieval  scheme
     based  on hash functions and descriptors.   The emphasis  is
     placed  on  showing  how the use of a  descriptor  file  can
     improve the performance of the scheme.   Records in the file
     are  given  addresses according to hash functions  for  each
     field in the record.  Furthermore, each page of the file has
     associated with it a descriptor, which is a fixed-length bit
     string,  determined  by the records actually present in  the
     page.   Before  a  page  is accessed to see if  it  contains
     records  in the answer to a query,  the descriptor  for  the
     page  is  checked.   This  check may show that  no  relevant
     records are on the page and,  hence,  that the page does not
     have  to be accessed.   The method is shown to have  a  very
     substantial performance advantage over pure hashing schemes,
     when  some fields in the records have large key  spaces.   A
     mathematical  model  of the scheme,  plus an  algorithm  for
     optimizing performance, is given.
     (ACM TRANSACTIONS ON DATABASE SYSTEMS,  Vol.  8,  No. 4, pp.
     552-576, 1983)
19.  OUTLINE OF A GENERAL PROBABILISTIC RETRIEVAL MODEL
     Abraham Bookstein
     University of Chicago
          For reasons of technical convenience, current retrieval
     algorithms based on probabilistic reasoning are derived from
     models  that  assume patrons evaluate documents using a  two
     value  relevance scale.   This paper extends the  theory  by
     describing  a model which includes a more general  relevance
     scale.   This  model permits a re-examination of the earlier
     theory as a special case of that developed here and leads to
     a more satisfying interpretation of the ranking principle of
     the earlier models.
     (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 39, No. 2, June 1983, pp. 63-72)
20.  TEXT ANALYSIS AND BASIC CONCEPT STRUCTURES
     John M. Weiner
     University of Southern California, School of Medicine,
     2025 Zonal Avenue, Los Angeles,  CA 90033,  U.S.A.
          Information  specialists frequently are called upon  to
     analyze unfamiliar subjects.   With the growth in volume and
     topic,  specialists  will  require techniques to  deal  with
     textual  material  rapidly  and  effectively.    This  paper
     describes  a method of text analysis designed to  facilitate
     extraction  of terms related to a single  characteristic  or
     concept.  The term extraction is performed by completing the
     sentence: "The characterisic of interest is described by ( -
     descriptive  term - )."  Using this method,  the analyst can
     extract  attributes  of the basic characteristic  and  terms
     representing  related  characteristics.    With  these   two
     classes  of  terms,  the analyst can build a  basic  concept
     structure describing the subject matter.  Prior knowledge of
     the  subject  is not required.   The method  is  illustrated
     using pathological descriptions of female genital cancers.
     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  19,  No. 5, pp.
     313-319, 1983)
21.  AUTOMATIC  SPELLING  CORRECTION USING A  TRIGRAM  SIMILARILY
     MEASURE
     Richard C. Angell, George E. Freund and Peter Willett
     Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield
     Sheffield  S10 2TN England
          A  nearest neighbour search procedure is described  for
     the  automatic correction of  misspellings.   The  procedure
     involves  the replacement of a misspelt word by that word in
     a dictionary which best matches the misspelling,  the degree
     of  match  being calculated using a  similarity  coefficient
     based  on  the number of trigrams common to the  two  words.
     Experiments  with  a collection of 1544 misspellings  and  a
     dictionary  of  64,636  words  suggest  that  the  procedure
     results in the unique identification of the correct spelling
     for over 75% of the misspellings if the correct form of  the
     word  is  in  the dictionary,  and that this figure  may  be
     increased  to  over  90%  if  near,   rather  than  nearest,
     neighbours are acceptable.
     (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  19,  No. 4, pp.
     255-261, 1983)
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

From vtisr1!irlistrq Fri Feb 14 09:20:40 1986
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 86 09:20:29 est
To: fox
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #9
Status: RO


-VOL-
2

-N-
9
-FROM-
From:	Bitnet%"RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1"  6-FEB-1986 14:24
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	my bitnet address [i.e., of the other ACM SIGIR Forum Editor -Ed]
-DATE-
Date:         Thu, 6 Feb 1986 13:21 CST
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
  My BITNET address is shown above. ...
  With regards,    Vijay

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: BATES%bbng.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date: 5 Feb 1986 09:35-EST
Sender: BATES%bbng.arpa@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject: more info please
-BODY-
Can you please send me (or publish in the IRList digest) more info on the
new journal of Applied AI?  (For example, the editorial board, publishers,
date of first issue, cost of subscription, etc.)
  Thanks,
    Lyn Bates

>-----------------------------
-END-
>From fox Sun Feb  9 17:51 EST 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Applied Artificial Intelligence - An Int. Journal
-CC-
Cc: seismo!bates@bbng.arpa
-BODY-
More details beyond that of V2 #6 follow -
  Editor-in-Chief: Robert Trappl (U. of Vienna)
  Assoc. Editors:
	Howard Austin	Ronald Brachman	Stefano Cerri	Larry Harris
	Makoto Nagao	Wolfgang Wahlster		William Woods
  Editorial Board:
	Luigi Carlucci Aiello		Leonard Bolc
	Ernst Buchberger		Jaime Carbonell
	Marie-Odile Cordier		Helder Coelho
	Tatsuya Hayashi			Werner Horn
	Margaret King			Setsuo Ohsuga
	Tim O'Shea			Ivan Plander
	Johannes Retti			Erik Sandewall
	Luc Steels			Harald Trost
Submissions of Manuscripts:
	Authors should send 3 copies to Editor-in-Chief, Robert Trappl,
Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3,
A-1010 Vienna, Austria

By the way, the information in V2 #6 was garbled for some recipients so
here it is again:

New Journal: Applied Artificial Intelligence, An International Journal
Publication Information: published quarterly starting March 86
Rates: $55/volume indiv ($88 institutional) plus $24 air mail postage
Contacts: order with check or money order to -
            Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, Journals Dept., 79 Madison Ave.
            New York, New York 10016
Information: Elizabeth D'Costa, Circulation Mgr. (212) 725-1999

Aims and Scope: Applied Artificial Intelligence is intended to help
exchange information about advances and experiences in this field among
AI researchers.  Furthermore, it will aid decision makers in industry and
management to understand the accomplishments and limitations of the
state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence.
   Research to be presented will focus on methodology, time-schedules,
problems, work force strength, new tools, transfer of theoretical
accomplishements to application problems, information exchange among
concerned AI researchers and decision makers about the potential impact
of their work on their decisions.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 8 Feb 1986 1612-EST
-FROM-
From: GREIF@mit-xx.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work:  CALL FOR PAPERS
-BODY-
                     PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
                           CONFERENCE ON
                  COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK
    Austin, Texas                                 December 3-5, 1986
                          sponsored by
       Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC)
                 Software Technology Program (STP)
CONFERENCE CHAIR: Herb Krasner, MCC STP
PROGRAM CHAIR: Irene Greif, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
   John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC
   Christine Bullen, MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)
   Paul Cashman, DEC
   Bill Curtis, MCC STP
   Clarence A. Ellis, MCC STP
   Douglas C. Engelbart, McDonnell Douglas
   George Huber, University of Texas
   Thomas Malone,  MIT Sloan School of Management
   Margrethe H. Olson, NYU Graduate School of Business Administration
   Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
   Mark Stefik, Xerox PARC
   Lucy Suchman, Xerox PARC
   Terry Winograd, Stanford University
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS:   Bryan Fugate, MCC STP
               CONFERENCE THEME -- SUGGESTED TOPICS
This conference takes an interdisciplinary look at
computer-supported cooperative work from technological,
sociological, organizational, cognitive and task domain points
of view. It grows from two past conferences: the DEC/MIT
Workshop on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in August, 1984
and the MCC Interdisciplinary Design Symposium in May, 1985.
The previous conferences drew participants from computer science,
organization design, cognitive science, sociology, artificial
intelligence and practical engineering disciplines.  We hope to
incorporate an even broader range of research and application
perspectives on groups and group work at this meeting.
We are soliciting new papers on the following
representative topics:
 * Experiences with  technology  for  cooperative work
 * Computer-based environments that support cooperation:
      co-authorship, project management, large-scale design of
      computer systems
 * Empirical studies of cooperation/teamwork
 * Impact of computer technology on group behavior, organizational
       structures and work practices
 * Underlying technologies: data bases, structured documents and
      hypertext, access controls and privacy
 * Theoretical models for analyzing group work:  "roles",
       communication protocols, coordination constraints
 *  Multi-media conferencing
 *  Group decision support systems
 *  Domain-specific requirements for computer-supported group work
In order to encourage an informal and informative atmosphere, the
conference's size will be limited.  The program will include invited
speakers, paper sessions, panel sessions and informal interest groups.
We invite proposals for panels and discussion groups as well as papers.
                        INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
IMPORTANT DATES
      Submission deadline: July 1, 1986
      Acceptance Notification: Sept 1, 1986
      Final Version Due: Oct 1, 1986
      Conference Date: Dec 3-5, 1986
Fifteen (15) copies of a double-spaced extended abstract of
10-12  pages in length should be submitted to:
            Dr. Irene Greif
            MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
            545 Technology Square
            Cambridge, MA 02139
             phone (617)- 253-5987
             e-mail:  greif@mit-xx.lcs.mit.edu
People who have limited access to copiers, or for whom overseas
airmail costs will be a burden, should submit only one copy.
Suggestions for panels and interest group meetings should be
1-2 pages long.  Submit these short proposals either by sending
fifteen copies to the address above, or by mailing one copy
to the email address above.
A conference proceedings will be available at the meeting and
published by Ablex.
COOPERATING SOCIETIES:
Software Psychology Society
College of Information Systems of The Institute for Management Sciences
ACM SigOA (pending)
ACM SigCHI (pending)
ACM SigSOFT (pending)
IEEE Computer Society (pending)
For more information call Barbara Smith, MCC STP  at 512-834-3336
or by netmail to basmith@mcc.arpa
>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "V.J. Raghavan"<raghavan%uregina1.bitnet@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 19:20:08 cst
-TO-
To: IRList%vpi.csnet@CSNET-RELAY
-SUBJECT-
Subject: submission to IR list [last part of long set of abstracts - Ed]
-BODY-
.op
.pl75
                                                         blurbs.vr

                            ABSTRACTS

(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1983 issues of journals
 in the retrieval area)

22.  THE  USE OF COMPUTER-MONITORED DATA IN  INFORMATION  SCIENCE
     AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

     Ronald E. Rice
     Annenberg School of Communications,
     University of Southern California
     Los Angeles,  CA 90089

     Christine L. Borgman
     Institute for Communication Research,
     Stanford University,  Stanford, CA 94305

          As    computer-based    information    retrieval    and
     communication  systems become more commonplace,  researchers
     have a greater opportunity to evaluate the uses and  impacts
     of  new  communication technologies.   The systems  and  the
     kinds  of  data  now  available  are  discussed  along  with
     advantages  and  disadvantages  of using  computer-monitored
     data.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(4); 247-256; 1983)

23.  MODERN ALGEBRA AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

     Virgil Diodato
     School of Library and Information Science,
     University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
     P.O. Box 413,  Milwaukee,  WI  53201

          Mathematical concepts used in modern algebra are useful
     for  modeling  aspects  of information  systems.   One  such
     aspect  is  the syndetic structure employed  in  information
     retrieval  systems.    The  equivalence  classes  of  modern
     algebra can represent the See Also components of traditional
     library  catalogs,  while  partial  orderings  and  mappings
     assist in modeling syndetics in more sophisticated  systems,
     such as thesauri.   Utilizing the full strength of algebraic
     techniques   should  provide  improvements  to  the   models
     suggested in this article.

     (JASIS, VOL 34(4); 257-261; 1983)

24.  AUTOMATIC QUERY FORMULATIONS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

     G. Salton, C. Buckley, and E.A. Fox
     Department of Computer Science
     Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

          Modern  information retrieval systems are  designed  to
     supply relevant information in response to requests received
     from  the user population.   In most retrieval  environments
     the  search  requests consist of keywords,  or index  terms,
     interrelated by appropriate Boolean operators.   Since it is
     difficult for untrained users to generate  effective Boolean
     search requests,  trained search intermediaries are normally
     used  to  translate  original statements of user  need  into
     useful Boolean search formulations.   Methods are introduced
     in   this  study  which  reduce  the  role  of  the   search
     intermediaries  by  making it possible to  generate  Boolean
     search  formulations completely automatically  from  natural
     language   statements   provided  by  the  system   patrons.
     Frequency considerations are used automatically to  generate
     appropriate term combinations as well as Boolean connectives
     relating   the  terms.    Methods  are  covered  to  produce
     automatic  query  formulations both in  a  standard  Boolean
     logic  system,  as well as in an extended Boolean system  in
     which  the  strict  interpretation  of  the  connectives  is
     relaxed.   Experimental results are supplied to evaluate the
     effectiveness  of  the automatic query formulation  process,
     and  methods are described for applying the automatic  query
     formulation process in practice.
     (JASIS,  VOL. 34(4); 262-280; 1983)
25.  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ONLINE SEARCHING

     Peter J. Vigil
     Health Sciences Library,
     University of California, Davis, CA 95616

          Online  searching  is a dynamic  process  requiring  an
     interactive  and  iterative  dialogue to fully  utilize  its
     potential.    However,   such  an  interaction  results   in
     communication  barriers at the human-computer interface  due
     to  demands and limits of human memory and human information
     processing.   An  algorithmic  method  of  searching,  using
     Boolean  negation  to eliminate redundancy  and  reduce  the
     cognitive strain of this barrier is proposed.   Experimental
     data  testing the efficacy of the method are also presented.
     Furthermore,  the  correlation of differences  in  cognitive
     processes  to the searcher's comprehension of the system and
     searching behavior are explored.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(4); 281-287; 1983)

26.  POSSIBLE IMPACT OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING ON ABSTRACTING  AND
     INDEXING

     Douglas S. Price
     Deputy Director, National Commission on Libraries and
     Information Science
     1717 K. Street, N.W., Suite 601,
     Washington, DC  20036

          The  following discussion is based upon the  assumption
     that  in  the  future,  a substantial portion  of  scholarly
     material will be published only - or at least primarily - in
     electronic  form.   I will not attempt to predict a date  or
     estimate  the  proportion,   but  electronic  publishing  of
     scholarly articles will certainly become significant in  the
     not-too-distant future.   When it does,  there will be  some
     interesting  ramifications,  which I have not seen discussed
     previously.  It is to these I am addressing this discussion.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(4); 288; 1983)

27.  USER ADAPTATION IN INTERACTIVE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

     Charles T. Meadow
     DIALOG Information Services, Inc.,
     3460 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304

          A  study  was  conducted of  users  of  an  interactive
     database  search system in order to observe and measure  how
     they adapted to the system, which was new to them.  Subjects
     were  selected  from  three  categories  of  prior  computer
     experience  and each was assigned to use one of three search
     languages which varied in complexity or logical power.   All
     searched  the same database of newspaper  clippings.   Useer
     performance appears to be a function of how well suited  the
     language  is  to the user and the problem  being  addressed,
     rather  than either language complexity or user  experience,
     alone.   A  major  conclusion  is that languages  should  be
     designed to suit recognizable classes of users,  rather than
     all users as a whole.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(4); 289-291; 1983)

28.  INFORMATION RETRIEVAL: A SEQUENTIAL LEARNING PROCESS

     Abraham Bookstein
     Graduate Library School,
     University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637

          The fundamental problem of information retrieval is how
     to  decide,  on  the basis of clues,  each of  which  is  an
     imperfect  indicator of document relevance,  which documents
     to  retrieve and the order in which to  present  them.   The
     most  satisfying  conceptual approaches have been  based  on
     probabilistic  decision theoretic  models.   However,  those
     previously used make a decision about a single document at a
     time,  and  extend  this to retrieve multiple  documents  by
     ignoring  interdocument  interaction.   The purpose of  this
     article  is  to  present  decision-theoretic  models   which
     intrinsically  include  the  multiple  retrieval  case.   In
     particular,  we  argue that information retrieval should  be
     envisioned as a process,  in which the information retrieval
     system  responds to a request by presenting documents to the
     patron  in  a sequence,  gathering feedback as  the  process
     proceeds,  and  using  this  information  to  modify  future
     retrievals.   A  retrieval strategy that  naturally  results
     from this model is described.   Two examples are examined in
     detail.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(5); 331-342; 1983)

29.  USAGE PATTERNS OF AN ONLINE SEARCH SYSTEM

     Michael D. Cooper
     School of Library and Information Studies,
     University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

          This  article examines the usage patterns of the ELHILL
     retrieval  program  of the National  Library  of  Medicine's
     MEDLARS  system.    Based on a sample of 6759 searches,  the
     study  analyzes  the  frequency  of  various  commands   and
     command options,  classifies messages issued by the  system,
     and   investigates  searcher  error  rates.    The   article
     concludes  with  suggestions for improving  and  redesigning
     both the program and query language.

     (JASIS,  Vol. 34(5); 343-349; 1983)

30.  A CLUSTER ANALYSIS OF RETRIEVAL PATTERNS AMONG BIBLIOGRAPHIC
     DATABASES

     A Neil Yerkey
     School of Information and Library Studies,
     State University of New York at Buffalo,
     Buffalo, NY 14260

          Searchers of bibliographical databases are faced with a
     multitude  of  choices,  but very few clues,  in  developing
     precise search strategies.   This study attempts to discover
     subject  patterns and clusters among databases in  order  to
     provide clues about differences and similarities among them.
     Descriptors   were  taken  at  random  from  seven   subject
     categories in the ERIC thesaurus and used as search terms on
     Bibliographic   Retrieval  Services'  CROSS  database.   The
     resulting 1,830,312 postings from 54 databases were analyzed
     in  two  ways:  (1) an Expectation Ratio was computed  which
     allowed  ranking  databases  in  order  of  their   relative
     responses  to the subject searches;  (2) a cluster  analysis
     was  conducted  to discover possible  subject  relationships
     among  databses.   The  results  show five  large  clusters:
     Technology,   Life  Sciences,   Bibliography,  Business  and
     Industry,  and Education;  and 12 well-defined  subclustesr.
     It  also shows several dimensions which cut across clusters,
     such  as Research and Social and  Economic  Enterprise,  and
     indicates   that  there  are  nonobvious  similarities   and
     differences  among databases which may provide clues to more
     effective search strategy development.

     (JASIS,  Vol. 34(5); 350-355; 1983)

31.  DOCUMENT CLUSTERING, USING MACRO RETRIEVAL TECHNIQUES

     Thomas R. Kochtanek
     Department of Information Science,
     University of MIssouri-Columbia,
     113B Stewart Hall, Columbia, MO 65211

          An  algorithmic  approach  for  generating  a   loosely
     structured  set  of  documents  based  upon  references  and
     citations is described and initially tested.   The technique
     is  based upon a small subset (or single relevant  document)
     of  known  relevant  documents which form the basis  of  the
     network of structured references and citations.  Suggestions
     for  improvement and refinement point out  potentially  ripe
     research  avenues  for investigating the  identification  of
     relevant  documents pertaining to emerging interdisciplinary
     subject areas.

     (JASIS, Vol. 34(5); 356-359; 1983)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
10
-FROM-
From:	Bitnet%"RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1" 18-FEB-1986 15:32
-DATE-
Date:         Tue, 18 Feb 1986 13:23 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      disconnected from UUCP
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
 ...
I am sending this message to advice you that our connection to the
UUCP network has been disconnected for some indefinite period of
time due to some financial difficulties. Thus, I can no longer
be reached via
     ihnp4!sask!regina!raghavan@ucbvax.arpa
           . . .
... my BITNET address ... be the only path available for some time.
If possible, you could make mention of this fact in the next IR digest.
My BITNET address is Raghavan@UREGINA1.  Thanks. With regards,  Vijay

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Caroline Eastman <gatech!usceast!eastman%seismo.css.gov@CSNET-RELAY>
Return-Path: <gatech!akgua!usceast!eastman>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 86 15:24:14 est
-BODY-
I am now at the University of South Carolina
and back on the networks.  I would like to get
on irlist and get back issues if possible.

Caroline M. Eastman
Department of Computer Science
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC  29208

(803) 777-8103

I am told that feasible paths here include
akgua!usceast   and
cnc!ncsu!ncrcae!usceast

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Don Walker at mouton.ARPA" <walker%mouton.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 86 23:25:15 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NEED INFORMATION ON AI SOCIETIES; PLEASE HELP
-BODY-
I am preparing a short article on associations, societies, and related
organizations in artificial intelligence.  For each, I would appreciate
receiving the following kind of information: name; purpose; date of
establishment; principal people involved in getting it started;
important events in its history; publications, conferences, and other
activities; current membership (if relevant); and any other items of
special interest.  I would like to put the set of organizations in some
historical perspective, if possible.  Pointers to other places where
something like this has already been done would be particularly
helpful, and copies of same would be even moreso.  Needless to say, net
transmission is most efficient, as the deadline is uncomfortably
close.  And I would particularly value finding someone who would be
interested in helping put all this information together!

I would expect to include SIGART, ACL, ICCL, AISB, IJCAII, AAAI, CSS,
CSCSI, ECCAI, and as many other national and regional groups as
possible.  Please help if you can; share with me what you have
available, even if you think you may not be the most appropriate person
to do so; and help get this message out to the people who should know.

Net messages to walker@mouton.arpa, walker%mouton@csnet-relay,
or ucbvax(or ihnp4, etc.)!bellcore!walker; mail to
	Don Walker (EAI)
	Bell Communications Research
	445 South Street, MRE 2A379
	Morristown, NJ 07960, USA

I am sending this notice to publications as well as bboards, digests,
and people, but note that the time is too short to justify actually
printing it in most of them.  Instead, the editors should respond
themselves or route it to those most likely to have the information.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Robert B. Allen at lafite.UUCP" <rba%lafite.dec.com@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 86 07:41:40 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: TOOIS
-BODY-
I looked in Bellcore's log of the IRlist and found the TOOIS
abstracts and the COIS announcement, but I didn't find the note
I had sent to you giving the titles for the January, '86 TOOIS.
There still seems to be some intermittent failure in the
mail from NJ to you -- I've mentioned this to Bruce Ballard and he
also claims to have had trouble.

[Note: V2 # 2 had this announcement but since it is so important
and interesting and since some of you missed it, here are the details.
I hope that mail is working better now that I am distributing from
Seismo. Please let me know of other problems! - Ed]

Ed,

The January, 1986 issue of the ACM Transactions on Office
Information Systems has several papers which may be of interest
to readers of irlist:

R.H. Trigg and M. Weiser
	TEXTNET: A Network-Based Approach to Text Handling
W.P. Jones and S.T. Dumais
	Spatial and Symbolic Filing
J. Donahue and J. Widom
	Whiteboards: A Graphical Database Tool
P. Martin and D. Tsichritzis
	Complete Logical Routings in Computer Mail Systems

I also have the pleasure of announcing that Bruce Croft has joined
the Editorial Board.

Bob Allen

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 86 23:12:13 EST
-FROM-
From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf
-BODY-
Ed,
Here is a review I wrote of Chris's book. Its supposed to appear in
JASIS as some point. I've sent the NROFF source. Thought it might
be nice to put it in IR digest. -- Thanks -- Bill Frakes

.P
\fBInformation and Misinformation: An Investigation of
the Notions of Information, Misinformation, Informing, and Misinforming.\fR
Fox, Christopher John. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press; 1983: 223 pp.
.P
The concept of information is among the most important of our time,
yet its meaning is unclear. What is this mysterious thing called information
which we use to label systems, mental processes, and even the current
age of civilization? This is the thorny and longstanding question that
Fox examines.  The answer the he reaches
has interesting implications for the information sciences,
both on a theoretical and a practical level.
.P
Fox's basic premise is that an adequate definition of information
must encompass the various common uses of the term.
He reviews previous definitions of information, which
have ranged from Fairthorne's
view that information is a bogus concept akin to phlogiston, to precise
definitions in a narrow domain such as Shannon's. Using the technique
of analytic philosophy, Fox argues that none of these definitions
captures the meaning of information as we use it in ordinary speech.
.P
The author argues persuasively that
a definition which does capture our ordinary use of "information" is
that information is propositions, i.e. descriptive statements about the world.
This result strongly indicates that the voluminous research that has been done
in philosophy, mathematics, and other fields,
on the nature and expression of propositions
has direct relevance to the foundations of computer and information science.
Fox's results also have practical consequences for the ways information should
be represented and manipulated in systems.
.P
If information is propositions, then an adequate formalism
for expressing information in a way useful for computation
will most likely be one allowing the expression and manipulation of
propositions. This is not the case with current information retrieval systems
which are term based.  For example, the logical statements and production rules
used in  used in expert systems
should be more useful for representing the information in a document
than a listing of the terms in a document.
As an illustration of this, consider a document consisting of the sentence,
"John loves Mary". In an information retrieval system, whether boolean
or probabalistic, the information will be represented by the words,
"John", "loves", and "Mary" losing the semantic links between the words.
The same document could be represented in a logical language, such as PROLOG,
as "loves(John,Mary)" with no such semantic loss.
.P
This book is an important addition to the literature of the
information sciences. The author does a good job of explaining the
methodology he uses, and thus this book
can and should be read by anyone interested in the foundations of the
information sciences, information systems, or artificial intelligence.
.DS

William B. Frakes
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Holmdel, N.J. 07733
.DE

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1986  12:13 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar  [extract - Ed]
Received: from rand-relay by vpi; Thu, 20 Feb 86 00:20 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CCA Colloquium
-BODY-
Thursday, 20 February  10:00am  Room: 4th floor large conference room,
                                       Four Cambridge Center

                  CCA Colloquium Series


     Deductive Databases and a Relational Knowledge Base
           A Survey of Work at ICOT, Japan

        Haruo Yokota and Masaki Murakami (Institute for New
           Generation Computer Technology (ICOT--Japan) )


> - -
CCA (Computer Corporation of America) is located at Four Cambridge
Center, which is on Broadway, behind Legal Seafood.  Tell the
security desk you are visiting CCA and they will send you up to
CCA on the 5th floor.  Tell CCA's receptionist to call Barbara
Wong who will show you where the seminar is.  (If you can't
remember that, simply say you're here for the colloquium.)
> - -
Abstracts of works to be covered:

1. Deductive Database System based on Unit Resolution
   by Haruo Yokota, Ko Sakai, Hidenori Itoh

   This paper presents a methodology for constructing a deductive
   database system consisting of an intensional processor and a
   relational database management system.  A setting evaluation
   is introduced.  The intensional processor derives a setting
   from the intensional database and a given goal and sends the
   setting and the relationship between setting elements to the
   management system.  The management system performs a unit
   resolution with setting using relational operations for the
   extensional databases.  An extended least fixed point operation
   is introduced to terninate all types of recursive queries.

2. A Model and an Architecture for a Relational Knowledge Base
   by Hauro Yokota, Hidenori Itoh

   A relational knowledge base model and an architecture which
   manipulates the model are presented.  An item stored in the
   relational knowledge base is a term, and it is retrieved by
   unification operation between the terms.  The relational
   knowledge base architecture we propose consists of a number
   of unification engines, several disk systems, a control processor,
   and a multiport page-memory.  The system has a knowledge compiler
   to support a variety of knowledge representations.

3. Formal Semantics of a Relational Knowledge Base
   by Masaki Murakami, Hauro Yokota, Hidenori Itoh

   A mathematical foundations for formal semantics of term relations
   [Yokota et al. 85] is presented.  A term relation is a basic data
   structure of a relational knowledge base.  It is an enhanced version
   of relational model in a database theory.  It may include syntactically
   complex structures such as terms or literals containing variables as
   items of relations.  The items are retrieved with operations called
   retrieval-by-unification.  We introduce as a semantic domain of
   n-ary-term relations n_T_RELATIONS and define a partial order on them.
   We characterize retrieval-by-unification as operations on n_T_RELATIONS
   with monotone functions and greatest lower bounds.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
11
-SUBJECT-
Subject: A Real Find
-BODY-
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.

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

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

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

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

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

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Emma Pease <Emma%su-csli.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed 12 Feb 86 17:40:37-PST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar February 13, No. 3 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
                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-
-VOL-
2

-N-
12
-DATE-
Date: Wed 5 Mar 86 07:49:07-CST
-FROM-
From: seismo!R20.UTEXAS.EDU!ICS.DEKEN
-BODY-
 . . .
The Information Science advisory panel met yesterday, and I think a
good number of important issues were substantially discussed.  If
possible, I will try to make their final report available.

You may post the following on IRlist if you care to.
	Thanks,
	Joe
[Note: I think Internet address is: ics.deken@r20.utexas.edu and
 that NSF now can be reached with lastname@nsf-cs via CSNET
 or with lastname@nsfvax via BITNET - Ed]

========================

A substantial reorganization in the management of computer science,
information science, computer engineering, supercomputer, and
networking research management is now underway at NSF.  All of these
activities, previously spread throughout the Foundation, are being
gathered together in a new Directorate (the Foundation's highest
organizational level).  Gordon Bell has been named to direct this
reorganization.  Bell is nationally known in a variety of contexts,
including his early work with Allen Newell, his role in designing the
DEC PDP and System 10 series computers, and the founding of the
Computer Museum in Boston.  The consolidation will result in a new
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
(CISE) at NSF.  Bell will become the responsible Assistant Director of
the Foundation.  The Division of Information Science and Technology,
of course, will be one of the key elements in the new Directorate.
Charles Brownstein, the current Division Director in the Information
Science and Technology Division, has been named as Gordon Bell's chief
staff officer.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Don Walker at mouton.ARPA" <walker%mouton.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 86 13:08:13 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Announcement; please post
-BODY-
CALL FOR PAPERS: Special issue of Computational Linguistics on the Lexicon

Antonio Zampolli, Nicoletta Calzolari, and Don Walker have been appointed
guest editors for a special issue of Computational Linguistics on the
lexicon.  There is general agreement that the lexicon has been a
neglected area, and that current research is addressing problems of
importance for all aspects of natural language processing.  The issue is
intended to make the community at large aware of these developments.
All papers submitted will be reviewed in the usual manner.  The only
difference in procedure is that three (instead of five) copies should
be sent to James Allen (CL Editor), Department of Computer Science,
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA [acl@rochester.arpa];
one copy should be sent to Antonio Zampolli (CL Lexicon), Laboratorio
di Linguistica Computazionale CNR, Via della Faggiola 32, I-56100 Pisa,
ITALY [glottolo%icnucevm.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa]; and one copy to Don Walker
(CL Lexicon), Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street, MRE
2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA [walker@mouton.arpa; walker%mouton
@csnet-relay; ucbvax!bellcore!walker].  Manuscripts should be received
by 31 August.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: "Don Walker at mouton.ARPA" <walker%mouton.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 86 15:29:19 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: 1987 Linguistics Institute notice
-BODY-
                     1987 LINGUISTICS INSTITUTE
                        STANFORD UNIVERSITY


The 1987 Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America will be
hosted by the Linguistics Department of Stanford University, from June
29  to  August 7, 1987.   It is  co-sponsored  by the  Association for
Computational Linguistics.

The theme of the Institute is "Contextual and Computational Dimensions
of Language",  and is meant  to reflect  the ever-growing  interest in
integrating theories of linguistic structure with theories of language
processing and models of  how language conveys information in context.
The aim is to provide  a forum in which it is possible  to integrate a
variety of  linguistic  traditions,  particularly  linguistic  theory,
computational  linguistics,   discourse  analysis,  psycholinguistics,
sociolinguistics, and artificial intelligence.

Several  different  kinds  of courses and activities will  be  offered
during the six-week period of the Institute:
     (i)    A  series  of overview classes in  the  main  subareas  of
linguistics (six weeks, 3 units)
     (ii)   A series of one-week intensive classes intended to provide
background for the four-week courses and seminars below (June  29-July
3, 1 unit)
     (iii)  Four-week classes on  topics related directly to the theme
of the Institute (July 13-August 7, 2 units)
     (iv)    Several seminars associated with research workshops  will
run throughout the last four weeks.  These can be taken for credit, as
part  of  the Stanford "directed research" program (subject  to  prior
approval of the workshop leader) (up to three units)
     (v)     A series of Wednesday lectures (e.g.,on the Synthesis  of
Approaches to Discourse), involving Institute participants and invited
visitors
     (vi)  The Association for Computational Linguistics will hold its
annual meeting during the second week of the Institute (July 6-10).

1987  marks  the  first  time in recent  years  that  two  consecutive
Institutes have been held with the same theme.   This  complementarity
of  the 1986 Institute held at the City University of New York and the
1987  Institute reflects remarkable changes taking place today in  the
field  of linguistics.   Taken together,  the Institutes  provide  the
depth  and  diversity necessary to cover the newly emerging  subfields
and  to  teach the range of interdisciplinary tools and  knowledge  so
fundamental  to  new  theoretical approaches.  The  1987  Institute at
Stanford differs from the 1986 Institute  primarily in specific course
offerings   and  faculty  and  in  its  focus  on  providing  a   rich
interdisciplinary research as well as teaching environment.   Many  of
the  instructors  will also be participating in  research  groups;  in
general  they   will teach only  one  course.

The  Executive  planning committee is:   Ivan  Sag  (Director),  Ellen
Prince (Associate Director), Marlys Macken, Peter Sells, and Elizabeth
Traugott.   David Perlmutter will be the Sapir Professor,  and  Joseph
Greenberg the Collitz Professor of the 1987 Institute.

For  more  information,   write  1987  LSA  Institute,  Department  of
Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California  94305.

Preliminary List of Institute Faculty:

  Judith Aissen
  Elaine Anderson
  Stephen Anderson
  Philip Baldi
  Jon Barwise
  Joan Bresnan
  Gennaro Chierchia
  Kenneth Church
  Eve Clark
  Herbert Clark
  Nick Clements
  Charles Clifton
  Philip Cohen
  Robin Cooper
  William Croft
  Penelope Eckert
  Elisabet Engdahl
  Charles Ferguson
  Charles Fillmore
  Joshua Fishman
  Lyn Frazier
  Victoria Fromkin
  J. Mark Gawron
  Gerald Gazdar
  Joseph Greenberg
  Barbara Grosz
  Jorge Hankamer
  Jerry Hobbs
  Paul Hopper
  Larry Horn
  Philip Johnson-Laird
  Ron Kaplan
  Lauri Karttunen
  Martin Kay
  Paul Kay
  Paul Kiparsky
  William Ladusaw
  William Leben
  Steve Levinson
  Mark Liberman
  Marlys Macken
  William Marslen-Wilson
  John McCarthy
  Nils Nilsson
  Barbara Partee
  Fernando Pereira
  David Perlmutter
  Ray Perrault
  Stanley Peters
  Carl Pollard
  William Poser
  Ellen Prince
  Geoffrey Pullum
  John Rickford
  Luigi Rizzi
  Ivan Sag
  Deborah Schiffrin
  Peter Sells
  Stuart Shieber
  Candace Sidner
  Brian Smith
  Donca Steriade
  Susan Stucky
  Michael Tanenhaus
  Elizabeth Traugott
  Peter Trudgill
  Lorraine Tyler
  Thomas Wasow
  Terry Winograd
  Annie Zaenen
  Arnold Zwicky

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Emma Pease <Emma%su-csli.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-DATE-
Date: Wed 19 Feb 86 17:20:04-PST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar February 20, No. 4 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
       C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
February 20, 1986               Stanford                        Vol. 1, No. 4


                          PIXELS AND PREDICATES
              Principles of Graphical User-Interface Design
                          Bill Verplank, Xerox
             1:00 pm, Wednesday, February 26, CSLI trailers

      User-interfaces are becoming increasingly graphical with windows,
   icons, pup-up menus, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, etc.  I believe
   that one key to success with these new user interfaces is good graphic
   design.  It's a new kind of graphics: ``graphics with handles''.
     From my experience with the Xerox Star user interface, these seems
   to be the critical graphical challenges:
	---to create the illusion of manipulable objects
	---to reveal hidden structure
	---to establish a consistent graphic vocabulary
	---to match the medium
	---to provide visual order and user focus

                            NEW CSLI REPORTS
      Report No. CSLI-85-34, ``Applicability of Indexed Grammars to
   Natural Languages'' by Gerald Gazdar, Report No. CSLI-85-39, ``The
   Structures of Discourse Structure'' by Barbara Grosz and Candace L.
   Sidner, and Report No. CSLI-85-44, ``Language, Mind, and Information''
   by John Perry, have just been published.  These reports may be
   obtained by writing to Trudy Vizmanos, CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford,
   CA 94305 or Trudy@SU-CSLI.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
13
-DATE-
Date: 11 March 1986, 00:16:55 EST
-FROM-
From: James H. Coombs <JAZBO    at BROWNVM>
-BODY-
Greetings!  Please add me to the IRLIST.
I have a Ph.D. in English and an A.M. in Linguistics.  Am currently
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Brown.  I have developed
an Information Management System for Scholars, currently in beta
testing, and am especially interested in the problems of full-text
retrieval and maintaining keyword consistency.  Thanks.  --Jim
[Welcome! Folks with common interests, please send James some news or
 send to IRList for sharing.- Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben%mimsy.umd.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 86 08:17:59 EST
Subject: SPS
.ll 6.0i
.(l
.ps 18
.b "SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY"
.sp 1
.b "  POTOMAC CHAPTER"
.ps 14
.sp 1
.b "VOLUME 10 NUMBER 3                   SPRING 1986"
.ps 12
.sp 2
.b "March 14                                                   Room 413-414"
.)l
.sp
.ps 12
.ce 4
.b "MANAGING PERSONAL COMPUTERS:"
.br
.b "HUMAN RESOURCES AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN THE OFFICE"
.sp 1
Marc Sokol, Department of Psychology
.br
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
.ps 11
.sp 2
During 1984, over 100 personal computers were installed in the
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, US
Dept of Health and Human Services.  A one-year study examined the
implementation, initial use, and impact.  The findings, presented
from the point of view of innovation diffusion and human resource
management, include:
1. The impact of the PC training design on staff perceptions
of the new technology and its applications.
2. Initial effects of widespread access to the PC on the work
behavior of secretaries, professional staff, and managers.
3. Correlates of higher use of the new technology.
4. A profile of how PCs were used during the first year.
.(f
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.
.)f
.sp 3
.(l L
.ps 12
.b "April 11                                    Room 413-414"
.)l
.sp
.ps 12
.ce 3
.b "THE USE OF COLOR IN COMPUTER DISPLAYS"
.sp 1
Glenn C. Kinney, The MITRE Corporation
.br
1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., McLean, VA 22102
.br
.ps 11
.sp 2
The talk reviews the literature on human color vision as
applied to the use of colors on computer displays, with
emphasis on the air traffic control system.  Several
demonstrations of relevant optical and physiological
properties of vision are included and empirical results are
reported.  Consideration is given to the importance of
hereditary and acquired color deficiencies.
.sp 3
.(l L
.ps 12
.b "May 9                                                      Room 413-414"
.)l
.sp 1
.ce 6
.ps 12
.b "INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION:"
.br
.b "A MINI-PANEL"
.sp 1
.br
Elizabeth Buie, Computer Sciences Corporation, 8728 Colesville Rd.,
.br
Silver Spring, MD 20910
.br
Sue Bogner, Army Research Institute, 5001 Eisenhower Ave.,
.br
Alexandria, VA 22333
.sp 2
.ps 11
Ms. Buie will briefly review the CHI'86 meeting of the Interest
Group on Individual Differences, touching on the research
studies described by interest group participants.  She will then
summarize research on Jungian psychological type as it relates to
programmers and users; special mention will be made of her own studies.
Dr. Bogner will present research results on cognitive complexity as
an individual difference. She will also discuss her research on
cognitive complexity as a factor in learning computer skills, and
in the effectiveness of computer assisted instruction.
Implications for user-system interface design will be discussed.
.(f
Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology Society, c/o
Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD
20851.
.)f
[Note: I have left this in troff format since some people may want a nicely
typeset copy - please let me know if you prefer having me process this
BEFORE sending it to you. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         Sun, 9 Mar 1986 12:40 CST
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.BITNET>
Subject:      call for forum
Ed,
  The deadline for the next issue of Forum would be around the end
of March. I encourage any one interested to submit material to me
elcetronically or otherwise.
  The hard copy material should be compact for the sake of economy.
Usually, the typing should be single space. Pl. include in IR digest.
  Vijay Raghavan (RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.BITNET)
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: "Robert B. Allen at lafite.UUCP" <rba%lafite.dec.com@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 86 14:03:01 est
Subject: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work:  CALL FOR PAPERS
                     PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
                           CONFERENCE ON
                  COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK
    Austin, Texas                                 December 3-5, 1986
                          sponsored by
       Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC)
                 Software Technology Program (STP)
CONFERENCE CHAIR: Herb Krasner, MCC STP
PROGRAM CHAIR: Irene Greif, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
   John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC
   Christine Bullen, MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR)
   Paul Cashman, DEC
   Bill Curtis, MCC STP
   Clarence A. Ellis, MCC STP
   Douglas C. Engelbart, McDonnell Douglas
   George Huber, University of Texas
   Thomas Malone,  MIT Sloan School of Management
   Margrethe H. Olson, NYU Graduate School of Business Administration
   Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland
   Mark Stefik, Xerox PARC
   Lucy Suchman, Xerox PARC
   Terry Winograd, Stanford University
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS:   Bryan Fugate, MCC STP
CONFERENCE THEME -- SUGGESTED TOPICS
This conference takes an interdisciplinary look at
computer-supported cooperative work from technological,
sociological, organizational, cognitive and task domain points
of view. It grows from two past conferences: the DEC/MIT
Workshop on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in August, 1984
and the MCC Interdisciplinary Design Symposium in May, 1985.
The previous conferences drew participants from computer science,
organization design, cognitive science, sociology, artificial
intelligence and practical engineering disciplines.  We hope to
incorporate an even broader range of research and application
perspectives on groups and group work at this meeting.
We are soliciting new papers on the following
representative topics:
 * Experiences with  technology  for  cooperative work
 * Computer-based environments that support cooperation:
      co-authorship, project management, large-scale design of
      computer systems
 * Empirical studies of cooperation/teamwork
 * Impact of computer technology on group behavior, organizational
       structures and work practices
 * Underlying technologies: data bases, structured documents and
      hypertext, access controls and privacy
 * Theoretical models for analyzing group work:  "roles",
       communication protocols, coordination constraints
 *  Multi-media conferencing
 *  Group decision support systems
 *  Domain-specific requirements for computer-supported group work
In order to encourage an informal and informative atmosphere, the
conference's size will be limited.  The program will include invited
speakers, paper sessions, panel sessions and informal interest groups.
We invite proposals for panels and discussion groups as well as papers.
                        INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS
IMPORTANT DATES
      Submission deadline: July 1, 1986
      Acceptance Notification: Sept 1, 1986
      Final Version Due: Oct 1, 1986
      Conference Date: Dec 3-5, 1986
Fifteen (15) copies of a double-spaced extended abstract of
10-12  pages in length should be submitted to:
            Dr. Irene Greif
            MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
            545 Technology Square
            Cambridge, MA 02139
             phone (617)- 253-5987
             e-mail:  greif@xx.lcs.mit.edu
People who have limited access to copiers, or for whom overseas
airmail costs will be a burden, should submit only one copy.
Suggestions for panels and interest group meetings should be
1-2 pages long.  Submit these short proposals either by sending
fifteen copies to the address above, or by mailing one copy
to the email address above.
For more information call Barbara Smith, MCC STP  at 512-834-3336
or by netmail to basmith@mcc.arpa
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************


-VOL-
2

-N-
14
-FROM-
From: Emma Pease <Emma%su-csli.arpa@CSNET-RELAY>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar February 27, No. 5 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
       C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
February 27, 1986               Stanford                        Vol. 1, No. 5
                         NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
              Logical Specifications for Feature Structures
                         in Unification Grammars
       William C. Rounds and Robert Kasper, University of Michigan
      In this paper we show how to use a simple modal logic to give a
   complete axiomatization of disjunctively specified feature or record
   structures commonly used in unification-based grammar formalisms in
   computational linguistics. The logic was originally developed as a logic
   to explain the semantics of concurrency, so this is a radically different
   application. We prove a normal form result based on the idea of Nerode
   equivalence from finite automata theory, and we show that the satisfi-
   ability problem for our logical formulas is NP-complete.  This last
   result is a little surprising since our formulas do not contain negation.
   Finally, we show how the unification problem for term-rewriting systems
   can be expressed as the satisfiability problem for our formulas.
                          PIXELS AND PREDICATES
       Sam: A Text Editor Based on Structural Regular Expressions
                           Rob Pike, Bell Labs
                 1:00 pm, Monday, March 3, CSLI trailers
        This talk will assume some familiarity with the `cut and paste'
   model of editing supported by the mouse interface, and will focus on
   the command language.
      `Sam' has two interfaces: a mouse-based language very similar to
   `jim'(9.1), and a command language reminiscent of `ed'(1).  `Sam' is
   based on `structural regular expressions': the application of regular
   expressions to describe the form of a file.  Conventional Unix tools
   think of their input as arrays of lines.  The new notation makes it
   easy to make changes to files regardless of their structure, to define
   structure within the elements (e.g., the pieces of a line), and to
   change the apparent shape of a file according to the change being
   made.
      The use of structural regular expressions makes it possible for the
   mouse and command languages to operate on the same objects, so that
   editing commands from the mouse and keyboard may be mixed comfortably
   and effectively.  Of course, either mouse or keyboard may be used
   exclusively of the other, so `sam' can be used as if it were `jim',
   `ed' or even `sed'---a `stream' version of `sam' is forthcoming.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1986  12:00 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar  [Extract - Ed]
Thursday , March 6  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom
            The Artificial Intelligence Lab
            Revolving Seminar Series
              Delegation And Inheritance:
    Two Mechanisms for Sharing Knowledge in Object-Oriented Systems
                Henry Lieberman
                  AI Lab, MIT
When a group of objects in an object oriented programming system shares
some common behavior, how can we avoid re-programming behavior in every
object that needs it?  I will explore the consequences of two mechanisms
for sharing knowledge, Inheritance and Delegation, for expressiveness
and performance of object oriented languages.
Using Inheritance, behavior common to a group of objects is encoded in a
Class object, which contains procedures for responding to messages, and
the names of variables that the procedure may access.  Each class may
create a set of Instances, which share the procedures of the class, but
may have their own private values for the variables.  Subclasses may
extend classes by adding additional procedures and variables.
Another way of sharing behavior is Delegation, which views each object
as a prototype capable of creating new objects by copying or reference,
removing the distinction between classes and instances.  General and
specialized objects communicate using message passing rather than a
"hard wired" mechanism.  Communication patterns can be determined at
message reception time rather than at compile time or object creation
time.  There is a time/space tradeoff between inheritance and
delegation, delegation permitting smaller objects at the cost of
increased message traffic.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1986  12:54 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar  [Extract - Ed]
Tuesday,  25, February  4:00pm  Room: Lecture Hall 101,
Aiken Computation Laboratory, 33 Oxford St, Cambridge
Harvard University Center for Research in Computing Technology
"On Some Inadequate Theories of Natural Language Understanding"
                   Dr. Mitch Marcus
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1986  12:28 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
       Friday, 14 March  11:00am  Room: NE43-512a
Evaluation of the PSI Micro-Interpreter and Discussion of PIM,
        the Parallel Inference Machine of ICOT
        Katsushi Nakajima and Akira Matsumoto
   Institute for New Generation Computing Technology (ICOT)
           and Mitsubishi Electric Company
This talk describes the evaluation of the microprogrammed interpreter of
the personal sequential inference machine (PSI) developed in the Japanese
Fifth Generation Computer Project.
The execution speed of PSI is almost the same as that of DEC-10 Prolog on
DEC 2060.  Particularly PSI is a little slower with some simple benchmark
programs and a little faster with the programs in which a lot of
backtrackings may occur.
We evaluate some application programs in PSI's machine language, KLO.  In
evaluating these programs, we consider some dynamic characteristics such as
"Backtrack Ratio," "Predicate Call Ratio," and "Execution Time Ratio."  In
particular, we show that the call ratio of user-defined predicates is 7% to
30%, lower than that of built-in predicates, although the "Execution Time
Ratio" for these predicates is very high (46% to 77%).
We also present an alternate execution method, in which
clauses are compiled to specially designed machine instructions.  This
alternative method is implemented experimentally on PSI.  This method
speeds up execution by a factor of two, though the load for compilation is
somewhat heavy.
The current status and future plans of PIM, the Parallel Inference Machine,
will also be discussed.
Host: Prof. Arvind
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1986  15:04 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
Thursday, 13 March  12:00pm   Room: E25-401
               VISION LUNCH
  "Neighborhoods of Words in the Mental Lexicon"
              Dr. David Pisoni
             Indiana University
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU%xx.lcs.mit.edu@CSNET-RELAY>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1986  09:47 EST
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
Friday, 14 March  3:30pm (refreshments 3:15)  Room: NE43-512a
           "Parallelism in Production Systems"
                   Anoop Gupta
            Carnegie-Mellon University
Production systems (or rule-based systems) are widely used in
Artificial Intelligence for modeling intelligent behavior and
building expert systems.  Most production system programs, however,
are extremely computation intensive and run quite slowly.  The slow
speed of execution has prohibited the use of production systems in
domains requiring high performance and real-time response.  The talk
will elaborate on the role of parallelism in the high-speed execution
of production systems.
On the surface, production system programs appear to be capable of
using large amounts f parallelism -- it is possible to perform match
for each production in a program in parallel.  Our research shows that
in practice, however, the speed-up obtainable from parallelism is
quite limited, around 10-fold as compared to initial expectations of
100-fold to 1000-fold.  The main reasons for the limited speed-up are:
(1) there are only a small number of productions that are affected
(require significant processing) as a result of a change to working
memory and (2) there is a large variation in the processing not
controlled by the implementor of the production system interpreter (it
is governed mainly by the author of the program and the nature of the
problem), the solution to the problem of limited speed-up is to
somehow decrease the variation in the processing cost of affected
productions.  We propose a fine grain to reduce this variation.  We
further suggest that to exploit the fine-grained parallelism, a
shared-memory multiprocessor with 32-64 high performance processors
should be used.  For scheduling the fine-grained tasks consisting of
about 5-100 instructions, a hardware task scheduler is proposed.
The results presented in the talk are based on simulations done for a
large set of production systems exploiting different sources of
parallelism. The simulation results show that using the suggested
multiprocessor architecture (with individual processors performing at
2 MIPS), it is possible to obtain execution speeds of 5000-27000
working memory element changes per second.  This corresponds to a
speed-up of 5-fold to 27-fold over the best known sequential
implementation using a 2 MIPS processor.  This performance is also
higher than that obtained by other proposed parallel implementations
of production systems.
Host: Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************


-VOL-
2

-N-
15
-SUBJECT-
Subject: alternate routing
-BODY-
The CSNET host machine at Virginia Tech has been down since last Sunday.
Mail will get through in spite of other claims - CSNET is holding our
messages.  Meanwhile, IRList can be reached through other addresses
such as those shown below.  Thank you for your patience.
 - Ed Fox (BITNET[cheapest]:foxea@vtvax3 or foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa;
  CSNET:fox@vt;Internet:fox%vtisr1.uucp@seismo.css.gov;UUCP:seismo!vtisr1!fox)

>-----------------------------
-END-
From fox Sat Mar 22 14:33 EST 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: call for news!
-BODY-
Dear IRList Subscribers:
   You may be wondering why IRList issues are settling down to a once
per week, or sometimes once per 1 1/2 week schedule.  The main reason
is that each of you are being derelict in sending in materials!  There
have been numerous questions sent to the list that NOONE has replied to.
Please do not be shy!  If some item in IRList perks your interest, or
says something you agree with, or runs counter to your viewpoint, please
send back a short commentary.  If you are involved in theory, practice,
or related fields to information retrieval, please send in at least a
yearly summary of work going on.  If you prepare a technical report,
please send in the title and abstract.
   I look forward to more active participation from all of you!
   Regards, Ed Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 11 March 1986, 00:16:55 EST
-FROM-
From: James H. Coombs                                JAZBO    at BROWNVM
-BODY-
Greetings!  Please add me to the IRLIST.
I have a Ph.D. in English and an A.M. in Linguistics.  Am currently
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Brown.  I have developed
an Information Management System for Scholars, currently in beta
testing, and am especially interested in the problems of full-text
retrieval and maintaining keyword consistency.  Thanks.  --Jim

[Jim: Please send more details about your system! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 86 10:39:55 EST
-FROM-
From: Jim Davis <seismo!MEDIA-LAB.MIT.EDU!jrd>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  IRList Digest V2 #13
-BODY-
I prefer to not see .troff commands in the IRList.

[Note: since you are the only person to give an opinion, I will follow
your suggestion.  Thanks for the feedback. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
From fox Sat Mar 22 12:31 EST 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Inquiry from Zurich
-BODY-
H.P. Giger recently sent a letter with the following comments. Please
send replies to him (or me or IRList so I can forward responses).
(If anyone know how to reach ETH through electronic mail, please
explain so we can speed this process up! - Thanks, Ed
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
   ...
  I am working in an Information Retrieval (IR) group at the Computer
Science department of the Swiss Institute of Technology.  My basic
interest is in coupling the power of a workstation (e.g. SUN) with an
existing boolean based IR system in order to improve the end-user
interface (e.g. coordinate level matching with a generalized Boolean
Operator ranging from "OR" to "ADJ" using combinations of the
Operators).
   ...
  Some ideas presented by Jamieson at the SIGIR Forum of 1979 (The
Economic Implementation of Experimental Retrieval Techniques on a Very
Large Scale using an Intelligent Terminal) are of interest to me too.
The weighting of the elementary logical conjuncts differs to the one
used in your method.  I'm looking for persons, working in the field of
intelligent front ends. Could you please send me a list of persons you
know working in this area?
   ...
H.P. Giger
Institut fur Informatik
ETH-Zentrum
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

>-----------------------------
-END-
From fox Sat Mar 22 12:47 EST 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Inquiry and abstract
-BODY-
Following are extracts from a letter asking about IRlist. If anyone
knows how to make electronic contact with GMD, please advise. - Ed
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 ...
   In the latest issue of SIGIR Forum I just read your announcement of
IRList.  This seems to me a very interesting idea and I would like to
learn more about it.
 ...
   I am interested in several of the topics you mentioned, in
particular in
	AI applications to IR
	expert systems for IR
	full-text retrieval
	knowledge representation
	probabilistic techniques
	statistical techniques
How can I get access to your material?  Right now, I cannot contact
you via electronic mail.  This may change when DFN (Deutsches
Forschungsnetz, a German network for use by scientists) may get access
to US nets.
   I am enclosing the abstract of a paper that will appear in
Nachrichten fur Dokumentation 36 (1985) no. 6 (page numbers as yet
unknown).  You are free to use it for IRList.
   Sincerely yours,
   Dr. Friedrich Gebhardt
GMD, Postfach 1240, SchloB Birlinghoven, D-5205 Sankt Augustin 1
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Connections between information retrieval systems and expert systems

Increasingly there arise connections and mutual enhancements between
information retrieval systems and expert systems.  They will be
analysed here on the basis of the recent literature.  Theser are the
connections dealt with in sections 1 to 3:
(1)	With their growing sizes, fact and rule bases of expert systems
	can no longer be held in main storage.  Since they in part
	consist of texts, the service of information retrieval
	systems is of advantage.
(2)	The quality of search results of information retrieval systems
	can be improved by an expert system.
(3)	Some less obvious connections consist of some applications of one
	system in the environment of the other, in particular in expert
	systems assisting in the acquisition and plausibility control
	of data for information retrieval systems.  Other proposals
	concern the construction of highly complex systems that comprise
	abilities of expert as well as of information retrieval systems.
	Mentioned here are a system for text retrieval in office databases,
	a system for utilizing statistical databases, and a vision
	of a very general system for problem treatment.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	edu%"ben@mimsy.umd.edu"  2-FEB-1986 22:10
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 86 21:55:46 EST
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  old articles
-BODY-
[Following is part 1 of a 2 part edited extract from materials describing
 research at the University of Maryland.  Contact B. Shneiderman for a
 complete reprint - Ed.]
			 Ben Shneiderman
		Department of Computer Science and
	      Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
		      University of Maryland
		      College Park, MD 20742

			  October 1985

                       The  Human-Computer  Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) is a
unit of the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland. HCIL
is an interdisciplinary	research group whose participants are faculty  in  the
Departments of Computer	Science	and Psychology and the Colleges	of Library and
Information Services, Business,	and Education.	In addition, staff scientists,
graduate  students,  and  undergraduates  contribute to	this small, but	lively
community that pursues empirical studies of people using computers.

Our support comes from industrial research projects,  government  grants,  the
State of Maryland, and the University of Maryland.
 ...  Some of our efforts during the past year are described below.



We have	been exploring ways to attach three or more separate screens to	an IBM
PC and use each	screen as a window.  ...

We have	conducted observational	studies	and built many variations of  multiple
screen	formats	 under	support	from IBM Federal Systems Division in Bethesda,
Maryland.  These studies have led us to	the following concepts:

Fusion:	 Several screens are `fused' together at the bottom/top	or  right/left
edge to	form one, continuous logical screen.  ...

Copying:  One central screen is	used  like  current  single  screens.  Several
other  screens	are  used  to  display	copies of text copied from the central
screen.	 ...  This allows the programmer to save text for later	reference  or,
the  programmers  can  save  part of an	on-line	manual or a directory listing.
...

Direct Selection:  As the cursor moves	from  object  to  object,  information
about the current object is displayed on the other screen.  ...

Synchronized Scrolling:	 This is similar to fusion of  the  left/right	edges.
One  file  is displayed	per screen.  The scrolling of the files	is linked; the
command	up-one-line moves all files up one line.  ...

Independent  Scrolling:	  All  screens	can  be	 controlled   separately.    A
programmer  can	 look  at arbitrary parts of several files or several parts of
one file.  Independence	is similar to logging on to several terminals at once.
The advantage is that you can copy from	one screen to another.	...

These concepts can be applied in many program development situations:

Input -	Filter - Output	Situations:  Using independent screens,	the input to a
program,  the  program text, and the output of the program can be displayed at
once.  This makes a very powerful debugging tool.  ...

Integration And	Reference Tasks:  Many tasks require referring to some text or
comparing  between  texts.   Help screens are little help when they obliterate
the lines you need help	with. ...   Semantically  linked  parts	 of  different
files  can be displayed	together even if there is no one-to-one	correspondence
of lines between the files.  ...  Direct selection is used in  reading	Pascal
programs. ...

Multi-Screen Editors:  New editors can be  designed  with  the	extra  viewing
space  of  the	multi-screen environment in mind. ...  The editor presents the
program	text in	a cognitively useful manner that does not resemble the	format
required by the	compiler.  ...

Cooperative Problem Solving:  Another use for  multiple	 screens  is  to  have
programmers  at	 different  sites  view	the common screens, with communication
arranged by a network.	They can talk by phone and use	cursors	 to  point  at
text or	graphics. ...


Some Human Factors Issues For Multi-Screen Workstations

Working	with a multi-screen terminal introduces	a number of  new  concepts  as
well as	questions about	the best way to	human factor the system.  For example,
with several screens how does one refer	to a particular	screen to direct input
to appear there	or to copy information from one	screen to another?  ...

Selection using	icons and menus	of actions might be  powerful  but  confusing.
How  do	 you  represent	 a screen using	an icon	and where do you put it	(which
screen)?  ...

In cases were the content of the screens implies differences in	operations  on
the screen, some way of	signifying the difference is needed.  ...

An obvious human factors  problem  is  the  physical  separation  between  the
screens.  This can be extremely	disruptive in cases where one needs to compare
the contents of	one screen with	another, line-by-line.	...


Cognitive Layout in Multi-screen Workstations

The added information that can be displayed on multi-screen  workstations  can
either	be  beneficial	or  detrimental	depending on the lay out.  The surface
layout of the information on the screens should	match the user's  expectation.
We  use	 the  term `cognitive layout' to indicate the user's mental picture of
the information.  ...

On the other hand, when	one screen is used as a	 copy  screen,	a  short  term
memory or notepad layout is appropriate.  ...

workstations allow constant display of the temporary storage  file,  relieving
the user of the	burden of remembering the contents.

A hierarchical or `blow	up' layout is useful when searching for	information in
a database or keeping track of position	in a lengthy manuscript.


Putting	the Concepts into Action

We began our work on multi-screen workstations by building a two screen	system
using  the  monochrome	and  color  displays on	an IBM PC.  This system, which
supports fusion, synchronized scrolling, copying  and  independent  scrolling,
was used for several experimental studies. ...

Since we could not get two useful monochrome displays on one PC	we decided  to
link  two  PCs	together.  This	gives us the two monochrome screens displaying
the different information that we needed at the	cost of	having to get the  two
machines communicating.	 ...  A	copy of	the same program runs on each machine.
The copies communicate to keep each other in step.

We needed a method to send characters from  one	 machine  to  the  other.   We
designed  a  simple  protocol  to exchange single characters across the	RS-232
ports.	...  The protocol is for the two machines to indicate  to  each	 other
that they are running by exchanging DTR	and DSR	signals.  ...

Once we	had character-at-a-time	communication it was rather simple  to	modify
existing  programs  to	work  in  the new environment.	...  We	are conducting
experimental tests of team program debugging, the importance  of  a  telephone
voice link, and	different protocols for	controlling cursors.

We find	that these new environments are	 appealing  to	programmers  and  most
users believe that these concepts are beneficial.  However, there is clearly a
period of accommodation	to these  novel	 approaches  before  the  productivity
benefits  accrue.   We	have  attempted	to keep	the commands simple and	few in
number,	so as to ease the learning  process.   During  1986  we	 will  conduct
several	 experiments  to  ascertain  the  effectiveness	 of these multi-screen
concepts for programming tasks and refine the designs.

There are attractive opportunities for expanding the horizon  of  programmers.
Multi-screen  workstations  offer  the	potential  of  showing	more  relevant
information concurrently.  Multi-screen	systems	are relatively cheap to	 build
and offer provocative and novel	ways to	develop	software.

Another	effort was the use of the IBM 3290 Plasma  Display  Workstation.   ...
Seeing	120  lines  of	program	 text  on the screen at	once leaves a dramatic
impression and changes the way programmers study programs.

A second prototype was for a hierarchical browser which	 shows	the  program's
modular	 representation	 in the	upper half of the screen. ...  There is	always
the danger that	more information acts as a distraction and that	extra commands
can  increase confusion.  Careful attention must be paid to the	user interface
design.

Our goal is not	to produce software or hardware	products, but to develop ideas
and  validate  their  effectiveness as we refine our cognitive models of human
performance with computers.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
16
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 86 02:28:43 est
-FROM-
From: ARCHIVE%vax3.oxford.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
-SUBJECT-
Subject: thesaurus software
-BODY-
 ...
    Has you or anyone come across any software
    tools for building/maintaining thesaurus information? Prefarbly for
    IBM PC clones tho UNIX tools would do. There doesnt seem to be much
    around

 ...
Lou Burnard

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Aviezri Fraenkel <fraenkel@wisdom.bitnet>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 86 13:18:20 -0200
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ETH
-BODY-
    ...
    Since people working in IR are for sure able to use it to retrieve an
electronic address, I conclude that you do not have the files. So let me help
you with it. The Institut fuer Informatik, from which H.P Giger wrote to you
(IRList #15), can be reached via the following uucp routes, as a simple search
in our uucp files indicates:
               ...cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!user
               ...princeton!seismo!prlb2!cernvax!ethz!user
    Best wishes and regards,    Aviezri S. Fraenkel.

[Note: Thanks for the information - you are right, I did not have the files.
 I will try the route via "mcvax" since it looks like a better connection
 for "seismo" and I will post a complete address if I make it thru. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:19 est
-FROM-
From: macrakis@harvard.harvard.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #13
-BODY-
I'd MUCH rather have the messages in plain text, single space, no
underlining, ragged right margin.  Almost all messages I read just
once.  I can't imagine when I'd want to typeset a message with troff.
	-s

[Note: I will clean up files for reading, but can't guarantee that
 the right margin will be ragged (esp. if nroff adjusts it) - Ed]

By the way, your address appeared to be fox@seismo.CSS.GOV, which
doesn't work.

[Note: IRList is distributed from seismo.css.gov, a kind service
 that saves a great deal of expense!  I don't have a login there,
 however.  I can be reached via UUCP connection to seismo at
    fox%vtcs1.uucp@seismo.css.gov
 in case that helps.  Sorry if this has caused confusion; I had
 hoped the distribution would be transparent. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Mon, 17 Mar 86 21:52:23 EST
-FROM-
From:         James H. Coombs <JAZBO@BROWNVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      DATABASE@BITNIC and Subject Fields
-BODY-
Greetings!  I have been trying to go through some old IR-Lists using the
SPIRES database accessible through DATABASE@BITNIC, and I have not been
getting the results that I would expect.  I think that I have identified
two major problems.
1) I was not using the proper command.  For example, instead of 'FIND
DATE MAR (IN IR-LIST', I should have used 'FIND DATE STRING MAR (IN
IR-LIST'.  The latter form will match on both "MAR" and "MARCH", which
is what I want.
2) The other problem, I believe, is that some of the notes do not have
SUBJECT fields.  I noticed that my own first note does not, and I believe
that the lack of the subject field prevented my retrieving a notice on
"electronic manuscript publishing" when I used the command 'FIND SUBJECT
STRING ELECTRONIC (IN IR-LIST'.  So, please try to ensure that you
include a subject header with your notices.
If I have made any mistakes here, someone please correct them.
Thanks.  --Jim

[Note: Well, well!  Isn't it funny that information retrieval people
 are the ones to not have meaningful Subject: headings!  In all
 seriousness, I have omitted Subject: entries that were simply
 "Fox" or "IRlist" or the like.  Please put meaningful subject lines
 in your messages, or I will have to make them up (as you will see).
 Thanks for the comments, Jim! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	edu%"ben@mimsy.umd.edu"  2-FEB-1986 22:10
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 86 21:55:46 EST
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  old articles
-BODY-
[Following is part 2 of a 2 part edited extract from materials describing
 research at the University of Maryland.  Contact B. Shneiderman for a
 complete reprint - Ed.]
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION RESEARCH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

			 Ben Shneiderman
		Department of Computer Science and
	      Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
		      University of Maryland
		      College Park, MD 20742

			  October 1985


2) Menu selection

Menu selection as a mode of user control over the human/computer interface has
been  the  topic of research of	a grant	supported by Control Data Corporation.
This effort has	been conducted in collaboration	with Prof. Kent	Norman of  the
Department  of	Psychology.   Although	menu  selection	 seems like a straight
forward	method of interaction for novice users,	our  research  indicates  that
there  are  a  number  of  important human factors considerations that must be
taken into account.  A series of empirical  studies  have  been	 conducted  in
which menu structures have been	implemented using a menu selection prototyping
system (MSPS) developed	here at	Maryland.

The first study	investigated training methods in learning a content free  menu
system.	  ...  The results indicated that users	who studied the	global tree of
the menu do somewhat better than users who (a) memorize	sequences of  choices,
(b) study menu frames, or (c) traverse the menu	in a trial and error fashion.

The  second  study  investigated  training  methods  and  distinctiveness   in
searching for target items in a	commercial timesharing service.	 ...  Again it
was found that the global tree method of training led to the best performance.
Distinctiveness	had a marginal effect.	In cases where the user	searched for a
specific target	item, times were faster	than when searching for	a item to meet
a  requirement or a function.  In the latter case, additional time is required
to determine if	the found item meets the needs of the user.

A third	study investigated the effect of menu structure	on the search process.
...   A	 data  base  of	 256  gift  items  was	generated and clustered	into 5
different structures with four levels.	The number of choices at each level in
the  5 structures were as follows:  4-4-4-4, 2-2-8-8, 8-8-2-2, 2-8-8-2,	8-2-2-
8.  Results to date  indicate  a  superiority  for  the	 4-4-4-4  and  8-2-2-8
structuress  over the others in	terms of overall time to find items and	number
of frames visited.

Other work along these lines has involved the development of a menu evaluation
scale  in  which  users	 assess	 the  degree  to which the menu	facilitates or
retards	work by	its clarity, speed, efficieny of path,	etc.   In  addition  a
theory	of  user  search  behavior is being developed that relies on behaioral
choice theory and information theory.

Future work  is	 planned  along	 three	lines.	 First,	 it  is	 important  to
understand  the	efficient use of menus by experienced users.  ...  Second, the
transfer of training from one system to	another	is becoming important as users
are having to learn a number of	different systems. ...	Finally, more and more
systems	are  using  icons  in  addition	 to  text.   Since  icons  are	highly
recognizable  and  discriminable  they	may greatly facilitate the use of menu
systems	in which the user does not need	to recall the item (icon)  but	merely
recognize it in	a display of many icons.
 ...  An experiment will then be designed in which we compare verbal,  iconic,
and iconic plus	verbal menus.


3) TIES	and OLMM

The Interactive	Encyclopedia System (TIES) has been under development  at  the
University  of	Maryland  since	 Fall 1983.  It	allows novice users to explore
information resources in an easy and appealing manner.	They merely touch  (or
use arrow keys to move a light bar onto) topics	that interest them and a brief
definition appears at the bottom  of  the  screen.   The  users	 may  continue
reading	 or ask	for details about the selected topic. An article about a topic
may be one or more screens long.  As users traverse articles, TIES  keeps  the
path  and  allows  easy	 reversal, building confidence and a sense of control.
Advanced features include the ability to view an index of  articles  or	 print
out articles of	interest. ...

The current version of TIES is being produced at the  University  of  Maryland
for  the  U.S.	Holocaust  Memorial Museum and Education Center	under contract
from the Department of Interior.  This version will include:

    - Novice user browsing software.
    - Database of approximately	110 articles (100-500 words each) on  "Austria
  and the Holocaust 1933-1945",	written	by Dr. Marsha Rozenblit	of the History
  Department.
    - Authoring	software for composing new articles and	editing.

TIES is	appealing to authors because of	the explicit instructional model,  the
reduction  of  computer-related	concepts, the focus on content,	and the	lively
user interface.	 ...

TIES allows authors to create a	 network  of  conceptual  knowledge  in	 which
concepts  are linked associatively and the learner is free to explore pathways
based on their needs and interests.  ...

Three experimental studies have	been conducted	to  test  out  certain	design
alternatives (such as demonstrating the	advantage of arrow keys	over the mouse
for this system) and observe user behavior.  ...  In the study	comparing  the
arrow  keys  (maybe better termed "jump" keys because the cursor would jump to
the closest target in the direction pressed) to	 the  mouse,  the  arrow  keys
proved	to  be	and  average  of 15% faster and	preferred by almost 90%	of the
subjects.  ...

In a second study using	the TIES technique, subjects traversed a database with
42  articles  about  the  University  of Maryland Student Union.  The embedded
menus technique	reduced	the number of screens viewed  when  compared  with  an
explicit  menu	strategy.   There were significant reductions in the times for
task performance, and the subjective preference	was strongly for the  embedded
menus.

The embedded menus  idea  was  also  used  for	two  experiments  with	online
maintenance  manuals  (OLMM),  conducted  by  Larry Koved and supported	by IBM
Federal	Systems	Division. ...  When a pruning algorithm	 was  applied  to  the
text  to allow users to	trim text unrelated to their task, the time was	cut in
half.	This  latter  experiment  used	only  the   computer   condition   and
demonstrated  one  of  the  advantages	of screens over	printed	text.  This is
important, since for many applications printed manuals are still easier	to use
and approximately 30% faster to	read than computer displays.

A field	trial was conducted for	a week in the B'nai Brith Klutznick Museum  in
Washington,  DC	using the touchscreen and arrow	key versions.  Visitors	from 7
to 77 years explored the Austria database and provided comments	on  subjective
evaluation  forms.   Reaction  was  generally  very  positive  with  a	strong
preference for the touchscreen version.

Major extensions include support for graphics, videodisc, or integration  with
other  software.   Further testing is needed to	select the optimum touchscreen
or other input devices and to test alternate screens. ...


4) Direct manipulation and DMDOS

Certain	computer systems generate feelings of enthusiasm,  confidence,	desire
for  exploration,  clarity,  competence,  and  predictability.	These positive
experiences seem to emerge when	the user is presented with a visual display of
the  world  of	action	with  the  objects  of	interest clearly available for
intuitively obvious manipulation.  Operations  are  accomplished  by  physical
actions, such as special buttons,
 joystick, mouse, or touchscreen, rather than by  typing  commands  or	making
menu  selections.  These operations are	generally rapid, incremental (that is,
smooth or
 continuous), and reversible.

Familiar examples of direct manipulation systems include full  screen  display
editor-formatters  (What  you  see  is	what  you get -	WYSIWYG), video	games,
VisiCalc and its descendants, some  educational	 games,	 air  traffic  control
displays,  and	the  Macintosh,	Lisa, and XEROX	STAR environments.  TIES might
also be	seen as	a direct manipulation system for  pursuing  ideas  in  textual
databases.

To explore the design  issues  in  direct  manipulation	 systems  Osamu	 Iseki
(Visiting  Scholar  for	Nippon Electric	Company	in Japan) implemented a	direct
manipulation version of	the IBM	PC-DOS commands.

Called DMDOS (for Direct Manipulation DOS), it	displays  both	the  A	and  B
directories  simultaneously.   Directory  files	 are  selected by pointing and
clicking.  The directory can be	sorted,	sub-directories	can be traversed,  and
the display can	be switched from WIDE to FULL mode.

Operations supported are comparison of two files, copying to a	file,  copying
from  a	 file to the screen, copying from the screen to	a file,	copying	from a
file to	the printer, comparison	of two files, erasing of files,	 execution  of
programs, and online help. ...

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
17
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 14 Mar 86 18:28:43 EST
-FROM-
From:         James H. Coombs <JAZBO@BROWNVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Keyword Consistency and Thoroughness
-BODY-
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.]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Tue, 25 Mar 1986 15:32 GMT
-FROM-
From:         Alan Smeaton <AFS@IRLEARN.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      for the IRLIST [intelligent front ends]
-BODY-
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]

>-----------------------------
-END-
Posted-Date:  25 Mar 86 12:45 EST
Acknowledge-To:  "Richard (Dick) Marcus" <Marcus@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
-DATE-
Date:  Tue, 25 Mar 86 12:41 EST
-FROM-
From:  "Richard (Dick) Marcus" <Marcus@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  IR Intermediary System Conference
-BODY-
   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

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: T3B%PSUVM.BITNET%wiscvm.wisc.edu@CSNET-RELAY
-DATE-
Date:    Sat, 15 Mar 86 09:58 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CRTNET NEWSLETTER 31 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
     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
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 86 02:28:48 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, March 27, No. 9 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
                          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.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:08:09 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, March 20, No. 8 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
                      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-
-VOL-
2

-N-
18
-DATE-
Date: 1986 Mar 28   10:52 SET
-FROM-
From: Robert Philip Weber   <USWRPW@SEGUC11.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: UW CENTRE FOR THE NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICT NEWSLETER
-BODY-
In V2 no 11 you reprint some info from the UW New Oxford Dict Newsletter.
Do you have either snail mail or email addresses so that I can follow up
on some of the info?
Thanks.
Bob Weber
BITNET : Weber3@Harvarda
ARPA: Weber3%Harvarda.Bitnet@Wiscvm.wisc.edu
(i am in sweden at the moment, but my email is forwarded automatically
from harvard. Thanks.)

[Note: Address for newsletter is Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario,
Canada N@L 3G1 (519) 885-1211 x6183.  In No. 6, Sept. 1985 it mentions
that Maureen Searle is serving as secretary, in case you want a person
to send to.  Does anyone have an electronic address? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Aviezri Fraenkel <fraenkel@wisdom.bitnet>
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 86 12:01:24 -0200
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Keywords...
-BODY-
    Regarding "Keyword Consistency and Thoroughness" by J.H. Coombs (IRList
#17), the establishment of good heuristics for the selection of keywords
is indeed a problem which needs to be addressed more fundamentally than has
been done hitherto, to my knowlege.
    THE PROBLEM IS OLD. Let me quote from Colin Tapper, British experience
in legal information retrieval, MULL pp. 127-134 (Dec 1964):
    "The plan...was to index all the material in a given area for both legal
concepts and fact situations, and then to attempt sample searches. The area
selected was the law relating to the admissibility in evidence of confessions.
It was felt that this area was well-defined, self-contained, and, in this
country at least, of relatively small compass.
    "Some preliminary indexing was carried out on this basis. It proved to be
disastrous. For one thing, the legal concepts, so well-defined in books,
proved to be much less so in practice. It was found that the indexers were
quite inconsistent in their attempts to index the same document, and that
even the same indexer was liable to index a document differently at different
times. This was especially true when it was presented in a different context."
    THE PROBLEM IS DIFFICULT. Modelling the keyword selection process, it
has been shown that the easy part of it, namely the question whether there
is a bounded number of keywords for representing a document {the bounded
thoroughness problem}, is NP-complete (Proc. 4th Intern. Conf. on Inf.
Storage & Retrieval, Oakland, CA, 1981, pp. 77-82, ACM 1981).
    These remarks of course do not solve the indexing predicaments,
but perhaps they contribute ever so little to convince IR researchers --
those that still need convincing! -- that the problems are difficult, and
new and more powerful tools for their solution are required...
    Regards,   Aviezri S. Fraenkel.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:  Sun, 6 Apr 86 22:12 EST
-FROM-
From:  "Richard (Dick) Marcus" <Marcus@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  CONIT Intermediary = Intelligent Front End
cc:  Gollu@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Message-ID:  <860407031256.924813@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
-BODY-
   Thanks to Alan Smeaton and Editor Ed for referencing [IRD:2(17)] our
CONIT retrieval assistant system in regard to Hans Peter Giger's request
[IRD:2(15)] for info on intelligent front ends.
   CONIT is an experimental syystem for investigating assisting users
retrieve information, especially bibliographic or text-based, from
heterogeneous systems and databases.  The last major journal article on
CONIT was in Journal of the ASIS (JASIS) 1983:  34(6):381-404.  That
full reference and abstract appear as entry 3 in the bibliography
prepared by Salton and Raghavan in IRD:2(7).  Other papers, articles and
references appear in JASIS (1981), IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics (SMC-1982), Annual Meeting Proceedings of ASIS in
1980-83 and 85, ACM SIGIR FORUM 1974, RIAO Conference (Grenoble, France.
1985), and ACM/BCS Symposium (Poster Presentation -- Cambridge, England.
1984).
   Work in this area has been accelerating in recent years as attested
to by the fact that we are conducting a SECOND conference on the subject
next month (see item FOLLOWING Smeaton item in IRD:2(17)).  The fact
that Smeaton couldn't find a reference to CONIT may say something about
the inadequacies of our existing IR systems.  In this respect, we have a
problem of terminology as pointed out by James Coombs in the PRECEDING
item of IRD:2(17):  front ends are also called interfaces,
intermediaries, gateways, assistants, etc.  Also, calling something
intelligent, or expert, or Knowledge-based doesn't make it so and,
conversely, not calling it intelligent doesn't mean it isn't.
   None of this will be news to Giger with whom I have been
communicating and who is getting CONIT demos via networking to the MIT
computer by a student of mine, Aleks Gollu, who is spending the Spring
term at ETH in Zurich.
   ---Dick Marcus...

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subject: msg indicating Forum schedule
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 30 Mar 1986 23:36 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
  I received a copy of your message to Mike Lesk in which you ask
about the status of Forum. I have been busy and it hasn't gone out
yet. I expect it will be out in a week or so. Certainly, it will
be mailed to ACM before April 10th.  With best wishes, Vijay

[Note:  People can begin sending submissions (to Vijay) for next
issue. This one should be mailed before the end of May. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 31 March 1986, 22:43:22 LCL
-FROM-
From: RNODDY   at SUVM.bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject: faculty position at Syracuse University
-BODY-
 ...  the IRlist Digest.
Very interesting!   Vijay accepted my ad for the next issue of SIGIR
Forum.  In case you are curious, here is a copy:
               NEW TENURE-TRACK FACULTY POSITION
                      ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
The Syracuse University School of Information Studies is seeking
an individual for a full-time, tenure-track faculty position
beginning September, 1986.  The teaching and research interests of
the School include the following areas, in the context of their
application in information transfer: Natural Language Processing,
Human-Computer Interaction, Telecommunications/Networking,
Database Management.
Preference will be given to those applicants who best reflect one
or more of these areas and complement the other needs of the School
We encourage applications from individuals with a variety of
backgrounds, such as information science, behavioral sciences,
computer science, linguistics, and library science.  Applicants
should have a commitment to excellence in teaching and a proven
research/publication record commensurate with experience.  PhD is
required.
The closing date for applications is May 15, 1986, or until filled.
Applications should be addressed to: Dr. Robert N. Oddy, Chair,
Search Committee, School of Information Studies, 200X Huntington
Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY 13244-2340. (On Bitnet:
RNODDY at SUVM).
Syracuse University is an AA/EOE.
Yours,  Bob Oddy.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
19
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 86 01:09:34 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% (Peter_Smit%ub-mts%umich-mts.mailnet@mit-multics.ARPA)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: seventh possible PhD research project
-BODY-
[Note: This is a long message, but Peter would like feedback. I have
left this in a narrow column (though in future it is better if
submissions are done more normally), which I hope won't hurt
readability too much.  The copy I edited had the 1st letter of most
lines omitted, so in case I erred in editing, you can try to figure
out the correct form yourself, since lines are as before. - Ed]

   University of Michigan
   Peter Smit 8603 2803
   Urban, Technological and Environm. Planning

    TITLE: Software development strategies for
  new information structures.

BACKGROUND:  Providing retrieval services of
existing literature sources for the public at
large, as is done at present by some on-line
systems and some laser disk services, is not enough
anymore.  There are many such services already.
Moreover, retrieval by  category or by a
combination of keywords is not good enough because,
in response to the general queries that non-
specialists are most likely to ask, it responds
with impractically large numbers of references.
While all of these may include that general
concept, usually only few provide good introductory
readings for a novice.  Finally, the readings to
which retrieval services typically refer  contain
parts that are redundant, side tracks irrelevant to
the user's purposes  and specialized unexplained
terminology.  People in a practical frame of mind
would like to know what all these articles and
books really have to say about their particuilar
problem, but they don't have the time to read even
a selection.

Rather, there may be some demand for a service that
provides short summaries of general as well as
specific topics, with menus of choices after each
summary to get to related or more specific summary
items.  The advantage of this approach is, first,
that in practice, the use of menus is easier than
having to learn command codes or retrieval
languages which is often necessary in keyword
retrieval systems.  Also, the specially re-written
summaries can be made short enough to fit on a
single screen display.  Furthermore, general
overview items can be retrieved in response to a
general queries, and more specific items in
response to queries contqaining more specialized
searching terms.  However many times different
source texts repeat each other in mentioning some
basic facts, the users will have to read those
general introductory items only once because one
summary item will cover all those instances.
Moreover, items can be made to inculde menus or
references to other items that deal with similars
topics, provide evidence, mention exceptions, or
are otherwise related.  Finally, just as that list
or menu of related items, a list can be provided
of all the books, articles and other source texts
that mention the topic described in the item.  The
latter will help the reader to assess the strength
or truthvalue of the contents of the items.

The disadvantage of the proposed linked, general
and specific summary items is that, in order to
make these, all literature has to be picked apart,
its elements summarized and compared to similarly
dissected sourcematerial.  This is kind of analysis
is different from abstracting because, of the
desired summaries, some go much more into depth
than typical abstracts do, and the summaries may be
segemented in strange ways to fit the divisions as
to what is mentioned in other source texts as well.
Not only is this a lot of work, but it also
involves judgements that cannot be left to a
computer: are particular paragraphs of two articles
so similar as to be redundant, does one paragraph
support the other or generalize from the other, are
they different but related or do they directly
oppose eachother, etc.  In fact, not even all
people will be able to analyze and summarize all
texts.  In a field like environmental care, there
are specialties like nature preservation, traffic
planning, housing, historic preservation, economic
development, utilities, water quality management,
emergency preparedness, recreation, etc.  Probably
only people from the right specialty, or better
yet, a panel of those specialists, will find their
content analyses and summaries accepted by others
in the field.  Making new information items for a
service as proposed above, then, will be a very
labor intensive endeavour.  Ways should be sought
in which computers may assist in getting that work
done.

APPROACH:  While the computer can not interpret
texts well enough to formulate the new sets of
summary items and link these with existing items,
it can help in setting priorities for new texts to
process and it can provide administrative support
to the specialists that do the analysis,
reformulation and overview building.  Computer
programs to assist in retrieval from the envisioned
integrated sets of text items should be no problem
in principle because several retreival files with
that structure are operational already (e.g.
Bernstein and Williamson's ANNOD, files on the
English PRESTEL or the Dutch VIDITEL, etc.).
However, software for entering, editing and
connecting new items into a file of this kind may
not exist  because most of these files are small,
custom made and may not expand as much as get
details within their items updated or altered.


Research questions are, then, (A) Is there software
that does part of the job, such as:

Maintain a classification of subscribers as to
their area of specialty and the kind of
feedback or reward that has made them willing
to process a new text in the past.

Perform a word frequency analysis on newly
incoming titles in order to determine the area
of specialty of which they seem to be a part.

Administer the citation (or the entire new
source text if there is room) to several
subscribers in the proper area of specialty and
ask, when they sign on, if they would be
willing to process it.  Keep track of who is
beginning to respond and how fast they seem to
go.  Put out this request to even more
articipants if the process is taking too long.

While helpful subscribers are retrieving items
to see how they relate to what the new text is
saying, let them work at a reduced rate.
provide a rebate on later system usage, lottery
tickets, names of famous people who are waiting
for this information to be added, or whatever
incentive is appropriate and indicated by 1.

Provide wordprocessing support and encourage
the use of standard  layouts and formats that
are used throughout the file.  Let it be a
matter of a few keystrokes to add the new
citation to lists of source material that are
shown on the bottom of other items.

Prod the analyst-editors for general summaries
that introduce a particular term or argument as
used in the new text, for title lines to
identify items in the menus of related items,
for connections to other texts even where the
author of the source text did not indicate
these in the new text or its bibliography, for
lists of synonyms, criteria to distinguish
between look-alike terms or for anything else
that may help in retrieval.

Facilitate debate when different specialists
disagree, such as concensus facilitation in the
delphi process and in computer conferencing.
Show them each other's analyses, perhaps in the
form of item-maps as well as the items
themselves and ask them to pick the prefered
formulation or pinpoint the areas of
disagreement.  Collect particular third
opinions or hold a poll if necessary.

Enter items about which there is minimal
agreement in a provisional way with indication
of the nature and extent of uncertainty or
disagreement still pending.

Enter the items properly once sufficient
agreement has been reached, replace the revised
ones and delete the provisional ones.

10. Keep solliciting user feedback.  Group comments
by the item or relation to which they pertain.
Call the matter to the attention of a
specialist in the proper area if the proportion
of users that leaves a comment is high.

11. Analyze usage frequencies and browsing patterns
so as to identify areas where additional
information would be most welcome and to spot
loops etc. where users are getting lost.
Propose clarifications even where users did not
have the awareness to leave comments.

12. Analyze specialist's summarizing quality by
tabulating the number of adjustments that have
to be made later to their work, because some
specialists are better at doing their thing
than at talking or editing about it.

Not all of these parts have the same priority, but
if programs for any of them exist, it would be good
to make programs for the other parts compatible and
to enable all of them to work from the same data
formats.

A further question if different software suppliers
can offer some of these parts, is, of course, (B)
what would be a good development startegy for
getting the missing parts written, in terms of
cost, duration and flexibility?  What effort of
writing database reformatting programs can be
justified to accomodate less compatible programs?

If you know of (A) any appropriate software, even
if only for part of the job, or of (B) any
strategies for complex package development, I
should like to hear from you.  Leave a message
before the end of April for Peter Smit on UB,
using the attached electronic address.
         Thank  you

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 86 01:08:43 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-TO-
To: friends@su-csli.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, April 3, No. 10 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
       C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S

April 3, 1986                   Stanford                       Vol. 1, No. 10

                      Categories of Correspondence
                  Brian C. Smith (Briansmith.pa@xerox)
                              [April 3]

      Photographs, sentences, balsa airplane models, images on computer
   screens, Turing machine quadruples, architectural blueprints,
   set-theoretic models of meaning and content, maps, parse trees in
   linguistics, and so on and so forth, are all representations---
   complex, structured objects that somehow stand for or correspond to
   some other object or situation (or, if you prefer, are `taken by an
   interpreter' to stand for or correspond to that represented
   situation).  It is important, in trying to make sense of
   representation more generally, to identify the ways in which the
   structure or composition of a representation can be used to signify or
   indicate what it represents.
      Strikingly, received theoretical practice has no vocabulary for
   such relations.  On the contrary, standard approaches generally fall
   into one of two camps: those (like model-theory, abstract data types,
   and category theory) that identify two objects when they are roughly
   isomorphic, and those (like formal semantics) that take the
   ``designation'' relation---presumably a specific kind of
   representation---to be strictly non-transitive.  The latter view is
   manifested, for example, in the strict hierarchies of meta-languages,
   the notion of a ``use/mention'' confusion, etc.  Unfortunately, the
   first of these approaches is too coarse-grained for our purposes,
   ignoring many representational details important for computation and
   comprehension, while the latter is untenably rigid---far too strict to
   cope with representational practice.  A photographic copy of a
   photograph of a sailboat, for example, can sometimes serve perfectly
   well as a photo of the sailboat.  Similarly, it would be pedantic to
   deny, on the grounds of use/mention hygiene, that the visual
   representation `12' on a computer screen `must not be taken to
   represent a number,' but rather viewed as representing a data
   structure that in turn represents a number.  And yet there are clearly
   times when the latter reading is to be preferred.  In practice,
   representational relations, from the simplest to the most complex, can
   sometimes be composed, sometimes not.  How does this all work?
      Our approach starts very simply, identifying the structural
   relations that obtain between two domains when objects of one are used
   to correspond to objects of the other.  For example, we call a
   representation `iconic' when its objects, properties, and relations
   correspond, respectively, to objects, properties, and relations in the
   represented domain.  Similarly, a representation is said to `absorb'
   anything that represents itself.  Thus the grammar rule `EXP ->
   OP(EXP1,EXP2)', for a formal language of arithmetic, absorbs
   left-to-right adjacency; model-theoretic accounts of truth typically
   absorb negation; etc.  A representation is said to `reify' any
   property or relation that it represents with an object.  Thus
   first-order logic reifies the predicates in the semantic domain, since
   they are represented by (instances of) objects---i.e., predicate
   letters---in the representation.  A representation is called `polar'
   when it represents a presence by an absence, or vice versa, as for
   example when the presence of a room key at the hotel desk is taken to
   signify the client's absence.  By developing and extending a typology
   of this sort, we aim to categorize representation relations of a wide
   variety, and to understand their composition, their use in inference
   and computation.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
20
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 86 06:37:18 est
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Query on Picture Retrieval/Similarity
-FROM-
From: cross%wsu@csnet-relay.ARPA
-BODY-
We are starting to build a system that will retrieve trademarks from a
DB which resemble a given trademark in order to assess possible
trademark infringement.  I would appreciate pointers to systems which
retrieve pictures from a DB which are similar to a given picture.
Picture means binary images in this context.  Please reply to me and I
will summarize to IRLIST.

 ---- George

 George R. Cross		cross@wsu.CSNET
 Computer Science Department	cross%wsu@csnet-relay.ARPA
 Washington State University	faccross@wsuvm1.BITNET
 Pullman, WA      99164-1210	Phone: 509-335-6319 or 509-335-6636

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 9 Apr 1986 14:30 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Next Forum
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
      There will probably be some delay in my sending the material
for the next forum. This is because I am hoping to get the preliminary
program for the Pisa conference included. I hope to get this sometime
next week from Rabbitti.
      With regards,   Vijay.

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:  Sat, 19 Apr 86 19:23 EST
-FROM-
From:  "Richard (Dick) Marcus" <Marcus@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Second Conference on Computer Interfaces and Intermediaries
          for Information Retrieval
-BODY-
   The conference agenda is now in near-final form.  Sessions will run
from early morning Thursday, 28 May, to Saturday PM, May 31, at Boston
Park Plaza Hotel.  Sessions scheduled:
  1- AI in Retrieval
  2- Gateways
  3- Interfaces
  4- Common Command Language
  5- Natural Language
   The following speakers will present papers on those topics:  Martha
Williams (U Illinois), Carol Fenichel (Hahnemann U), Gio Wiederhold
(Stanford), Nick Belkin (Rutgers), Linda Smith (U Illinois), Michael
Pincus (Thunderstone Corp), Bruce Croft (U Mass), Ed Fox (VPI), Viktor
Hampel (Lawrence Livermore Natl Lab), Gladys Cotter (DTIC), Judy Hushon
(BBN), Richard Marcus (MIT), Charles Meadow (U Toronto), David Toliver
(ISI), Bill Mischo (U Illinois), Michael Monahan (GAEC Computers Intl),
Donald Hawkins (Bell Labs), Marcia Bates (UCLA), Hilary Burton (Lawrence
Livermore Natl Lab), Dineh Moghdam Davis (Bentley C), Emily Fayen (U
Penn), Rita Bergman (CCA), Lionel Bernstein (U Illinois-Chicago),
Gabriel Jacobson (GTE Labs), Ralph Weischedel (BBN), Sharon Salveter
(Boston U), Craig Thompson (Texas Instruments), and Gerard Salton
(Cornell U).
   In addition, there will be system presentations and demonstrations by
Artificial Intelligence Corp (INTELLECT), Dialog (DialogLink),
Disclosure (Micro Disclosure), H.W.  Wilson (WILSEARCH), ISI (Sci-Mate),
KNM Inc.  (SIRE), Telebase (systems (EASYNET), and MIT (CONIT).
   Early registration is $225 ($175 for government attendees, $20 extra
for pay-at-door).  For further info, including brochure with full agenda
details and registration form plus info on special rates for hotel and
transportation, call or write the American Defense Preparedness
Association (ADPA), Rosslyn Center, Suite 900, 1700 N Moore St.,
Arlington, VA 22209, 703/522-1820 or Ms.  Carol Jacobson at the Defense
Technical Information Center (DTIC) 202/274-5367.
   In my objective opinion, it looks like a good, one-track conference!

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 86 00:49:50 est
-FROM-
From: walker@mouton.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACL Annual Meeting, 10-13 June, Columbia University, New York City
-BODY-
The Program and Registration Information brochure is just being mailed
to all ACL members and to selected members of AAAI and LSA.  If you are
not sure you will be receiving it and would like a net copy, send a
message to one of the addresses below; and I will (try to--even
electronic mail is not always reliable) send you one.  Please include
the phrase "ACL net info" in the subject line.  And include the
full net address in the body of the message; the complexity of
network connections coupled with the poverty of our mail system
sometimes makes "replies" unsendable.

The file has about 20,000 characters; it contains the full program
(33 papers; an invited presentation by Gary Hendrix; two forums, one
on Connectionism with Terry Sejnowski and Dave Waltz, the other
on Machine Translation with Martin Kay and Maghi King);
descriptions of the 6 tutorials (Intro to Computational Linguistics,
Natural Language Generation, Structuring the Lexicon, Recent
Developments in Syntactic Theory and Their Computational Import,
Current Approaches to Natural Language Semantics, and Machine
Translation--all held on 10 June); registration information and
directions; and an Application Form that can be printed out,
filled in (or filled in, printed out), and mailed in.  Inexpensive
air-conditioned dormitory accommodations are available, and some
good rates for hotels have been secured.  We are still encouraging
people who would like to exhibit or demonstrate programs to contact
Ralph Grishman (Computer Science, New York University, 251 Mercer
Street, New York, NY 10012; 212:460-7492; grishman@nyu.arpa).

Don Walker
walker@mouton.arpa
walker%mouton@csnet-relay
{ucbvax, ihnp4, ...}!bellcore!walker

address mail to:
Donald E. Walker (ACL)
Bell Communications Research
445 South Street, MRE 2A379
Morristown, NJ 07960, USA

201:829-4312

ACL Annual Meeting, 10-13 June 1986, Columbia University, New York City

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 86 19:02:36 est
-FROM-
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@mc.lcs.mit.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
Tuesday, 15 April  10:30am  Room: 2nd floor large conference room
                                  BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge
    BBN SCIENCE DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM - AI/EDUCATION SEMINAR
"Pragmatic  Modeling:  Toward a Robust Natural Language Interface"
                Professor Sandra Carberry
                 University of Delaware

Naturally occurring dialogue is both imperfect and incomplete.  Not
only does the information-seeker fail to communicate all aspects of
his underlying task and partially constructed plan for accomplishing
it, but also his utterances are often imperfectly or imcompletely
formulated.  It appears that human information-seekers expect an
information-provider to facilitate a productive exchange by
assimilating the dialogue and using this knowledge to remedy many of
the information-seeker's faulty utterances.

This talk will describe an on-going research effort aimed both at
developing techniques for inferring and constructing a user model from
an information-seeking dialogue and at identifying strategies for
using this model to develop more robust natural language interfaces.
Emphasis will be on the dynamic construction of the task-related plan
motivating the information-seeker's queries, and its application in
handling pragmatically ill-formed and incomplete utterances.



Wednesday, 16, April  4:00pm (refreshments 3:45) Room: NE43-512A
           LCS  THEORY OF COMPUTATION SEMINAR
             "Inexact Reasoning Using Graphs"
                      JUDEA PEARL
              Computer Science Department
                         UCLA

Probability theory is shunned by most researchers in Artifical Intelligence.
New calculi, claimed to better represent human reasoning under uncertainty,
are being invented and reinvented at an ever-increasing rate.  A major reason
for the emergence of this curious episode has been the objective of making
reasoning systems TRANSPARENT i.e., capable of producing PSYCHOLOGICALLY
MEANINGFUL explanations for the intermediate steps used in deriving the
conclusions.

While traditional probability theory, admittedly, has erected cultural
barriers against meeting this requirement, we shall show that these barriers
are superficial, and can be eliminated with the use of DEPENDENCY GRAPHS.
The nodes in these graphs represent propositions (or variables), and the arcs
represent causal dependencies among conceptually-related propositions.  We
further argue that the basic steps invoked while people query and update
their knowledge correspond to mental tracings of preestablished links in such
graphs, and it is the degree to which an explanation mirrors these tracings
that determines whether it is considered "psychologically meaningful".

The first part of the talk will examine what properties of probabilistic
models can be captured by graphical representations, and will compare the
properties of two such representations:  Markov Networks and Bayes Networks.

The second part will introduce a calculus for performing inferences in Bayes
Networks.  The impact of each new evidence is viewed as a perturbation that
propagates through the network via local communication among neighboring
concepts.  We show that such autonomous propagation mechanism leads to
flexible control strategies and sound explanations, that it supports both
predictive and diagnostic inferences, that it is guaranteed to converge in
time proportional to the network's diameter, and that every proposition is
eventually accorded a measure of belief consistent with the axioms of
probability theory.

In conclusion, we will show that the current trend of abandoning probability
theory is grossly premature--taking graph propagation as the basis for
probabilistic reasoning satisfies most computational requirements for
managing uncertainties in reasoning systems and, simultaneously, it exhibits
epistemological features unavailable in any competing formalism.

HOST: Ronald Rivest

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 86 18:55:11 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, April 10, No. 11 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR THURSDAY, April 10, 1986

              Representation: Foundations of Representation
                       Ken Olson (Olson.pa@xerox)

      What is it for a thing to represent another?  Answers that rely in
   any simple way on resemblance and causality are easily dismissed.
   Peirce thought that representation was an irreducibly three-place
   relation between a sign, an object, and what he called an
   interpretant.  But while Peirce's view has much to recommend it, the
   notion of an interpretant seems to introduce an unwelcome mentalistic
   element.  At least it is unwelcome if we wish to account for mental
   representation as one species of the more general notion instead of
   giving it privileged status.  I claim, however, that the notion of
   interpretant does not presuppose a full-fledged mind.  Other ideas of
   Peirce's also deserve attention.  Situation theory may finally be the
   proper medium in which to realize his goal of a general theory of
   signs.


            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR THURSDAY, April 17, 1986

                  Understanding Computers and Cognition
                            by Terry Winograd
           Discussion led by Brian Smith (Briansmith.pa@xerox)

   For some time, Terry Winograd has believed that the general semantical
   and theoretical approaches embodied in current AI systems are
   inadequate for dealing with human language and thought.  What
   distinguishes his views from those of various other AI critics is the
   scope of what he takes to be the problem.  In particular, as he argues
   in his new book, he is convinced that that nothing within what he
   calls the ``rationalistic tradition''---in which he would presumably
   include most CSLI research---will overcome these inherent limitations.
      In this TINLunch we will discuss the argument presented in the
   book, try to separate the various threads that lead to Terry's
   conclusion, and assess its relevance to the CSLI research program.
   (The book, which is not difficult to read, should be available at
   local bookstores; some selected portions will be made available in the
   usual places.)

>----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 86 00:59:40 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, April 17, No. 12 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
                              CSLI SEMINAR
                Lexical Rules and Lexical Representations
                Mark Gawron, Paul Kiparsky, Annie Zaenen
               4:15 p.m., April 24, CSLI Trailer Classroom

      This is the third of a series of talks reflecting the ongoing
   elaboration of a model of lexical representation.  In the first, Mark
   Gawron discussed a frame-based lexical semantics and its relationship
   to a theory of lexical rules. In the second, Paul Kiparsky proposed a
   theory of the linking of thematic roles to their syntactic realizations,
   emphasizing its interactions with a theory of morphology; and in this
   one, 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.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
20
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 86 12:23:07 est
-FROM-
From: seismo!harvard!wjh12!mirror!rs (Rich Salz)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Please add
-BODY-
Please add info-ret to the list.  We have a couple of
people here who are interested, and may be starting
an information retreival project here.

Thanks,
	/rich $alz,
	sys Admin
[Note: Can you tell us more about your group? Other groups: please do
send in abstracts of new papers or reports, comments on conferences
attended, etc.! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 12 Apr 86 17:38 PST
-FROM-
From: William Daul / McDonnell-Douglas / APD-ASD
<seismo!OFFICE-1.ARPA!WBD.MDC>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: The Use Of Internet Digests
-BODY-
Most people probably receive these digests, read them and then either save them
for awhile (as is) and/or delete them.  I would like to know how other users
use these digest in a more exotic way.  We use a system of electronic journals
to save the digests.  Any user will see a citation (or link) to the actual
journal item (in this case a Digest).  The digests don't have to clutter up a
users directory.  We can search the journal for key fields or subjects.

I will compile a list of how other use it (if anyone replies) and send it to
the digest.  How many times do any of you go back over old digests, why and
how?

Thanks,  --Bi//

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:24 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract of long, interesting newsletter: Pt.1 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: CSLI seminars have often been listed in IRList issues.  Since
the aims of CSLI are so broad, and since many relate to IR work, it is
suitable to include a description of CSLI and the research underway.
Whereas Vol. 1 No. 1 was 4 long files, the summary in IRList will be
two (brutally edited) moderate messages.  Here is part 1. - Ed
PS Since these issues are so long, I encourage those interested to
subscribe directly.]

                         C S L I   M O N T H L Y
  March 15, 1986		  Stanford                Vol. 1, No. 1
    A monthly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
   Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

   Editor's note
    ...  This issue introduces CSLI and then characterizes each of
   its current research projects; following issues will report on
   individual projects in more detail and discuss some of the research
   questions raised here.


   What is CSLI?
   CSLI is a research institute devoted to building theories about the
   nature of information and how it is conveyed, processed, stored, and
   transformed through the use of language and in computation.
   Researchers include computer scientists, linguists, philosophers,
   psychologists, and workers in artificial intelligence from several San
   Francisco Bay Area institutions as well as graduate students,
   postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars from around the world.
[Note: no mention is made of information retrieval or information
science! - Ed]


   Where is it located?
   CSLI's location is one of its more interesting features: it is
   discontinuous. CSLI research and activities are conducted at SRI
   International, Stanford University, and Xerox PARC.  ...


   What is its research goal?
   In using the rich resources language provides for dealing with
   information, we all show mastery of a powerful apparatus which
   includes concepts of meaning, reference, knowledge, desire, and
   intention.  CSLI's goal is to develop theories of information that are
   explicit and systematic and at least as rich as our implicit
   understanding, and to apply these theories to the analysis of
   language.  The implications of these theories should be far-reaching,
   not only for the study of natural languages, but also for the analysis
   and design of computer languages.

   Current efforts to endow a computer with human information-processing
   abilities are being made without benefit of a theory of information
   content.  This is like trying to design a calculator without a precise
   formulation of the laws of arithmetic: some of the pieces will be
   right, but their unification into a smoothly running whole is
   unlikely, if not impossible.  For example, natural language database
   query systems can handle restricted uses of language, but may yield
   unexpected results when faced with ambiguity, anaphora, or indirect
   speech acts.  Other artificial intelligence programs count on
   similarly limited domains such as characteristics of specific diseases
   or rules of game-playing.  In real-time applications, unexpected
   failures are often the result of our inability to account fully for
   interactions of machine-processes with real world events.  Even if we
   cannot resolve all the intricacies, a full characterization of them
   will increase our understanding of the limitations of computer
   technology and influence decisions we make about its use.

   CSLI researchers conceive of their work as part of the development of
   a newly emerging science of information, computation, and cognition.
   ...  The endeavor requires the
   collaboration of all.  The most explicit theories of meaning come from
   philosophy and logic, but these cannot be straightforwardly applied to
   natural languages.  The most explicit and detailed theories of
   grammatical structure come from linguistics; these deal well with
   phrases and sentences, but cannot be directly applied to larger units
   of discourse.  Computer scientists can give detailed accounts of
   programs, themselves large units of discourse, but the "sentences" out
   of which programs are built exhibit far less complexity than those of
   natural languages.  Action has been studied in various ways by various
   disciplines, but the action theories that are well-worked-out
   mathematically -- like "choice theory" in economics -- are too simple
   to capture real-life applications.  And those that seem more promising
   -- like Aristotle's theory of "practical reason" -- haven't been
   developed to the point where they can really be applied.  Logic and
   psychology have quite a lot to tell us about inference and reasoning,
   each in its different way, but this work has seldom been related to
   natural language uses.


   How does it work?
   Since its inception, the Center has included a multitude of mechanisms
   to promote formal and informal interaction, including weekly seminars
   and colloquia, frequent project meetings, and daily teas.  But the
   nature of the interaction has changed over time.  At first, the main
   function was mutual education of a general sort.  ...
   In time, the interactions became more focussed, and new research
   constellations were formed.  ...  Discussion focussed on
   the assumption, central to most AI work, that the agent's relation to
   the world is mediated by logical representations.  ...
   Out of this interaction came a new goal: to
   give an account of an agent's place in the world that, on the one
   hand, is as detailed and rigorous as the AI accounts, and, on the
   other hand, does not start from an a priori assumption of a
   representational connection.

   CSLI's current research projects represent this sort of convergence of
   theories and ideas.  Most activities of mutual education are now
   connected with the projects.  However, the impact of the first two
   years has not dissipated.  Mechanisms are being put into place to
   ensure that new connections are encouraged and strengthened, and the
   respect CSLI has for individual differences ensures that vigorous
   debates will continue into the foreseeable future.


   What made CSLI possible?
        o 40 researchers
        o 5 academic disciplines
        o 3 separate locations
        o 3 different administrations
        o 1 common research goal
    combined with
        o A large grant from the System Development Foundation
        o Smaller grants from the National Science Foundation
        o Equipment grants from Xerox Corporation and Digital Equipment
          Corporation
        o The generosity and vision of Stanford University, SRI
          International, and Xerox PARC

   How do the present projects contribute to the common goal?
     One schema for organizing our research activities is the following,
     based roughly on sizes of information chunks:
        o The nature of information, representation, and action
        o Information and meaning in extended discourse
        o Information and meaning in sentences
        o Information and meaning in words
        o Sources of information
   As with any schema, this one is useful only as long as it's taken with
   a grain of salt.  It doesn't, for instance, imply an ordering on the
   process of understanding information; it doesn't mean that information
   is passed upwards, or from one level to its nearest neighbors ...


   THE NATURE OF INFORMATION, REPRESENTATION, AND ACTION
   A full account of the content and transfer of information requires us
   to embed theories of meaning and interpretation in the real world.  A
   first step is to understand how information about the world is
   represented.  The [Representation and Reasoning] project is developing
   a general theory of representation and modelling that will
   characterize a variety of representational systems including
   sentences, utterances, parse-trees, computer screens, minds, and
   computers.  The goal is to build the foundations of a theory of
   computation that can explain what it is to process, rather than merely
   to carry, information.

   The group considers the following properties of representation
   essential:
     o	Representation is a more restrictive notion than information,
        but a broader one than language.  (Representation includes
        photographs and other physical simulations, such as model
        airplanes, and also uses of non-linguistic symbols like
        numbers to represent distances and sets to represent
        meanings.)
     o  Representation is circumstantially dependent, not only because
        it is specifically relational, but also because whether  A
        represents  B  depends, in general, on the whole context
        in which  A  and  B  appear.
     o  There is no reason to suppose that representation is "formal";
        it emerges out of partially disconnected physically
        embodied systems or processes.
     o  It matters that "represent" is a verb.  Representational
        acts are the primary objects of study, and
        representational structures, especially those requiring an
        independent act of interpretation, are taken as derivative.
   ...

   Acts of communication do not occur in a vacuum but among a host of
   activities, including other acts of communication.  In addition, the
   communication often refers to other situations and assumes a certain
   state of mind on the part of the receiver.  The [Situation Theory and
   Situation Semantics] project is a coordinated effort, both to develop
   a unified theory of meaning and information content that makes use of
   all of these activities and assumptions, and to apply that theory to
   specific problems that have arisen within the disciplines of
   philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and artificial
   intelligence.  ...

   The group has five overlapping semigroups ...: developing an
   information-based theory of inference, developing an information-based
   theory of representation, examining problems in the semantics of
   natural languages, examining problems in the semantics of computation,
   and axiomatizing and modeling situation theory. ...


   The [Situated Automata] project is concerned with the analysis of
   dynamic informational properties of computational systems embedded in
   larger environments, especially physical environments.  The theory
   takes as its point of departure a model of physical and computational
   systems in which the concept of information is defined in terms of
   logical relationships between the state of a process (e.g., a machine)
   and that of its surrounding world.  ...

   In order to deal with the enormous number of states typically
   encountered in realistic systems, the theory is being extended to
   hierarchically constructed machines, the informational characteristics
   of which can be rigorously derived in a compositional fashion from
   those of its component machines.  Theoretical work is also being done
   to relate this work to abstract models of concurrent processes.

   ... the situated automata project has been
   developing tools for constructing complex machines with well-defined
   informational properties, and has been testing the theory by applying
   these tools to software design for robots and other reactive systems.
   Planned future work includes applying the situated automata framework
   to the analysis of dynamic informational properties of systems engaged
   in linguistic interaction. ...


   In the [Rational Agency] project, philosophers and researchers in AI
   are merging their two traditions in the study of rational behavior to
   build a theory of belief, desire, and intention as these attitudes act
   collectively, informed by perception, to produce action.  They seek
   models that take account of the resource limitations of humans and
   computers, and formal, automatable theories that can be used to endow
   artificial agents with the requisite commonsense reasoning abilities.
   They are investigating ways by which planning will fit into their
   theory of rationality, e.g., can plans be reduced to some configuration
   of other, primitive mental states, or must they also be introduced as
   a primitive?  Finally, because a main function of planning is the
   coordination of an agent's own projects and of interpersonal
   activities, they require their theories to account for multiagent
   interaction.

   Recent developments in philosophy of action ...
   have provided insights about the
   nature of "intention formation" and its function as a mechanism
   required by a resource-bounded agent in evaluating and making
   decisions in a constantly changing world.  Recent developments in AI
   planning theory have ...
   have provided insights into the nature of intention realization.
   Researchers in the Rational Agency project are bringing about a
   convergence of these two developments and are looking to it as the
   cornerstone of their future work.


   The [Semantics of Computer Languages] project is seeking to develop a
   theory of semantics of computational languages through the design of a
   specific family of languages for system description and development.
   The theory will serve as the basis for a variety of constructed
   languages for describing, analyzing, and designing real world
   situations and systems.  ...  For
   example, in describing any complex real-world situation, people mix
   descriptions at different levels of abstraction and detail.  They use
   generalization, composition, idealization, analogy, and other
   "higher-level" descriptions to simplify in some way the account that
   is needed at a "lower" or more detailed level. ...  The group is
   experimenting with a class of languages called "system description
   languages" which share some properties with programming languages, but
   have a semantics more in the tradition of model theory and work on
   natural languages.  Finally, to provide the ease and flexibility they
   need for experimenting with description languages, the group is
   developing an environment ...



   Researchers in the closely related [Embedded Computation] project wish
   to understand how the local processing constraints, physical
   embodiment, and real-time activity of a computer or other
   computational system interact with the relational constraints of
   representing and conveying information and language.  They wish to
   account for these interactions in information processing systems that
   range in complexity from those with perceptual mechanisms connected
   rather directly to their environment such as thermostats and the
   sensory transducers of humans, to those able to use language, reason
   deliberately, and reflect in a detached way about situations remote in
   space, time, or possibility.

   Members of the project are searching for system architectures and
   theoretical techniques that can adequately analyze this range of
   capacities.  For example, they ...
   are formulating type theories able to deal with both
   procedural and declarative information, developing a theoretical
   framework for a full semantical analysis of a simple robot ...


   The [Analysis of Graphical Representation] project is concerned with
   developing an account of the document as an information-bearing
   artifact, a topic which until now has been largely neglected by many
   of the fields that count language among their subject matter.  Issues
   include: the relationship between the concepts of "text" and
   "document", an analysis of systems of graphical morphology, and the
   nature of writing in relation to representational systems in general.  ...
					--Elizabeth Macken
					  Editor

[Note: Part 2 will appear in next IRList issue - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
22
-DATE-
Date: Sat 3 May 86 08:52:49-EDT
-FROM-
From: John C. Akbari <AKBARI@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: RE: CONIT Intermediary = Intellignet Front End
-BODY-
thanks for the message.  please add my name to the irlist.  i recently
got several papers on computer-human interaction from a couple of
people at virginia tech.  don't have them here, so i can't give you
their names.  ...  i am working in the
financial services area here in NYC, and am developing several expert
systems and possibly a NLP system as well.   given the computer background
of most people, you can understand the importance of the interface.
one of the more difficult problems i am encountering in designing the
interface is the manner of representing financial concepts in an
easy-to-understand fashion.  i would like to use iconic representation,
but it's not easy.  let me know if you'd be interested in sharing ideas.
thanks
john c akbari
380 riverside drive, no. 7d
new york ny  10025
212.662.2476
akbari@cs.columbia.edu

[John:  You have been added to IRList and will receive materials
separately.  I think your comments and questions are of general
interest and so have included them so that others can comment too.
You are probably referring to work of H. Rex Hartson, D. Hix, Robert&
Beverly Williges, R. Ehrich here in regard to human-computer interaction?
 - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue 6 May 86 10:58:17-MDT
-FROM-
From: Lee Hollaar <Hollaar@utah-20.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Workshop Announcement
-BODY-
Information Retrieval ACM SIGIR/SIGDOC         Documentation
............................................................

                  Writing To Be Searched:
        A Workshop on Document Generation Principles

     This workshop is to  bring  together  people  who  know
about writing documents and people who know about retrieving
them.  Among the specialties we expect to attract are  those
interested  in generating natural language documents by com-
puter; those who write similar documents  today;  those  who
search  free text documents; and those who evaluate writing.
There is great interest today in programs to write  English;
However,  many  of  the documents being planned for computer
generation are reference-type materials for which  efficient
searching  is  more necessary than reading from beginning to
end.  In fact, what should really be built are not  document
generation  systems,  but  information  transfer systems, in
which English is written not as an end in itself, but  as  a
way  of  getting  knowledge from the system to a person.  To
design these, we should have an  interaction  between  those
who  know  how  to phrase the knowledge in natural language,
and those who know  how  to  find  things  so  phrased.   At
present  these  researchers  are  largely separate, and this
workshop will bring them together.

     The workshop is planned  to  be  informal.   Attendance
will be limited to a maximum of 75, and we hope that as many
as possible will speak.  Prospective speakers should send  a
brief abstract (less than 100 words) along with their regis-
tration.

............................................................
Where?
                       Snowbird, Utah
                   June 30 - July 2, 1986
How much?
    Registration Fee: Members of SIGIR/SIGDOC, $70; others $90.
    Cost of single room at Snowbird: about $50/night.
    Conference banquet included in registration.
What should I do next?
    Please send your name, address, telephone number, and  elec-
    tronic  mail  address  with  check  for the registration fee
    (payable to ACM SIGIR/SIGDOC Workshop) to:

                    Michael Lesk
                    Rm 2A-385
                    Bellcore
                    435 South St.
                    Morristown, NJ 07960

If you wish to speak, please enclose a  brief  (<100  words)
description of your topic.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:24 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract of long, interesting newsletter: Pt.2 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: CSLI seminars have often been listed in IRList issues.  Since
the aims of CSLI are so broad, and since many relate to IR work, it is
suitable to include a description of CSLI and the research underway.
This is the final (2nd) part of the (brutally edited) summary of the
four long files sent as Vol. 1 No. 1. - Ed]

   INFORMATION AND MEANING IN EXTENDED DISCOURSE

   The information content of a statement is only partially determined by
   the sentence used.  Other tools for interpretation come from the
   discourse as a whole, the context of the discourse, and the
   states-of-mind of the participating agents.


   Members of [Discourse, Intention, and Action] are developing various
   components of theories of discourse, emphasizing the use of extended
   sequences of utterances to achieve particular effects and the fact
   that discourse is an activity of two (or more) participants located in
   particular contexts.  They are extending the kind of semantic accounts
   often given to natural languages in two directions: first, by
   accounting for some non-declarative utterances, particularly
   interrogatives and imperatives, and second, by dealing with discourses
   containing several utterances, possibly produced by several speakers.  ...
    o  Discourse.  ... includes a study
       of the components of discourse structure, the nature of coherence
       relations, ...
    o  Sentence-level phenomena.  ... questions of
       illocution ... the contribution of utterance mood to such a theory ...
       what is implicated in an utterance.
    o  Subutterance phenomena. ...  relation between referring expressions ...
       and speakers' and hearers' beliefs, mutual beliefs, and intentions.


   In thinking about how to make computer languages more like natural
   languages, it is useful to view computer programs as examples of
   extended discourse.  [Linguistic Approaches to Computer Languages] is
   a pilot project to investigate the application of methods and findings
   from research on natural languages to the design and description of
   high-level computer languages.  ...  The increasing
   complexity of computer languages, current progress in formal
   linguistics, and the growing importance of ergonomic factors in
   computer language design motivate a combined effort between computer
   science and linguistics. ...

   Currently, the group is investigating the need for and feasibility of
   applying linguistic approaches, techniques, and findings to a set of
   sample problems:
    o  The use of partially free word order among the arguments of
       functions to allow flexibility in the order of evaluation ...
    o  The exploitation of parallels between natural language parsing
       schemes, based on complex structured representations and type
       inference in polymorphically typed computer languages.
    o  The use of type inheritance systems for imposing a conceptually
       transparent structure on the lexicon.
    o  The introduction of morphology for marking related lexical items as
       to type (derivational morphology), thematic structure (relation
       changing), or role (case marking).
    o  The need for less restricted uses of proforms in computer
       languages than currently exist.


   The goal of the [Grammatical Theory and Discourse Structure] project
   is to integrate a particular theory of grammar, the lexical-functional
   theory (LFG), with a theory of discourse structure ...  LFG, as a very
   explicit and highly modular theory, provides a useful framework from
   which to study the interaction between discourse and sentence
   phenomena.  Moreover, the general architecture of the framework allows
   experimentation with different modes of interaction between different
   components.  ...  a more parallel fashion.  The different
   subcomponents can constrain the output without being in linear order.  ...



   INFORMATION AND MEANING IN SENTENCES

   Two closely connected projects are looking at representations of
   sentence structure from the point of view of several formalisms; they
   are searching for commonalities with respect to meaning and
   interpretation.  One seeks a conceptual foundation for the theories,
   and the other seeks representations with direct ties to the semantics.

   Specifically, the goal of the [Foundations of Grammar] project is a
   better understanding of methods of encoding linguistic information as
   systems of rules or constraints, and of how that information can be
   used in recognition and generation.  The group is developing, not a
   particular theory of grammar, but rather a conceptual foundation and a
   common frame of reference for such theories.  ...

   The group is incorporating their results in a computational tool kit
   for implementing grammatical theories, and the result will be a
   facility for experimentation with various syntactic, semantic, and
   morphological theories and processing strategies.


   The [Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar] project is analyzing the
   structure and interpretation of natural language within the HPSG
   framework which incorporates theoretical and analytic concepts from
   Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar,
   Situation Semantics, Categorial Grammar, and Functional Unification
   grammar.  The goal is a single-level, constraint-based
   characterization of linguistic structures, rules, and principles which
   interact through the operation of unification.


   INFORMATION AND MEANING IN WORDS

   Two projects are exploring the structure of information in the lexicon
   and its relation to larger units of communication.

   The goal of the [Lexical Project] is to develop a workable lexicon
   that integrates semantic knowledge about lexical items with the
   semantic and syntactic frameworks currently under development at CSLI.
   The group has sorted its task into a linguistic problem and a
   computational problem: the linguistic problem is to determine what the
   content of a lexical entry must be, and the computational problem is
   to understand how this knowledge can be built into an online lexicon.
    o  How do knowledge of the world and lexical meaning link up?
    o  How should lexical meaning be represented?
    o  What is the place of lexico-semantic information in the overall
       grammar?
    o  What is the structure of the lexicon?
   ...


   The [AFT Lexical Representation Theory] project is developing three
   basic parts of Aitiational Frame Theory, a theory of lexical
   representation which gives a rich internal structure to lexical
   meanings and is designed to feed into generative syntactic
   representations.



   SOURCES OF INFORMATION

   For human agents, speech and vision are the primary sources of
   information about the world, and we expect similar mechanisms to
   accommodate our communication with computers.  Three projects at CSLI
   are concerned with representing and characterizing information
   contained in speech signals and with relating this information to
   other aspects of the communication process.  A fourth is exploring
   comparable aspects of visual information.


   The [Phonology and Phonetics] project is investigating the
   organization of phonology and its role in language structure, with
   particular emphasis on postlexical phonology.  ...


   The [Finite State Morphology] project is bringing a new kind of
   dialogue between linguists and computer scientists to CSLI.  ...
   Finite State Morphology is a framework within computational morphology
   which uses finite state devices to represent correspondences between
   lexical and surface representations of morphemes.  ...


   The goal of the project on [Computational Models of Spoken Language]
   is to formally specify, through computational models, the information
   projected from speech signals and how that information is represented
   and used in speech analysis. ...


   The [Visual Communication] project is concerned with mechanisms of visual
   communication and visual languages and the identification of visual
   regularities that support the distinctions and classes necessary for
   general-purpose reasoning.  The group assumes that the manner in which
   visual languages convey meaning, is, at least in part, fundamentally
   different from conventions in spoken language, and, therefore, requires
   study beyond the confines of the standard linguistic tradition.  ...

					--Elizabeth Macken
					  Editor

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
23
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 5 May 86 13:38:15 edt
-FROM-
From: ltw@eecs.umich.CSNET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Ed, FYI
-BODY-
	Date: Mon, 28 Apr 86 16:30:44+0100
	From: user <seismo!mcvax!unizh!gross%nyu.ARPA@zippy.eecs>
	Subject: (forwarded) request for information
	Resent-From: Lou Salkind <salkind%nyu.ARPA@zippy.eecs>
	Resent-To: supercomputer@nyu.ARPA
	Resent-Date: Wed, 30 Apr 86 11:45:10 EDT
	
	I am working on a non-numerical problem (document similarity
        computations in information retrieval) with a VP200 vector processor.
        Do you know of other people working on non-numerical problems with
        vector processors. I would like to get in contact with other
        researchers in this field and I thought you might have some addresses.
	
		 Thank you in advance
	
		   Juerg Grossmann
		   c/o Institute of Informatics
		   University of Zurich
		   Winterthurerstrasse 190
		   CH-8057 Zurich
	
		  ...!cernvax!unizh!circe!gross
	
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 8 May 86 00:53:50 edt
-FROM-
From: RICHER@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA
-TO-
To: richer@sumex-aim.arpa
-SUBJECT-
Subject: JOB ANNOUNCEMENT
-BODY-
               SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

A major new initiative has resulted in the following
positions for which applications are invited.

   o  Knowledge Engineer
   o  Post-doctoral Fellow
   o  Research Scientist

The Instructional Psychology Research Group is seeking
qualified researchers trained in AI techniques.  Applicants
will join our staff in work aimed at transfering basic
AI technology to educational applications and conducting
specific research in:

   o  Expert Systems
   o  Planning Systems
   o  Knowledge Understanding and Representation
   o  Intelligent CAI

The successful applicant will have an advanced degree in
computer science and demonstrated experience in at least
one of the aforementioned areas.  Experience with Symbolics
hardware, LISP, PROLOG and other AI languages is desirable.
Preference will be given to applicants eligible for
employment in Canada at the time of application.

For further information contact

Dr. Philip H. Winne
Director, Instructional Psychology Research Group
Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6
(604) 291-3395

Questions may be directed to the above address, or:

Wolfgang_Rothen%SFU.Mailnet@MIT-Multics.ARPA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 5 May 86 13:37:53 edt
-FROM-
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@mc.lcs.mit.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
    From- Lisa F. Melcher <LISA at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
    Monday, 5 May  4:00pm  Room: NE43-453

             AUTOMATIC INDUCTION OF PROBABILISTIC EXPERT SYSTEMS

                               Peter Cheeseman
                                  NASA Ames

Many have realized that expert systems that make decisions under uncertainty
must represent this uncertainty and manipulate it correctly.  This cannot be
done in general by "symbolic" (i.e. non-numeric) methods or by sprinkling
numbers over logical inference, as advocated by many authors in AI.
Probability has been proved to be the only consistent inference scheme if
uncertainty is represented by a real number.  Probabilistic inference
requires assessing the effect of ALL the relevent evidence on the hypothesis
of interest though ALL the possible chains of inference (rather than
establishing a single path from axioms to theorem, as in logic).  However,
some methods used in probabilistic inference in AI (e.g. Prospector) impose
strong constraints on the structure of the information (e.g. conditional
independence) or require large amounts of information.  The solution to this
problem is to use Maximum Entropy to spread the uncertainty over the set of
possibilities as evenly as possible consistent with the known information.  A
computationally efficient method for performing the maximum entropy
calculation will be presented as well as a method for extracting the
necessary probabilistic information directly from data.  The result is a
complete probabilistic expert system without using an expert.

              Sponsored by TOC, Laboratory for Computer Science
                             Ronald Rivest, Host

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 86 01:34:20 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, April 24, No. 13 [Extracted and edited - Ed]
-BODY-
                  THIS WEEK'S SEMINAR (April 24, 1986)
                 Uses and Abuses of Models in Semantics
                     Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy
                 Barwise@su-csli and Etchemendy@su-csli

     The use of set-theoretic models as a way to study the semantics of
   both natural and computer languages is a powerful and important
   technique.  However, it is also fraught with pitfalls for those who do
   not understand the nature of modeling.  In this talk we hope to show
   how a proper understanding of the representation relationship implicit
   in modeling can help one exploit the power while avoiding the
   pitfalls.  ...  The talk will presuppose some familiarity with the
   techniques under discussion.


                          PIXELS AND PREDICATES
                           Prolog and Geometry
                    Randolph Franklin, UC at Berkeley
                         wrf@degas.berkeley.edu
               1:00 p.m., Tuesday, April 29, CSLI trailers

   The Prolog language is a useful tool for geometric and graphics
   implementations because its primitives, such as unification, match the
   requirements of many geometric algorithms.  We have implemented
   several problems in Prolog including a subset of the Graphics Kernal
   Standard, convex hull finding, planar graph traversal, recognizing
   groupings of objects, and boolean combinations of polygons using
   multiple precision rational numbers.  Certain paradigms, or standard
   forms, of geometric programming in Prolog are becoming evident.  They
   include applying a function to every element of a set, executing a
   procedure so long as a certain geometric pattern exists, and using
   unification to propagate a transitive function.  Certain strengths and
   weaknesses of Prolog for these applications are now apparent.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 1 May 86 18:41:21 edt
-FROM-
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, May 1, No. 1 [Extracted and edited - Ed]
-BODY-
                         THIS WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
                     Structures in Written Language
                      Geoff Nunberg (Nunberg@csli)
                 4:15, Thursday, May 1, Redwood G-19

      Just about all contemporary research on linguistic structure has
   been based exclusively on observations about the spoken language; the
   written language, when it is talked about at all, is generally taken
   to be derivative of speech, and without any independent theoretical
   interest.  When we consider the written language in its own terms,
   however, it turns out to have a number of distinctive features and
   structures. In particular, it contains a number of explicitly
   delimited ``text categories,'' such as are indicated by the common
   punctuation marks and related graphical features, which are either
   wholly absent in the spoken language, or at best are present there
   only implicitly. In the course of uncovering the principles that
   underlie the use of text categories like the text-sentence, paragraph,
   and parenthetical (i.e., a string delimited by parentheses), we have
   to provide three levels of grammatical description: a semantics, which
   sets out the rules of interpretation associated with text categories
   by associating each type with a certain type of informational unit; a
   syntax, which sets out the dependencies that hold among category-types;
   and a graphology, which gives the rules that determine how instances
   of text categories will be graphically presented. Each of these
   components is a good deal more complex and less obvious than one might
   suppose on the basis of a recollection of what the didactic grammars
   have to say about the written language; what emerges, in fact, is that
   most of the rules that determine how text delimiters are used are not
   learned through explicit instruction, and are no more accessible to
   casual reflection than are the rules of grammar of the spoken
   language.

                      NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH (5/8/86)
                     Definiteness and Referentiality
                            Vol. 1, Ch. 11 of
              Syntax: A Functional-Typological Introduction
                             by Talmy Givon
              Discussion led by Mark Johnson (Johnson@csli)

      The relationship between syntactic structure and meaning is one of
   the most interesting lines of research being undertaken here at CSLI.
   One of the questions being addressed in this work concerns the way
   that grammatical or syntactic properties of an utterance interact with
   its semantics, i.e., what it means.  Givon and others claim that
   discourse notions of topicality and definiteness interact strongly
   with grammatical processes such as agreement---and moreover, that
   there is no clear dividing line between grammar and discourse; one
   cannot understand agreement or anaphora viewing them as purely
   grammatical processes.  Linguists here at CSLI are tentatively moving
   toward this position, for example Bresnan and Mchombo (1986) make
   explicit use of a theory of ``discourse functions'' to explain the
   distributional properties of Object Marking in Chichewa, so a
   discussion of what it would mean to have an ``integrated'' theory of
   language is quite timely.
      Givon's treatment of definiteness and referentiality explicitly
   rejects earlier philosphical treatments as being ``too restrictive to
   render a full account of the facts of human language.''  He starts by
   listing some observations on the interactions between definiteness and
   a variety of other linguistic phenomena (e.g. modality) and goes on to
   propose a model based on a ``Universe of Discourse'' and the notion of
   ``referential intent.''  After examining examples of how
   referentiality is coded in various languages and how it interacts with
   various other syntactic and semantic phenomena, he finishes by
   discussing degrees of definiteness and referentially, and introduces
   the notion of communicative importance.
      This chapter raised several interesting questions.  For example,
   what are the key properties of referentiality and definiteness, and
   how would one go about building a theory that expresses them?  What
   are Givon's insights into this matter, and how could these be
   reconstructed within a formal theory such as DRS theory or Situation
   Semantics?

                      NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR (5/8/86)
                         On Visual Communication
       David Levy, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Dlevy.pa@xerox)

      Lately there has been much talk around CSLI about representation as
   a concept transcending and unifying work being done in different
   research groups and domains.  Various points have emerged and recurred
   in recent presentations and discussions: the distinction between the
   representing state of affairs (A) and the state of affairs represented
   (B); examples of the dangers inherent in conflating them; forms of
   structural correspondence between aspects (objects, properties, and
   relations) of A and aspects of B; the partiality of representation
   (the fact that only certain aspects of A correspond to aspects of B,
   and that only certain aspects of B correspond to aspects of A); the
   priority of B over A; and so on.
      The use of computers is largely mediated by representations.  Many
   of these are transparent to us: We talk of ``typing an A'' when we
   actually press a key, causing a character code (a character
   representation) to be generated from which an actual character is
   rendered.  We talk of ``viewing'' data structures, when in fact we do
   nothing of the sort, since data structures ``inside'' machines are
   inherently non-visual, much as are mental states ``inside'' heads;
   rather, we view *visual representations* of data structures.
      In many contexts the transparency of representations (leading to
   the conflation of A and B) is tremendously useful and powerful.  The
   term ``direct manipulation'' denotes a style of user interface design in
   which the user is led (or encouraged) to conflate the visual objects
   on the screen (e.g. icons) with the things they represent (e.g.
   printers), and to conflate the representation of these visual objects
   with the visual objects themselves.  But there seem to be times when
   our facility for seeing through representations is a hindrance rather
   than a help, as Barwise and Etchemendy argued recently for the case of
   model theory.
      As a theoretician and observer of certain classes of computer
   systems, and, equally importantly, as a *designer* of them, I believe
   that we need an understanding of representation (and of the sorts of
   issues described in the first paragraph) to help us build truly
   rational systems.  In this talk I will focus on the problem of
   developing an analysis of visual representation.  I will use examples
   from the surface of computer screens (e.g. windows, scroll bars, and
   icons) to illustrate the importance of distinctions such as visual vs.
   non-visual entities, representing vs.  represented entities, and
   (active) processes vs. (static) representation relations.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 8 May 86 00:53:56 edt
-FROM-
From: EMMA@SU-CSLI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, May 8, No. 15 [Extracted - Ed]
-BODY-
                  NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM (May 15, 1986)
            Transfer of f-structures Across Natural Languages
           Tom Reutter, Weidner Communications Corp., Chicago

      A recursive algorithm for mapping functional structure from a
   source natural language into a target natural language is presented
   and its implementation in the programming language CPROLOG is
   discussed.  The transfer algorithm is guided by a symmetrical
   bilingual lexicon. It was prototypically implemented for
   German-English as part of a transfer-oriented machine translation
   system at the University of Stuttgart (Germany).  Special emphasis is
   placed on asymmetiral transfer, e.g., mapping of f-structures with
   different semantic valencies, unequal NUM and SPEC attributes, etc.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
24
-FROM-
From: Aviezri Fraenkel <fraenkel@wisdom.bitnet>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 15 May 86 16:54:01 -0200
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList
-BODY-
Hello Ed, The last IRList I got was Issue #21 of April 23. Has it stopped
to appear, or did subsequent issues get lost in the mails -- I wonder...
Regards,   Aviezri S. Fraenkel.

[Note: Thank you for alerting me to mail problems! I had sent out issues 22
and 23 in the interim but some mishap must have occurred during distribution
after the message left here.  I sent both out again last week, and am still
getting error messages (about this second try) back about mailer failures at
some sites - but I think this second attempt will make it through eventually.
Please let me know, folks, if you don't have issues 1-24 of Volume 2, and I
will retransmit any missing files as needed. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 9 May 86 19:09:19 edt
-FROM-
From: donna@NLM-VAX.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: diff marks
-BODY-
Do you know of any software that finds significant
differences between text files.  It is fairly easy
to get nroff, etc. to find differences, but these
could be changed spelling, a single new word,
punctuation.  We need to be able to compare two
versions of a document and "mark" significant
differences.  Mike Lesk knew of nothing.
This would make an interesting research topic
for someone.

Has your ir network disappeared.  This would be
a good question for it.  Also are there
any other nets that I could send this out on.

                              Donna

[Note: nlm-vax had mail problems too which have since been resolved
and they should now have received the various issues they missed.
Regarding the 'diff' problem, it sounds like an interesting and useful
topic to study. One solution might be to take the UNIX 'diff' approach,
but on a word rather than line level, with spelling correction or other
inexact matching techniques added in.  Does anyone have something
working to do this? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: Hans-Peter Giger <edison!scgvaxd!seismo!mcvax!ethz!hpg>
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 7 May 86 15:28:34 -0100
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  test
-BODY-
Hi! I got your Reply of the 5th May. Addresses seem to work now
Hanspeter Giger

[Note: In issues 15-18 was discussion of contacting Hanspeter Giger.
We now finally have made contact and he is on the distribution list
thanks to help by several people. - Ed
PS - Can anyone give me an ARPANET-type address to reach
maisel@sds.mfenet - he also wanted to be added to IRList but
none of my attempts to find 'sds' have succeeded.]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 14 May 86 01:09:59 edt
-FROM-
From: ben@MIMSY.UMD.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hello
-BODY-
Here's another announcement for IRLIST...
I tried to put it into a more useful form....Ben
[Note: Nice Job! Thanks, Ed]

    SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY
      POTOMAC CHAPTER
    VOLUME 10 NUMBER 4                      SUMMER 1986

    June 13                                                   Room 413-414

      DIGITAL TYPOGRAPHY: ART, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY
     Richard Rubinstein, Digital Equipment Corporation
       150 Locke Drive - LM04/H4, Marlboro, MA 01752

Digital typography is using computers  to  present  text  on
screens  and paper.  Doing this well, producing high-quality
images that people read easily, calls for  an  admixture  of
three  disparate  disciplines.  The  first, typography, is a
traditional art encompassing aesthetic knowledge.   Psychol-
ogy  offers knowledge of perception, and the means of objec-
tive evaluation.  And computer technology provides the vehi-
cle  for  delivery  of  letterforms,  economically  and upon
demand.

The knowledge of these three  specialties  is  expressed  in
three vastly different languages.  Typographers know a great
deal about letterforms, readability, effective layout and so
on,  but  they  say  these things in terms that are not very
familiar or useful to the engineers.  By contrast, psycholo-
gists  have  measurements  that may be hard to relate to the
real world of reading books and screens. Historically, read-
ing experiments have not been typographically sophisticated.
And engineers have been accused  of  just  building  systems
without talking to anyone else, user or expert.

I am working to convert typographic knowledge  into  princi-
ples,  data,  and algorithms that engineers can use directly
in the design of computer systems.  I will present a  number
of  typographical  conjectures  that I believe psychological
research may illuminate.  I will present data  that  I  have
collected that bear on these conjectures.

The result of  research  spanning  these  three  disciplines
could  be  algorithms  that  would  dramatically improve the
quality of machine-made text, and a better understanding  of
the  role  of typographic quality in the effective presenta-
tion of text.
____________________
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 Sci-
ences.


July 11                                                        Room 413-414

    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.
One study showed that predictions were easy to make in terms
of  feature articles and sections of the newspaper that sub-
jects read.  However, a second study showed that it is rela-
tively difficult to predict specific news articles that will
read.  Overall, the results suggest possible problems in the
wide-spread  application of user models.  Finally, the rela-
tionship betweeen computer  user  models  and  psychological
models  which  make predictions about people (e.g., attitude
and personality models) is discussed.



Have a pleasant summer.  No meeting in August.

See you in September!
____________________
Send correspondence  for  this  newsletter  to:  Software
Psychology  Society, c/o Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems,
Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD 20851.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 16 May 86 01:03:50 edt
-FROM-
From: walker@MOUTON.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IJCAI-89 Site Selection and Officer Election
-BODY-
IJCAI-89 Site Selection and Officer Election

The Trustees of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial
Intelligence, Inc. are pleased to announce that IJCAI-89 will be held
20-26 August 1989 in Detroit, Michigan, USA.  Wolfgang Bibel, Technical
University of Munich, has been elected Conference Chair; Sri
Sridharan, BBN Laboratories, has been elected Program Chair; and Sam
Uthurusamy of General Motors Research Laboratories has been appointed
to chair the Local Arrangements Committee.  Don Walker, Bell
Communications Research, the IJCAII Secretary-Treasurer, will also
serve as Secretary-Treasurer for the conference.

IJCAI-89 will be cosponsored by the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence.  All conference activities will be coordinated through
the AAAI Office by Claudia Mazzetti, Executive Director of the AAAI,
who will provide direct support for the IJCAI-89 Conference Committee.
In accordance with customary practice for IJCAI conferences held in
North America, the AAAI will also arrange the tutorial and exhibit
programs at the meeting.

For further information, contact one of the following:

Wolfgang Bibel (IJCAI-89)
Institut fuer Informatik
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Postfach 202420
D-8000 Muenchen 2, West Germany
Telephone: (49-89)2105-2031
bibel%germany.csnet@csnet-relay

N. S. Sridharan (IJCAI-89)
BBN Laboratories
10 Moulton Street
Cambridge, MA 02238
Telephone: (1-617)497-3366
sridharan@bbng.arpa

R. Uthurusamy (IJCAI-89)
Computer Science Department
General Motors Research Laboratories
Warren, MI 48090, USA
Telephone: (1-313)575-3177
samy%gmr.csnet@csnet-relay

Donald E. Walker (IJCAI-89)
Bell Communications Research
445 South Street MRE 2A379
Morristown, NJ 07960, USA
Telephone: (1-201)829-4312
walker@mouton.arpa

Claudia Mazzetti (IJCAI-89)
AAAI Headquarters
445 Burgess Drive
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Telephone: (1-415)328-3123
aaai-office@sumex-aim.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 14 May 86 01:09:40 edt
-FROM-
From: EMMA@SU-CSLI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Van Nguyen talk
-BODY-
  From: Margaret Olender <OLENDER@SRI-AI.ARPA>
  DATE:	          May 14, 1986
  LOCATION:       SRI International, Ravenswood Avenue, Building E

                 KNOWLEDGE, COMMUNICATION, AND TIME

                           Van Nguyen
                IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
                  (Joint work with Kenneth J. Perry)

                            Abstract
   The role that knowledge plays in distributed systems has come under
much study recently.  In this talk, we re-examine the commonly
accepted definition of knowledge and examine how appropriate it is for
distributed computing.  Motivated by the draw-backs thus exposed, we
propose an alternative definition that we believe to be better suited
to the task.  This definition handles multiple knowers and makes
explicit the connection between knowledge, communication, and time.
It also emphasizes the fact that knowledge is a function of one's
initial knowledge, communication history and deductive abilities.  The
need for assuming perfect reasoning is mitigated.

   Having formalized these links, we then present the first proof
system for programs that incorporates both knowledge and time.  The
proof system is compositional, sound and relatively complete, and is
an extension of the Nguyen-Demers-Gries-Owicki temporal proof system
for processes.  Suprisingly, it does not require proofs of
non-interference (as first defined by Owicki-Gries).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 14 May 86 01:09:44 edt
-FROM-
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  From: Robert H. Kassel <sr.rob at MIT-SPEECH>
  Subject: Speech Recognition
  Wednesday, 14 May  3:00pm  Room: 34-401B
          Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition at IBM:
                       An Expert Approach

                          Fred Jelinek
                IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
                      Yorktown Heights, NY

                 Demonstration after the talk,
                          Room 36-428


  From: JHC at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU
  Thursday, 15 May  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor playroom
                    -- AI Revolving Seminar --
                LEARNING TO CONSTRUCT ABSTRACTIONS

                          Rick Lathrop
                           MIT AI Lab

One useful trait of an intelligent agent is to construct higher-level
abstractions from a mass of detailed low-level information.  This talk
will explore one way an agent might be taught how to construct such
abstractions, and why it might be a useful or interesting for an agent
to do so.  A main motivation is the possibility of the use of these
abstractions to see similarities (between situations) that are
obscured by the mass of irrelevant details at the lower level.
Preliminary examples from the Rieger (causal) mechanism world, VLSI
circuit analysis, and protein structure analysis will be discussed.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
25
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 23 May 86 06:49:28 edt
-FROM-
From: SUEARNOLD@TI-EG.CSNET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Retrieval, a Computer Technology & Automation (CTA) product
-BODY-
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

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 23 May 86 06:49:19 edt
-FROM-
From: LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: User Modeling
-BODY-
> 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

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 22 May 86 06:41:12 edt
-FROM-
From: LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Thesis Proposal
-BODY-
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.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:  9 May 86 1819-EDT
-FROM-
From: Dave Steiner (The Moderator) <WorkS-Request@Red.Rutgers.Edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: WORKS Digest   V6 #16 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
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.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 23 May 86 06:49:58 edt
-FROM-
From: sdpage%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Computers and Music Research: meeting announcement
-BODY-
                ----------------------------------------
               |      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)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 22 May 86 06:41:17 edt
-FROM-
From: JAMIE@SU-CSLI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, May 22, No. 17 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
             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-
-VOL-
2

-N-
26
-SUBJECT-
Subject: size of list
-BODY-
Congratulations, folks!  We now have 200 entries in our mailing list!
Some of these are redistribution lists, so the set of readers is even
larger.

I will be sending out notes to selected individuals to ask that more
local redistributions be set up; please think about doing so even if I
don't ask since it is possible that there are other people at your site
who might be interested if they new a msg was already being received.

Thank you all for your continuing support of IRList!
 - Ed Fox (BITNET[cheapest]:foxea@vtvax3 or foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa;
  CSNET:fox@vt;Internet:fox%vtisr1.uucp@seismo.css.gov;UUCP:seismo!vtisr1!fox)
      Dr. Edward A. Fox; Dept. of Computer Science; 562 McBryde Hall
      Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061; (703) 961-5113 or 6931

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: seismo!nwc-143b.ARPA!sefai
-DATE-
Date: 2 Jun 86 16:56:00 PST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: References on Natural Language???
-BODY-
	I am investigating literature that will hopefully help me on my
master's thesis. Without being too specific, the topic centers around
schemes for representing natural language in a computer system. So far,
my list of references includes:

	1. Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, Barr and Feigenbaum
	2. NETL: A System for Representing and Using Real-World
	   Knowledge, Fahlman
	3. Human Information Processing, Lindsay and Norman
	4. A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language,
	   Marcus
	5. Principles of Artificial Intelligence, Nilsson
	6. Basic English (series), Ogden
	7. The Cognitive Computer on Language, Schank with Childers
	8. Computer Models of Thought and Language, Schank and Colby
	9. Artificial Intelligence,  Winston
	10. A Handbook of English Grammar, Zandvoort

	I'd appreciate any good references others have come across and
I'd be more than happy to send out the list afterwards.

					Gene Guglielmo
					sefai@nwc-143b

[Note: Thank you for the offer of collecting references.  You have
quite an unusual assortment of works!  I encourage you to look at
"Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval" by Salton and McGill
and "Information Retrieval, 2nd ed." by C.J. VanRijsbergen for a
rather different perspective.  Let us know more details of your plans
when you become more focused. - Ed]
references

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 27 May 86 10:31:37 edt
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::fox
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Thesis defense on CODER system
-BODY-
The M.S. defense of Robert K. France will be held at 10am Monday June 2 in
Norris 301. The title of his thesis is "An Artificial Intelligence Environment
for Information Retrieval Research."

Abstract:
The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval) project is
a multi-year effort to investigate how best to apply artificial intelligence
methods to increase the effectiveness of information retrieval systems.
Particular attention is being given to analysis and representation of hetero-
geneous documents, such as electronic mail digests or messages, which vary
widely in style, length, topic, and structure. In order to ensure system
adaptability and to allow reconfiguration for controlled experimentation,
the project has been designed as a moderated expert system.  This thesis
covers the design problems involved in providing a unified architecture and
knowledge representation scheme for such a system, and the solutions chosen
for CODER.  An overall object-oriented environment is constructed using a set
of message-passing primitives based on a modified Prolog call paradigm.
Within this environment is embedded the skeleton of a flexible expert system,
where task decomposition is performed in a knowledge-oriented fashion and where
subtask managers are implemented as members of a community of experts.  A
three-level knowledge representation formalism of elementary data types,
frames,
and relations is provided, and can be used to construct knowledge structures
such as terms, meaning structures, and document interpretations.  The use of
individually tailored specialist experts coupled with standardized blackboard
modules for communication and control and external knowledge bases for
maintenance of factual world knowledge allows for rapid prototyping, incre-
mental development, and flexibility under change.  The system as a whole is
structured as a set of communicating modules, defined functionally and imple-
mented under UNIX using sockets and the TCP/IP protocol for communication.
Inferential modules are being coded in MU-Prolog; non-inferential modules are
being prototyped in MU-Prolog and will be re-implemented as needed in C++.

Host: Dr. Edward A. Fox, Dept. of Computer Science

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 86 06:53:33 edt
-FROM-
From: walker@MOUTON.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS for IJCAI-87 [Edited - Ed]
-BODY-
                          CALL FOR PAPERS:  IJCAI-87
        Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
                              August 23-28, 1987
                                 Milan, Italy

The  IJCAI  conferences  are the main forums for the presentation of artificial
intelligence research to an international audience.  The goal of IJCAI-87 is to
promote  scientific  interchange, within and between all subfields of AI, among
researchers from all over the world.    The  conference  is  sponsored  by  the
International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, Inc. (IJCAII).

In  response  to  the  growing  interest  in  engineering  issues within the AI
community, IJCAI-87's Technical Program will have two distinct tracks:  science
and  engineering.    The  science  papers,  presented  Sunday through Wednesday
(August 23-26), will stress the computational principles  underlying  cognition
and  perception  in man and machine.  The engineering papers, presented Tuesday
through Friday (August 25-28), will highlight pragmatic issues  that  arise  in
applying these computational principles.  Tutorials will be presented on Sunday
and  Monday  in  parallel  with  the  first  two  days  of  the  science  paper
presentations.    Meetings  or  workshops  focussed on specific research issues
might most appropriately be held on Thursday or Friday.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
Authors are invited to submit papers  to  either  the  science  or  engineering
tracks within one of the following topic areas:
   - Architectures   and  Languages  (including  logic  programming,  user
     interface technology)
   - Reasoning (including theorem proving, planning, explaining)
   - Knowledge  Acquisition   and   Learning   (including   knowledge-base
     maintenance)
   - Knowledge Representation (including task domain analysis)
   - Cognitive Modeling
   - Natural Language Understanding
   - Perception  and  Signal Understanding (including speech, vision, data
     interpretation)
   - Robotics

REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION:
Authors are requested to prepare full papers, no more than 7 proceedings' pages
(approximately  5600 words), or short papers, no more than 3 proceedings' pages
(approximately 2400 words).  The  full-paper  classification  is  intended  for
well-developed  ideas,  with  significant  demonstration of validity, while the
short-paper  classification  is  intended  for  descriptions  of  research   in
progress.      Authors   must   ensure  that  their  papers  describe  original
contributions  to  or  novel  applications  of   AI,   regardless   of   length
classification,  and that the research is properly compared and contrasted with
relevant literature.

DETAILS OF SUBMISSION:
Authors should submit six (6) copies of their papers  (hard  copy  only  --  we
cannot accept on-line files) to the Program Chair no later than Monday, January
5, 1987.  The following information must be included on the title page:
   - Author's name, address, telephone number and  computer  mail  address
     (if applicable)
   - Paper type (full-paper or short-paper), topic area, track (science or
     engineering), and a few keywords for  further  classification  within
     the topic area
   - An abstract of 100-200 words
The timetable is as follows:
   - Submission deadline:  5 January 1987 (papers received after January 5
     will be returned unopened)
   - Notification of acceptance or rejection:  17 March 1987
   - Camera ready copy due:  10 April 1987
The language of the conference is  English;  all  papers  submitted  should  be
written in English.

REVIEW CRITERIA:
Each  paper will be reviewed by at least two experts.  Acceptance will be based
on the overall merit and significance of the reported research, as well  as  on
the  quality  of  the  presentation.    A  paper  may  be  reviewed  by experts
responsible for an area or track other than the one to which it  was  submitted
if, in the opinion of a program committee member, it can thereby be more fairly
reviewed.

Papers submitted to the science track should make an original  and  significant
contribution to knowledge in the field of artificial intelligence.

Papers submitted to the engineering track should focus on pragmatic issues that
arise in reducing AI principles and techniques to practice.  Such papers  could
identify the critical features of some successful application system's approach
to reasoning or knowledge acquisition or natural language  understanding.    Of
particular  interest  are papers that demonstrate insightful analysis of a task
domain  motivating  the  selection  of  a  computational  and  representational
approach.

CONTACT POINTS:
Submissions  and  inquiries  about  the  program  should be sent to the Program
Chair:
          John McDermott
          Department of Computer Science
          Carnegie-Mellon University
          Pittsburgh, PA   15213
          USA
          1-412-268-2599
          McDermott@cmu-cs-a.arpa
Inquiries about registration, tutorials, exhibits, and other local arrangements
should be sent to the Local Arrangements Chair:
          Marco Somalvico
          Dipartimento di Elettronica
          Politecnico di Milano
          Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci N.32
          I-20133 Milano
          ITALY
          39-2-236-7241
          somalvic!prlb2@seismo
Other inquiries should be directed to the General Chair:
          Alan Bundy
          Department of Artificial Intelligence
          University of Edinburgh
          80 South Bridge
          Edinburgh EH1 1HN
          UK
          44-31-225-7774 ext 242
          Bundy%edinburgh.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 86 06:53:20 edt
-FROM-
From: bundy%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IJCAI AWARDS
-BODY-
                CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR IJCAI AWARDS
               The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence

         The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is given at each
     International Joint Conference  on  Artificial Intelligence,
     to a scientist who has carried out  a program of research of
     consistently  high  quality   yielding  several  substantial
     results.  If the research program  has been carried out col-
     laboratively the award  may be made  jointly to the research
     team.  The first recipient  of this award  was John McCarthy
     in 1985.

          The Award carries with it a certificate and the sum of
     $1,000 plus travel and living expenses  for the IJCAI.  The
     researcher(s) will be invited to deliver  an address on the
     nature and significance of the results achieved and write a
     paper for the conference prodeedings.  Primarily,  however,
     the award carries the honour  of having one's work selected
     by one's peers as an exemplar  of sustained research in the
     maturing science of Artificial Intelligence.

          We hereby call for nominations for The IJCAI Award for
     Research Excellence to be made at IJCAI-87 in Milan. The
     accompanying note on Selection Procedures for IJCAI Awards
     provides the relevant details.


                   The Computers and Thought Award
          The Computers and Thought Lecture is given at each
     International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence by
     an outstanding young scientist in the field of artificial
     intelligence.  The Award carries with it a certificate and
     the sum of $1,000 plus travel and subsistence expenses for
     the IJCAI.   The Lecture is one evening during the Conferen-
     ce, and the public is invited to attend. The Lecturer is in-
     vited to publish the Lecture  in the conference proceedings.
     The  Lectureship was  established  with  royalties  received
     from the book  Computers and Thought,  edited by  Feigenbaum
     and Feldman;  it is currently supported by income from IJCAI
     funds.
          Past recipients of this honour have been Terry Winograd
     (1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas
     Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981),  Tom
     Mitchell (1983) and Hector Levesque (1985).
          Nominations are invited for The Computers  and  Thought
     Award to be made at IJCAI-87 in Milan. The note on Selection
     Procedures for IJCAI Awards covers the nomination procedures
     to be followed.

                Selection Procedures for IJCAI Awards
          Nominations for The Computers and Thought Award and The
     IJCAI  Award for Research Excellence are invited from all in
     the Artificial Intelligence  international  community.   The
     procedures are the same for both awards.
          There should be a nominator and a  seconder,  at  least
     one  of whom should not have been in the same institution as
     the nominee.  The nominee must agree to be  nominated. There
     are no other restrictions on nominees, nominators or second-
     ers.   The nominators should prepare a short submission less
     than  2,000 words  for  the voters,  outlining the nominee's
     qualifications  with respect to the criteria  for the parti-
     cular award.
          The award selection committee is the union of the  Pro-
     gram,  Conference  and  Advisory Committees  of the upcoming
     IJCAI and the Board of  Trustees  of  IJCAII, with  nominees
     excluded.  Nominations  should  be submitted before December
     1st, 1986 to the Conference Chair for IJCAI-87:
                Dr Alan Bundy,
                IJCAI-87 Conference Chair,
                Department of Artificial Intelligence,
                University of Edinburgh,
                80 South Bridge,
                Edinburgh, EH1 IHN,
                Scotland.                tel 44-31-225-7774 ext 242
                        ArpaNet: bundy@rutgers.arpa
                        JANet: bundy@uk.ac.edinburgh

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
27
-DATE-
Date:     Thu,  5 Jun 86  09:16:59 EDT
-FROM-
From:     SAROFF@UMass.bitnet  (MANAGER OF THE KILLER DIGEST)
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  A question about library software......
-BODY-
Hi,
    The University of Massachusetts Science Fiction Society has a library
with over 3000 books in it.  We are currently using a paper-and-3x5-card
system to handle the books.
    A number of people, myself included, have decided to investigate the
possibility of computerizing the library, card catalogue, and membership
roster.  What sort of software is available to do this.
    The requirements for the software follow:
1) It must be able to interface with a bar-code reader or some other
similar system (Minimizes Human Error In check-ins/check-outs).
2) It must prevent a person with books or fines outstanding from checking
out books.
3) It must be able to maintain an up to date membership roster.
4) It must be able to function as a card catalogue.
5) It must distinguish between hard and soft bound books.
6) It must be able to handle "doubles". (Books that have two novels, generally
by two different authors, that are bound together.)
7) Must be reasonably "idiot proof" to use.
8) The budgetary constraints limit us to: A micro-computer, a bar code reader,
and a hard disc.
   U.M.S.F.S. does not currently have a micro, so any software source is fine
we will select the system based on the library software.
                         Matthew Saroff
BITNET:SAROFF@UMASS
ARPANET:SAROFF%UMASS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU

[Note: I am not really current on latest automation software.  I know
that the Virginia Tech library uses VTLS, and it handles most of your
requirements (I am not sure about 2,5), but uses HP mini for our
million record file. I am sure other readers can give you more info.
or you could go to upcoming Library conference to see for yourself.
By the way, there are other IRList subscribers at Umass such as Roger
Thompson who you might talk with.  Let us know what your select!
Good luck - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 86 14:37:14 edt
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::fox
-SUBJECT-
Subject: MS Project Defense Monday 6/9 at 3pm
-BODY-
Sharat Sharan will defend his report "Information Retrieval Comparisons"
on Monday June 6 at 3pm.  This report deals with experimentatl studies
of extended Boolean query notations and with an investigation of retrieval
approaches to handle a fair subset of the VTLS data from our library.

All are invited to attend and to learn about the SMART retrieval system.
Regards, Edward A. Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 86 00:48:20 edt
-FROM-
From: JAMIE@SU-CSLI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: [Carl Pollard <POLLARD@SU-CSLI.ARPA>: ESCOL 86]
-BODY-
	Date: Tue 27 May 86 13:15:20-PDT
	From: Carl Pollard <POLLARD@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
	Subject: ESCOL 86

	
ESCOL 86, Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, will be jointly sponsored
by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University.
	Dates:			October 10-12, 1986
	Invited Speakers:	Charles Fillmore (Berkeley)
				Lily Wong Fillmore (Berkeley)
				Martin Kay (Xerox PARC)
				George Miller (Princeton)
        Added Attraction:       Demonstrations of NLP Software

Theme of the conference is "Linguistics at work":  we invite papers
on computational linguistics or language teaching, as well as on any
topic of general linguistic interest.

	Send a 1 page anonymous abstract, with separate return
address, by US Mail to
		ESCOL 86
		Department of Linguistics
		University of Pittsburgh
		Pittsburgh, PA 15260
or by netmail to
		Thomason@c.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA.

Abstract should arrive in Pittsburgh by June 13.  Submitted papers will
be scheduled for 20 minutes, with 10 minutes for discussion.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 86 06:53:26 edt
-FROM-
From: JAMIE@SU-CSLI.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Calendar, June 5, No. 19 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
             CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR THIS THURSDAY, June 5, 1986
                         THIS WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
                       AFT, Past and Prospects
                     Julius Moravcsik (Julius@csli)

   AFT was introduced as a theory of lexical representation with the
   following distinguishing features: a) Meanings determine extension
   only partially, b) Meaning structures are composed of (at most) four
   components c) by talking about the four meaning components we can give
   the theory of lexical representation more empirical explanatory power.

   This year's work expanded the theory considerably, showing how it ties in
   with direct reference theory, with semantic predicate structure analysis,
   and with accounts of linguistic competence.  In the talk examples will be
   given, showing how AFT analysis yields an interesting account of
   verb-semantics and predicate argument structure, and what additional
   factors are needed in order to specify fully reference.


             CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, June 12, 1986
                         NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
         	Ordinals and Mathematical Structure
                       Chris Menzel (Menzel@csli)

   This talk will have two components, one semantical and the other
   philosophical.  I will begin with an account of the semantics of ordinals
   in English as they occur in NPs like `The third man on the moon' and
   `Seventeen of the first one hundred tickets'.  The account will be
   developed within the framework of generalized quantifiers, augmented by
   work of Godehard Link on plurals.

   I will then move to the philosophical problem that started me thinking
   about these semantical issues in the first place, viz., the nature of
   number.  An influential movement in the philosophy of mathematics known
   as ``structuralism'' claims that mathematics is the study of abstract
   structure per se, and not of a realm of peculiarly mathematical objects
   like ordinal numbers at all.  Indeed, structuralists argue, any attempt
   to find such objects is necessarily wrong-headed.  For to identify any
   particular objects as (say) THE ordinal numbers is in effect just to pick
   out an INSTANCE of the structure which is the proper subject matter of
   arithmetic (viz., the structure exemplified by all omega-sequences), and
   not the structure itself.

   I think structuralism is half right.  Much of mathematics is in fact the
   study of abstract structure, but I will argue that when we get clear
   about what this comes to, there are natural accounts to be given of
   several types of mathematical objects.  In particular, I will revive an
   old neglected doctrine of Russell's that the ordinal numbers are
   (roughly) abstract relations between objects and structured situations of
   a certain kind.  I'll then point out why this doesn't run afoul of the
   structuralist argument above.  I'll close by showing that this view of
   the ordinals is implicit in the semantics given in the first part of the
   talk.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 29 May 86 00:49:45 edt
-FROM-
From: keller@UTAH-CS.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SLP '86 Program [Extract - this has been brutally cut - Ed]
-BODY-
                          SCHEDULE SLP '86
              Third IEEE Symposium on LOGIC PROGRAMMING
     September 21-25, 1986; Westin Hotel Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah

                            Conference Chairperson
                      Gary Lindstrom, University of Utah

Program Chairperson			Local Arrangements Chairperson
Robert M. Keller, University of Utah	Thomas C. Henderson, University of Utah

Tutorials Chairperson			Exhibits Chairperson
George Luger, University of New Mexico	Ross Overbeek, Argonne National Lab.

Program Committee:
Francois Bancilhon, MCC			William Kornfeld, Quintus Systems
John Conery, University of Oregon	Gary Lindstrom, University of Utah
Al Despain, U.C. Berkeley		George Luger, University of New Mexico
Herve Gallaire, ECRC, Munich		Rikio Onai, ICOT/NTT, Tokyo
Seif Haridi, SICS, Stockholm		Ross Overbeek, Argonne National  Lab.
Lynette Hirschman, SDC			Mark Stickel, SRI International
Peter Kogge, IBM, Owego			Sten Ake Tarnlund, Uppsala University


SUNDAY, September 21
19:00 - 22:00	Symposium and tutorial registration

MONDAY, September 22
08:00 - 09:00	Symposium and tutorial registration
09:00 - 17:30	TUTORIALS (concurrent)
	George Luger		Introduction to AI Programming in Prolog
	University of New Mexico

	David Scott Warren 		Building Prolog Interpreters
	SUNY, Stony Brook

	Neil Ostlund 		Theory of Parallelism, with Applications to
	Romas Aleliunas				Logic Programming
	University of Waterloo
12:00 - 17:30	Exhibit set up time
18:00 - 22:00	Symposium registration
20:00 - 22:00	Reception


TUESDAY, September 23
08:00 - 12:30	Symposium registration
09:00		Exhibits open
09:00 - 09:30	Welcome and announcements
09:30 - 10:30	INVITED SPEAKER: 		W. W. Bledsoe
				 	Some Thoughts on Proof Discovery
11:00 - 12:30	SESSION 1: Applications
 The Logic of Tensed Statements in English - an Application of Logic
Programming
 Incremental Flavor-Mixing of Meta-Interpreters for Expert System Construction
 The Phoning Philosopher's Problem or Logic Programming for Telecommunications
   Applications
14:00 - 15:30	SESSION 2: Secondary Storage
 EDUCE - A Marriage of Convenience: Prolog and a Relational DBMS
 Paging Strategy for Prolog Based Dynamic Virtual Memory
 A Logical Treatment of Secondary Storage
16:00 - 17:30	SESSION 3: Compilation
 Compiling Control
 Automatic Mode Inference for Prolog Programs
 IDEAL: an Ideal DEductive Applicative Language
17:30 - 19:30	Reception
20:30 - 22:30	Panel (Wm. Kornfeld, moderator)
		Logic Programming for Systems Programming
		
WEDNESDAY, September 24
09:00 - 10:00	INVITED SPEAKER: 		Sten Ake Tarnlund
					Logic Programming - A Logical View
10:30 - 12:00	SESSION 4: Theory
 A Theory of Modules for Logic Programming
 Building-In Classical Equality into Prolog
 Negation as Failure Using Tight Derivations for General Logic Programs
13:30 - 15:00	SESSION 5: Control
 Characterisation of Terminating Logic Programs
 An Execution Model for Committed-Choice Non-Deterministic Languages
 Timestamped Term Representation in Implementing Prolog
15:30 - 22:00	Excursion

THURSDAY, September 25
09:00 - 10:30	SESSION 6: Unification
 Refutation Methods for Horn Clauses with Equality Based on E-Unification
 An Algorithm for Unification in Equational Theories
 An Implementation of Narrowing: the RITE Way
11:00 - 12:30	SESSION 7: Parallelism
 Selecting the Backtrack Literal in the AND Process of the AND/OR Process Model
 Distributed Semi-Intelligent Backtracking for a Stack-based AND-parallel
Prolog
 The Sync Model for Parallel Execution of Logic Programming
14:00 - 15:30	SESSION 8: Performance
 Redundancy in Function-Free Recursive Rules
 Performance Evaluation of a Storage Model for OR-Parallel Execution
 MALI: A Memory with a Real-Time Garbage Collector for Implementing Logic
   Programming Languages
16:00 - 17:30	SESSION 9: Warren Abstract Machine
 A High Performance LOW RISC Machine for Logic Programming
 Register Allocation in a Prolog Machine
 Garbage Cut for Garbage Collection of Iterative Programs
EXHIBITS:
An exhibit area including displays by publishers, equipment manufacturers,  and
software houses will accompany the Symposium.  The list of exhibitors includes:
Arity,  Addison-Wesley,   Elsevier,   Expert   Systems,   Logicware,   Overbeek
Enterprises, Prolog  Systems, Quintus,  and Symbolics.   For more  information,
please contact:
		Dr. Ross A. Overbeek
		Mathematics and Computer Science Division
		Argonne National Laboratory
		9700 South Cass Ave.
		Argonne, IL 60439
		312/972-7856

[Note: Additional information can be obtained by writing to address
below - Ed.]
	Third IEEE Symposium on Logic Programming
	IEEE Computer Society
	1730 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
	Washington, D.C. 20036-1903

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
28
-SUBJECT-
Subject: summer slowdown
-BODY-
Not much has been reported, so this will be a short issue. Please send
news from conferences, talks, etc. to the next issue (scheduled late
June or beginning of July). Regards, Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
>From fox Tue Jun 17 19:00 EDT 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: "Parallel Free Text Search on the Connection Machine System"
-BODY-
  Authors: Craig Stanfill, Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines Corp.
  Abstract:
	A new parallel computer, the Connection Machine (Trademark) System,
has been applied to the free text search of large databases.  In one benchmark,
the time to evaluate a 20,000 term boolean query on a 15 gigabyte database was
projected to be 3 minutes.  The method has been adapted to implement Simple
Queries, in which documents are assigned scores based on the presence or
absence of various words, and the documents with the highest scores are
retrieved first.
	These capabilities have been applied to create an experimental
document retrieval system.  Simple queries are used to locate a small
number of possibly relevant documents.  The user then has the option of marking
some of these documents as good or bad.  Words contained in good documents
are given positive weights; words in bad documents are given negative
weights.  This yields a new query, which is used to search the database a
second time.  This process of iteratively refining queries based on marking
documents as good or bad is called Relevance Feedback, and is a significant
improvement over boolean queries, measured both by ease of use and quality
of results.

[Note:  The paper this goes along was given to me but I have only heard
by rumor that the paper may appear in CACM.  The 1st part, about using the
CM, is interesting.  The experimental part is rather brief - only 2 queries
were considered.  The paper has 9 references, so it is clear that the authors
have not had extensive experience with information retrieval work.  But,
the use of a connectionistic type of machine is clearly of interest! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
>From fox Tue Jun 17 19:10 EDT 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: UW Centre for the New OED - Newsletter 10 May 1986
-BODY-
[Extracts are severely edited - Ed]

Lexicon Workshop: was held in Pisa May 19-23. Sponsored by EEC, Univ.
of Pisa, and the Istituto de Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, and
gave special emphasis to lexical knowledge bases and practices in a multi-
lingual environment.

Visiting Fellowship: awarded for 1 month to Dr. Lise Winer of Dept.
of Linguistics at Southern Illinois Univ.  During her June visit she
will continue work on a Dictionary of Trinidadian English.

Advances in Lexicology: Call for Papers for 2nd Annual Conference
issued. Deadline 15 June; conference will run 9-11 November in
Waterloo.

Report from OUP: Vol. Iv of the Supplement, Se-Z, was published this
month.  The fourth volume is the achievement of Dr. Robert Burchfield
and his editorial team, marking one of the great milestones in
historical scholarship.
   John Simpson, who worked on the Supplement and who is now turning
his attention to the New English Words Series (NEWS), has been
appointed Co-Editor of the New OED.  John spent 4 months at the UW
Centre last fall.

Research Fellowships:  Several will be awarded for period July 1, 1986
to June 30, 1987.  Letters of application and requests for additional
information should be addressed to: The Administrative Director, The
UW Centre for the New OED, Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario,
CANADA, N2L 3G1.

>-----------------------------
-END-
>From fox Tue Jun 17 18:47 EDT 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Fall Joint Computer Conference
-BODY-
[Extract from News Release from ACM - Ed]
	Program Set for ACM/IEEE Computer Society
	   1986 Fall Joint Computer Conference

  "World's Largest Computer Organizations Join Forces for New
     Conference at Infomart in Dallas, Nov. 2-6, 1986"

The ACM and the IEEE Computer Society, the world's largest volunteer
computer organizations, have announced the program for their 1986 Fall
Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) to be held Nov. 2-6 in Dallas, Texas.
According to Dr. Stanley Winkler, FJCC'86 General Chairman, "The time is
ripe to inaugurate a forum to provide the richest, most potent opportunity
for computer professions to share concepts and insights on how and where
we should apply computers today and into the 1990's."

Dr. Harold Stone, FJCC'86 Program Chairman, has assembled an array of more
than eighty sessions in thirty tracks covering the major arenas of concern
to computer professionals, including artificial intelligence, supercomputing,
software systems, data bases, operating systems, and computer design.  Also
scheduled for FJCC'86 is a Professional Education Program consisting of
twenty-four one and two day tutorials on Nov. 2-3.  These in-depth sessions
with hands-on capabilities, will cover such topics as robotics, network
management, VLSI circuit layout, fault-tolerant computing and RISC
architecture.
...
For further information ... call INFOMART at 1-800-722-FJCC

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
29
-SUBJECT-
Subject: trouble with ARPAnet/Bitnet gateway
-BODY-
News has recently filtered down to me from CSNET about some
loss of messages that people should be made aware of.
There is a severe overload of traffic at Wisconsin machine
"wiscvm" which is the official gateway between BITNET and
ARPANET.  When mail is sent to CSNET, destined for a BITNET
machine, it may not get through!

Please let me know if you have missed IRList messages.  I suggest you
ask for acknowledgment on all crucial messages going through wiscvm.

 - Ed Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 86 21:54:16 EDT
-FROM-
From: Rick Adams <seismo!rick>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  CSNET problems with BITNET traffic
-BODY-
[Note: following is comment sent regarding IRList traffic to BITNET
recipients.  It looks like we are OK, but caution is advised! - Ed]

it goes through wiscvm. Occasionally there is a backup and
then I reroute them through harvard

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 86 19:24:24 edt
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::janlee
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Computing Reviews
-BODY-
[Note: the following is from J.A.N. Lee, Professor of Computer Science
at Virginia Tech. He has been serving as Vice President of ACM. He
would like the advice of one or more members of the IR community.
Please respond to IRList so we can all discuss this, and send direct
communications to JAN at:
   ARPANET: janlee%vt@csnet-relay.arpa
   BITNET: janlee@vtcs1
   CSNET: janlee@vt
Thanks for your cooperation! - Ed]

Ed:

Over the past few years, under Jean Sammet's leadership, ACM's journal
"Computing Reviews" has been "automated" in two significant ways:
(1) The management of the review process is now installed on the
Association's IBM 4361, mainly to better select reviewers and to
track their responses, and
(2) To prepare the journal on-line with automatic type-setting through
Science Press.

We have thus created a massive "data base" which is also used to create
the Annual Guides to the Literature.  On the other hand, the income from
the sales of the journal and the annual Guides does not come close to
covering our costs.  At the same time, after many years of service
Jean Sammet has asked to be relieved of the editorship at the end
of the current volume.  I have been asked to head a committee to
look at how we might enhance our services to the community
using this data base.  ACM is already considering electronic publications
for other journals so there might be a possibility of "piggy-backing"
several such activities together.

I would like to invite the IR community to suggest directions that we might
take in making good use of this volunteer driven data base; all suggestions
will be earnestly considered.  Commentaries should be sent to me at
"janlee at vtcs1 on csnet" before August 4th next.

Thanks

JAN

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 2 Jul 86 10:54:00 PST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NL references/ideas
-FROM-
From: sefai@nwc-143b.ARPA
-BODY-
Ed,
	Thanks for the two references. Before I head off to UCLA this
weekend and dive thru all the literature, do you know if anyone has
addressed the issue of using specific bit configurations to represent
words. What I'm after is the creation of an index that I can use to
manipulate words and somehow use this index to relay semantic information.
What comes to mind is Shank's definition of interlingua in one of his
earlier works.
	I'd appreciate any leads/info/thoughts you may have.
					Thanks,
						Gene Guglielmo
						sefai@nwc-143b
						China Lake, Ca.

[Note: see the references below that Gene has already received, and
please reply directly to him as well as to IRList if you have any
additions to help. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: sefai@nwc-143b.ARPA
-DATE-
Date: 1 Jul 86 15:35:00 PST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Natural Language References
-BODY-
[Note: this refers back to Query in V2 #26, 8 June 1986 - Ed]

	As promised, the following is a list of references on Natural
Language. I'd like to thank all who contributed references as well as
suggestions. Before I can definitely commit to my topic, I need to
investigate work done by Harris and Wiley, Sager, and Winograd. Hopefully,
I'll nail this down before summer's end. Will keep you posted.

					Gene Guglielmo
					SEFAI@NWC-143B
					China Lake, Ca.

.rA Ananiashviii, G.G.
.rA Mundzhishvii, Z.I.
.rA Bichashvii, N.N.
.rP Word Identification in a Natural Language in Interactive Systems
.rC Soobshch. Akad. Nauk. Gurzin. SSR
.rD 1984

.rA Boguraev, B.K.
.rA Jones, K.S.
.rP A Framework for Inference in Natural Language Front Ends to Databases
.rI University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
.rC Report No. 64
.rD 1985

.rA Brachman, Ron (ed)
.rA Levesque, Hector (ed)
.rB Readings in Knowledge Representation
.rI Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.
.rW Palo Alto, California
.rD 1986

.rA Briggs, R.
.rP Transcendental Semantic Primitives for Natural Language Processing
.rI Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, NASA Ames
Research Center
.rC RIACS Techical Report TR 85.14
.rW Moffett Field, California
.rD 1985

.rA Damerau, F.J.
.rP An Interactive Customization Program for a Natural Language Database
Query System
.rI IBM Research Division
.rC Report No. 10411
.rD 1984

.rA Damerau, F.J.
.rP Problems and Some Solutions in Customization of Natural Language Data
Base Front Ends
.rI IBM Research Division
.rC Report No. 10872
.rD 1984

.rA Dyer, M.G.
.rB In-Depth Understanding: A Computer Model of Integrated Processing
for Narrative Comprehension
.rI MIT Press
.rW Cambridge, Massachusetts
.rD 1986

.rA Enomoto, H.
.rP TELL: a Natural Language Based Software Development System
.rI Institute for New Generation Computer Technology
.rC Report No. 67
.rD 1984

.rA Findler, Nicholas V. (ed)
.rB Associative Networks: Representation and Use of Knowledge by Computers
.rI Academic Press
.rW NY
.rD 1983

.rA Frederking, R.E.
.rP Syntax and Semantics in natural Language Parsers
.rI Carnegie-Melon University
.rC Department of Computer Science
.rC Report No. 85-133
.rD 1985

.rA Harris, M.D.
.rB Introduction to Natural Language Processing

.rA Harris, Z.
.rA Wiley
.rB A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles
.rD 1984

.rA Ibragimov, T.I.
.rB Cybernetics and Natural Languages

.rA Jacobs, P.S.
.rP PHRED: A Generator for Natural Language Interfaces
.rI University of California
.rC Berkeley Computer Science Division
.rC Report No. 85-198
.rD 1985

.rA Johnson, D.E.
.rP Design of a Robust, Portable Natural Language Interface Grammar
.rI IBM Research Division
.rC Report NO. 10867
.rD 1984

.rA Johnson, T.
.rB Natural Language Computing: The Commercial Applications
.rI Ovum Limited
.rW London

.rA Kalita, J.K.
.rP Generating Summary Responses to Natural Language Database
.rI University of Saskatchewan
.rC Report No. 84-9
.rD 1984

.rA Kandrirody, A.
.rA Kapur, D.
.rA Narendran, P.
.rB An Ideal-Theoretic Approach to Word Problems and Unification Problems
over Finitely Presented Commutative Algebras

.rA Karpen, J.L
.rP The Digitized Word: Orality, Literacy, and the Computerization of
Language
.rC Ph.D. thesis
.rI Bowling Green State University
.rW Bowling Green, Ohio
.rD 1984

.rA Marcus, M.P.
.rB A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language
.rI MIT Press
.rW Cambridge, Massachusetts
.rD 1985

.rA Mays, E.
.rP A Modal Temporal Logic for Reasoning About Changing Database with
Applications to Natural Language Question Answering
.rI Unviersity of Pennsylvania
.rC Moore School of Electrical Engineering
.rC Department of Computer Science
.rC Report No. 85-01
.rD 1985

.rA Michalski, R.S.
.rA Carbonell, J.G.
.rA Mitchell, T.M.
.rB Machine Learning; An Artificial Intelligence Approach, Volume II
.rI Morgan kaufman Publishers, Inc.
.rW Palo Alto, California
.rD 1986

.rA Neuamnn, B.
.rP Natural Language Descriptions of TIme-Varying Scenes
.rI Universitaet Hamburg.
.rC Fachbereich Informatik
.rC Report NO. 105
.rD 1984

.rA Orlowska,  E.
.rP The Montague Formalization of Natural Language
.rI Polish Academy of Sciences
.rC Institute of Computer Sciences
.rC Report No. 105
.rD 1984

.rA Petrick, S.R.
.rP Natural Language Database Query Systems
.rI IBM Research Division
.rC Report No. 10508
.rD 1984

.rA Rau, L.F.
.rP The Understanding and Generation of Ellipses in a Natural Language
Systems.
.rI University of California Berkeley
.rC Computer Science Division
.rC Report No. 85-227
.rD 1984

.rA Sager, Naomi
.rB Natural Language Information Processing
.rI Addison-Wesley
.rW Reading

.rA Saint-Dizier, P.
.rP An Approach to natural Language Semantics in Logic Programming
.rI Institute National de Recherce en Informatique et en Automatique
.rC Report NO. 389

.rA Salton
.rA McGill
.rB Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval

.rA Schank, R.C (ed)
.rA Colby, K.M. (ed)
.rB Computer Models of Thought and Language
.rI W.H.Freeman and Company
.rW San Francisco
.rD 1973

.rA Schank, R.C.
.rB Conceptual Information Processing
.rI Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.
.rW Amsterdam
.rD 1984

.rA Schank, R.C.
.rA Childers, P.G.
.rB The Cognitive Computer
.rI Addison-Wesley
.rW Reading
.rD 1984

.rA Schieber, Stuart M.
.rP An Introduction to Unification-based Approaches to Grammar
.rI University of Chicago Press
.rC CSLI Lecture Note Series
.rD 1986

.rA Sowa, John F.
.rB Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine
.rP Addison-Wesley
.rW Reading
.rD 1984

.rA VanRijsbergen
.rB Information Retrieval, 2nd Edition

.rA Winograd, Terry
.rB Language as a Cognitive Process, Volume 1: Syntax
.rI Addison-Wesley
.rW Reading
.rD 1983

.rP Large-Dictionary, On-Line Recognition of Spoken Words
.rI Helsinki University of Technology
.rC PB84-214246/CAO
.rD 1983

.rB Natural Language Processing: A Knowledge Engineering Approach
.rL 0-8476-7358-8

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
30
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 86 11:24:44 EDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!harvard.HARVARD.EDU!macrakis (Stavros Macrakis)
-TO-
To: nlm-vax.arpa!donna
-SUBJECT-
Subject: word-wise diff
-BODY-
[This is a reply to query of Donna Williamson appearing in Issue 24 - Ed]

The classic Unix-style approach to this is to translate the original
files to one-word-per-line, use diff, and then translate the diff
back.  The main problems with this are:
  1. Translating so that you can recover the original is finicky;
  2. `diff' is (very) slow; for simple changes, `diff -h' may work;
  3. Mapping the diff results back to source file terms is painful.
You might want to look at Walter Tichy's paper `The String-to-String
Correction Problem with Block Moves' ACM Trans. Comp. Sys. 2:4:309
(Nov 84) for an algorithm that seems far superior to that used in
`diff'.  His implementation ran at about the same speed as `diff' in
tests, delivering 7% smaller output; it promises to be much faster and
much better in environments with more general kinds of changes.
	-s

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 17 Jun 1986 22:12-EDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!cad.cs.cmu.edu!Michael.Mauldin
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: try again to send msg, now with correct address
-BODY-
Dr. Fox,

   I will send you a written copy of my proposal.  Thanks for the
comments, and thanks for pointing out IRlist.  I started subscribing to
IRlist just this month, so I am already in your tables.

   Dr. Salton's ``single term indexing'' for comparison sounds like it
would reduce my workload and also give me a better comparison.  Do you
have his net address so that I may contact him?  My opinion is that
when my ``fancy conceptual text skimmer'' works, the ``right'' solution
will be a hybrid of both keyword based and conceptual based retrieval
systems.  They each work best on different types of documents, and the
combination of approaches will have better recall AND precision.  That
is similar to the SIRE approach: keywords to get EVERYTHING that might
be related, and something more intelligent to do the final winnowing.

   I will be submitting to IRlist as sooon as I feel I have something
important to say.  In the meantime, I look forward to reading it (and,
of course, storing the contents in FERRET).

Michael L. Mauldin (Fuzzy)		Department of Computer Science
ARPA: Michael.Mauldin@CAD.CS.CMU.EDU	Carnegie-Mellon University
Phone: (412) 268-3065			Pittsburgh, PA  15213-3890

[Note: G. Salton is, on the ARPANET, at gs@cornell.arpa and Mr.
Mauldin is, I believe, now in touch with him. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 86 18:38:48 edt
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Project EXPRES
-BODY-
On 4/17/86 the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced 2 solicitations
in the Commerce Business Daily.  The 2nd, RFP 86-104, has been suspended.
The first, which now covers both topics, has been distributed as EXPRES
Project Solicitation for Research Groups, NSF 86-34.  A meeting was held at
NSF on 13 June for EXPRES Research Group Proposers - I attended along with
almost 40 others.  The following summary of the solicitation and meeting
is based on documents released by NSF, and my own impressions.

I. Solicitation:
   "The Office of Information Systems of the National Science Foundation
(NSF) has initiated a project called "EXPerimental Research in
Electronic submission" (EXPRES).  Its purpose is to improve the
ability of the Nation's research community to exchange documents
containing text, image and graphics.  The vehicle for experimentation
will be the NSF proposal development, submission and review process.
   Awards will be made to research groups to study the problems of
compound document transmission among different hardware/software
environments.  The project duration will be three years, beginning in
September, 1986.  NSF anticipates making awards to two research groups.
   ...
   Proposal must be received on or before Friday, August 1, 1986 to be
considered for award under this solicitation.

BACKGROUND
...
The Goal:
   To move to a situation in which the scientific and engineering
research community, building on computing equipment and facilities
currently available, will benefit from emerging technologies and will
be able to exchange compound documents among dissimilar [multivendor,
multiuniversity, multidisciplinary] hardware and software environments.
[Compound documents are those which may contain text with numerical
and symbolic data, images, drawings, charts and graphs, and photographs.]
...
The Approach:
   The National Science Foundation has initiated a project called
"EXPerimental Research in Electronic submission" (EXPRES).  The vehicle for
experimentation will be the NSF proposal development, submission and review
process, which embodies all aspects of the problem [high volume,
geographically dispersed community, and multivendor environments] but
permits a measure of control necessary for experimentation.
   The National Science Foundation will make awards to groups to
perform research on overcoming the barriers to compound document
transmission in the multidisciplinary, multiuniversity and multivendor
environment.  The research effort will include the design and
installation of pilot systems with the aim of expanding them.  Systems
characterized as "high-function, single vendor" or
"mediaum/limited-function, multivendor" could be used as a basis for
the project.
   The awardee[s] will cooperate with industry and government
initiatives advocating and promoting interoperability [communication
among multivendor equipment and software] based on the International
Standards Organization Open Systems Interconnecttion [OSI] standards.

The National Science Foundation:  NSF faces a subset of the
communication problems of the Nation's research community.  Scientists
and engineers at about 2,400 organizations submit proposals to the
National Science Foundation each year; the vast majority of these
organizations is educational.  NSF receives approximately ten copies
of 37,000 proposals annually.  Each proposal averages 50 pages and may
contain more than 100 pages.  Most contain not only text but images
and graphics; some contain black and white or color photographs.  After
their initial review at NSF over half of these proposals are mailed to
6-8 reviewers for analysis.  ...
...
Research Areas:  It is anticipated that research in the following
areas will be required during the project:
 - document representation and management
 - networking protocols
 - authentication, certification and security
 - data compression
 - data management
 - high volume image transmission
 - graphics
 - human-machine interface
 - user acceptance and impact on work and social patterns

Electronic proposal submission: The EXPRES experimental design will be
based on the following model for electronic propsal preparation,
submission and processing.
 - The principal investigator prepares the proposal using a computer
  workstation.
 - The proposal is forwarded through institutional channels in the Research
  Administration Office where it is approved by the authorized officials
 - It is then submitted over NSFNET or another wide-area network to NSF
 - A receipt acknowledgement is sent to the submitting institution
 - The proposal is entered into the computerized processing systems at
  NSF and assigned to a program manager
 - After initial review, the program manager selects reviewers
 - The proposal and reviewing instructions are sent to the reviewers
 - Reviews are completed and sent back to NSF
 - The program manager evaluates the reviews, and decides to recommend
  award or declination of the proposal
 - For recommended awards, the necessary forms are completed and sent
  with the proposal through division and directorate approvals, then to
  the administrative divisions for final processing
 - For declinations, the decision justification and proposal are sent
  to the division director for concurrence
 - The notification of award or declination is transmitted to the
  institution

  It is expected that paper copies of the proposal and forms could be
generated at any stage in this process, but transmisison and handling
would be primarily of electronic media.

Cost Sharing:  The current total level of NSF funding available for
this EXPRES activity is approximately $2 million per year.
Accordingly, it will not be possible for NSF to bear all the costs
associated with the project, and significant cost sharing by the
research groups may therefore be necessary. ..."

[Note: the solicitation advertised the meeting of 13 June, and gave
David Staudt at (202) 357-7448 as the contact.]


II. Minutes of Meeting
"...
What are your really looking for? What will constitute "success"?
  As stated in the Management Plan, "The primary objective of EXPRES
  is to provide an environment in which compound documents can be
  transmitted efficiently and economically."  What we want is a system
  that will eventually work, that can be used by the academic scientific
  and engineering research community to communicate electronically
  quickly, efficiently, economically, fully and robustly. ...
...
What will happen to the installed equipment and software at the end
of the project?
  Disposition of any equipment provided to colleges and universities as
  part of the EXPRES project is a matter between them and the vendors.
  Any equipment installed at NSF must either be returned or purchased
  separately.
...
Will the pilot system have to handle fascimile or some other method of
inputting paper proposals?
  No. The purpose of the pilot is to research and demonstrate an
  electronic system. ...
What percentage of proposals contain photographs and other image?
  The percentages vary by discipline, but about 75% have graphics or
  image. Some have color.  We would expect that an electronic system
  would ultimately be able to handle color.
...
How important is it to be able to edit the data contained in the
proposal?
  We wouldn't necessarily need to change the proposal, but we would
  want to be able to search for words, for example, or otherwise be
  able to scan the document using its contents.
..."


III. My comments
1. Interested parties
a- Companies
  Serious interest was expressed by vendors like IBM, Digital, Xerox
  Organizations like BBN, Aspen have done work in related areas
b- Educational Institutions
  MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Berkeley are expected to compete
  States like NY, NJ, Michigan may submit proposals

2.Communications
NSFNET will be used; there is interest in moving to the OSI protocols
but that may take longer than it will take to complete this part of EXPRES

3.Importance
The Director of NSF, and several of the program directors, attended the
meeting.  There is keen interest at NSF in this venture!

4.Becoming involved
Due to the short time before proposals must be submitted, and the
orientation to having consortiums send proposals, it seems imperative
for anyone interested to become part of a large consortium of say 2-5
universities along with 1-3 vendors.

5.For more information:
Contact David Staudt at the phone number given above. I hope that the
information I included is enough to help people decide if they are
interested in getting involved.  But the intent of the explanation is
really for those who would like to know that such an effort is
underway!  - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 86 00:55:09 edt
-FROM-
From: rba@PETRUS.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Office Information Systems Conference Program
-BODY-
          ACM CONFERENCE ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
               October 6-8, 1968, Providence, R.I.

Conference Chair:        Carl Hewitt, MIT
Program Chair:           Stan Zdonik, Brown University
Keynote Speaker:         J.C.R. Licklider, MIT
Distinguished Lecturer:  A. van Dam, Brown University

          Panels and Sessions
Advanced Computational Models
AI in the Office
Impacts of Computer Technology on Employment
Organizational Analysis: Due Process
Future Directions in Office Technology
Comparison of Social Research Methods
Organizational Analysis: Organizational Ecology
Models of the Distributed Office
Interfaces

For more information, call the Conference Registrar at Brown U.
(401-813-1839), or send electronic mail to mhf@brown.CSNET.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 86 06:53:08 edt
-FROM-
From:  DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
Thursday,  26 June  1:00-4:00pm  Room: E51-329
       EXPERT SYSTEMS SEMINAR

        The Oncocin Project
An Expert System to Assist Physicians with Cancer Treatments

        Curtis P. Langlotz
        Stanford University

The Oncocin Project is overseen by a collaborative group of physicians
and computer scientists who are developing an intelligent system that
uses the techniques of knowledge engineering to advise oncologists in
the management of patients receiving cancer chemotherapy.  The general
research focus of the group members include knowledge acquisition,
inexact reasoning, explanation, and the representation of time and of
expert thinking patterns.  Much of the work developed from research in
the 1970's on the MYCIN and EMYCIN programs, early efforts that helped
define the group's research directions for the coming decade.

The prototype ONCONCIN system is in limited experimental use by
oncologists in the Stanford University Oncology Clinic.  Thus much of
the emphasis of this research has been on human engineering so that
the physicians will accept the program as a useful adjunct to their
patient care activities.  ONCOCIN has generally been well-accepted
since its introduction, and we are now testing a version of the
program which runs on Xerox 1100-series professional workstations to
further enhance its acceptability and to facilitate its evaluation at
sites away from the University.


Hosts: Sloan School of Management, MIT
       Xerox Arificial Intelligence Systems

Info:  (603) 881-7028

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
31
-DATE-
Date: Tue 15 Jul 86 12:04:09-PDT
-FROM-
From: David Erickson <ERICKSON@sushi.STANFORD.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: information on IRList Digest
-BODY-
Ed,
  thanks for the information about IRList - perhaps my original query would
have been better directed if sent to IRList.  If you still have a copy, could
you distribute it?  If not, let me know, and I will mail one.
Thanks,
  Dave

[Note: as Dave indicates, I have answered his query for IRList. Others who
have affiliation with different bulletin boards may wish to examine
the message below and reply directly to Dave with information. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed 9 Jul 86 08:55:31-PDT
-FROM-
From: David Erickson <ERICKSON@su-sushi.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Education Bulletin Boards & Lists
-BODY-
I would like to compile a list of bulletin boards with an educational focus.
I am primarily interested in BBs which are distributed either as lists or in
digest format, such as AI-ED or VPL-LIST.

If you know of such a bulletin board, or better yet, have such a list, please
send the information directly to me and I will summarize to AI-ED.  Please
include a brief description of the bulletin board:

   Net address for requests to be added to distribution list
   Format (Digest, List, ...)
   Focus
   Primary user community
   How active is it
   General comments

> Dave

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 4 July 1986, 13:45:02 MDT
-SUBJECT-
Subject: test analysis program
-FROM-
From: JLAMONT@UALTAVM.bitnet
-BODY-
Ed:
I would like to thank you VERY much for sending me back issues of IRLIST
DIGEST again. In reading them I happened to notice in issue 24 of
May 21/1986 under the subject 'diff marks' that someone is looking for
a textual analysis software. A program I am familiar with is called
Oxford Concordance Program developed by the Oxford University in England.
This program enables the user to analyze text that is stored in a computer
file. It is very easy to use and has many features such as creation of
concordances, a keyword list, a word list, a frequency count, or a
grammatical analysis. It can accommodate texts in a variety of languages
and alphabets. Among the program's applications are the following:
study of style, vocabulary distribution, rhyme schemes, and language study
and teaching. Extensive documentation and manual is available from Oxford.
I will gladly provide more information to anyone interested.
                                       Jana Lamont, U of A

[Note: I revised the reference to 'diff marks' to match what I could
find in old IRList issues.  The program mentioned here sounds
interesting, even if it is not quite what Donna Williamson was asking
for in her original query. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: fox
Date: Thu Jul  3 10:28 EDT 1986
To: nwc-143b.arpa@sefai
Subject: bit configurations

[Note: this refers back to query in issue 29 of 3 July. - Ed]

Gene:
   I am unclear about what you mean by "bit configurations to represent
words" and so will ask some questions to try to pin that down.
1) Are you interested in papers on how to store dictionaries to be
  accessed as databases?  There is a published paper by Sherman
  and a tech report by Peterson, that are about Webster's 7th -- both
  are fairly old.  There are also some even older ones.  Work is now
  underway at Waterloo at Centre for New OED on this issue too.
2) Are you interested in superimposed coding for partial matches?
  There has been work at Melbourne University, and implementation of
  their methods of indexing Prolog facts for partial match retrieval,
  which I make use of in our dictionary project here.  That is in
  Muprolog, the db version.  There are papers by Naish and others
  on this.

Any other comments on what you are looking for in particular would
help.  Have you looked at recent ACL proceedings?

Good luck and Happy 4th of July! - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: nwc-143b.ARPA@sefai
-DATE-
Date: 9 Jul 86 12:04:00 PST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Some clarifications.
-BODY-
Ed,

In regards to your last message for clarification on "bit configurations",
let me try to explain by an illustration.  Suppose I store a
vocabulary list in a table of some sort and define two fields: one
for the actual word and the other for the word's definition. Once this
is set up, I generate a unique key based on each word and its
definition, and create a front-end program that manipulates these keys.
This program would map the input language words to this key, determine
if sentence is syntactically and semantically correct by some means, then
map to the output language. For example, suppose the concept of a house is
defined by the key "HS78JK"; in English, the key translates to "house";
in Italian, the key translates to "casa"; .... I would think that I should
be able to map most of the words in one language to equivalent words
in another language.

Has anyone looked at the idea of this kind of key and if so, how did they
generate it? In addition, what concepts are dominating today for possible
ways to represent definitions? (I think I've opened Pandora's box on this one).

At the AI Conference in Anaheim at the end of April, I asked this question of
various companies putting out natural language interfaces. Some companies
couldn't answer because they said it was proprietary information, others
didn't know. (salesmen!)

Does all this make sense or am I off the deep end? 	-- Gene

 ...

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 86 01:01:04 edt
-FROM-
From: Vshank%Weizmann.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Change of electronic address
-BODY-
Effective July 27th, 1986 I will no longer be at Weizmann.  My new
Bitnet electronic address will be: HANK@BARILVM

Mail sent to Vshank@Weizmann will be forwarded to my new address
for a period of 2 months, after which, it will disappear into
random electronic pulses somewhere over the Mediterranean Ocean.

I will be at my new id starting August 3rd, 1986.

Cheers,
Hank

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 9 Jul 1986 14:53 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      submission to and status of Forum
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
  ...
After getting info. on Pisa conference, we  decided to also include the
call for papers for the 87 conference to be in New Orleans. After getting
that, I had a call from ASIS saying I might include some stuff on
their Fall meeting since SIGIR has a special session as a part of
that meeting. I finally got all the material together and the Forum
issue has been finalized. Due to the lateness of it, I decided to
make the issue coming out Spring-Summer 86. That is, there will not
be another issue until Fall.
  ...
  I will be at Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana for 1986-87. My address
is mentioned in the inside front cover of Forum. I don't have an
account set up for me yet. I will ask them to call it 'RAGHAVAN'.
When done, my electronic address should be raghavan@usl.csnet.
I expect to be there from August 10, 1986.
  ...
  I will mail you abstracts that I have included in the Spring-Summer
issue of Forum later today(providing our flexlink between VAX and IBM
systems is alive)for the digest. I will also send the electronic
version of the table of contents.    Vijay

[Note: look forward to this information on SIGIR Forum issue soon! It
is a very informative issue. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed Jul 16 08:22 EDT 1986
-FROM-
From: fox
-SUBJECT-
Subject: address for SIGIR Forum submissions
-BODY-
Please send all contributions for Fall 1986 issue of ACM SIGIR Forum
to co_editor:
 - Ed Fox (BITNET[cheapest]:foxea@vtvax3 or foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa;
  CSNET:fox@vt;Internet:fox%vtisr1.uucp@seismo.css.gov;UUCP:seismo!vtisr1!fox)
      Dr. Edward A. Fox; Dept. of Computer Science; 562 McBryde Hall
      Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061; (703) 961-5113 or 6931

The deadline for receipt of submissions is 10 September.  Many thanks for
your assistance.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 10 Jul 1986, 12:36:26
-FROM-
From: (James Heilik) <USERLIJM@UALTAMTS.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: appropriateness of IRList
-BODY-
[Note: this msg is composed from several sent.  It illustrates
interests of some of our members.  Comments on such efforts and
discussion of library automation work is most certainly appropriate
for IRList Digest. - Ed]
   ...
Some of us at the University of Alberta library are interested
in joining your IRList.
   ...

I am still not sure how appropriate our membership is. We are not
involved in research work per se; our main project at the moment is
the mounting of a public access on-line catalog. We have a pilot
version operating now with about 65 terminals and 350,000 records.
Aiming for mid September for the big production one.
   ...
Thanks for the back issues of IRList. For our library installation,
we are building on IBM's DOBIS/LIBIS. Cataloguing data from the
bibliographic utility UTLAS.
   ...
Regards, Jim Heilik

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun 13 Jul 86 20:10:27-PDT
-FROM-
From: Martha Evens <EVENS@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACL Meeting Report
-BODY-
                        ACL MEETING

The Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics was held at Columbia University in New York City from
June 10-13, 1986.  There were six half-day tutorials on June 10:
Introduction to Computational Linguistics by Ralph Grishman, Natural
Language Generation by Kathleen McKeown, Structuring the Lexicon by
Robert Ingria, Recent Developments in Syntactic Theory by Anthony Kroch,
Current Approaches to Natural Language Semantics by Graeme Hirst, and
Machine translation by Sergei Nirenburg.  Paper sessions and forums on
special issues were held June 11-13.  Workers in Information Retrieval might be
particularly interested in the papers on morphology by Byrd, Church, and
Barton,
the papers on question-answering by Guindon and Stallard, and the forum on
machine translation featuring John White, Matin Kay, nd Margaret King.  There
were in addition fourteen exhibits including six book publishers.  A copy of
the Proceedings may be obtained from Dr. Donald E. Walker at Bell
Communications Research, 445 South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: fox
-DATE-
Date: Sat Jul 12 17:33 EDT 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: AAP Announces Author's Guide for Electronic Manuscript Project
-BODY-
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ----- June 27, 1986
For additional information contact: Carol A. Risher, (202) 232-3335
   AAP, 2005 Mass. Ave., N.W., Wash. DC 20036

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has prepared four guidebooks
to assist authors and editors in using the AAP Standard for Preparation
and Markup of Electronic Manuscripts.  These books are available from AAP

[Note: contact Ms. Risher regarding ordering - the charge is nominal - Ed]

The first volume, the "Author's Guide", explains how to use the AAP
Provisional Standard for the Preparation and Markup of Electronic
Manuscripts. In non-technical language, the Author's Guide instructs
an author in the basic steps necessary to prepare a manuscript with
AAP markup so that the electronic file can be efficiently transferred
to a publisher.  The Author's Guide covers the most basic rules for
AAP markup.

The second volume, the "Reference Manual on Electronic Manuscript
Preparation and Markup," provides information on how to prepare more
complex manuscripts that may include simple tabular material.  It
explains more about the provisional standard and includes a compre-
hensive listt of all manuscript elements and their associated tags.
The first two guides should provide introduction and markup procedures
for a large body of non-technical publications.

The third volume, "Markup of Mathematical Formulas," expands on the
basic concepts described in the first two guides.  This guide
describes markup rules for mathematical formulas that will be embedded
in text and for marking up stand-alone mathematical formulas.  This
markup scheme can be used by technical and non-technical
professionals.  It uses only the standard characters (ISO 646 and
ASCII) recognized by most devices involved in electronic manuscript
transmission and processing.

The fourth volume, "Markup of Tabular Material," describes the tagging
scheme for denoting both simple, single-cell tabular materials and
detailed, complex tables.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
32
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 86 19:49:04 EDT
-FROM-
From: Jim Davis <jrd@MEDIA-LAB.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Citations on dictionary papers
-BODY-
Could we please have the full citations for the papers by
Sherman and Peterson on Webster's 7th?  I'd like to read them.

[Note: this is referring back to my msg to nwc-143b.arpa@sefai in issue 31.
References are:
      1) Peterson, James L. <peterson@mcc.arpa>
	Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary: A Computer-Readable
	File Format. TR-196, Univ. of Texas at Austin Dept. of Comp.  Sci.,
	May 1982.
      2) Sherman, D.
	A New Computer Format for Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary.
	In Computers and Humanities, 8:21-26, 1974.
Maybe Jim will comment on this? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 86 06:45:18 edt
-FROM-
From: LEWIS@cs.umass.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: query on almanacs
-BODY-
    I would appreciate any information people could give me on the availability
of online almanacs or similar large bodies of broadranging statistical data.
Public domain or cheap would be preferable, of course.  Please send replies to
me; if there is sufficient demand I will summarize for the digest.
     Thanks, David D. Lewis
             Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst
             "well, I used to think it was LEWIS@UMASS-CS
              and lately it's been LEWIS%cs.umass.edu@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
              but maybe it's longer now"

[Note: perhaps amsler@mouton.arpa might make some comments? - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     28-JUL-1986 17:44:08
-FROM-
From:     LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Oxford concordance program
-BODY-
Oxford Concordance Program
I have just seen the note from Jana Lamont on IRList on 4 July.
[Note: see V2 #31 of 16 July 1986 - Ed]
The Oxford Concordance Program (OCP) is sold under licence from
Oxford University Computing Service. At present there is a one-off
price of 130 pounds sterling including documentation. OCP is
is written in Fortran and is very easy to implement. It is running
at over 230 institutions throughout the world on all major
machine ranges.
For more information and an order form, mail SUSAN@VAX2.OXFORD.AC.UK
on BITNET or write to
Oxford Concordance Program
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
UK
or
Phone 44-865-56721 and say that it is an enquiry about OCP
Susan Hockey
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 25 Jul 1986 01:24 EDT
-FROM-
From:         James H. Coombs <JAZBO@BROWNVM.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      diff marks
-BODY-
[Note: see discussion in issues 24 and 31 - Ed]
I don't know of anything available to locate only "significant"
differences between document files.  Presumably, such software would
have to be table driven so that the user could control what the program
treats as significant and what it ignores.
The only programs that I know of are designed to treat all differences
as significant.  You might be able to "relax" these somewhat, however,
by translating your files into SOUNDEX first--that at least would
collapse most of the trivial spelling differences.
You might also consider contacting Polytron Corporation.  They have a
version control system with a builtin comparator that appears to be very
sophisticated.  Their program is a little expensive (ca. $350), so I am
not optimistic about their cooperating with you on a special project.
It might be worth a phone call, however.
"Significant" troubles me.  Sounds as though you need a parser; perhaps
a semantic interpreter as well.  If you can settle for something like
"at least five words in sequence have been changed," then the problem
should be quite manageable.  There are several good DIFF/COMPARE
programs floating around for PCs, and I bet the authors would be happy
to consult, sell source code, etc.
1) Polytron Corporation  [product is PVCS]
   PO Box 787
   Hillsboro, OR 97123
   (503) 648-8595
2) Seven Valleys Software
   I have the source (in C) for their Compare and Update programs.
   It includes 'ignore case', 'ignore white space between words',
   'resync on n lines'.  If you have a programmer, this might be a
   good start.  Let me know if you want me to send this.  An ARC
   file would be most convenient, but I can send it as ASCII as well.
   (Yes, this is legal.)
   Author:
   Cheyenne C. Wills
   12 West Locust St.
   Mechanicsburg, Pa. 17055
   (717) 697-5198
   Written for:
   Seven Valley's Software
   P.O. Box 99
   Glen Rock, Pa 17327
3) I have C source for another by
   Charles Daney
   19567 Dorchester Drive
   Saratoga, CA 95070
   (408) 257-8440
4) Chris Dunford wrote an "HDIFF" for a prototypical source code control
   system.  I don't have the source for this, but Dunford seems to be a
   good programmer and might be interested in discussing possibilities.
   Christopher J. Dunford
   10057-2 Windstream Drive
   Columbia, Maryland 21044
   CompuServe 76703,2002
   Source STR211
It sounds as though you must have an interesting application in mind, but
it is hard to tell just what you need.  In any case, I would like to hear
more about it.  --Jim
Acknowledge-To:  <JAZBO@BROWNVM>

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 86 16:38:23 BST
-FROM-
From: William Clocksin <wfc%cam.cl@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Job
-BODY-
The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, is
looking for a faculty member to strengthen A.I. in the
Laboratory.  No very detailed specification is put upon
candidates.  We are looking for someone with a fairly
down-to-earth approach who nevertheless has a proper
grasp of theory, who will extend or complement the present
range of interests.  People in the Lab active in the area
include Boguraev, Clocksin, Gordon, Sparck-Jones, and
Pulman.  The Lab is also active in functional programming,
logic, and verification.
Send a c.v., list of publications, and the names of not
more than three referees to:  Secretary of the Appointments
Committee, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge,
Corn Exchange Street, Cambridge  CB2 3QG, U.K. as soon as
possible.
For more information, contact William Clocksin
(wfc@uk.ac.cam.cl  or wfc%cam.cl@cs.ucl.arpa)
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 21 Jul 86 12:33:00 EDT
-FROM-
From: "PSOTKA, JOSEPH" <psotka@ari-hq1.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NRC Announcement for Associates Program
-BODY-
The National Research Council (NRC) and the Army Research Institute
(ARI) are entering an agreement to provide recent graduates and
established scientists an opportunity to compete for research
associate awards.  The Associateship Program  with ARI will focus on
Intelligent Training Systems (ITS) research.   Ideally the candidate
would be interested in research on semantic memory,  knowledge
representation, qualitative modelling, student modelling,
causal reasoning, or any of the other important research topics
connected with ITS. There are two levels of competition: recent
Ph.D.s  (5 yrs and under ) and senior scientists (more than 5 yrs).
Associates  are expected to work some time at ARI.  Tenure is for one
to two  years. Stipend varies from about $25,000 on up, to be
negotiated.  Official applications are to the NRC, but for more
information, contact:

Joseph Psotka, Ph.D.  Army Research Institute 5001 Eisenhower Avenue
Alexandria,
 Va 22333-5600

(202)274-5540 PSOTKA@ARI-HQ1

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 12:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Clem's request
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
  Clem phoned me yesterday. He asked me to remind you to include in
future IR digests information on SIGIR conf. 86, and conf. 87.
 ...
With Regards,   Vijay

[Note: Clem [Yu] is chairman of ACM SIGIR and Vijay is one of the
two co-editors of ACM SIGIR Forum; I am the other. Please note
comments in the next msg about the SIGIR Conference for 1986.
Further details will be given in next issue of IRList.  We
also hope that Don Kraft <kraft@lsu.csnet> will send an electronic
version of call for papers for 1987 conference to be included in a
future IRList issue. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 12:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      FROM THE EDITOR - taken from next issue of SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
The purpose of this note is two fold:  first, I want to highlight
some of the contents of this issue;  secondly,  I want to mention
a  few items of general interest that are not included  elsewhere
in the Forum.

Starting  on Page 2,  there is the preliminary program of the 9th
Annual  International  ACM-SIGIR Conference to be held  in  Pisa,
Italy this Fall.   Also included is the registration information.
SIGIR  members  will  NOT  receive a  separate  mailing  of  this
information.  On  pages 7 through 17,  the first  installment  of
summaries  of  papers  given at the Workshop  on  Foundations  of
Adaptive  Information processing are included.   The workshop was
sponsored by the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and the
Computer Science Department of the University of Regina,  and was
held in Regina,  Saskatchewan,  Canada on June 10-11,  1985.  The
workshop  followed the ACM/SIGIR annual international  conference
on  research and development in information  retrieval,  held  in
Montreal, Quebec, Canada during the previous week.  The remaining
summaries  will  appear in future issues of  the  Forum.  Another
interesting  item in this issue is the report by M.  Lesk on  the
workshop  held last November at the Waterloo's Center for the New
OED.   As  is usually the case,  abstracts of  articles  recently
published in journals in the area are also included.  The program
highlights  for ASIS annual conference (pp.  46-48) mentions  the
special sessions I have put together on behalf of SIGIR.

Now for a few items of general interest:

>   The  IR-list Digest,  an electronic medium for  communication
    between  reseachers/practitioners  in the field is alive  and
    well.   Ed  Fox (address in back of front cover) is  the  co-
    ordinator of the IR-list Digest;

>   While  there  are  enough items being submitted  to  make  up
    issues  of  Forum,  I  always wonder how  well  received  and
    interesting this publication is. I would like to see at least
    one or two technical papers in each issue.   I need your help
    in  this regard.   I would also like to receive feedback  and
    criticisms,  which may help make the Forum attractive to most
    subscribers;

>   For the year 1986-87,  I have accepted a faculty position  at
    the University of Southwestern Louisiana.   Anyone wishing to
    correspond  with me should use the address shown on the  back
    of the front cover.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 12:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      SIGIR FORUM Contents
-BODY-
SPRING-SUMMER 1986          CONTENTS        Volume 20 Issue 1-4

SIGIR NEWS

>From the Forum Editor ............................... 1

Preliminary Program & Registration Information
    SIGIR-86 Conference in Pisa, Italy .............. 2

Summary of Papers Presented at University
    of Regina Workshop in June, 1985 (Part 1)

    Metric Data Models and Associated
    Search Strategies ............................... 7

    Research into Fuzzy Extensions of
    Information Retrieval ........................... 12

    A Unified Approach for Artificial Intelligence
    and Information Retrieval ....................... 14

    A Concept-learning Information Retrieval
    System-Basic Ideas .............................. 16

Workshop Report

    Information in Data:  using the Oxford
    English Dictionary on a Computer ................ 18

Book Review

    Information and Misinformation:  An Investigation
    of the Notions of Information, Misinformation,
    Informing and Misinforming by C. J. Fox ......... 22

Abstracts of Articles in IR Area

    Selected from Recent Issues of Journals ......... 23

    Selected from 1984 Issues of Journals ........... 30

Announcement

    Syracuse University School of Information
    Studies ......................................... 42

Call for Papers

    ACM SIGIR 1987 International Conference
    on Research and Development in IR ............... 43

    GI Conference on Database Systems for Office
    Automation, Engineering and Scientific
    Applications .................................... 45

Program Highlights

    1986 Annual Meeting of ASIS ..................... 46

    FJCC '86 ........................................ inside of
                                                      back cover
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 86 18:40:32 edt
-FROM-
From: rba@LAFITE.BELLCORE.COM
-SUBJECT-
Subject: April 86 issue of ACM Trans. on Office Inf. Systems
-BODY-
Papers appearing in:
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
April, 1986

Communications Design in Co-oP: A Group Decision Support System.
	T.X. Bui and M. Jarke
A Society Model for Office Information Systems.
	C-S Ho, Y-C Hong, and T-S Hong
BARQUE: A Browser for Relational Databases
	A. Motro
A System for Generating Direct Manipulation Office Systems
	S. Hudson and R. King

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
33
-DATE-
Date:     24-JUL-1986 23:09:36
-FROM-
From:     RAHTZ%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: The Machine-Readable Collins English Dictionary, Job at Leeds
-BODY-
                The Machine-Readable Collins English
                     Summary of work in progress

                        Sebastian Rahtz
                Department of Computer Studies
                   University of Southampton

1. Introduction:
This short document summarizes the responses I had to a letter sent
out in June 1986 to all the people who have ordered a tape of Collins
English Dictionary from the Oxford Text Archive (my thanks to Lou
Burnard for the list of names and addresses). I am grateful to all
those who replied to my request for information about how they had
decoded the text, and what they were doing with it; since it was
apparent that quite a lot of work had been done, and that some were
much further on than others, it seemed sensible to send out a summary
of the replies. I have either included sections of electronic mail directly,
or summarized paper mail. ...



2. Philip Taylor, University of London
  Date:	1-JUL-1986 11:23:07
  From:	CHAA006@UK.AC.RHBNC.VAXA

I carried some some work on transliterating the dictionary from photo-
typesetting codes to a more useable form some years ago, when I first received
the tape.  I had two objectives:- (1) to provide an online English-language
HELP system, using VMS help, for all entries in the dictionary, and (2) to
integrate the dictionary into the Dennison spelling checker (which also runs
on the VAX).  Neither of these projects was 100% successful, but the
intermediate results may be of some use to you.  (As part of (1), I also
implmented the core of the IPA on a Mellordate DT80/1 (VT-100 look-alike),
with reasonable success).

I should be happy to pass on all the work I have done, provided only that any
publications resulting from this work acknowledge the various contributors, and
that any further work which you carry out should be equally freely available
among the Academic community.

Philip Taylor (RHBNC, Univ. of London) [CHAA006@UK.AC.RHBNC.VAXB]

2.1 Pascal programs

Here are the more useful files from my work on the Collins English
Dictionary; they are written in Pascal and Macro-32.  The programs TYPESET,
DECRYPT and PARSE are good starting points.  TYPESET, as is, will produce quite
acceptable output even on unmodified VT100s; if you have any DT80/1s, I can
copy the IPA ROM for you, and the output will then be as close to Collins type-
set form as I was able to achieve within the time available.

If you have no DT80s, I could let you have the IPA in 8*8 dot-matrix form, and
you could burn it into ROMs for whatever devices you do have.



3. Ian Ellis, University of New England
  From:	ian%oz.neumann@oz.munnari  3-JUL-1986 03:41
  Date: Thu, 3 Jul 86 11:30:10 est

Thank you for your letter regarding CED. As yet no one on this Campus has
tried to use CED other than a list of words. We did try to figure some of
the symbols and produce a database but lack of user pressure has allowed
us to put it on the back burner

Ian Ellis,
Director,
Computer Centre,
University of New England



4. Edward Fox, Virginia Tech
  From:	vtisr1!fox@gov.css.seismo  3-JUL-1986 08:06

You have hit the jackpot!

I have worked with several students during the last year on
the Collins English Dictionary.  One completed his M.S. project
specifically on this.

We are almost done with production of a database, that can be
used from Prolog or from any relational database system, and
probably modified for other systems.  I hope to be sending a tape
to Oxford Text Archive by the end of August.

Ed Fox (BITNET[cheapest]:foxea@vtvax3 or foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa;
  CSNET:fox@vt;Internet:fox%vtisr1.uucp@seismo.css.gov;UUCP:seismo!vtisr1!fox)
      Dr. Edward A. Fox; Dept. of Computer Science; 562 McBryde Hall
      Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061; (703) 961-5113 or 6931

   We have done everything EXCEPT for the phonetic and etymology
information - I hope you don't need them!  All I have so far is
the MS report - ...



5. David Eckersley, University of Salford
  Date:     MON, 07 JUL 86 13:57:38 GMT
  From:     D_ECK@UK.AC.SALFORD.SYSC
   University of Salford Computing Services:  Dr J B Slater, Director

I reply to your letter of June 24th concerning the Collins English Dictionary
from the Oxford Text Archive.  I'm afraid we have for the time being shelved
our
plans for using this data.  The person who was do to the work left us, and I
have not taken it up.  We did not manage to attach any consistent meanings to
the embedded codes in the text.

D Eckersley
(Secretary, IUSC)



6. Eric Atwell, University of Leeds
  From: E S Atwell [eric@uk.ac.leeds.ai]
  Date: Tue, 15 Jul 86 13:26:11 bst

I'm afraid I haven't done anything of use to
you with the CED tape: I got it mainly to evaluate it and compare
it  to  the  machine-readable versions of two other dictionaries,
the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) and  the  Longman
Dictionary  of  Contemporary  English  (LDOCE).  I am researching
into aspects of parsing and grammatical analysis  of  unresticted
`raw'  text,  for which a large non-`toy' dictionary is required.
Each  word  in  the   dictionary   needs   detailed   grammatical
information; and the grammatical codes used in OALD and LDOCE are
far more refined and detailed  than  those  of  CED,  so  I  have
concentrated  work on the other two.   In fact, LDOCE has already
been converted into a database-type  format,  and  this  form  is
available  for general (including commercial) research, though at
a price - at the Alvey workshop on linguistic theory and computer
applications  at  UMIST  last  september, a figure of pounds 30,000 was
mentioned!  As an alternative, I have a copy of  the  OALD  tape,
and  last  year  I  got  one  of  our undergraduates to attempt a
reformatting of this as a Third Year Project.  Unfortunately,  he
did  not get as far as a form worthy of general distribution, but
after graduating he stayed on here  over  the  summer  to  finish
parsing  the  original file; the end result is exemplified by the
sample at the end of this letter.

I am currently trying to get some funding from OUP to carry  this
work   further   (in  collaboration  with  Prof  Sampson  of  the
linguistics  dept.  and  Tony  Cowie  from  our  English   dept.)
However, if you are committed to using the CED, I suggest you get
in touch with the Speech research group at IBM Scientific  Centre
in  Winchester;  they  have  extracted a quarter-million wordlist
from CED I believe, with grammatical part-of-speech and  phonetic
transcription  codes  (but  with  other  fields ignored); the CED
phonetic transcriptions are, they say, better than those of  OALD
or LDOCE, which is why they are 'out on a limb' in the sense that
most other researchers i know of are using OALD or LDOCE.


 Eric Steven Atwell                  Artificial Intelligence Group
                                    Department of Computer Studies
 phone: +44 532 431751 ext 6307/6119              Leeds University
 JANET: eric@uk.ac.leeds.ai                          Leeds LS2 9JT
 UUCP:  ...!seismo!mcvax!ai.leeds.ac.uk!eric               England
 EARN/BITNET/ARPA: eric%uk.ac.leeds.ai@rl.earn

EXAMPLE OF PARSED REFORMATTED OALD FILE:
headword			    :B
alternative spelling of headword    :b
pronunciation			    :bi
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
conjugation or plural label	    :pl
conjugation or plural spelling	    :B's
conjugation or plural spelling	    :b's
pronunciation			    :biz
__________definition__________
text				    :the second letter of the English alphabet.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :baa
pronunciation			    :bq
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :cry of a sheep or lamb.
***change in part of speech***
word class label		    :vi
text				    :(baaing, baaed or baa'd /bqd/) make this
                                      cry; bleat.
====subentry====
derivative			    :%@-lamb
word class label		    :n
>--subentry definition---
text				    :child's word for a sheep or lamb.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :baas
pronunciation			    :bqs
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :(S Africa) boss.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :babble
pronunciation			    :%babl
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :vi
word class label		    :vt
__________definition__________
verb pattern			    :2A
verb pattern			    :2B
verb pattern			    :2C
text				    :talk in a way that is difficult to
                                     understand; make sounds like a b
__________definition__________
verb pattern			    :6A
verb pattern			    :15B
====subentry====
idiom				    :@ (out)
text				    :, repeat foolishly; tell (a secret):
                                     @ (out) nonsense/secrets.
***change in part of speech***
word class label		    :n
nountype			    :U
text				    :childish or foolish talk; confused talk
                                     not clearly to be understoo
__________definition__________
text				    :gentle sound of water flowing over
                                     stones, etc.
====subentry====
derivative			    :bab.bler
pronunciation			    :%bablE(r)
word class label		    :n
>--subentry definition---
text				    :person who @s, esp one who tells secrets.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :babe
pronunciation			    :beIb
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :(liter) baby.
__________definition__________
text				    :inexperienced and easily deceived person.
__________definition__________
text				    :(US sl) girl or young woman.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :babel
pronunciation			    :%beIbl
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :the Tower of B@, tower built to reach
                                     heaven. (Gen 11).
__________definition__________
text				    :(sing with indef art) scene of noisy and
                                     confused talking: What a @
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :ba.boo
alternative spelling of headword    :babu
pronunciation			    :%bqbu
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :(as Hindu title) Mr; Hindu gentleman;
                                     Hindu clerk; (old use, pej) H
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :ba.boon
pronunciation			    :bE%bun
US pronunciation		    :ba-
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :large monkey (of Africa and southern Asia)
                                     with a dog-like face.
cross reference		    	    :the illus at ape
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :baby
pronunciation			    :%beIbI
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
conjugation or plural label	    :pl
conjugation or plural spelling	    :-bies
__________definition__________

6.1 Further remarks
It will be interesting to see what others are doing with CED  and
other  dictionary  tapes,  so  please do circulate your findings.
You may like to join Euralex, the European association for
lexicography,  and  find other related work through their bulletin (I
assume you are not already a member as your name did  not  appear
on  the  recent  membership list).  For details contact RRK
Hartmann, Language Centre, Exeter  University,  Exeter  EX4  4QH  (no
JANET address that I know of!)

I would also like to hear how your 3rd year project student  gets
on.   TEFL  students  might  prefer  a ``browser aid" for LDOCE or
OALD,  as  these  as  specifically  designed  for  2nd   language
learners;  in  my previous job at Lancaster University, I wrote a
browser aid for the LDOCE which ELT MA students could  use.   The
speaking  CED  sounds  a  great idea.  A major problem with
`off-the-shelf' speech synthesisers is that they have no way  of
producing  varied ``listenable" intonation contours for sentences and
longer texts; but this problem is neatly sidestepped in a talking
dictionary,  as most fields (keyword, part of speech, spelling)do
not require smooth continuous speech, and the  definition  fields
tend  to  be  short  sentences or sentence-fragments where a very
simple intonation contour would be quite acceptable to the  user.
Even  so, as you suggest, it is still quite ambitious for a third
year project!

6.2 an interesting job
  From:	E S Atwell [eric@uk.ac.leeds.ai] 22-JUL-1986 16:10
  Subj:	vacancy for NLP/AI/OR Software Engineer

I am collaborating with Professor Sampson on a Parsing research project, and
we have just had the go-ahead to advertise for a software engineer to work
with us on the project.  I would be most grateful if you could bring the
following details to the attention of any potential candidates you know of.

********* UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS ****** ANNEALING PARSER PROJECT *********
Applications are invited for a post of SOFTWARE ENGINEER, to work on a project
developing a parser for unrestricted English using the connexionist technique
of simulated annealing.  The project (funded by the Joint Speech Research
Unit) is supervised by Prof. Geoffrey Sampson of the Linguistics & Phonetics
Department (where the post will be tenable) and Eric Atwell of the Computer
Studies Department.  The person appointed will be working on a SUN-3/52M
Workstation dedicated to his/her use.  Candidates should have a good honours
degree; experience with natural language analysis, and of programming in a
Unix environment, will be advantages.

The post is available from 1 October 1986 for a fixed term of up to 3 years.
Starting salary will be within the range 8020 to 9495 pounds (under rev
Other-Related IA Grade, according to age, qualifications, and experience.

Informal enquiries may be made to Prof. Sampson on (0532) 431751 ext.6252;
or by electronic mail to Eric Atwell, eric@Leeds.AI via JANET or
eric%UK.ac.Leeds.AI@RL.EARN via EARN or BITNET.  For application forms and
further particulars write to the Registrar, The University, Leeds LS2 9JT,
quoting reference no. 14/20.
****** The closing date for applications is 14 AUGUST 1986 ******

Leeds University is one of the largest and most influential universities in
the country.  Leeds itself is the commercial, social and sporting centre for
much of North and West Yorkshire; it has all the facilities you would expect
of a major city, yet the outskirts of Leeds lead directly out onto 2,00 square
miles of outstandingly beautiful countryside.  Leeds also offers some of the
cheapest housing in England; for example, pounds 15,000 buys a two-bedroomed
se or a larger terraced house.

Simulated Annealing, a technique originating in statistical mechanics, can be
used in operational research and artificial intelligence in optimisation
problems requiring an efficient search of a very large search space.  We plan
to apply this technique to parsing unrestricted English, where the search
space is a set of trees.  The appointee will find a stimulating research
environment at Leeds: the University is a thriving centre for research in
Computer Analysis of Language and Speech, Artificial Intelligence, Operational
Research and related areas.  In addition to her/his dedicated workstation, the
appointee will have access to a wide range of equipment and software,
including specialist Departmental libraries, a VAX 11/750 dedicated to
Artificial Intelligence research, and a spacious SUN LOUNGE with a network of
Suns, fileserver, laserprinter, and large south-facing windows.



7. Ron Hardie, Brighton Polytechnic
[summary of letter] has only just started thinking about CED;
interested to hear what others are doing.

Ron Hardie, Department of Modern Languages, Brighton Polytechnic,
Brighton BN1 9PH



8. Herbert Wenzel, Erlangen
[summary of letter] writing text retrieval system for PC, now
integrating dictionary, but has problems physically reading tape (sent
suggestion).

Professor H. Wenzel, Institut fEuLr Technische Chemie II,
Egerlandstr. 3, Erlangen, W. Germany.



9. Roger Mitton, University of London
[summary of letter] looked at Collins dictionary but finds the Oxford
Advanced Learner's more useful. Has produced a database from the
OALDCE as part of research into spelling checking, which is available
from the Oxford Text Archive.

Roger Mitton,
Dept Computer Science, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
34
-FROM-
From: seismo!hplabs!pesnta!lsuc!dave
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 86 07:34:50 pdt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #32 [Note: see issues 24, 31 too - Ed]
-BODY-
Re: significant differences
A rather trivial point, but the UNIX "diff" command has
a "-b" option which causes it to ignore differences which
are only in the blanks and tabs (whitespace).

Dave Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
dave@lsuc.UUCP

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 86 13:43:23 EDT
-FROM-
From: fox
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACM SIGIR-86 Conference in Pisa, Italy
-BODY-
[Note: the following was typed based on program in upcoming issue of
 ACM SIGIR Forum. Await receipt of that for more details, or contact
 G. Salton <gs@cornell.arpa> with questions. - Ed]


                           ADVANCE PROGRAM

          1986 -- ACM Conference on Research and Development in
                         Information Retrievel

           Palazzo des Congressi, Via Matteotti, 1, Pisa ITALY
                        September 8-10, 1986

    Sponsored by Italian National Research Council in cooperation with
          ACM SIGIR    AICA-GLIR    BCS-IRSG    IDI     ESA-IRS


SUNDAY Sept. 7, 1986
 16:00 - 21:00 Conference Registration (18-19:00 welcoming drink)

MONDAY Sept. 8, 1986
 8:00 - 9:00   Conference Registration
 9:00 - 9:30   Opening Session
 9:30 - 10:30  Keynote Speech - Recent trends in automatic IR (G. Salton)
 10:30 -11:00  Chairman: F. Rabitti
             Using structural representation of anomalous states of knowledge
             for choosing doc. retrieval strategies (N.J. Belkin, B.H. Kwasnik)
 11:30-13:00   OFFICE SYSTEMS - Chairman F. Rabitti
             Doc. presentations and query formul. in Muse (Gibbs,Tsichritzis)
             Approach to multimedia inf. mgmt. (Gallelli,Iacobelli,Marchisio)
             Method. issues for the design of an office information server
                (Truckenmuller,Rathgeb)
 14:30-16:00   USER INTERFACES - Chairman W.B. Croft
             IR, NLP, AI and UFOS: or IR-relevance, Natural Language Problems,
                Artful Intelligence and User-Friendly Online Systems (Doszkocs)
             Visual display of info. in an IR environment (D. Crouch)
             Improved subject access, browsing and scanning mechanisms
                in modern on-line IR (Ingwersen, Wormwell)
 16:30-18:00   STORAGE STRUCTURES - Chairman P. Willett
             S-Tree: Dynamic balanced signature index for office ret.
(Deppisch)
             Improved hierarchical bit-vector compression in doc. ret.
                systems (Fraenkel, Klein, Choueka, Segal)

TUESDAY Sept. 9, 1986
 8:30 - 10:00   LINGUISTIC RETRIEVAL - Chairman Y. Chiaramella
             Incorporating syntactic information into a doc. ret.
                 strategy: An investigation (Smeaton)
             CALIN: A user interface based on a simple natural
                 language (Bosc, Courant, Robin)
             Solving grammatical ambiguities within a surface
                 syntactical parser for automatic indexing (Berrut, Palmer)
 10:30-12:00    INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS - Chairman D. Kraft
             A design of a distributed full text retrieval system
                 (Macleod, Martin, Nordin)
             REALIST: Retrieval aids by linguistics and statistics (Thurmair)
             COREL: A conceptual ret. system (DiBenigno,Cross,DeBessonet)
 13:30-14:45    CLUSTERING - Chairman P. Bollman
             Hierarchical doc. classification using Ward's clustering method
                 (El-Hamdouchi, Willett)
             User-oriented doc. clustering: A framework for learning
                 in IR (Raghavan, Deogun)
             The efficiency of inverted index and cluster searches (Voorhees)
 15:10-16:00    RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES - Chairman M. Agosti
             On extending the vector space model for Boolean query
                 processing (S.K.M. Wong, Ziarco, Raghavan, P.C.N. Wong)
             An experimental study of factors important in doc.
                 ranking (D. Williamson)

WEDNESDAY Sept. 10, 1986
 9:00-10:30    KNOWLEDGE BASED IR (I) - Chairman C.J. van Rijsbergen
             Invited paper - A new theoretical framework for IR
                (C.J. van Rijsbergen)
             User-specified domain knowledge for doc. ret. (Croft)
 11:00-12:30   KNOWLEDGE BASED IR (II) - Chairman C.J. van Rijsbergen
             IOTA: A full text IR system (Chiaramella,Defude,Bruandet,Kerkouba)
             An IR system based on AI techniques (DeJaco,Garbolino)
             The use of inference mechanisms to improve the retrieval
                facilities from large relational databases (Zarri)
 14:00-15:30   LEARNING SYSTEMS - Chairman G. Salton
             A machine learning approach to IR (S.K.M. Wong, W. Ziarko)
             An automatic and tunable doc. indexing system (Ozkarahan,Can)
             Performance of self-taught documents (Bookstein)
 15:50-18:00   PROBABILISTIC RETRIEVAL - Chairman A. Bookstein
             Two models of retrieval with prob. indexing (Fuhr)
             Two Poisson and binary indep. assumptions for prob. doc.
                retrieval (Losee, Bookstein, Yu)
             Non-binary independence model (Yu, Lee)
             The maximum entropy principle in IR (Kantor, Lee)
             An interpretation of index term weighting schemes based
                on doc. components (Kwok)

THURSDAY Sept. 11, 1986
  The Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (GLIR) of the
  Italian Computing Society (AICA) is organizing a Tutorial Day on
  FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN IR
 9:00-10:45    Design of automatic retrieval systems (G. Salton)
 11:00-12:30   Future directions in IR: theory   (C.J. van Rijsbergen)
 14:00-15:30   Future directions in IR: practice (C.J. van Rijsbergen)
 15:45-17:15   Technological trends in IR hardware (T. Toszkocs)
 17:15         Concluding remarks

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 86 11:06:46 cdt
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft%lsu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  1987 conference [Reformatted for CRT - Ed]
-BODY-
              Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
        Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR)

                 1987 International Conference on
           Research and Development in Information Retrieval

                          June 3-5, 1987
              Monteleone Hotel (in the French Quarter)
                   New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

                         CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on theory, methodology, and applications of information
retrieval.  Emerging areas related to information retrieval, such as office
automation, computer hardware technology, and artificial intelligence and
natural language processing are welcome.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

retrieval system modelling                     user interfaces
retrieval in office environments               hardware development
natural language processing                    mathematical models
retrieval system performance                   linguistic models
system development and evaluation              multimedia retrieval
storage and search techniques                  complexity problems
cognitive and semantic models                  knowledge representation
information retrieval and database management

Submitted papers can be either full length papers of approximately twenty
to twenty-five pages or extended abstracts of no more than ten pages.  All
papers should contain the authors' contributions in comparison to existing
solutions to the same or to similar problems.

Important Dates:
Submission Deadline        December 15, 1986
Acceptance Notification    February 15, 1987
Final Copy Due             March 20, 1987
Conference                 June 3-5, 1987

Four copies of each paper should be submitted.  Papers submitted from
North America can be sent to Clement T. Yu; submissions from outside North
America should be sent to C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen.

Conference Chairman    Treasurer               Publicity Chairman
Donald H. Kraft        Bert R. Boyce           Vijay Raghavan
Department of          School of Library and   Department of
  Computer Science       Information Science     Computer Science
Louisiana State Univ.  Louisiana State Univ.   Univ. of Regina
Baton Rouge, LA 70803  Baton Rouge, LA  70803  Regina, Saskatchewan Canada
(504) 388-1495         (504) 388-3158                  and
                                               Center for Advanced Studies
                                               Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana
                                               P.O. Box 44330
                                               Lafayette, LA  70504


Arrangements Chairman  Technical Program Co-Chair  Technical Program Co-Chair
Michael C. Stinson     Clement T. Yu               C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen
Department of          Department of               Department of
  Computer Science       Elect. Engineering          Computer Science
Lousiana State Univ.     and Computer Science      University of Glascow
Baton Rouge, LA 70803  Univ. of Illinois, Chicago  Lilybank Gardens,
                                                   Glascow G12 8QQ
(504) 388-1495         Chicago, IL  60680          Scotland
                       (312) 996-2318              (041) 339-8855


Technical Program Committee Members:
Abraham Bookstein (USA)                 Nick Cercone (Canada)
Stavros Christodoulakis (Canada)        Yves Chiaramella (France)
Martha Evens (USA)                      Aviezri Fraenkel (Israel)
Jochum Friedbert (Germany)              Richard Frost (Scotland)
Tetsuro Ito (Japan)                     W. S. Luk (Canada)
Michael McGill (USA)                    Esen Ozkarahan (USA)
Fausto Rabitti (Italy)                  Gerard Salton (USA)
Peter Scheuermann (USA)                 C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen (Scotland)
Michael Wong (Canada)                   Clement T.  Yu (USA)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 86 18:57:49 edt
-FROM-
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
    Date: Friday, 18 July 1986  10:09-EDT
    from: BGOODMAN@G.BBN.COM
    Subject: Seminar on Knowledge Bases

              BBN Laboratories Inc.
            Science Development Program
              AI/Education Seminar
             Friday, 1 August   10:30am

  From Guidon to Neomycin and Heracles--Viewing
       Knowledge Bases as Qualitative Models

          Dr. William J. Clancey
          Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory
          Computer Science Department
          701 Welch Road, Bldg C
          Palo Alto, CA 94304

Beginning with early attempts to improve MYCIN's representation of
knowledge for use in teaching, we have followed the approach of
decomposing knowledge from how it is used, abstracting knowledge
structures and reasoning procedures, and formulating an increasingly more
general understanding of what knowledge engineering and knowledge bases
are all about.  In NEOMYCIN, medical knowledge and diagnostic procedure
are separately represented in well-structured languages to facilitate
explanation and student modeling.  In HERACLES, this knowledge base is
viewed as a classification model of some physical, cognitive, or social
system that is heuristically related to some design, modification,
prediction, or control action.  That is, we view the knowledge base as a
qualitative model of some system in the world, designed with practical
engineering value in mind.  From this perspective, the "diagnostic
strategy" of Neomycin is a general inference procedure that describes
memory activation and search for constructing a situation-specific model.

This talk will review the development of NEOMYCIN from GUIDON and
summarize the generalizations that we are now exploiting in our
development of the HERACLES shell and GUIDON2 teaching programs.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
35
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 86 11:28:01 CDT
-FROM-
From: James Peterson <seismo!mcc.com!peterson>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: W7 file format
-BODY-
Since you asked about my report, I am including below the introductory
part (not the appendix).  It seems too long for IRList, but as editor,
that is your decision.  You may want to cut it even more.  jim

[Note: the report below is unedited - it seems about right for an
 issue of IRList.  Readers not interested in this topic need not read
 any more than they wish. - Ed]


        Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
              A Computer-Readable File Format


                     James L. Peterson
 Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC)
                    Austin, Texas 78759


Section 1. Introduction

A transcript of Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary [1] is
available in a computer-readable form. This is not just a word list,
but a copy of the entire dictionary including definitions, cross
references, variants, synonyms, and so on. It consists of some
15,696,929 characters, with 68,764 main entries. It could be used for
all forms of text processing, including spelling, hyphenation, syntax,
semantics, and so on.

  The original dictionary was keyboarded onto the Q-32 computer at
System Development Corporation (SDC) for a project headed by John
Olney [2]. The dictionary was then heavily edited and moved onto an
IBM 360. Magnetic tapes of this form were moved to IBM T. J. Watson
Research Center and further processed by C. Alberga. A copy of this
was acquired by Robert Amsler, who used the Pocket Dictionary for his
dissertation [3]. We have acquired a copy of the dictionary from
Amsler, and have modified it in many minor ways. This document
describes our version.

  The dictionary is such a large collection of text that it is broken
up into 220 files for easier handling. These files reside under the
names d.101, d.102, d.103, ..., d.320. The file names were selected to
require three digits in all cases.

The first letter of each word in a file is the same; that is when
we switch from words starting with 'D' to words starting with 'E',
we start a new file. Otherwise, files are broken to create roughly
equal-sized files (from 70,000 to 80,000 characters).

  Here is a sample of a dictionary file.

F;chase;1;;;vb;;
P;'ch{a-}s
E;ME [italic chasen], fr. MF [italic chasser], fr. (assumed) VL [italic#
captiare] -- more at [mini CATCH]
D;1;a;;vt;to follow rapidly : [mini PURSUE]
D;1;b;;vt;[mini HUNT]
D;1;c;;vt;to follow regularly or persistently with the intention of#
attracting or alluring
L;2;;;[italic obs]
D;2;;;vt;[mini HARASS]
D;3;;;vt;to seek out
D;4;a;;vt;to cause to depart or flee : [mini DRIVE]
L;4;b;;[italic slang]
D;4;b;;vt;to take (oneself) off
D;1;;;vi;to chase an animal, person, or thing
D;2;;;vi;[mini RUSH], [mini HASTEN]
S;0;[mini PURSUE], [mini FOLLOW], [mini TRAIL]:
S;1;[mini CHASE] implies going swiftly after and trying to overtake something#
fleeing or running;
S;2;[mini PURSUE] suggests a continuing effort to overtake, reach, attain;
S;3;[mini FOLLOW] puts less emphasis upon speed or intent to overtake and may#
not imply an awareness on the part of the leader that he is pursued;
S;4;[mini TRAIL] may stress a following of tracks or traces rather than a#
visible object
F;chase;2;;;n;;
D;1;a;;n;the act of chasing : [mini PURSUIT]
D;1;b;;n;[mini HUNTING] -- used with [italic the]
D;1;c;;n;an earnest or frenzied seeking after something desired
D;2;;;n;something pursued
D;3;a;;n;a franchise to hunt within certain limits of land
D;3;b;;n;a tract of unenclosed land used as a game preserve


Each line of the file has a character in column 1 which identifies
the type and format of the line. The following table shows the
number and meaning of each line type.

       Frequency   Line type   Meaning
       ________________________________________________________
          68,764   F           First line, start for a new word
          30,673   E           Etymology
          66,987   P           Pronunciation
           9,959   V           Variant
         140,501   D           Definition, one per line
          19,123   R           Related word
           4,596   X           Cross-Reference
          11,992   L           Label
             835   S           Synonym block

Each line is composed of a number of fields. Fields are separated by a
semicolon and are defined by their position. The first field of each
line is the line type character (F, E, P, V, D, L, R, X, or S, as
given above). The remaining fields depend upon the type of the line.
For example, the second entry on an F-line is a main entry word, the
fifth field has hyphenation information, and the seventh has part of
speech information.

The following table shows the contents of the fields for each line type.

	F lines - Main entry
	 F1 - F
	 F2 - Main entry
	 F3 - Homograph Number
	 F4 - Prefix/Suffix/Infix
	 F5 - Hyphenation
	 F6 - Part of Speech
	 F7 - Part of Speech Joiner
	 F8 - Secondary Part of Speech

	E lines - Etymology
	 E1 - E
	 E2 - text

	P lines - Pronunciation
	 P1 - P
	 P2 - text

	V lines - Variants
	 V1 - V
	 V2 - Variant Word
	 V3 - Hyphenation
	 V4 - Variant Level

	D lines - Definitions
	 D1 - D
	 D2 - Sense number
	 D3 - Sense letter
	 D4 - Sense subnumber
	 D5 - Part of Speech
	 D6 - Text definition

	R cards - Related Words
	 R1 - R
	 R2 - Related Word or Phrase
	 R3 - Hyphenation
	 R4 - Part of Speech
	 R5 - Part of Speech Joiner
	 R6 - Secondary Part of Speech

	X lines - Cross Reference
	 X1 - X
	 X2 - Word
	 X3 - superscript, if any
	 X4 - subscript, if any
	 X5 - Type of cross reference
	 X6 - Secondary word

	L lines - Labels
	 L1 - L
	 L2 - Sense Number
	 L3 - Sense Letter
	 L4 - Sense Subnumber
	 L5 - Label Text

	S lines - Synonym Block
	 S1 - S
	 S2 - Synonym number
	 S3 - text

Appendix I discusses each line and field in more detail.

  Some lines, particularly definitions and synonym blocks are quite
long and hence it is difficult to fit them on one 80 character line.
Therefore, lines are split whenever necessary so that no physical line
exceeds 80 characters. Lines are always split at a blank, and the
incomplete line is terminated with a sharp or hash mark character
('#'). When processing the dictionary, if a line is terminated with a
# character, then the # character should be replaced by a blank and
the next physical line should be read in and appended to the previous
line.

1.1 Character codes

A major problem with the dictionary is its character set. First, the
dictionary publisher did not feel constrained in his use of
characters, but choose whatever symbols best fit his purpose. Second,
the dictionary was originally encoded in an extended BCD (for the Q-32
computer), then translated into EBCDIC (for the IBM 360/370) and now
has been translated into ASCII. None of these character sets is
completely compatible with the others, nor is any of them sufficient
to represent all of the variation found in the original printed
dictionary. Hence an encoding scheme must be used to expand the set of
representable characters.

  This expansion occurs in two independent directions: font
information and special characters.

  Font information is represented by use of the square brackets in
ASCII to surround any special font material. Five font types are
recognized: (1) italic, (2) MINI-CAPS, (3) bold, (4) subscripts, and
(5) superscripts. Each is denoted by an identifying keyword
immediately after the opening left square bracket, followed by a
space, followed by the material to be in the defined font, followed by
the closing right square bracket.  For example, an italic was is
represented as [italic was], while a mini-caps AMBIENT is [mini
AMBIENT] and a bold syn is [bold syn]. Superscripts and subscripts may
be italic, mini-caps, or bold, and a few superscripted superscripts
also occur, as in 6.24 {times} 10 [sup 10 [sup 10]].

  The dictionary includes a large number of special symbols which are
not representable in ASCII. These include all the Greek alphabet, the
Hebrew alphabet and many miscellaneous other special symbols. All
special symbols which are not available in ASCII (and some that are)
have been given names which are represented by the name encased in
braces, as {degrees} (for a degree symbol) {times} (for multiplication
represented by a small x), {tau} (for the lower-case greek letter
tau), and so on. A complete list of these special symbols is in
Appendix II.

  Each symbol name has been selected to exclude embedded blanks.  Thus
all characters between an opening right brace and its closing right
brace are non-blank. Certain characters which are in ASCII (braces,
brackets, question mark, exclamation mark, and so on) have also been
represented in this way because it allowed them to be used for other
purposes (such as font and special character representation), and they
occurred only infrequently (less than 100 times).

Section Errors in W7.

  While processing W7 both to understand its contents and to put those
contents into a usable form, we encountered a large number of errors.
These errors were of several types:

* Merged illustrations. For example, under false, the illustration was
  "< ~ documents ~ teeth >" and should have been "< ~ documents > < ~
  teeth >". To correct this, we searched for any line of the form
  "<...~...~...>".

* Words containing letters with accents (236 entries).  The accent
  field was wrong about half the time.  The normal problem was that
  the accent was on the wrong letter.  In these cases, the hyphenation
  information generally showed syllables that were two letters two
  long.

* Incorrect values in fields.  The lists in Appendix I were examined
  for rare or inappropriate values; for example, a g in a numeric
  field, or a zero in an alphabetic field.

* Mismatched parentheses or brackets.  We wrote a program to simply
  count parentheses, braces, and brackets.  Many were found to be
  mismatched.

* Duplicate words. We scanned the text for instances where the same
  word occurs twice in a row.  The assumption was that these would be
  places where the last word on a line of the original input was typed
  twice by mistake.  Instead we found a large number of places where
  of or was typed as or or, as a was typed as a a, and the first word
  on an input line was typed twice.

* Incorrect article.  We found all occurrences of a followed by a word
  starting with a vowel, or an followed by a consonant.

All these errors, once found and verified by visual inspection of
the printed dictionary, were corrected by hand, using a text editor.

A last form of error analysis was an attempt to find typographical
errors.  The approach was simple: we extracted a list of all
unique words used in the dictionary definitions.  This produced a
list of 54,298 words.  We compared this list with the list of all
words defined in the dictionary (main entries, variants, and
related words). This reduced our list to 20,292 words that were
used in definitions, but not defined.  Many of these were derived
forms of defined words: past tense, plurals, and so on.  Doing
some simple suffix analysis, we were left with about 8,000 words.
Most of these were apparently Greek or Latin botanical or
zoological names.  Deleting those ending in -ia or -ae and all
words in italics in the dictionary left a list of 2,821 words.

These were checked by hand to produce a list of 903 incorrectly
spelled words. We also found 54 words which were used, but not
defined:

   Australasian bloomery broadheaded clothesline crossbeam
   darkskinned dinnerware doorbell entranceway equivalve etc
   fieldworks flattish foreseen foretold fourpence gunstock hairdress
   hindlimbs homeward hyperactivity leftward lightcolored longlegged
   lowcut messroom Mr. nailhead neckband noctuid nubby parimutuel
   partaken pregenital pyrotechny rangeland rosebush sawteeth
   seneschal sheepdogs shorthaired sightsee snowstorm songbook
   spinymargined spondumene sulphates supersensitized TV twelvefold
   understock upcurved valency workpiece.

We also found a smaller list of words with typographical errors in
the main entry in the computer files.

Of the 903 typographical errors, 543 were the result of a missing
blank between two words.  Of the remaining 360, 34% were a missing
letter, 27% were a wrong letter, 20% were an extra letter, and 13%
were the result of transposed letters.  The remaining errors were
caused by two extra or two missing letters, or by transposing two
letters around a third.  The middle letter in this case was always
a vowel. (For example, 'min' would be typed 'nim'.)

We also found 10 cases of typographical errors in the original
printed dictionary.  These are

[barranca]	gulley => gully
[bitch]		doublecross => double-cross
[capsicum]	genu => genus
[drift]		quantitive => quantitative
[fornication]	NCE => New Catholic Edition
[kid]		goodhumored => good-humored
[lapse]		apostasize => apostatize
[lycopodium]	clubmosses => club mosses
[type species]	permanenty => permanently
[vanity]	knicknack => knickknack

[select]	mismatched parenthesis
[terpineol]	mismatched parenthesis

[tapa]		an Hawaiian (but see 'a Hawaiian' for [luau] and [poi])

[pay]		REQUITE in syn not defined
[rude]		ROUGH in syn not defined

[Lag b'Omer]	33d => 33rd
[one]		3d-person => 3rd-person

It was interesting to follow these errors through the various
printings and editions of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries.  Four
errors were corrected in the 1970 printing of W7, one in the 1971
printing of W7, and one in the 1975 printing of the New Collegiate
Dictionary.  Three errors remain in the 1983 printing of the Ninth
New Collegiate ([bitch], [drift], [vanity]).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
36
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 86 20:57:33 edt
-FROM-
From: JCMA%AI.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: BU Seminar on: ANALOGIES AND METAPHORS
-BODY-
		      CS 791: ADVANCED TOPICS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
			    (To be offered in Fall 1986)

			      ANALOGIES AND METAPHORS
			 An Interdisciplinary Perspective

	    In this seminar we will examine the role played by metaphors and
 analogies in several cognitive processes like learning, problem solving
 etc. and in natural languages. We will take into account different points
 of view ranging from philosophy and linguistics to psychology and artificial
 intelligence.
	    We will discuss a formal framework in which several cognitive
 properties of metaphors and analogies can be explained. Near the end of the
 seminar we will spend some time considering how cognitive models of metaphors
 and analogies can be designed.

 Prereq: Consent of the Instructor.
 Place:  TBA, Boston University
 Time:   Thursday 6-9.

 For further information contact Bipin Indurkhya at 353--8923.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 86 16:10 EDT
-FROM-
From: Brad Miller <miller@UR-ACORN.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: New List formed on Natural Language and Knowledge Representation
-BODY-
[Reprinted From AIList 4:175]

As most of you know, Ken Laws has been getting swamped with AIList
duties, and has asked for help. In this vein, I am starting a separate
list to deal exclusively with the Natural Language and Knowledge
Representation subfields of AI.

Since the scope of this list will be much narrower than the AIList, I
welcome postings from disciplines throughout cognitive science that are
related to these areas. I feel that AI is more of a conglomeration of
several diverse fields than it is a field unto itself, so this sort of
diversity is necessary.

More specifically, here are some details:

    You may submit material for the digest to nl-kr@rochester.arpa .
Digests are sent to Arpanet readers and USENET readers as appropriate.
(There are no current plans for forwarding to the UUCP news system.)

    Administrative requests (including asking to be included on the
list) should be sent to nl-kr-request@rochester.arpa .  Archival copies
of all digests will be kept; feel free to ask nl-kr-request for recent
back issues.

    NL-KR is open to discussion of any topic related to the natural
language (both understanding and generation) and knowledge
representation, both as subfields of AI.  My own related interests are
primarily in

    Knowledge Representation    Natural Language Understanding
    Discourse Understanding     Philosophy of Language
    Plan Recognition            Computational Linguistics

Contributions are also welcome on topics such as

    Cognitive Psychology (as related to NL/KR)
    Human Perception (same)
    Linguistics
    Machine Translation
    Computer and Information Science (as may be used to implement
                                      various NL systems)
    Logic Programming (same)

Contributions may be anything from tutorials to speculation. In
particular, the following are sought:

    Abstracts                             Reviews
    Lab Descriptions                      Research Overviews
    Work Planned or in Progress           Half-Baked Ideas
    Conference Announcements              Conference Reports
    Bibliographies                        History of NL/KR
    Puzzles and Unsolved Problems         Anecdotes, Jokes, and Poems
    Queries and Requests                  Address Changes (Bindings)

    This list is in some sense a spin-off of the AIList, and as such, a
certain amount of overlap is expected. The primary concentration of this
list should be NL and KR, that is, natural language (be it
understanding, generation, recognition, parsing, semantics, pragmatics,
etc.) and how we should represent knowledge (aquisition, access,
completeness, etc. are all valid issues). Topics I deem to be outside
the general scope of this list will be forwarded to AIList (or other
more appropriate list) or rejected.


                                            Bradford Miller
                                            University of Rochester
                                            Computer Science Department
                                            miller@rochester.arpa

[Note: editors of IRList and nl-kr have agreed to cross-reference and
cross-list some items of mutual interest. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 1 August 1986, 23:08:00 EDT
-FROM-
From: Jean-Louis Lassez <JLL@ibm.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: 4th International Conference on Logic Programming
-BODY-
                        CALL FOR PAPERS

      Fourth International Conference On Logic Programming

               University of Melbourne, Australia
                          Late May 1987

  The   conference  will   consider  all   aspects  of   logic
  programming, including, but not limited to:

   Theory and Foundations
   Architectures and Implementations
   Programming Languages and Methodology
   Databases
   Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Expert Systems
   Relations   to   other  computation   models,   programming
   languages, and programming methodologies.

  Of special interest are papers discussing novel applications
  and applications that address  the unique character of logic
  programming.

  Papers can be submitted under  two categories, short - up to
  2000 words, and  long - up to 6000  words.  Submissions will
  be   considered  on   basis  of   appropriateness,  clarity,
  originality, significance, and overall quality.

  Authors should send six copies  of their manuscript, plus an
  extra copy of the abstract to:

             Jean-Louis Lassez
             ICLP Program Chairman
             IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
             H1-A12
             P.O. Box 218
             Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
             USA

  Deadline  for  submission of  papers  is  December 1,  1986.
  Authors  will  be notified  of  acceptance  or rejection  by
  February 28, 1987.   Camera ready copies are  due April 1st,
  1987.

  General Chairman:
             John Lloyd
             Department of Computer Science
             University of Melbourne
             Parkville, Victoria 3052
             Australia

  Program Committee

   Ken Bowen, Syracuse, USA
   Keith Clark, Imperial College, U.K.
   Jacques Cohen, Brandeis, USA
   Veronica Dahl, Simon Fraser University, Canada
   Maarten van Emden, University of Waterloo, Canada
   Koichi Furukawa, ICOT, Japan
   Ivan Futo, SZKI, Hungary
   Seif Haridi, SICS, Sweden
   Jean-Louis Lassez, Yorktown Heights, USA
   Giorgio Levi, University of Pisa, Italy
   Jacob Levy, Weizmann Institute, Israel
   John Lloyd, University of Melbourne, Australia
   Fumio Mizoguchi, Science University of Tokyo, Japan
   Fernando Pereira, SRI International, USA
   Antonio Porto, University of Lisbon, Portugal
   Marek Sergot, Imperial College, U.K.
   David Warren, Manchester University, U.K.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 86 20:59:22 edt
-FROM-
From: walker@MOUTON.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACL-87 CALL FOR PAPERS
-BODY-
			   CALL FOR PAPERS

25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

			    6-9 July 1987
		         Stanford University
		      Stanford, California, USA

TOPICS OF INTEREST:  Papers are invited on substantial, original, and
unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics,
theoretical or applied.  Papers that demonstrate the power of a
technique for computational purposes or present new ideas together with
a comparison and evaluation of their implications for current research
are particularly welcomed.  The following topics are illustrative:

  phonology, morphology, the lexicon, syntax, semantics, discourse, pragmatics;
  parsing and generation; language understanding; knowledge representation;
  speech acts and planning; language interfaces; language acquisition;
  speech analysis and synthesis; information and document retrieval;
  computational, mathematical, and psychological models;
  programming strategies; computer architectures.

REQUIREMENTS:  Papers should describe unique work that has not been
submitted elsewhere; they should emphasize completed work rather than
intended work; and they should indicate clearly the state of completion
of the reported results.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION:  Authors should submit ten copies of an extended
abstract not to exceed eight double-spaced pages (exclusive of
references) in a font no smaller than 10 point (elite).  The title page
should include the title, the name(s) of the author(s), complete
addresses, a short (5 line) summary, and a specification of the topic
area.  Submissions that do not conform to this format will not be
reviewed.  Send to:

		Candy Sidner, ACL-87 Program Chair
		BBN Laboratories Inc.
		10 Moulton Street
		Cambridge, MA 02238, USA
		(617)497-3566; sidner@g.bbn.com

SCHEDULE:  Papers must be received by 12 January 1987.
           Authors will be notified of acceptance by 2 March 1987.
           Camera-ready copies of final papers prepared in a double-column
	   model paper format must be received by 30 April, along with a
           signed copyright release statement.

OTHER ACTIVITIES:  Special events will signal the 25th Anniversary of
the ACL.  The meeting will also include a program of applied tutorials
and a variety of exhibits and demonstrations.  Anyone wishing to
arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should send a brief
description together with a specification of physical requirements
(space, power, telephone connections, tables, etc.) to Paul Martin,
SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA; (415)859-4480;
pmartin@sri-ai.arpa.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION:  Local arrangements are being handled by
Doug Appelt, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA 94025; (415)859-6150;
appelt@sri-ai.arpa.  For other information on the conference and on the
ACL more generally, contact Don Walker (ACL), Bell Communications
Research, 445 South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960;
201:829-4312; walker@mouton.bellcore.com or walker%mouton@relay.cs.net
or bellcore!walker@ucbvax.berkeley.edu.

LSA SUMMER LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE:  ACL-87 will be preceded and followed
by the 54th LSA Institute at Stanford University, which will be
cosponsored by the ACL and the AAAI.  Computational linguistics will be
the major focus for the Institute.  The week preceding the 25th Annual
Meeting will feature ten 8-hour courses that can be taken by ACL
members as tutorials.  For more information, contact Ivan Sag,
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305,
USA; (415)723-4284; institute@su-csli.stanford.edu.  A conference on
Logic and Linguistics will follow ACL-87 from 10-11 July, also at
Stanford University; contact Rich Thomason, Linguistics Department,
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; (412)624-5791;
thomason@c.cs.cmu.edu.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 9 Aug 86 20:59:28 edt
-FROM-
From: walker@MOUTON.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACL-European Chapter: 1987 CALL FOR PAPERS
-BODY-
			    CALL FOR PAPERS

		Third Conference of the European Chapter
	    of the Association for Computational Linguistics

			    1-3 April 1987
			Copenhagen University
			 Copenhagen, Denmark

PURPOSE:  This conference is the third in a series of biennial
conferences on computational linguistics sponsored by the European
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.  It was
preceded by meetings in Pisa in September 1983 and in Geneva in March
1985.  Although regional in organizational structure, these conferences
are global in scope and participation.

SCOPE:  Papers are invited on all aspects of computational linguistics,
including, but not limited to:

  morphology;
  lexical semantics;
  computational models for the analysis and generation of language,
    spoken and written;
  computational lexicography and lexicology;
  syntax and semantics;
  machine translation and translation aids;
  natural language interfaces, knowledge representation, and expert systems.

SUBMISSION:  Authors should send seven copies of a 5 to 8 page double-
spaced summary to the Programme Committee Chairperson:

	Bente Maegaard
	Institut for Anvendt og Matematisk Lingvistik
	Kobenhavns Universitet
	Njalsgade 96
	DK-2300 Kobenhavn S, DENMARK
	Telephone: +45-1-542 211

It is important that the summary identify the new ideas in the paper
and clearly indicate to what extent the work is complete and to what
extent it has been implemented.  It should contain sufficient
information to allow the programme committee to determine the scope of
the work and its relation to relevant literature.

SCHEDULE:  Summaries must be submitted by 15 November 1986.  Authors
will be notified of acceptance by 1 February 1987.  Camera-ready copies
of final papers prepared in a double-column model paper format must be
received by 3 April 1987, that is, at the end of the Conference, along
with a signed copyright release statement.  The Proceedings will be
published after the Conference.

EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS:  A program of exhibits and demonstrations
is planned.  Anyone wishing to participate is asked to contact Bente
Maegaard.


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
37
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 86 11:35:23 edt
-FROM-
From: amsler@mouton.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  IRList Digest V2 #33 on Collins Dictionary Work
-BODY-
Collins Dictionary Work:
Work at Bellcore is proceeding with an effort to make a comprehensive
database format for the CED comparable to that prepared by Jim Peterson
for the W7 (Merriam-Webster Seventh Collegiate). The following is
an approximation to the format we intend to convert the data into.

Headword
	H1: H
	H2: Headword
	H3: Homograph Number
	H4: Syllabification (as numeric code)
	H5: Preferred Hyphenation (as numeric code)
	H6: Headword Part of Speech (n, vb, adj, symbol for)
	H7: Alternate Part of Speech
Alternate form of Headword (Inflectional and Variant forms)
	A1: A
	A2: Headword Alternate
	A3: "  " Part of Speech (e.g. n.)
	A4: "  " Inflection Type (e.g. pl.)
	A5: "  "'s Primary Headword
	A6: "  "'s Homograph Number
	A7: Type of Alternate Form (e.g. USA, for U.S. Spelling)
Pronunciation
	P1: P
	P2: Pronunciation
	P3: Type of Pronunciation (e.g. USA, for U.S.; French, etc.)
Label
	L1: L
	L4: Sense Number of this Label
	L5: Subsense Number of this label
	L3: Label
	L4: Type of Label (Temporal, Usage, Connotative, Subject, National
		Regional)
Definition
	D1: D
	D4: Definition Sense
	D5:  " Subsense Letter
	D6: "  " Part (signified by ;'s in definition text)
	D6: Part of Speech of (Sub)Sense
	D7: Definition label
	D8: " Text
Cross-Reference
	X1: X
	X2: Cross-Referenced Headword
	X3: "-"  " Homograph Number
	X3: "-"  " Sense
	X4: "-"  " Subsense Letter
	X6: "-" Type (e.g. See, See Also, Also Called, etc.)
	X7: "-" Definition Text
Related Expressions (including Run-In and Run-On Entries)
	R1: R
	R2: Type of Related Expression (I = Run-in; O = Run-On)
	R2: Related Expression
	R3: "  " Part of Speech (e.g. n.)
	R7: "  "'s Primary Headword's SubSense Letter
	R8: "  "'s Primary Headword's SubSense Part Number (;'s)
Citation or Example Sentence
	C1: C
	C2: Citation's Local Headword
	C3: Citation's Primary Headword
	C4: "  "  "'s Homograph Number
	C5: "  "  "'s Part of Speech
	C6: "  "  "'s Sense Number
	C7: "  "  "'s SubSense Letter
	C8: "  "  "'s SubSense Part Number (;'s)
Etymology
	E1: E
	E2: Primary Headword
	E3: "  " Homograph Number
	E4: Century
	E5: Etymology Text
Usage Note Comments
	U1: U
	U2: Usage Primary Headword
	U3: "  "  " Homograph Number
	U4: Usage Note Text

Here is an entry from the B's in this format...

[Note: the example was deleted 8/21 since it apparently caused kermit and
 UUCP to not agree to transfer this file! - Ed]

I would very much like to obtain a list of the decoded special symbols
in the CED, i.e. those represented by the sequential #800 numbers.
These appear to be unique assignments and are nothing but tedium to
extract.

[Note: We have already extracted the data into a similar form and will
be sending that to the Oxford Text Archive soon.  Since almost a year
of part-time effort, cleaning up data, editing by hand, etc. have
been involved, it might be wiser to wait for that.  A MS project
report by R. Wohlwend documents much of the tape analysis effort. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 1 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should soon receive the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 30-31. The rest will appear in
 machine readable form also in later issues of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1984 issues of journals
in the retrieval area)

1.  APPLICATION  OF MODERN TECHNOLOGIES TO INTERLIBRARY RESOURCE-
    SHARING NETWORKS
    J. Francis Reintjes
    Laboratory    for   information   and    decision    Systems,
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA  02139

    Examined  in  this article is the hypothesis that it  is  now
    technologically and economically feasible to move the content
    of  documents electronically among nodes of a library network
    rather than the documents themselves or photocopies  thereof.
    Comparisons  are  made  on the basis  of  response-to-request
    time,  quality  of  reproduced copy and  cost  factors.   The
    conclusion is reached that electronic interlibrary  resource-
    sharing networks are ideally suited to situations where there
    are  high  frequency  occurrences of internode  requests  for
    information  contained  in serials,  where  nodal  separation
    distances do not exceed a few tens of miles and where copy is
    in  six-point  type  or  larger.   A  three-node  network  is
    examined in detail.   Specifications for each element of  the
    network are given,  with emphasis placed on a highly critical
    element,  the  bound-document  scanner.   The results  of  an
    economic  study of interlibrary electronic networks are  also
    presented.
    (JASIS, Vol. 35(1): 45-52; 1984)

2.  CO-CITATION ANALYSIS AND THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE
    Elliot Noma
    CHI  Research/Computer  Horizons,  Inc.,  1050 Kings  Highway
    North, Cherry Hill, NJ   08034

    Co-citation  analysis  is based on the  assumption  that  all
    citing  articles view the scientific literature from a common
    point-of-view.   When a co-citation matrix is analyzed,  this
    assumption   affects  measures  of  the  dimensionality   and
    clustering  of articles.   Therefore,  before  a  co-citation
    matrix is constructed,  the citing articles should be limited
    to those written by individuals in an invisible college.
    (JASIS, Vol. 35(1): 29-33; 1984.)

3.  LESS  THAN  FULL-TEXT INDEXING USING A NON-BOOLEAN  SEARCHING
    MODEL
    Donald B. Cleveland
    School of Library and Information Sciences, North Texas State
    University, Denton  TX   76203

    Ana D. Cleveland and Olga B. Wise
    Texas Woman's University, Denton  TX  76204

    The  relative  effectiveness of indexing using  full-text  or
    less than full-text was tested using a non-Boolean,  chaining
    type  of file structure and searching method.   Indexing  was
    done using  titles,  abstracts,  full-text,  references,  and
    various  combinations of these surrogates and then  Goffman's
    indirect   method  of  information  retrieval  was  used   to
    structure and search the file.  The database consisted of 733
    documents  and 38 queries were searched.   The hypothesis  of
    the  study was that by using a particular non-Boolean  method
    as  a  file structuring and  searching  technique,  full-text
    indexing  is  not essential to optimum information  retrieval
    effectiveness.  The outcome of the study was positive.
    (JASIS, Vol. 35(1): 19-28; 1984)

4. STATISTICAL RECOGNITION OF CONTENT TERMS IN GENERAL TEXT
   Martin Dillon
   School  of  Library Science,  University  of  North  Carolina,
   Chapel Hill, NC

   Peggy Federhart
   Library, IBM Corporation, Charlotte, NC   28257

   This   article  discusses  ways  to  improve  the  quality  of
   retrieval systems that depend on the use of truncated words of
   quasi-word  stems  as an indexing  vocabulary.   The  problems
   addressed   are   the  generalizability   and   stability   of
   discriminant  function  analysis  for selecting  good  topical
   terms  from terms of relatively high frequency in  a  database
   drawn from abstracts of Harris Survey press releases.  Results
   confirm   that  topical  terms  can  be  identified  by  their
   statistical properties.   Consistently high recall of  topical
   terms   under  a  variety  of  different  conditions   implies
   persistent  underlying  properties  strong  enough  to  resist
   changes in test environment.
   (JASIS, Vol. 35(1): 3-10; 1984)

5.  INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FROM CLASSICAL DATABASES FROM A SIGNAL-
    DETECTION STANDPOINT - A REVIEW
    M. H. Heine
    School of Librarianship & Information Studies
    New Castle upon Tyne Polytechnic, UK

    The     retrieval    of    information     from     classical
    (object/attribute)  databases  is discussed in the  light  of
    signal-detection  theory.   The  approach  is  based  on  the
    Swetsian  schema,  although it is expressed in a more general
    form.
    (Information Technology, Vol. 3, No. 2.  95-112, April 1984)

6.  MAXIMUM   ENTROPY  AND  THE  OPTIMAL  DESIGN   OF   AUTOMATED
    INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS
    Paul B. Kantor
    Tantalus Inc.
    Suite 218, 2140 Lee Road
    Cleveland, Ohio  44118

    The  application of the maximum entropy principle is extended
    to  problems  of  information  storage  and  retrieval.   The
    extension   includes   continuous   or   'fuzzy'    relevance
    valuations,   fuzzy   descriptors,   and  prior  or  feedback
    constraints.    A  decomposition  property   of  the  entropy
    function is used to express the total entropy in terms of the
    entropy  of  nonoverlapping components.   Each  component  is
    described  by a richness parameter which is determined  by  a
    set of coupled constraint equations given in closed form.   A
    method  is outlined for solving those equations in real time,
    and   possible  grounds  for  applying  the  maximum  entropy
    principle are explored.   The relation to term weighting, and
    the  possibility of constructing rigorous  relations  between
    information and effort, are also discussed.
    (Information Technology, Vol. 3 No. 2  88-94  April 1984)

7.  INFORMATION  SCIENCE RESEARCH:  THE SEARCH FOR THE NATURE  OF
    INFORMATION
    Manfred Kochen
    Schools   of  Medicine  and  Business   Administration,   The
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI  48109

    High level scientific research in the information sciences is
    illustrated  by a sample of recent discoveries involving  the
    design  of  information-processing  algorithms,  bibliometric
    scaling,  and flows of information in biological systems  and
    in  countries.   It  is pointed out that when the concept  of
    information first assumed an independent identity,  the  only
    known  information processing systems were  biological;  now,
    after  four  decades  of vigorous development  of  electronic
    information systems,  the search for the essential nature  of
    information  is focussing again on biological systems and  on
    sociotechnological systems as well.
    (JASIS, Vol. 35(3): 194-199; 1984)

8.  BRIEF HISTORY OF INFORMATION SCIENCE
    Saul Herner
    President,  Herner  and  Company,  1700 North  Moore  Street,
    Arlington, VA  22209

    Information science is the product of convergences of library
    science,   computer   and  punched  card  science,   R  &   D
    documentation,   abstracting  and  indexing,   communications
    science,  behavioral  science,  micro- and  macro-publishing,
    video  and  optical  science,  and various other  fields  and
    disciplines.  The role and contribution of each participating
    segment  is reflected in certain basic and seminal  writings,
    in  the  work of "major actors" in the field,  and  in  major
    events  or  developments.   These  contributing  sources  are
    reviewed,  analyzed,  and related,  as a means of tracing the
    history  of the field,  from its pre- and post-World  War  II
    beginnings to the early 1980's, to the near-term future.
    (JASIS, Vol 35(3): 157-163; 1984)

9.  A  NOTE  ON  THE USE OF NEAREST  NEIGHBORS  FOR  IMPLEMENTING
    SINGLE LINKAGE DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATIONS
    Peter Willett
    Department of Information Studies,  University of  Sheffield,
    Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom

    Best  match  search algorithms provide an efficient means  of
    identifying  the  sets of nearest neighbors for each  of  the
    documents  in a collection.   These sets contain much of  the
    important  similarity data contained in a full  interdocument
    similarity  matrix  and  may be used for  the  generation  of
    hierarchic document classifications,  such  as those  arising
    from  the  use  of  the  single  linkage  clustering  method.
    Cluster   based   retrieval  experiments  based   upon   such
    classifications are shown to give results that are comparable
    in   effectiveness   with  those  obtained  using  the   full
    similarity matrix.
    (JASIS, Vol. 35(3): 149-152; 1984)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
38
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 86 12:07:31 edt
-FROM-
From: seismo!mirror.TMC.COM!rs (Rich Salz)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Submission
-BODY-
I just posted this in the Usenet group net.unix-wizards; if you
think it's appropriate, can you please put it your next convenient
mailing?  Thanks.

PS:  You've been doing a real nice job as editor, thanks!  One
    suggestion, tho -- could you put the e-mail address of the
    list just after, say, the Subject line summary?  /r$

[Note: my mailer won't cooperate and I don't want to clobber
undigesters, so I hope what I am trying on this message will work. - Ed]

/* beginning of posted question */
We will probably be starting a research project in the area of
free-text retrieval.  Looking around shows that our major bottleneck
is going to be how quickly we can read in large amounts of data
(eventually, in the Gigabyte range).

I'm asking the net for any hints and kinks people have used to increase
disk *read* throughput on Unix.  We're at an exploratory phase, so I'm
open to any and all suggestions, from "increase the block size to 16K"
to "buy a Convex." For example, does anyone have any feel for what kind
of performance I can get if I open a raw disk on 4.[23]BSD and do
vread(2)'s?  (I will probably not need the Unix filesystem structure.)

I know a great deal depends on the controller -- any word out there on
what's "best" and "fastest"?  At the start of the project, the group
will be sharing the machine with the rest of the company, although they
will probably have one or two controllers and disks of their own.  I
expect they'll need multiple controllers because of the need for
multiple simultaneous reads.  The initial development machine will
probably be something like a Pyramid 98x or a Sequent 21000.

This brings me to my second question.  The group may eventually move up
to a UTS-class machine in two years.  Does anyone have any numbers on
the overall disk throughput of those class of machines?  Or, what other
machines are good IO pumps?

Please reply to me, and I will summarize for the net.

Thanks,
	/r$
Rich $alz	{mit-eddie, ihnp4, wjh12, cca, cbosgd, seismo}!mirror!rs
Mirror Systems	2067 Massachusetts Avenue  Cambridge, MA  02140
Telephone:	617-661-0777					"Hi, mom!"
/* End of text from mirror:net.unix-wizar */

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 86 04:55:07 edt
-FROM-
From: ihnp4!akgua!usceast!kersch@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Larry Kerschberg's Address Change
-BODY-
Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I want to inform you that as of September 1, 1986 I will be joining
the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax Virginia.  My
surface mail address is given below:
	Professor Larry Kerschberg
	Department of Information Systems and Systems Engineering
	George Mason University
	4400 University Drive
	Fairfax, Virginia 22030

Phone:  (703) 323-2713  (This phone number is the departmental number)

I can be reached via the UUCP net at
	allegra!seismo!gmu90x!kersch
and on the ARPA net at
	allegra!seismo!gmu90x!kersch@Berkeley.ARPA

Our family is leaving South Carolina on August 15, so please route all
mail to my new address as of that date.

When you plan to be in the Washington area, please give me a call so
we might set up a visit to George Mason.  Access to GMU is best
through Dulles Airport.

Best regards,
Larry Kerschberg

[Note: Welcome to Virginia, Larry! I used to live in SC too. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 86 18:58:33 edt
-FROM-
From: PHYSICSLIB@SU-SIERRA.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: [Henry E. Lowood <PHYSICSLIB@Sierra.Stanford.EDU>: Positon open]
-BODY-
  FR: Henry Lowood, Stanford University
Would the IRList be willing to run this job posting?  Ken Laws over at AIList
suggested that I try you.
Thanks.
[Note: sure, this is appropriate for IRList. - Ed]


Please pass on this message regarding the now vacant position of head librarian
in the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Library at Stanford University.
(For further information, Henry Lowood, 415-723-4342)
                   ________________________________

Stanford University Libraries
Head Librarian and Bibliographer, Mathematical and Computer Sciences Library

The Stanford University Libraries seek a Head Librarian & Bibliographer to
direct the program of library service & collection management in the
Mathematical/Computer Sciences Library.

We require: an MLS or equivalent in training & experience; knowledge of
collection development principles & practices; effective supervisory skills;
ability to contribute to planning & implementing new & improved services for a
graduate research library; public service experience; experience providing
automated data & reference services; abililty to work effectively with faculty,
students, & staff; effective communication skills, both orally and in writing.
An academic degree in computer science, mathematics, or the physical sciences
is
highly desirable.

Associate Librarian or Librarian rank ($31,000-$46,000).  Send statement of
qualifications with full resume & names of three professional references to
Carolyn J. Henderson, Library Personnel Officer, Stanford University Libraries,
Stanford CA 94305 by 10/15/86.  Cite #291 on all correspondence pertaining to
this position.  EOE/AA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 86 19:02:14 edt
-FROM-
From: E1AR0002%SMUVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: abstracts relating to retrieval
-BODY-
D MAG24 Optical Engineering\
%V 25\
%N 3\
%D MAR 1986

%H PA
%A Donald H. Kraft
%A Duncan A. Buell
%T Advances in a Bayesian Decision Model of User Stopping Behavior
for Scanning the Output of an Information Retrieval System
%J Proceedings of the Third BCS/ACM Symposium on Research
and Development in Information Retrieval
%P 421-433
%D 1984


%H TR84-021
%A Tadeusz Radecki
%T Probabilistic Methods for Ranking Search Output in Boolean Retrieval
Systems
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report 84-021

%H TR84-022
%A Tadeusz Radecki
%T Document Ranking Methodology for Conventional Boolean Retrieval Systems
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report 84-022


%H TR84-024
%A E. T. Lee
%T Similarity Retrieval for Pictorial Databases
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report TR84-024

%H TR85-008
%A S. V. Nageswara Rao
%A S. S. Iyengar
%T A Comparative Study of Multiple Attribute Tree and Inverted Files
for Large Bibliographic Files
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report TR85-008

%H TR85-009
%A S. V. Nageswara Rao
%A S. S. Iyengar
%T Attribute Ranking Problem in MAT Data Structure
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report TR85-009

%H TR85-028
%A Sukhamay Kundu
%T A Theory of Multi-Relations for Uncertain Facts
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report TR85-028

%H TR85-037
%A Cary G. deBessonet
%A George R. Cross
%T Distinguishing Legal Language-Types for Conceptual Retrieval
%J LSU Computer Science Technical Report TR85-037

%A M. Balaban
%T Knowledge Representation and Inferencing in a Musical Database
%R TR 85-11
%I State University of New York at Albany, Computer Science Department
%K frames AA25 AA14 T02

%A M. Balaban
%T The Generalized Concept Formalism - A Frame and Logic Based
Representation Model
%R TR 85-20
%I State University of New York at Albany, Computer Science Department
%K AA25 T02

%A Y. V. Silva-Filho
%T Multidimensional Search Trees as Indices of Files
%R No. 4
%I University of Kent at Canterbury
%D FEB 1981

%A John W. Lloyd
%T Optimal Partial-match Retrieval
%R Technical Report 80/3
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D September 1980
%P 14
%K partial match retrieval, file design, secondary key retrieval
%O also in BIT, vol.20, 1980
%X
  This paper studies the design of a system to handle partial-match
queries from a file. A partial-match query is a specification of the value
of zero or more fields in a record. An answer to a query consists of a listing
of all records in a file satisfying the values specified.
  Aho and Ullman have considered the case when the probability that a
field is specified in a query is independent of which other fields are
specified. We consider here the more realistic case where the independence
assumption is dropped. This leads to an optimisation problem more general
than that considered by Aho and Ullman. The major part of the paper is the
presentation of an efficient algorithm for solving this optimisation problem.

%A John W. Lloyd
%T Partial-match Retrieval for Dynamic Files
%R Technical Report 80/4
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D September 1980
%P ?
%K partial match retrieval, file design, secondary key retrieval

%A John W. Lloyd
%A Kotagiri Ramamohanarao
%T Partial-match Retrieval for Dynamic Files
%R Technical Report 81/5
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D September 1981
%P 18
%K partial-match retrieval, dynamic files, extendible hashing,
linear hashing, rao
%X
  This paper studies file designs for answering partial-match queries
for dynamic files.  A partial-match query is a specification of the
value of zero or more fields in a record.  An answer to a query
consists of a listing of all records in the file satisfying the values
specified.
  The main contribution is a general method whereby certain primary
key hashing schemes can be extended to partial-match retrieval schemes.
These partial-match retrieval designs can handle arbitrarily dynamic
files and can be optimized with respect to the number of page faults
required to answer a query.
  We illustrate the method by considering in detail the extension of two
recent dynamic primary key hashing schemes.

%A John F. Doolan
%A Michael C. Flower
%A Bernard J. Marshall
%A Ian W. Turnbull
%T Titan User's Manual
%R Technical Report 85/7
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D September 1985
%P 89
%K partial match retrieval, interactive forms editor, PMR, IFE, MENU

%A John F. Doolan
%A Michael C. Flower
%A Bernard J. Marshall
%A Ian W. Turnbull
%T Titan Administrator's Manual
%R Technical Report 85/8
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D September 1985
%P 133
%K partial match retrieval, interactive forms editor, PMR, IFE, MENU

%A Rohan McColl
%A Ian W. Turnbull
%T Titan User's Tutorial
%R Technical Report 85/9
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D to appear
%P ?
%K partial match retrieval, interactive forms editor, PMR, IFE, MENU

%A Rohan McColl
%A Michael C. Flower
%T Tital Administrator's Tutorial
%R Technical Report 85/10
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D to appear
%P ?
%K partial match retrieval, interactive forms editor, PMR, IFE, MENU


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
39
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 86 11:48:53 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: call for papers for ACM SIGIR Forum, fall 1986
-BODY-
It is time to gather short articles, book reviews, abstracts,
announcements, etc. for the next Forum.  I will be putting out
this issue, so send electronic versions (unless you say otherwise
they may appear in IRList too) or paper copies (done in camera
ready form, single spaced).

I look forward to receiving your materials in the next few weeks.
Many thanks, Ed Fox (co-editor for Forum).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 2 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should have received the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 30-31. The rest will appear in
 machine readable form also in later issues of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1984 issues of journals
in the retrieval area)

10. TESTING  OF  A NATURAL LANGUAGE RETRIEVAL SYSTEM FOR  A  FULL
    TEXT KNOWLEDGE BASE

    Lionel M. Bernstein and Robert E. Williamson
    Lister  Hill National Center for  Biomedical  Communications,
    National Library of Medicine,  National Institutes of Health,
    Bethesda, MD  20209

    "A Navigator of Natural Language Organized Data" (ANNOD) is a
    retrieval   system  which  combines  use  of   probabilistic,
    linguistic, and empirical means to rank individual paragraphs
    of full text for their similarity to natural language queries
    proposed  by  users.   ANNOD includes common  word  deletion,
    word  root  isolation,  query expansion by a  thesaurus,  and
    application   of  a  complex  empirical  matching   (ranking)
    algorithm.   The  Hepatitis  Knowledge Base,  the text  of  a
    prototype information system,  was the file used for  testing
    ANNOD.   Responses to a series of users' unrestricted natural
    language   queries   were   evaluated   by   three   testers.
    Information  needed  to answer 85 to 95% of the  queries  was
    located  and displayed in the first few selected  paragraphs.
    It  was  successful  in  locating  information  in  both  the
    classified  (listed  in Table of Contents)  and  unclassified
    portions  of  text.   Development  of this  retrieval  system
    resulted from the complementarity of and interaction  between
    computer   science  and  medical  domain  expert   knowledge.
    Extension  of  these techniques to larger knowledge bases  is
    needed to clarify their proper role.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(4): 235-247; 1984)

11. A  COMPARISON  OF  THE COSINE CORRELATION  AND  THE  MODIFIED
    PROBABILISTIC MODEL

    W. Bruce Croft
    Computer and Information Science Dept.
    University of Massachusetts
    Amherst, MA  01003

    It  has  been  pointed out that the  comparison  between  the
    performance  of  the  cosine  correlation  and  the  modified
    probabilistic model was incomplete.   In particular, the term
    weights used for the cosine correlation were term frequencies
    within  the document text.    Salton has for some time used a
    term  weight known as 'tf.idf' in his  retrieval  experiments
    with  the  cosine correlation.   This weight consists of  the
    within  document term frequency (sometimes normalized by  the
    maximum   frequency)  multiplied  by  the  inverse   document
    frequency  weight.   Although the inverse document  frequency
    weight can be regarded as a product of the retrieval process,
    it has also been used as part of the indexing process in that
    the  weight  is  assigned  to  the  terms  in  the   document
    representatives.   In this note, we shall present the results
    of  retrieval experiments with the cosine correlation and the
    tf.idf  weights.   The comparison of these results  to  those
    obtained  with the modified probabilistic model leads to some
    interesting conclusions about the cosine correlation.

    (Information Technology, Vol. 3 No. 2 113-115, April 1984

12. SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY:  A MODEL FOR ONLINE SEARCHING

    Stephen P. Harter
    School   of   Library  and   Information   Science,   Indiana
    University, Bloomington, IN  47405

    Scientific   inquiry  is  proposed  as  a  philosophical  and
    behavioral  model  for  online  information  retrieval.   The
    nature   of   scientific  research  concepts   of   variable,
    hypothesis formulation and testing,  operational  definition,
    validity, reliability, assumption, and the cyclical nature of
    research   are   established.    A  case  is  made  for   the
    inevitability of end-user searching.   It is argued that  the
    model  is  of  interest now only for its own  sake,  for  the
    intellectual  parallels that can be established  between  two
    apparently  disparate  human  activities,  but  as  a  useful
    framework  for  discussion and analysis of the online  search
    process from an educational and evaluative viewpoint.

    (JASIS, VOL. 35(2): 110-117; 1984)


13. A DRILL AND PRACTICE PROGRAM FOR ONLINE RETRIEVAL

    Bert R. Boyce
    School  of Library and Information Science,  Louisiana  State
    University, LA   70803

    David Martin, Barbara Francis, and Mary Ellen Slevert
    Department of Information Science,  University of Missouri at
    Columbia, 110 Stewart Hall, Columbia, MO  65211

    DAPPOR,  a  drill and practice program for  online  retrieval
    provides  reinforcement  to students engaged in learning  the
    basic command protocols of the major vendors of bibliographic
    databases.   The  DAPPOR  evaluation  program  overcomes  the
    difficult  problems of determining the correctness of a  user
    response  in a highly flexible environment.   The  coding  of
    answer  definitions  and the process of  recursive  reduction
    used by the evaluation program are described.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(2): 129-134; 1984)


14. TWO PARTITIONING TYPE CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS

    Fazli Can and Esen A. Ozkarahan
    Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287

    In this article,  two partitioning type clustering algorithms
    are  presented.   Both  algorithms  use the same  method  for
    selecting cluster seeds;  however, assignment of documents to
    the  seeds  is different.   The first algorithm  uses  a  new
    concept  called  "cover coefficient" and it is a  single-pass
    algorithm.   The  second one uses a conventional measure  for
    document assignment  to the cluster seeds and is a  multipass
    algorithm.   The  concept  of clustering,  a model  for  seed
    oriented partitioning,  the new centroid generation approach,
    and an illustration for both algorithms are also presented in
    the article.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(5): 268-276 1984)


15. ARTIFICIAL  INTELLIGENCE:   UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS AND  BASIC
    OBJECTIVES

    Nick Cercone
    Computing   Science  Department,   Simon  Fraser  University,
    Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada  V5A 1S6

    Gordon McCalla
    Department   of   Computational   Science,    University   of
    Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7N 0W0

    Artificial  intelligence (AI) research has recently  captured
    media  interest  and  it is fast becoming  our  newest  "hot"
    technology.   AI is an interdisciplinary field which  derives
    from a multiplicity of roots.  In this article we present our
    perspectives   on   methodological   assumptions   underlying
    research  efforts in AI.   We also discuss the goals  (design
    objectives)   of  AI  across  the  spectrum  of  subareas  it
    comprises.   We conclude by discussing why there is increased
    interest in AI and whether current predictions of the  future
    importance of AI are well founded.

    (JASIS Vol, 35(5): 280-290; 1984)


16. NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

    Ralph Grishmman
    Department  of  Computer Science,  New York  University,  251
    Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012

    Natural language processing has two primary roles to play  in
    the  storage  and retrieval of large bodies  of  information:
    providing a friendly, earily-learned interface to information
    retrieval  systems,  and  automatically structuring texts  so
    that  their  information  can be more  easily  processed  and
    retrieved.   This  article  outlines the  organization  of  a
    natural language interface for data retrieval (a "questions -
    answering  system") and some of the approaches being taken to
    text  structuring.   It  closes by describing a  few  of  the
    research   issues   in   computational  linguistics   and   a
    possibility for using interactive natural language processing
    for information acquisition.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(5): 291-296; 1984)

17. EXPERT SYSTEMS: A TUTORIAL

    N. Shahla Yaghmai
    School  of  Library and Information  Science,  University  of
    Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53102

    Jacqueline A. Maxin
    Computer Services, The H.W. Wilson Company, Bronx, NY 10452

    Expert systems are intelligent computer applications that use
    data,  a  knowledge  base,  and a control mechanism to  solve
    problems  of  sufficient difficulty  that  significant  human
    expertise  is necessary for their solution.   Expert  systems
    use  artificial  intelligence problem-solving and  knowledge-
    representation  techniques to combine human expert  knowledge
    about   a   problem  area  with  human  expert   methods   of
    conceptualizing and reasoning about that problem area.   As a
    result, it is expected that such systems can reach a level of
    performance  comparable  to  that  of a  human  expert  in  a
    specialized problem area.   The high-level knowledge base and
    associated control mechanism of expert systems are in essence
    a  model  of the expertise of the best practitioners  of  the
    problem area in question and, hence, human users are provided
    with  expert opinions about problems in  that  area.   Expert
    systems  do not pretend to give final or ultimate conclusions
    to  displace  human decision making;  they are  intended  for
    consulting purposes only.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(5); 297-305; 1984)

18. APPROACHES TO MACHINE LEARNING

    Pat Langley
    The   Robotics   Institute,    Carnegie-Mellon    University,
    Pittsburgh, PA 15213

    Jaime G. Carbonell
    Department  of Computer Science,  Carnegie-Mellon University,
    Pittsburgh, PA 15213

    The field of machine learning strives to develop methods  and
    techniques  to  automate the acquisition of new  information,
    new skills,  and new ways of organizing existing information.
    This article reviews the major approaches to machine learning
    in symbolic domains, illustrated with occasional paradigmatic
    examples.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(5); 306-316: 1984)

19. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Compiled by Linda C. Smith
    Graduate   School   of  Library  and   Information   Science,
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801

    The  literature of artificial intelligence (AI) is  scattered
    over  many  books,   journals,  conference  proceedings,  and
    technical  reports.   This selected  annotated  bibliography,
    arranged by type of material, can serve as an introduction to
    that literature.

    (JASIS, Vol. 35(5); 317-319: 1984)

20. AUTOMATIC SEARCH TERM VARIANT GENERATION

    K. Sparck Jones and J. I. Tait
    Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge

    The  paper  describes research designed to improve  automatic
    pre-coordinate  term indexing by applying  powerful  general-
    purpose language analysis techniques to identify term sources
    in  requests,  and  to  generate variant  expression  of  the
    concepts involved for document text searching.

    (Journal of Documentation,  Vol.  40,  No. 1, March 1984, pp.
    50-66).

21. HIERARCHIC  AGGLOMERATIVE  CLUSTERING METHODS  FOR  AUTOMATIC
    DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATION

    Alan Griffiths, Lesley A. Robinson and Peter Willett
    Department  of Information Studies,  University of Sheffield,
    Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK

    This   paper  considers  the  classifications   produced   by
    application  of the single linkage,  complete linkage,  group
    average and Ward clustering methods to the Keen and Cranfield
    document test collections.   Experiments were carried out  to
    study  the  structure  of  the hierarchies  produced  by  the
    different  methods,  the extent to which the methods  distort
    the  input  similarity matrices during the  generation  of  a
    classification, and the retrieval effectiveness obtainable in
    cluster based retrieval.   The results would suggest that the
    single  linkage  method,  which has been used extensively  in
    previous  work  on  document  clustering,  is  not  the  most
    effective  procedure of those tested,  although it should  be
    emphasized that the experiments have used only small document
    test collections.

    Journal of Documentation, Vol. 40, No. 3, September 1984, pp.
    175-205.

22. PROBABILISTIC  AUTOMATIC  INDEXING  BY  LEARNING  FROM  HUMAN
    INDEXERS

    S. E. Robertson
    Department   of   Information   Science,   City   University,
    Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB

    P. Harding
    Inspec,    Station   House,    Nightingale   Road,   Hitchin,
    Hertfordshire SG5 1RJ

    A  probabilistic model previously used in relevance  feedback
    is adapted for use in automtic indexing of documents (in  the
    sense  of  imitating human indexers).   The model  fits  with
    previous   work  in  this  area (the  'adhesion  coefficient'
    method),  in  effect  merely suggesting a  different  way  of
    arriving  at  the  adhesion coefficients.   Methods  for  the
    application  of  the model are  proposed.   The  independence
    assumptions  used  in  the model  are  interpreted,  and  the
    possibility of a dependence model is discussed.

    Journal of Documentation,  Vol. 40, No. 4, December 1984, pp.
    264-270.


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
40
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 86 00:43:45 edt
-FROM-
From: Ewgorc@CS.UCL.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: indexing of mailing-list items
-BODY-
mailing list digest indexing
Dear Mr. Fox,

I've just found out from the moderator of the AIList that you have built
a system for the automatic indexing of mailing-list items. I am currently
implementing a similar system for an M.Sc. project, and I would be very
grateful if you could tell me a little about your system, as a comparison
would be useful as part of my project report. (The only similar system
I'd heard about before was one designed by an M.Sc. student at
Queen Mary College, University of London : this was very much oriented
towards reserarch into user-modelling, and was never actually implemented.)

My system is designed to run under UNIX on a Sun workstation.
It first identifies the mailing-list to which each new message belongs,
copying them into an appropriate directory (and splitting digests into
several files, one for each item or for "Today's Topics").

An index file for each is then produced : indexing terms are taken from
profiles set up by potential readers, and from a dummy profile maintained
by the system administrator which will be particularly useful in the early
days of the system before many readers have created large profiles.
The indexing process is based on "fgrep" : the number of times each term
occurs in the text of the message is noted (terms occurring in the "Subject"
header are given an especially high score, but other header lines are
disregarded.)

Each reader's profile is then compared to the index files,
adding up the scores for each term which occurs in both the profile and
the index of a message, and then dividing by the number of lines in the
text, to obtain the interest value of the message to that reader : messages
for which the interest value is greater than or equal to a
threshold (which may be given in the profile, although a default is
provided) are mailed to a file associated with the reader, using
details of the match - the interest value and a list of the matched
terms - as a new Subject header.

The three main programs of the system are written in C : although much
of the work could possibly have ben done by "grep", "awk" and similar
utilities, I felt C code would be more maintainable (e.g. once the
basic system is in operation, I would like to allow readers to link
terms together by "and" and "or").

I would be interested to know if my system differs radically from yours
in any way, particularly in the algorithms used for indexing and
matching. For example, does your system perform any semantic analysis
of messages rather than just string-matching, and if so how?

Thanks in advance for any information you can give me.

Tim Miles
BP Research Centre, Sunbury-on-Thames, England.

[Tim: Sounds like an interesting and useful project. Yes, my system is
different. I will try to fill in a few comments and give pointers to
related works - other readers are invited to add to this discussion.
1) Thomas Malone at MIT has worked on the "Information Lens" which
  deals with mail handling and profiles.
2) Michael Mauldin (see IRList V2 #25, 30) is working on FERRET which
  is an application and extension of methods like FRUMP to mail
  indexing and retrieval.
3) The SMART system at Cornell and Virginia Tech has been used to
  index and retrieve collections of mail and mail digest messages.
4) The CODER system is under development at Virginia Tech to use AI
  methods to analyze and retrieve (parts of) messages from an archive
  of messages from AIList Digest.  A brief discussion appears in IRList
  V2 #26, and there have been several conference papers and technical
  reports on it.
5) Your approach is like several SDI (selective dissemination of
  information) systems that matched profiles against new files of
  recent abstracts.
6) Some online interactive systems for searching archives have recently
  become available on networks like BITNET.
7) R. Korfhage has recently done work on profiles and queries in
  information retrieval.

Hope this is the kind of info you wanted. Regards, Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     29-AUG-1986 14:33:03
-FROM-
From:     LOU%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Oxford Text Archive news
-BODY-
OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE

A new edition of the Oxford Text Archive Shortlist was published in
August 1986. Send your name and address for a free copy! (second and subsequent
copies cost $3 each)

Recent acquisitions include TWO diffent parsed/structured versions of the
Oxford Advanced Lwearners Dictionary, one produced by Roger Mitton at
Birkbeck College; the other by Rick Kazman at University of Waterloo.
Both versions are available under the OTA's standard conditions of use.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Call for Papers WG 6.5
-FROM-
From: Peter Schicker <schicker%ean.cs.nott.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.UK>
-DATE-
Date: 13 Jun 86 7:55 -0100 BST
-BODY-
[Forwarded msg below was sent to me for redistribution - Ed]

Hugh and Stef:
Could you post the following call for papers on the US and European nets,
please.

             CALL  FOR  PAPERS

      IFIP WG 6.5 International Working Conference on

              MESSAGE HANDLING SYSTEMS
          (State of the Art and Future Directions)

             27 to 29 April 1987
                   Munich
            Fed. Rep. of Germany

Program:
The purpose of the conference is to provide an international forum for the
exchange of information on the technical, economic, social, and political
impacts of computer message and office systems. The conference format will
be two days of conference paper presentations followed by one day of work-
shops.


Papers are desired in the following topic areas:

MHS Interconnection and Interworking
  Interconnection of X.400 Systems (Private and public)
  Gateways to X.400 Systems
  X.400 Shell to non-X.400 Systems
  Interworking between X.400 and the Postal System
  Interworking with other Architectures (e.g., DIA/DCA, All-In-1, etc.)
  Multi-Vendor Private Message Systems

Documents and Messages
  Document and Message Architectures
  Multimedia Documents and Messages
  Graphics (GKS) vs. Facsimile
  Communication of Business Forms and Trade Documents

Directory Services
  Naming and Addressing
  Public Directory Systems
  Interworking between Public and Private Directory Systems

New Access Protocols
  Mailbox Services
  Extensions to X.400 Series Recommendations

Message Management
  Personal Message Management
  Message and Document Filing and Retrieval

Group Communication
  Distribution Lists
  Organization of Message Flow
  Real-Time Conferencing
  Models for Group Communication

Workstations and User Interface
  Workstation and Cluster Design
  Backup and Archiving
  User Interface Issues
  Message Editing

Security Aspects
  Authentication
  Confidentiality

Impacts of MHS
  Social and Behavioral Impacts
  Impacts on Organizations
  Impacts on Nations
  Inpacts on Relieving Impairment

Policy Issues
  Public Policy Issues in MHS
  Transborder Data Flow
  Legal Status of MHS
  Privacy and Confidentiality

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Instructions to Authors:

Prospective Authors are invited to submit for review unpublished original
contributions (not exceeding 5000 words) which describe recent developments
on any design or service aspect of computer message systems.

Accepted papers will appear in the Conference Proceedings published by
North-Holland Publishing Company.

Deadlines:

Today               Send a postcard with your name, telephone, and EMail
                    address to:
                       Message Systems '87
                       Mrs. Stenzel
                       Siemens AG
                       D-AP.11
                       Otto Hahn Ring 6
                       D-8000 Munich 83
                       Fed. Rep. of Germany
                    This will ensure that you will receive further information
                    about the conference. Please indicate also the provisio-
                    nal title if you intend to submit a paper.
Sept. 30, 1986      Draft versions of papers required
Nov. 30, 1986       Notification of acceptance
Jan. 31, 1987       Camera-ready papers required

Papers should be submitted to:

Peter Schicker
Zellweger Telecommunications AG
CH-8634 Hombrechtikon
Switzerland

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 3 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should have received the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 37-39. The rest will appear in
 machine readable form also in a later issue of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1984 issues of journals
in the retrieval area)

23. RANKING TECHNIQUES AND THE EMPIRICAL LOG LAW

    Bertram C. Brookes
    64 Abbots Gardens, London N2 0JH, England

    Four  empirical  laws of bibliometrics - those  of  anomalous
    numbers, of Lotka, Zipf and Bradford, together with Laplace's
    notorious "law of succession" and de Solla Price's cumulative
    advantage  distribution,  are shown to be  almost  identical.
    Some  of these laws are expressed as frequency distributions,
    some   are   frequency-ranked.     A   simple   model   which
    discriminates  these various forms is  described.   It  shows
    that  the frequency forms conform with an inverse square  law
    over  the  appropriate interval and that the equivalent  rank
    distribution - the Log Law - has the Df

         Q(r) = log b (r + 1)

    where b is the rank interval.

    It  is  further shown that  frequency  distributions  discard
    empirical  statistical information which the equivalent  rank
    distributions   retain   for   analysis.     So   that   rank
    distributions of theoretical advantages in this field.

    The  paper  concludes  with comments on the analysis  of  the
    empirical  hybrid forms which arise.   The reduction  of  the
    above  laws,  empirical and hypothetical,  to a single law is
    achieved by NOT equating the ordinals 1st,  2nd,  3rd,...  to
    the numbers 1, 2, 3,... as is commonly done.

    (Information Processing & Management,  Vol.  20, No. 1-2, pp.
    37-46, 1984).


24. HUMAN INFORMATION SEEKING AND DESIGN OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS

    William B. Rouse and Sandra H. Rouse
    Center for Man-Machine Systems Research, Georgia Institute of
    Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

    The  literature of psychology,  library science,  management,
    computer  science,  and systems engineering is  reviewed  and
    integrated  into an overall perspective of human  information
    seeking and the design of information systems.  The nature of
    information  seeking  is considered in terms of its  role  in
    decision  making  and problem solving,  the dynamics  of  the
    process,  and the value of information.  Discussions of human
    information  seeking  focus on basic  psychological  studies,
    effects  of  cognitive style,  and models of human  behavior.
    Design  issues considered include attributes  of  information
    systems,  analysis of information needs, aids for information
    seeding, and evaluation of information systems.

    INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  20, No. 1-2, pp
    129-138, 1984.


25. EXPERIMENTAL  AND QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS FOR RESEARCH  IN
    INFORMATION SCIENCE

    David F. Haas and Donald H. Kraft
    Department  of Computer Science,  Louisiana State University,
    Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA

    This  is  a  paper  about  research  designs  in  information
    science.  We look at a sample of current research and compare
    its  designs with an abstract ideal of experimental  research
    design  to  see how closely they  approximate  it.   We  then
    consider ways in which research in our field might be brought
    closer  to  the ideal.   We do this because we  believe  that
    experimental  and  quasi-experimental  designs  offer  unique
    advantages  over other research designs,  especially  in  the
    production  of knowledge that can be applied to the  solution
    of practical problems in information and in software science.

    (INFORMATION  PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT  Vol.  20,  No.  1-2,
    pp. 229-237, 1984).


26. THE  RELATION BETWEEN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY  FOR   DESIGNING
    EXPERIMENTS IN INFORMATION SCIENCE

    Charles Pearson
    Catronix Corporation,  151 Sixth STNW, Suite 100, Atlanta, GA
    30313, USA

    The  relation  between theory and experiment  in  Information
    Science  is  the  same as that in any  other  science.   This
    relation  is  examined in some detail in order to  provide  a
    better understanding for designing experiments in Information
    Science.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol 20, No. 1-2, pp.
    239-241, 1984)


27. MATHEMATICAL MODELS OF TEXT

    Harold P. Edmundson
    Department  of  Computer  Science,  University  of  Maryland,
    College Park, MD  20742, USA

    An  object  of serious study in the information  sciences  is
    printed language,  called text.  This paper presents numerous
    examples  of  mathematical  models of text and  in  so  doing
    exposes some interesting results and problems associated with
    the  linquistic,  mathematical,  and computational aspects of
    current research involving text.

    First,  the  notions of mathematical models and modeling  are
    reviewed.   Then the graphemic, morphological, syntactic, and
    semantic linquistic levels of text analysis are distinguished
    and  discussed.   Next,  Numerous  deterministic  models  and
    stochastic  models  of  text  are  treted  in  some   detail.
    Finally,   thses   research  accomplishments  in  information
    science are summarized and future research is discussed.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol. 20, No. 1-2, pp.
    261-268, 1984).



28. FUZZY PROBABILITIES

    Lotfi A. Zadeh
    Computer   Science   Division,   Department   of   Electrical
    Engineering   and  Computer  Sciences  and  the   Electronics
    Research Laboratory,  University of California,  Berkeley, CA
    94720, USA.

    The conventional approaches to decision analysis are based on
    the  assumption that the probabilities which enter  into  the
    assessment  of  the  consequences  of a  decision  are  known
    numbers.   In most realiastic settings, this assumption is of
    questionable   validity  since  the  data  from   which   the
    probabilities  must  be  estimated  are  usually  incomplete,
    imprecise or not totally reliable.

    In the approach outlined in this paper, the probabilities are
    assumed  to be fuzzy rather than real numbers.   It is  shown
    how such probabilities may be estimated from fuzzy data and a
    basic relation between joint,  conditional and marginal fuzzy
    probabilities   is   established.    Manipulation  of   fuzzy
    probabilities  requires,   in  general,   the  use  of  fuzzy
    arithmetic, and many of the properties of fuzzy probabilities
    are simple generalization of the corresponding properties  of
    real-valued probabilities.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT.  Vol. 20, No. 3, 363-
    372, 1984).

29. ENTROPIES WITH AND WITHOUT PROBABILITIES
    APPLICATIONS TO QUESTIONNAIRES

    Bruno Forte
    Department  of Applied Mathematics,  University of  Waterloo,
    Waterloo, Ontario, Canada   N2L 3G1

    Entropy  is  a basic quantity in Information Theory.   As  it
    measures the amount of uncertainty one has in an alternative,
    it is "conditional" upon all kinds of "information" that  has
    been given.   New motivations for measures of uncertainty and
    infomation  are provided.   A more natural interpretation  of
    the  entropies in the "mixed theory" and the entropies for  a
    random  vector  is  given.   The  proposed  new  approach  in
    measuring  uncertainty  is  illustrated  with  examples,   in
    particular, from questionnaires theory.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol. 20, No. 3, 397-
    405, 1984).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
41
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 86 00:42:30 CDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!gswd-vms.ARPA!marick%turkey (Brian Marick)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: back issues of the mailing list
-BODY-
There's a line of information retrieval/organization research that
stretches back to Vannevar Bush and Memex, through Englebart and NLS, up
to Xerox Notecards and TextNet.  I'd like to apply those ideas about
organizing and retrieving information to the (I feel) analogous problems
involved in the maintenance and enhancement of large software systems by
smallish groups of people.  The more I learn about the
Bush-Englebart-... family tree, the better.  Would back issues of the
IRList help me?  If so, is there any way to get to those back issues?

Thanks much.

Brian Marick, Wombat Consort
Gould Computer Systems -- Urbana && University of Illinois
...ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!marick
ARPA:  Marick@GSWD-VMS

[Note: yes, see the Welcome message I will send you for details - Ed]

[Note: Dr. William Frakes at AT&T Bell Laboratories and some of his
colleagues have been interested in searching large software
collections for "relevant" modules, which is a little like what
you are talking about.  Perhaps Bill and others will comment on
your ideas.  Please let us know what further developments result. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 86 13:25:06 PDT
-FROM-
From: Hibbert.pa@Xerox.COM
-SUBJECT-
Subject: PARC Forum September 11:  NoteCards
-BODY-
[Forwarded from: AI-ED Digest   Friday, 5 Sep 1986   V.1: Issue 30 - Ed]

			PARC Forum

                Thursday, September 11, 1986
                4:00PM, PARC Auditorium

Frank Halasz
Randy Trigg
Tom Moran

Intelligent Systems Lab
Xerox PARC

NoteCards: An Experimental Environment for Idea Processing and
Information Management

NoteCards is an extensible environment designed to help people
formulate, structure, compare, and manage ideas.  It was developed here
at PARC as a vehicle for our research on the nature of idea processing
tasks and the ways in which computers can be used to support
intellectual work.  As part of this research, we have been actively
seeding a community of NoteCards users inside Xerox and at a number of
university, government, and industrial sites.  NoteCards is currently
being used by more than 50 people engaged in idea processing tasks
ranging from writing research papers through designing parts for
photocopiers.

In this forum, we will briefly demonstrate the current version of
NoteCards and discuss the major design considerations that drive its
development.  We will describe the NoteCards user community and the
range of clever applications that are being developed using NoteCards.
Finally, we will assess how well the system meets the needs of its
users.  Specifically, we will argue that NoteCards is very successful in
supporting the task of managing and organizing large collections of
ideas, but is relatively less suited to the task of formulating and
structuring these ideas.  We will also argue that the system lacks
adequate support for collaborative work.  These assessments will be used
to motivate and briefly describe the current research directions of the
NoteCards project.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:  4 Sep 86 19:58 PDT
-FROM-
From: William Daul / McDonnell-Douglas / APD-ASD <WBD.MDC@OFFICE-1.ARPA>
Author: Mitch Betts (ComputerWorld)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ComputerWorld 9/1/86 p.31 "National Archives' Storage Under Scrutiny"
-BODY-
   Comment: I thought this might be of interest to you.  It is copied without
            permission.  --Bi//
   Keywords: National Archives, information retrieval, infomation storage,
             archives, historians

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The prestigious National Research Council has issued a
report urging the National Archives not to use magnetic media or optical disks
to permanently store historical documents.

Optical disks and magnetic media last only 10 to 20 years for archival
purposes, and the rapid pace of change in hardware and software technology
suggests that it may be impossible to read the historical records in the
centuries to come, according to the report, "Preservation of Historical
Records."

William Holmes, director of the National Archives and Records Administration's
archival research and evaluation staff, stated that he agrees with the research
report's conclusions.

He said that although the agency plans a pilot test of digital imaging and
optical-disk technology, optical disks will be used only for public retrieval
and not for permanent storage.

"Even if the operating systems and documentation problems somehow are dealt
with, what is the archivist to do when the machine manufacturer declares the
hardware obsolete or simply goes out of business?," the research report adked.
"Will there be an IBM or a Sony in the year 2200?  If they still exist, will
they maintain a 1980-1990 vintage machine?" the report continued.

An example of the problem occurred in the mid-1970s when archivists discovered
that there were only two computers that could read the 1960 U.S. census; one
was in the Smithsonian Institution and the other was in Japan.

The inescapable conclusion, the researchers said, is that long-term archives
would be committed to an expensive file conversion program every 10-20 years if
it uses electronic media for permanent storage.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:  5 Sep 86 09:34 CDT
-FROM-
From: "Don Young"@csnet-relay.csnet,
      "Augmentation Systems Division"@csnet-relay.csnet,
      MDC <DFY.MDC@OFFICE-1.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:ComputerWorld 9/1/86p.31 "National Archives' Storage Under
Scrutiny"
-BODY-
[Note: this is a follow up to previous message. - Ed]

Thanks for putting this article on-line.

Yes, the National Archive folks have two major problems:

1.  The question that they ask us "WILL YOU BE AROUND AS A VENDOR TO SUPPORT
YOUR PRODUCT OVER THE LONG TERM".

2.  Problem with finding the proper recording devices for long term storage.

The positive thing in the article is that they confirmed that they are going to
run a pilot test.  This pilot test could be with ASD.  Also, the Air Force/Navy
Standard Multiuser small Computer Requirements Contract (RFIas this point)
describes Augment On-Line Files in good detail as a requirement.  The
specification is Augment coupled with the methodology used by AFCC.  Will hope
that the RFP states the same when available next month.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 4 of 4 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should have received the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 39-42. The previous parts have
 appeared in machine readable form in earlier issues of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Chosen by G.  Salton or V. Raghavan from 1984 issues of journals
in the retrieval area)

30. STRUCTURE   OF  HIERARCHIC  CLUSTERINGS:    IMPLICATIONS  FOR
    INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AND FOR MULTIVARIATE DATA ANALYSIS

    F. Murtagh
    Department  of Computer Science,  University College  Dublin,
    Dublin 4 Ireland

    Hierarchic  clustering  methods  may  be  used  to   condense
    information  for  a user,  as they are in  multivariate  data
    analysis, or to achieve computational advantages, as they are
    in  information retrieval.   The structure of the  hierarchic
    classification   produced   has  a  direct  bearing  on   the
    effectiveness and utility of using cluster analysis, yet this
    important  feature  of  the  classification  has  only   been
    implicitly  referred to in the literature to date.   In  this
    study,  three  different  coefficients are defined,  each  of
    which   quantify   the   symmetry-asymmetry    (balancedness-
    unbalancedness)  of hierarchic clusterings on a scale from  0
    to  1.   Using examples of data from the areas of information
    retrieval  and  of multivariate data analysis,  a  number  of
    hierarchic  clustering methods are discussed in terms of  the
    hierarchies they produce.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol. 20, No. 5/6, pp.
    611-617, 1984).

31. AUTOMATIC INDEXING OF FULL TEXTS

    Dr. Zdenek Jonak
    Central   Office  of  Scientific,   Technical  and   Economic
    Information, Prague, Czechoslovakia

    The  article deals with the preparation of query  description
    using  a  semantic analyser method based on the  analysis  of
    semantic structure of documents.   The aim of the paper is to
    demonstrate  the  efficiency of this method in the  field  of
    automatic  indexing.   The results obtained by means of  this
    method  are compared with results of  automatic  indexing
    performed by some traditional methods and with the results of
    indexing done by human indexers.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol. 20, No. 5/6, pp.
    619-627, 1984).


32. ASPECTS AND THE OVERLAP FUNCTION

    Marilyn M. Levine
    Dr.  Levine's Information Machine,  823 N.  2nd Street,  Room
    200, Milwaukee, WI 53203, USA

    Leonard P. Levine
    Department  of  Electrical Engineering and Computer  Science,
    University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI  53201, USA

    It  is  intuitively clear that putting the  cart  before  the
    horse  is not the same as putting the horse before the  cart.
    It  is equally clear that a history of philosphy is different
    from  a  philosophy  of history.   Yet there  is  no  logical
    relationship,  like  the AND/OR/NOT  functions,  which  would
    enable  manipulation  of  these  permuted,   non-commutative,
    relationships.   In  this  paper  we  present  a  system  for
    automatic  handing  of ordered sets,  states based  on  these
    sets, and of differing points of view regarding a Universe of
    Discourse.   We  call what we are dealing with aspects and we
    represent them by means of a new logical function called  the
    Overlap function.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol 20, NO. 5/6, pp.
    629-636, 1984).


33. A  COMPARISON  OF  TWO METHODS FOR  BOOLEAN  QUERY  RELEVANCY
    FEEDBACK

    G. Salton and E. Voorhees
    Department of Computer Science,  Cornell University,  Ithaca,
    NY 14853, USA

    E. A. Fox
    Department   of   Computer  Science,   Virginia   Polytechnic
    Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

    The relevance feedback process uses information derived  from
    an  initially retrieved set of documents to improve subsequnt
    search formulations and retrieval output.  In a Boolean query
    environment  this  implies  that  new  query  terms  must  be
    identified and Boolean operators must be chosen automatically
    to  connect  the  various query terms.   In  this  study  two
    recently proposed automatic methods for relevance feedback of
    Boolean  queries  are  evaluated and  conclusions  are  drawn
    concerning the use of effective feedback methods in a Boolean
    query environment.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol. 20, No. 5/6, pp.
    637-651, 1984).

34. ORGANIZATION OF CLUSTERED FILES FOR CONSECUTIVE RETRIEVAL

    J. S. Deogun
    University of Nebraska

    V. V. Raghavan and T. K. W. Tsou
    University of Regina

    This  paper  studies the problem of storing single-level  and
    multilevel   clustered  files.    Necessary  and   sufficient
    conditions  for  a single-level clustered file  to  have  the
    consecutive retrieval property (CRP) are developed.  A linear
    time algorithm to test the CRP for a given clustered file and
    to identify the proper arrangement of objects, If CRP exists,
    is  presented.   For the single-level clustered files that do
    not have CRP,  it is shown that the problem of identifying  a
    storage organization with minimum redundancy is NP-complete.

    Consequently,  an efficient heuristic algorithm to generate a
    good  storage  organization  for  such  files  is  developed.
    Furthermore,   it  is  shown  that,   for  certain  types  of
    multilevel   clustered   files,   there  exists   a   storage
    organization  such that the objects in each cluster,  for all
    clusters  in  each  level  of  the  clustering,   appear   in
    consecutive locations.

    (ACM  TRANSACTIONS  ON  DATABASE  SYSTEMS,  Vol.  9,  No.  4,
    December 1984, Pages 646-671)

35. LASER OPTICAL DISK:  THE COMING REVOLUTION IN ON-LINE STORAGE

    Larry Fujitani

    Commercially available only recently,  the optical disk drive
    uses  a  laser beam to burn impressions onto a plastic  disk.
    Employing  a  highly  focused  beam  rather  than  a  diffuse
    magnetic field to write, the laster optical disk drive yields
    storage densities up to 10 times those of magnetic disks.

    (COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, Vol. 27, Number 6, June 1984)

36. AUTOMATIC  SPELLING  CORRECTION IN SCIENTIFIC  AND  SCHOLARLY
    TEXT

    Joseph J. Pollock and Antonio Zamora

    An  automatic spelling correcting algorithm corrects most  of
    the 50,000 misspellings culled from 25,000,000 words of  text
    from  seven  scientific and scholarly databases.   It uses  a
    similarity  key to identify words in a large dictionary  that
    are  most similar to a particular misspelling,  and  then  an
    error-reversal  test to select from these the most  plausible
    correction(s).

    (COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, Vol. 27, Number 4, April, 1984)

37. THE DATA-DOCUMENT DISTINCTION IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

    David C. Blair

    The  speed  and effectiveness of documents retrieval  systems
    can  be  greatly improved by reducing the number  of  logical
    decisions  required of the user.   Based on the weighting  of
    single  terms by the user,  the proposed system  provides  an
    optimized search strategy by combining the terms to yield the
    highest  probabilities  and then calculating the size of  the
    retrieval set in each case.

    (COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, Vol. 27, Number 4, April 1984)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
42
-DATE-
Date: 13 Aug 86 20:36:33 EDT
-FROM-
From: MCCARTY@RED.RUTGERS.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conference on AI and Law
-BODY-
[Forwarded from: PROLOG Digest   Tuesday, 19 Aug 1986  V.4: Issue 39 - Ed]

                           CALL FOR PAPERS:
                  First International Conference on
                   ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW
                           May 27-29, 1987
                       Northeastern University
                      Boston, Massachusetts, USA
In recent years there has been an increased interest in the
applications of artificial intelligence to law.  Some of this interest
is due to the potential practical applications: A number of
researchers are developing legal expert systems, intended as an aid to
lawyers and judges; other researchers are developing conceptual legal
retrieval systems, intended as a complement to the existing full-text
legal retrieval systems.  But the problems in this field are very
difficult.  The natural language of the law is exceedingly complex,
and it is grounded in the fundamental patterns of human common sense
reasoning.  Thus, many researchers have also adopted the law as an
ideal problem domain in which to tackle some of the basic theoretical
issues in AI: the representation of common sense concepts; the process
of reasoning with concrete examples; the construction and use of
analogies; etc.  There is reason to believe that a thorough
interdisciplinary approach to these problems will have significance
for both fields, with both practical and theoretical benefits.
The purpose of this First International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence and Law is to stimulate further collaboration between AI
researchers and lawyers, and to provide a forum for the latest
research results in the field.  The conference is sponsored by the
Center for Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University.  The
General Chair is: Carole D.  Hafner, College of Computer Science,
Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston MA 02115,
USA; (617) 437-5116 or (617) 437-2462; hafner.northeastern@csnet.
Authors are invited to contribute papers on the following topics:
   - Legal Expert Systems
   - Conceptual Legal Retrieval Systems
   - Automatic Processing of Natural Legal Texts
   - Computational Models of Legal Reasoning
In addition, papers on the relevant theoretical issues in AI are also
invited, if the relationship to the law can be clearly demonstrated.
It is important that authors identify the original contributions
presented in their papers, and that they include a comparison with
previous work.  Each submission will be reviewed by at least three
members of the Program Committee (listed below), and judged as to its
originality, quality and significance.
Authors should submit six (6) copies of an Extended Abstract (6 to 8
pages) by January 15, 1987, to the Program Chair: L.  Thorne McCarty,
Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ
08903, USA; (201) 932-2657; mccarty@rutgers.arpa.  Notification of
acceptance or rejection will be sent out by March 1, 1987.  Final
camera-ready copy of the complete paper (up to 15 pages) will be due
by April 15, 1987.
Conference Chair: Carole D. Hafner         Northeastern University
Program Chair:    L. Thorne McCarty        Rutgers University
Program           Donald H. Berman         Northeastern University
Committee:        Michael G. Dyer          UCLA
                  Edwina L. Rissland       University of Massachusetts
                  Marek J. Sergot          Imperial College, London
                  Donald A. Waterman       The RAND Corporation
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 86 18:38:39 edt
From: E1AR0002%SMUVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: recent abstracts (from SMU)


%A Michael Lebowitz
%T Researcher: An Experimental Intelligent Information Systems
%R CUCS-171-85
%I Columbia University
%C New York City
%K AI02 AA14

%H TR85-037
%A Cary G. deBessonet
%A George R. Cross
%T Distinguishing Legal Language-Types for Conceptual Retrieval
%R LSU Computer Science Technical Report TR85-037
%K AA24 AA14 AI02

%A Michael Lesk
%T Writing to be Searched: A Workshop on Document Generation Principles
%J SIGIR Forum
%V 19
%N 1-4
%D WINTER 1986
%P 9-14
%K Cucumber Information Knowledge Systems AI02 A08  AA14
%X "It is now possible to design full-text retrieval systems that accept
conventional docuements and questions in natural English, and then retrieve
documents or passages from documents that probably answer the questions."
Cucumber Information Systems and Knowledge Systems, Inc. sell such systems.
A high degree of grammatical variation does not seem important to produce
natural effects in short paragraphs (as evidenced by Karen Kukich's
stock market report generator)"  "Syntax is much less important
for retrieval than semantics; you need to know what the words mean more
than you need to know their relationship."  "Editing manuals to make
them suitable for machine translation, requiring simple translation, has
turned out to make them better in the original language as well."

%A Susanne M. Humphrey
%T Automated Classification and Retrieval Program: Indexing Aid Project
%J SIGIR Forum
%V 19
%N 1-4
%D WINTER 1986
%P 16-17
%K AA14 AI02 AA01
%X Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine is
developing this system to generate indices consistent with
those normally used by MEDLINE.  They are using a frame based system.

%A N. Fuhr
%A G. E. Knorz
%T Retrieval Test Evaluation of a Rule Based Automatic Indexing
(AIR/PHYS)
%K AI01 AA14
%B Proceedings of the Third Joint BCS and ACM Symposium
%E C. J. van Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University Press
%D 1984

%A W. S. Cooper
%T Bridging the Gap between AI and IR
%B Proceedings of the Third Joint BCS and ACM Symposium
%E C. J. van Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University Press
%D 1984
%K AI01 AA14

%A M. Balaban
%T Knowledge Representation and Inferencing in a Musical Database
%R TR 85-11
%I State University of New York at Albany, Computer Science Department
%K frames AA25 AA14 T02

%R 127
%A J. K. Cipolaro
%A N. V. Findler
%T MARSHA, the daughter of ELIZA \- a simple
program for information retrieval in
natural language
%I SUNY Buffalo Computer Science
%K AA02 AA14

%R 141
%A N. V. Findler
%T A heuristic information retrievalsystem based on
associative networks
%D February 1978
%I SUNY Buffalo Computer Science
%K AI12 AA14

%A John W. Lloyd
%T An Introduction to Deductive Database Systems
%R Technical Report 81/3
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D April 1981 (revised April 1983)
%P 24
%K  T02 AA14  AA09
%O also in Australian Computer Journal, vol.15, 1983
%X
  This paper gives a tutorial introduction to deductive database systems.
Such systems have developed largely from the combined application of the
ideas of logic programming and relational databases. The elegant theoretical
framework for deductive database systems is provided by first order logic.
Logic is used as a uniform language for data, programs, queries, views
and integrity constraints. It is stressed that it is possible to build
practical and efficient database systems using these ideas.

%A John W. Lloyd
%T Implementing Clause Indexing for Deductive Database Systems
%R Technical Report 81/4
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D October 1981
%P 22
%K AA14 AA09
%X
  The paper presents a file design for handling partial-match
queries which has wide application to knowledge-based artificial
intelligence systems and relational database systems.  The
advantages of the design are simplicity of implementation, the
ability to cope with dynamic files and the ability to optimize
performance with respect to the average number of disk access
required to answer a query.

%A Lee Naish
%A James A. Thom
%T The MU-Prolog Deductive Database
%R Technical Report 83/10
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D November 1983
%P 16
%K muprolog, partial match retrieval, unix T02 AA09 AA14
%X
  This paper describes the implementation and an application of a
deductive database being developed at the University of Melbourne.
The system is implemented by adding a partial match retrieval system
to the MU-PROLOG interpreter.

%A Rodney W. Topor
%A Teresa Keddis
%A Derek W. Wright
%T Deductive Database Tools
%R Technical Report 84/7
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D June 1984 (revised August 1985)
%P 27
%K database management, deductive database, query language,
integrity constraint, logic programming, T02 AA14 AA09 T02
AI10
%O also in Australian Computer Journal, vol.?, 1985
%X
  A deductive database is a database in which data can be represented
both explicitly by facts and implicitly by general rules. The use of
typed first order logic as a definition and manipulation language for
such deductive databases is advocated and illustrated by examples.
Such a language has a well-understood theory and provides a uniform
notation for data, queries, integrity constraints, views and programs.
We present algorithms for implementing domains, for using atoms with
named attributes, for evaluating queries, and for checking static and
transition integrity constraints.  The implementation is by translation
into Prolog and can be performed using a standard Prolog system. The
paper assumes some familiarity with relational databases, logic and Prolog.

%A John W. Lloyd
%A Rodney W. Topor
%T Making Prolog More Expressive
%R Technical Report 84/8
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D June 1984
%P 22
%K first order logic, programming in logic, deductive databases,
query language AI10 AA14 AA09
%O also in Journal of Logic Programming, vol.4, 1984
%X This paper introduces extended programs and extended goals for logic
programming. A clause in an extended program can have an arbitrary first
order formula as its body.  Similarly, an extended goal can have an arbitrary
first order formula as its body. The main results of the paper are the
soundness of the negation as failure rule and SLDNF-resolution for extended
programs and goals. We show how the increased expressibility of extended
programs and goals can be easily implemented in any PROLOG system which has
a sound implementation of the negation as failure rule. We also show how
these ideas can be used to implement first order logic as a query language
in a deductive database system. An application to integrity constraints in
deductive database systems is also given.

%A John W. Lloyd
%A Rodney W. Topor
%T A Basis for Deductive Database Systems
%R Technical Report 85/1
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D February 1985 (revised April 1985)
%P 22
%K logic programming, first order logic, soundness, integrity constraints
AA14 AA09 T02
%X
  This paper provides a theoretical basis for deductive database systems.
A deductive database consists of closed typed first order logic formulas
of the form A<-W, where A is an atom and W is a typed first order formula.
A typed first order formula can be used as a query and a closed typed first
order formula can be used as an integrity constraint. Functions are allowed
to appear in formulas. Such a deductive database system can be implemented
using a PROLOG system. The main results are the soundness of the query
evaluation process, the soundness of the implementation of integrity
constraints, and a simplification theorem for implementing integrity
constraints. A short list of open problems is also presented.

%A John W. Lloyd
%A Rodney W. Topor
%T A Basis for Deductive Database Systems II
%R Technical Report 85/6
%I Department of Computer Science, University of Melbourne
%D February 1985 (revised April 1985)
%P 17
%K AI10 first order logic, soundness, integrity constraints,
query evaluation  AA09 AA14
%X
  This paper is the third in a series providing a theoretical basis for
deductive database systems. A deductive database consists of closed typed
first order logic formulas of the form A<-W, where A is an atom and W is a
typed first order formula. A typed first order formula can be used as a
query and a closed typed first order formula can be used as an integrity
constraint. Functions are allowed to appear in formulas. Such a deductive
database system can be implemented using a PROLOG system. The main results
of this paper are concerned with the non-floundering and completeness of
query evaluation. We also introduce an alternative query evaluation process
and show that corresponding versions of the earlier results can be obtained.
Finally, we summarize the results of the three papers and discuss the
attractive properties of the deductive database system approach based on
first order logic.

%A B. R. Boyce
%T Questions Natural Language Examples in Caduceus
%J OnLine
%V 10
%N 2
%D MAR 1986
%P 54-76
%K AA01 AI01 AI02 AA14

%A Viswanath Subramanian
%A Gautam Biswas
%A James C. Bezdek
%T Document Retrieval Using a Fuzzy Knowledge Based System
%J MAG24
%P 445-455
%K AA14 O04
>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
43
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      More SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 1 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should have received the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 23-24. The remaining parts will
 appear in machine readable form in later issues of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Selected from recent issues of journals)

1.  USING   INTERDOCUMENT  SIMILARITY  INFORMATION  IN   DOCUMENT
    RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS

    Alan Griffiths, H. Claire Luckhurst, and Peter Willett
    Department  of Information Studies,  University of Sheffield,
    Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom

    The  first part of this paper reports a comparative study  of
    the  document  classifications  produced by the  use  of  the
    single linkage,  complete linkage,  group average,  and  Ward
    clustering methods.  Studies of cluster membership and of the
    effectiveness  of cluster searches support previous  findings
    that  suggest  that  the single linkage  classifications  are
    rather  different  from  those produced by  the  other  three
    methods.   These latter methods all produce large numbers  of
    small  clusters  containing just pairs  of  documents.   This
    finding motivates the work reported in the second part of the
    paper,  which  considers the use of clusters consisting of  a
    document together  with  that document with which it is  most
    similar.   A  comparison  of  the use of such  clusters  with
    conventional  best match searches using seven documents  test
    collections  suggest   that  the two types of search  are  of
    comparable  effectiveness,   but  they  retrieve   noticeably
    different sets of relevant documents.

    (JASIS, Vol. 37(1): 3-11, 1986)

2.  TOWARDS EXPERT SYSTEMS FOR THE SELECTION OF SEARCH KEYS

    Raya Fidel
    Graduate   School   of  Library  and   Information   Science,
    University of Washington, Seattle, WA  98195

    Intermediary  expert systems are designed to mediate  between
    end-users   and   complex  information   retrieval   systems.
    However,   since  most  of these expert systems are based  on
    text analysis rather than on models of human searching,  they
    cannot process request-related criteria, such as precision or
    recall requirements.   Analysis of the searching behavior  of
    human  intermediaries revealed a routine for the selection of
    search  keys  - freetext or controlled vocabulary  - along  a
    decision tree.   Examples of decision rules demonstrate  that
    although  further  research is required,  these rules can  be
    automated  to  significantly  enhance  the  adaptability   of
    intermediary expert systems.

    (JASIS, Vol 37(1): 37-44, 1986)

3.  DESIGNING MENU SELECTION SYSTEMS

    Ben Schneiderman
    Department  of  Computer  Science,  University  of  Maryland,
    College Park, MD  20742

    Menu  selection  systems  reduce training  and  memorization,
    simplify  entry of choices,  and structure the user's  tasks.
    However,  the  use  of menu selection is  no  guarantee  that
    novices  or  experts will be satisfied or able to  carry  out
    their  work.   This  article focuses on the  multiple  design
    issues in creating successful menu selection systems.   These
    include the primary issue of semantic organization and a host
    of  secondary issues such as response time and display rates,
    shortcuts for frequent users, titles, phrasing of menu items,
    graphic layout,  and selection mechanisms.  Novel  approaches
    such   as  popup  menus  and  embedded  menus  are   covered.
    Experimental results and design guidelines are presented.

    (JASIS, Vol. 37(2): 57-70: 1986)

4.  Boolean   Queries  and  Term  Dependencies  in  Probabilistic
    Retrieval Models

    W. Bruce Croft
    Computer  and Information Science Department,  University  of
    Massachusetts, Amherst, MA  01003

    A  method of integrating Boolean queries  with  probabilistic
    retrieval   models   is  proposed.    Boolean   queries   are
    interpreted  as specifying term dependencies that can be used
    to  correct  the  documents  scores  obtained  with  a  basic
    probabilistic  model.    Alternative  methods  of   obtaining
    dependency information,  such as user-specified phrases,  can
    also  be  used in this approach.   The  experimental  results
    indicate   that  significant  performance  benefits  can   be
    obtained,  particularly  when  dependencies are derived  from
    term phrases identified in natural language queries.

    (JASIS, Vol. 37(2): 71-77: 1986)

5.  AN INVESTIGATION OF DOCUMENTS PARTITIONS

    W. M. Shaw, Jr.
    School  of  Library Science,  University of  North  Carolina,
    Chapel Hill, NC  27514

    In  this  paper,   the  empirical  significance  of  document
    partitions  is investigated as a function of term-weight  and
    similarity  thresholds.   The term-weight threshold selects a
    particular level of indexing exhaustivity and specificity for
    the  document  representation and  the  similarity  threshold
    selects  a  specific  level  of  the  associated  single-link
    hierarchy.   The  results  show  that  the  same  empirically
    "preferred"  partitions  can be detected by  two  independent
    strategies:    an   analysis   of   cluster-based   retrieval
    effectiveness   and  an  analysis  of  regularities  in   the
    underlying  structure of the document  graph.   These results
    represent  the  first step in an  investigation  designed  to
    determine   if  the  statistical  significance  of   document
    partitions can explain the empirical significance of the same
    partitions.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  22, No. 1, pp.
    19-28, 1986)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
44
-FROM-
From: Mitchell Wyle <wyle@ethz.uucp>
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 86 13:10:16 -0200
-SUBJECT-
Subject: paper on research in automatic indexing
-BODY-
...
I just joined professor H.P. Frei's IR group.  I am preparing a conspectus
paper of the fundamentals and current research in automatic indexing in IR.
Thanks in advance.   -M Wyle
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 86 18:37:08 edt
-FROM-
From: sdpage%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Code to match sound-alike words?
-BODY-
I have vague memories of a code which will map two words which sound
alike onto each other. The typical application is an airline
reservations system, where a telephone caller could be saying "Smith" or
"Smyth" -- the database query system will match either.

Can anyone give me a reference to a code like this one?   - Thanks.

Stephen Page
Programming Research Group -- Oxford
sdpage%prg.oxford.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk

[Note: some early work is described below
  Davidson, Leon.  Retrieval of Misspelled Names in an Airlines
     Passenger Record System.  Commun. ACM, 5(5): 169-71, May 1962.
  Greenfield, R.H.  An Experiment to Measure the Performance of
     Phonetic Key Compression Retrieval Schemes.  Meth. Inform. Med.,
     16: 230-233, 1977.
  Joseph, D.M. and Ruth L. Wong.  Correction of Misspellings and
     Typographic Errors in a Free-Text Medical English Information Storage
     and Retrieval System.  Meth. Inform. Med., 18: 228-234 (sic?), 1979.
 perhaps others will comment on more recent articles - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 86 18:40:45 edt
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@AI.AI.MIT.EDU
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar

	Date: Tuesday, 9 September 1986  11:09-EDT
	From: AHAAS at G.BBN.COM

Thursday, 11 September 10:00am  Room: BBN 2nd Floor Large Conference
                                       Room, 10 Moulton St.


               BBN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR

              Interactive Incremental Speech Input:
Interim Report on a Linguistics/AI Approach to Speech Recognition

                         Henry Thompson
                     University of Edinburgh


The Alvey Large Scale Demonstrator Project entitled 'Speech Input
Workstation and Word Processor' is a British effort involving the
Plessey company and three universities, including  Edinburgh,  in
the  construction  of a demonstration prototype of a commercially
viable speech input system.  Edinburgh  is  responsible  for  the
speech  processing  aspects  of the project.  In this talk I will
try to cover three things:

1) An overview of the systems architecture and methodology of our
   work.   We  are committed to using explicit knowledge bases at
   as many levels of the processing  as  possible,  to  employing
   parsing  (active  chart based) in using those knowledge bases,
   and to supporting only selective, as opposed to instructional,
   interaction between levels.

2) A brief report of the performance of our first milestone  sys-
   tem,  which came up in June of this year about 18 months in to
   our five year effort.

3) A more detailed exposition of how we are employing parsing  at
   the segmentation and labelling level.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
-FROM-
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      More SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 2 - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should have received the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 24-27. The remaining part will
 appear in machine readable form in the next issue of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Selected from recent issues of journals)

6.  STATISTICS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL EXPERIMENTS

    V. E. Weissmann
    Institut  fur Angewandte Informatik,  Technische  Universitat
    Berlin Projekt LIVE

    Nearly all people use statistics, but very often in the wrong
    way.  To give some clues for the proper use of statistics,  a
    framework  will  be  developed  in this  paper  to  help  one
    understand  the  methodology  of applying  statistics  in  IR
    experiments.

    The  central  idea of this framework is that  one  should  i)
    distinguish between two kinds of models:  an expert model and
    a  mathematical-statistical  model,  and ii)  recognize  that
    these two models are highly interdependent.

    The  argument  for  the need for these two  models  (and  the
    distinction  between  them)  will  follow  a  meta-scientific
    approach of J. D. Sneed[1].

    To  make  the numerous relationships in this  framework  more
    comprehensible a graphical method called Isac is used.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  22, No. 1, pp.
    29-37, 1986).

7.  INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN AN OFFICE FILING FACILITY AND FUTURE
    WORK IN PROJECT MINSTREL

    A. F. Smeaton and C. J. Van Rijsbergen
    University  College Dublin,  Department of Computer  Science,
    Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    In  this paper we review filing and retrieval mechanisms  for
    unstructured  and mixed media information in an office filing
    facility.  In particular, we concentrate on methods of filing
    and  retrieval using the content of the unstructured or  free
    text parts of office objects, but the state of the art in the
    handling of voice and image data is also discussed.   Two  of
    the  ways of implementing content retrieval of free text  are
    to  search the text itself or to search some text  surrogate.
    Two of the problems associated with the latter method, choice
    of  an internal representation form and analysis of text into
    this form, are detailed in the paper.  Finally, an outline is
    given of work to be done as part of Project Minstrel.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING AND MANAGEMENT,  Vol.  22, No. 2, pp.
    135-149, 1986).

8.  AN   INDUCTIVE   SEARCH   SYSTEM:     THEORY,   DESIGN,   AND
    IMPLEMENTATION

    M. E. Maron and Paul Thompson
    School of Library and Information Studies
    University of California,
    Berkeley, CA  94720

    Sean Curry
    University of California
    San Francisco, CA   94143

    An  automated information system that can accept requests for
    information   and,   in  response,   selects  and  ranks   by
    probability of satisfaction the names of those people who can
    answer  the  input queries is  described.   This  information
    system (called Helpnet) is based on new probabilistic  design
    principles,   which   were  previously  proposed  (but  never
    implemented) for the document retrieval problem.  Helpnet has
    now  been  implemented  on an  IBM  Personal  Computer.   The
    theoretical  design  principles  used  for  Helpnet  and  the
    computer programs used by this implementation of Helpnet  are
    discussed.   Also,  a  preliminary  sensitivity  analysis  is
    presented,  which  looks at the question of how imput  errors
    influence  the  rankings at the  output.   The  probabilistic
    design  principles  used in Helpnet can be applied to a  much
    larger class of similar situations,  which we call "inductive
    search" situations.

    (IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN AND CYBERNETICS, Vol. SMC-
    16, No. 1, pp. 21-28, January/February 1986)

9.  MULTIPLE   GENERATION  TEXT  FILES  USING  OVERLAPPING   TREE
    STRUCTURES

    F. Waren Burton
    Department  of Electrical Engineering and  Computer  Science,
    University of Colorado at Denver, Denver, Colorado 80202, USA

    Matthew M. Huntbach
    Cognitive Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K.

    J. (Yiannis) G. Kollias
    Department of Computer Science, National Technical University
    of  Athens,  9  Heroon Polytechniou Avenue,  Zografou  Athens
    (624), Greece

    When repeatedly editing a text file,  one is often faced with
    a  choice  of  keeping  previous  generation  for  backup  or
    deleting previous generations to reduce storage requirements.
    Since  on generation of a text file is often very similar  to
    the  previous  generation,  the above conflict can  often  be
    resolved by sharing much of the common information.

    We  propose using a tree structure to represent a text  file.
    Common  subtrees  can be shared.   Results of  an  experiment
    with one file are reported.

    (THE COMPUTER JOURNAL, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 414-416, 1985)

10. STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF THE STRING STATISTICS PROBLEM

    A. Apostolico
    Department  of  Computer  Science,  Purdue  University,  West
    Lafayette, Indiana  47907

    F. P. Preparata
    Coordinated  Sciences Laboratory,  University of Illinois  at
    Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801

    A  suitably weighted Index Tree such as a B-tree or a  Suffix
    Tree can be easily adapted to store, for a given string x and
    for all substrings w of x,  the number of distinct  instances
    of w along x.  The storage needed is seen to be linear in the
    length  of x:  moreover,  the whole statistics can itself  be
    derived in linear time,  off-line of a RAM.  If the substring
    w  has nontrivial periods,  however,  the number of  distinct
    instances  might differ from that of distinct  nonoverlapping
    occurrences  along  x.   It  is shown here that  O(n  log  n)
    storage  units  - n  standing  for  the  length  of  x  - are
    sufficient  to  organize this second kind of  statistics,  in
    such  a  way  that  the  maximum  number  of   nonoverlapping
    instances  for  arbitrary  w along x can be  retrieved  in  a
    number  of character comparisons not exceeding the length  of
    w.

    (JOURNAL OF COMPUTER AND SYSTEM SCIENCES  31, 394-411, 1985)


11. A  COMPARISON  OF A NETWORK STRUCTURE AND A  DATABASE  SYSTEM
    USED FOR DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL

    W. Bruce Croft
    Thomas J. Parenty
    Computer  and Information Science Department,  University  of
    Massachusetts, Amherst, MA  01003

    Database   systems  have  many  advantages  for  implementing
    document retrieval systems.  One of the main advantages would
    be  the  integration of data and text handling  in  a  single
    information system.   However, it has not been clear how much
    a  database implementation would cost in terms of efficiency.
    In  this paper,  we compare a database implementation  and  a
    stand-alone  implementation  of a flexible representation  of
    the   content   of  documents  and  the   associated   search
    strategies.  The representation used is a network of document
    and  index  term nodes.   The comparison shows  that  certain
    features  of a database system can have a significant  effect
    on the efficiency of the implementation.   Despite  this,  it
    appears  that  a database implementation of  a  sophisticated
    document  retrieval  system can be competitive with a  stand-
    alone implemention.

    (INFORM. SYSTEMS Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 377-390, 1985)

12. A NOTE ON NATURAL SELECTION

    Wlodzimierz Dobosiewicz
    Department  of Computing Information Science,  University  of
    Guelph, Guelph, Ontario  N1G 2W1, Canada

    Replacement  selection is the most popular algorithm used  in
    the  creation of initial runs for a sort/merge external sort.
    In  1972,  Frazer  and Wong  suggested  a  variation,  called
    natural  selection,  which uses an auxiliary memory reservoir
    to   increase  the  performance  of  replacement   selection.
    Natural  selection  produces  longer  runs  than  replacement
    selection  if the auxiliary memory reservoir is  sufficiently
    large,  but  it  behaves very strangely when the size of  the
    auxiliary memory is small:  while using more memory resources
    than  replacement selection,  it creates shorter  runs,  thus
    being less efficient.

    As it turns out,  this deficiency can be avoided at low cost.
    This  note presents a variation of natural selection that  is
    efficient when the auxiliary memory is small.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING LETTERS 21 (1985) 239-243)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
45
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 86 06:40:30 edt
-FROM-
From: keller@UTAH-CS.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SLP '86
-BODY-
We have requested, and the IEEE has agreed, that
Symposium registrations be accepted at the "early" fee for a
couple of more days, so please act immediately by sending
the enclosed coupon if you wish to exploit this rate.

Hotel Reservations: phone 801-531-1000, telex 389434

The (nearly) final schedule:
                             SLP '86

                     Third IEEE Symposium on
                        LOGIC PROGRAMMING

                      September 21-25, 1986
                        Westin Hotel Utah
                      Salt Lake City, Utah

SUNDAY, September 21
19:00 - 22:00   Symposium and tutorial registration

MONDAY, September 22
08:00 - 09:00   Symposium and tutorial registration
09:00 - 17:30 TUTORIALS (concurrent) Please see abstracts later.
   George Luger            Introduction to AI Programming in Prolog
     University of New Mexico
   David Scott Warren              Building Prolog Interpreters
     SUNY, Stony Brook
   John Conery           Theory of Parallelism, with Applications to
     University of Oregon                   Logic Programming
12:00 - 17:30   Exhibit set up time
18:00 - 22:00   Symposium registration
20:00 - 22:00   Reception

TUESDAY, September 23
08:00 - 12:30   Symposium registration
09:00           Exhibits open
09:00 - 09:30   Welcome and announcements
09:30 - 10:30   INVITED SPEAKER:
                        W. W. Bledsoe, MCC
                 Some Thoughts on Proof Discovery
11:00 - 12:30   SESSION 1: Applications
                           (Chair: Harvey Abramson)
  The Logic of Tensed Statements in English -an Application of Logic
Programming
     Peter Ohrstrom, University of Aalborg
     Nils Klarlund, University of Aarhus
  Incremental Flavor-Mixing of Meta-Interpreters for Expert System Construction
     Leon Sterling and Randall D. Beer, Case Western Reserve University
  The Phoning Philosopher's Problem or
       Logic Programming for Telecommunications Applications
     J.L. Armstrong, N.A. Elshiewy, and R. Virding; Ericsson Telecom
14:00 - 15:30   SESSION 2: Secondary Storage
                           (Chair: Maurice Bruynooghe)
  EDUCE - A Marriage of Convenience: Prolog and a Relational DBMS
     Jorge Bocca, ECRC, Munich
  Paging Strategy for Prolog Based Dynamic Virtual Memory
     Mark Ross, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
     K. Ramamohanarao, University of Melbourne
  A Logical Treatment of Secondary Storage
     Anthony J. Kusalik, University of Saskatchewan
     Ian T. Foster, Imperial College, London
16:00 - 17:30   SESSION 3: Compilation
                           (Chair: Richard O'Keefe)
  Compiling Control
     Maurice Bruynooghe, Danny De Schreye, Bruno Krekels
     Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
  Automatic Mode Inference for Prolog Programs
     Saumya K. Debray, David S. Warren
     SUNY at Stony Brook
  IDEAL: an Ideal DEductive Applicative Language
     Pier Giorgio Bosco, Elio Giovannetti
     C.S.E.L.T., Torino
17:30 - 19:30   Reception
20:30 - 22:30   Panel (Wm. Kornfeld, moderator)
                Logic Programming for Systems Programming
		Panelists:  Steve Taylor, Weizmann Institute
			    Steve Gregory, Imperial College
                            Bill Wadge
                            A researcher from ICOT
                            (sorry this is incomplete)

WEDNESDAY, September 24
09:00 - 10:00   INVITED SPEAKER:
                        Sten Ake Tarnlund, Uppsala University
                          Logic Programming - A Logical View
10:30 - 12:00   SESSION 4: Theory
                           (Chair: Jean-Louis Lassez)
  A Theory of Modules for Logic Programming
     Dale Miller, University of Pennsylvania
  Building-In Classical Equality into Prolog
     P. Hoddinott, E.W. Elcock; The University of Western Ontario
  Negation as Failure Using Tight Derivations
       for General Logic Programs
     Allen Van Gelder, Stanford University
13:30 - 15:00   SESSION 5: Control
                           (Chair: Jacques Cohen)
  Characterisation of Terminating Logic Programs
     Thomas Vasak, The University of New South Wales
     John Potter, New South Wales Institute of Technology
  An Execution Model for Committed-Choice Non-Deterministic Languages
     Jim Crammond, Heriot-Watt University
  Timestamped Term Representation in Implementing Prolog
     Heikki Mannila, Esko Ukkonen; University of Helsinki
15:30 - 22:00   Excursion

THURSDAY, September 25
09:00 - 10:30   SESSION 6: Unification
                           (Chair: Uday Reddy)
  Refutation Methods for Horn Clauses with Equality Based on E-Unification
     Jean H. Gallier and Stan Raatz, University of Pennsylvania
  An Algorithm for Unification in Equational Theories
     Alberto Martelli, Gianfranco Rossi; Universita' di Torino
  An Implementation of Narrowing: the RITE Way
     Alan Josephson and Nachum Dershowitz; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
11:00 - 12:30   SESSION 7: Parallelism
                           (Chair: Jim Crammond)
  Selecting the Backtrack Literal in the  AND Process of AND/OR Process Model
     Nam S. Woo and Kwang-Moo Choe; AT & T Bell Laboratories
  Distributed Semi-Intelligent Backtracking for Stack-based AND-parallel Prolog
     Peter Borgwardt, Tektronix Labs
     Doris Rea, University of Minnesota
  The Sync Model for Parallel Execution of Logic Programming
     Pey-yun Peggy Li and Alain J. Martin; California Institute of Technology
14:00 - 15:30   SESSION 8: Performance
  Redundancy in Function-Free Recursive Rules
     Jeff Naughton, Stanford University
  Performance Evaluation of a Storage Model for OR-Parallel Execution
     Andrzej Ciepelewski and Bogumil Hausman
     Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS)
  MALI: A Memory with a Real-Time Garbage Collector
       for Implementing Logic Programming Languages
     Yves Bekkers, Bernard Canet, Olivier Ridoux, Lucien Ungaro
     IRISA/INRIA Rennes
16:00 - 17:30   SESSION 9: Warren Abstract Machine
                           (Chair: Manuel Hermenegildo)
  A High Performance LOW RISC Machine for Logic Programming
     J.W. Mills, Arizona State University
  Register Allocation in a Prolog Machine
     Saumya K. Debray, SUNY at Stony Brook
  Garbage Cut for Garbage Collection of Iterative Programs
     Jonas Barklund and Hakan Millroth, Uppsala University

EXHIBITS:

An exhibit  area  including  displays  by  publishers,  equipment
manufacturers, and software houses will accompany the  Symposium.
The list of exhibitors includes: Arity, Addison-Wesley, Elsevier,
Expert Systems, Logicware, Overbeek Enterprises, Prolog  Systems,
and Quintus.  For more information, please contact:

                Dr. Ross A. Overbeek
                Mathematics and Computer Science Division
                Argonne National Laboratory
                9700 South Cass Ave.
                Argonne, IL 60439
                312/972-7856


ACCOMODATIONS, MEALS AND SOCIAL EVENTS, TRAVEL, CLIMATE,
SLP '86 Symposium and Tutorial Registration Coupon,
SLP '86 Hotel Reservation Coupon:
   [edited out - Ed]


                   SLP '86 TUTORIAL ABSTRACTS


       IMPLEMENTATION OF PROLOG INTERPRETERS AND COMPILERS

                       DAVID SCOTT WARREN
                       SUNY AT STONY BROOK

Prolog is  by far  the  most used  of various  logic  programming
languages that have been  proposed.  The reason  for this is  the
existence of very efficient implementations.  This tutorial  will
show in detail how this efficiency is achieved.

The first  half  of  this tutorial  will  concentrate  on  Prolog
compilation.  The approach  is first to  define a Prolog  Virtual
Machine (PVM), which can  be implemented in software,  microcode,
hardware, or  by  translation  to the  language  of  an  existing
machine.  We will describe  in detail the  PVM defined by  D.H.D.
Warren (SRI Technical Note 309) and discuss how its data  objects
can be represented  efficiently.  We  will also  cover issues  of
compilation  of  Prolog  source   programs  into  efficient   PVM
programs.



               ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PROLOG:
                 AN INTRODUCTION TO THEORETICAL
                ISSUES IN AI WITH PROLOG EXAMPLES

                         GEORGE F. LUGER

                    UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

This tutorial is intended to introduce the important concepts  of
both  Artificial   Intelligence   and  Logic   Programming.    To
accomplish this  task,  the  theoretical issues  involved  in  AI
problem solving are  presented and discussed.   These issues  are
exemplified with programs  written in Prolog  that implement  the
core ideas.   Finally,  the design  of  a Prolog  interpreter  as
Resolution Refutation system is presented.

The main  ideas  from  AI  problem  solving  that  are  presented
include: 1) An introduction of  AI as representation and  search.
2)  An  introduction  of  the  Predicate  Calculus  as  the  main
representation formalism for Artificial Intelligence.  3)  Simple
examples  of  Predicate  Calculus  representations,  including  a
relational data  base.   4)  Unification and  its  role  both  in
Predicate  Calculus  and  Prolog.   5)  Recursion,  the   control
mechanism for searching trees and graphs, 6) The design of search
strategies, especially depth first, breadth first and best  first
or "heuristic" techniques, and 7)  The Production System and  its
use both for organizing search in a Prolog data base, as well  as
the basic data structure for "rule based" Expert Systems.

The  above  topics  are  presented  with  simple  Prolog  program
implementations,  including   a   Production  System   code   for
demonstrating search strategies.  The final topic presented is an
analysis of  the  Prolog  interpreter and  an  analysis  of  this
approach  to  the  more  general  issue  of  logic   programming.
Resolution is considered as an inference strategy and its use  in
a refutation system for  "answer extraction" is presented.   More
general issues in  AI problem  solving, such as  the relation  of
"logic" to "functional" programming are also discussed.



                PARALLELISM IN LOGIC PROGRAMMING

                          JOHN CONERY
                     UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

The fields  of parallel  processing  and logic  programming  have
independently   attracted   great   interest   among    computing
professionals  recently,  and  there  is  currently  considerable
activity at  the  interface, i.e.  in  applying the  concepts  of
parallel computing to  logic programming  and, more  specifically
yet,  to  Prolog.   The  application  of  parallelism  to   Logic
Programming takes two  basic but related  directions.  The  first
involves leaving  the semantics  of sequential  programming,  say
ordinary Prolog,  as intact  as possible,  and uses  parallelism,
hidden from the programmer, to improve execution speed.  This has
traditionally been a difficult problem requiring very intelligent
compilers.  It may  be an easier  problem with logic  programming
since parallelism is  not artificially made  sequential, as  with
many applications expressed in procedural languages.  The  second
direction involves adding new parallel programming primitives  to
Logic Programming to allow  the programmer to explicitly  express
the parallelism in an application.

This tutorial will assume a basic knowledge of Logic Programming,
but  will  describe   current  research   in  parallel   computer
architectures, and will survey many of the new parallel machines,
including shared-memory  architectures  (RP3,  for  example)  and
non-shared-memory   architectures   (hypercube   machines,    for
example).  The tutorial  will then describe  many of the  current
proposals for parallelism in  Logic Programming, including  those
that allow the  programmer to express  the parallelism and  those
that hide the parallelism from the programmer.  Included will  be
such proposals as Concurrent Prolog, Parlog, Guarded Horn Clauses
(GHC), and Delta-Prolog.   An attempt will  be made to  partially
evaluate  many  of  these  proposals  for  parallelism  in  Logic
Programming, both  from a  pragmatic architectural  viewpoint  as
well as from a semantic viewpoint.

                     Conference Chairperson
               Gary Lindstrom, University of Utah

                       Program Chairperson
              Robert M. Keller, University of Utah

                 Local Arrangements Chairperson
             Thomas C. Henderson, University of Utah

                      Tutorials Chairperson
             George Luger, University of New Mexico

                      Exhibits Chairperson
              Ross Overbeek, Argonne National Lab.

                        Program Committee

                     Francois Bancilhon, MCC
                    John Conery, U. of Oregon
                    Al Despain, U.C. Berkeley
                  Herve Gallaire, ECRC, Munich
                  Seif Haridi, SICS, Stockholm
                     Lynette Hirschman, SDC
                     Peter Kogge, IBM, Owego
                William Kornfeld, Quintus Systems
               Gary Lindstrom, University of Utah
             George Luger, University of New Mexico
                   Rikio Onai, ICOT/NTT, Tokyo
              Ross Overbeek, Argonne National  Lab.
                 Mark Stickel, SRI International
              Sten Ake Tarnlund, Uppsala University
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************


From vtisr1!irlistrq Fri Sep 19 09:00:53 1986
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 86 09:00:45 edt
From: vtisr1!irlistrq
To: fox
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #46
Status: R


-VOL-
2

-N-
46
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 86 18:37:37 edt
-FROM-
From: Michael_DAlessandro%wayne-mts%umich-mts.mailnet@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  BITSERVE use
Status: RO
-BODY-
Ed,
  ...
Also, could you give me instructions how I can get at archived issues of
IRList that are on the BITSERVE machine?  I'm afraid I don't know much
about this machine - only that it is some sort of file server on BITNET
that stores old issues of various net digests.  I'd like to get indexes
of the messages in old IRList digests, and then be able to pull out of
the file server the messages that interest me.  Can this be done?

   Michael

[Note: there are no indexes prepared by me of old IRList digests;
would you like to volunteer? It should not be hard, given the "Today's
Topics" section in each issue.  As mentioned in the welcome message
that all IRList readers should have received (let me know if you want
it again), I keep an archive of old issues and there are some others,
such as one that people can FTP from if they have that capability.
The archive for BITNET users is a Spires database accessible through
DATABASE@BITNIC, so you can search for interesting items. See
discussion by J.H. Coombs in IRList V2#16, and by me in V2#1 --
send a msg with 3 lines as below to database@bitnic.bitnet
	help
	help arpanet
	help design
to get instructions on how it all works. Good luck, Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 86 00:36:56 edt
From: rba@LAFITE.BELLCORE.COM
Subject:  ACM Conf. on Office Inf. Systems

Subject: COIS-86

          ACM CONFERENCE ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
               October 6-8, 1968, Providence, R.I.

Conference Chair:        Carl Hewitt, MIT
Program Chair:           Stan Zdonik, Brown University
Keynote Speaker:         J.C.R. Licklider, MIT
Distinguished Lecturer:  A. van Dam, Brown University

COIS is a major research conference on the design and use of
computing systems for professional and knowledge workers.

At this meeting, sessions and panels emphasize AI and
organizational models of offices as sites for distributed information
processing.  Other themes include user interfaces,
graphics, group cooperation, and object-oriented systems.

For more information, call the Conference Registrar at Brown U.
(401-813-1839), or send electronic mail to mhf@brown.CSNET.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         Wed, 23 Jul 1986 13:06 CST
From:         Vijay V. Raghavan <RAGHAVAN@UREGINA1.bitnet>
Subject:      More SIGIR FORUM Abstracts [Part 3 of 3 - Ed]

[Note: Members of ACM SIGIR should have received the spring/summer
 Forum, and can find these on pages 27-29. The earlier parts have
 appeared in machine readable form in previous issues of IRList. - Ed]

                            ABSTRACTS

(Selected from recent issues of journals)

13. INCREMENTAL STRING MATCHING

    Bertrand Meyer
    Department  of  Computer Science,  University of  California,
    Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA

    The  problem studied in this paper is to search a given  text
    for  occurrences of certain strings,  in the particular  case
    where the set of strings may change as the search proceeds.

    A  well-known  algorithm by Aho and Corasick applies  to  the
    simpler case when the set of strings is known beforehand  and
    does not change.   This algorithm builds a transition diagram
    (finite automation) from the strings,  and uses it as a guide
    to traverse the text.   The search can then be done in linear
    time.

    We   show  how  this  algorithm  can  be  modified  to  allow
    incremental diagram construction, so that new keywords may be
    entered  at  any time during  the  search.   The  incremental
    algorithm  presented  essentially retains the time and  space
    complexities of the non-incremental one.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING LETTERS 21 (1985) 219-227)

14. A SYSTOLIC ARRAY FOR THE LONGEST COMMON SUBSEQUENCE PROBLEM

    Yves Robert and Maurice Tchuente
    Centre National de a la Recherche  Scientifique,  Laboratoire
    TIM3, Institut IMAG, BP 68, 38402 Saint Martin d'Heres Cedex,
    France

    We  introduce a linear systolic array for the Longest  Common
    Subsequence  (LCS,  for short) problem.   We first present an
    array  of m identical cells which computes the length  of  an
    LCS of two strings of length m and n, respectively, in linear
    time  (i.e.  in  time proportional to m + n).   Then we  show
    that,   by  extending  any  cell  with  the  systolic   stack
    introduced  by  Guibas and Liang (1982),  a new array can  be
    designed to recover an LCS in linear time.

    (INFORMATION PROCESSING LETTERS 21 (1985)  191-198)

15. SEARCHING  UNINDEXED AND NONUNIFORMLY GENERATED FILE  IN  log
    log N TIME

    Dan E. Willard
    State University of New York,
    Albany, NY  12222

    The first algorithm that searches unindexed and nonuniformity
    distributed  ordered  files  in log log N  expected  time  is
    presented  in this paper.   Our analysis rests on a synthesis
    of  concepts from the literature on interpolation search  and
    on the method of regula faisi in numerical analysis.

    (SIAM J. COMPUT, Vol 14, No. 4, pp. 1013-1029, November 1985)

16. DATA  STRUCTURES  FOR ON-LINE UPDATING  OF  MINIMUM  SPANNING
    TREES, WITH APPLICATIONS

    Greg N. Frederickson
    Computer Science
    Purdue University
    West Lafayette, Indiana  47907

    Data  structures are presented for the problem of maintaining
    a  minimum  spanning  tree on-line  under  the  operation  of
    updating the cost of some edge in the graph.  For the case of
    a general graph,  maintaining the data structure and updating
    the tree are shown to take O(SQRT(m)) time, where m is the number
    of  edges in the graph.   For the case of a planar  graph,  a
    data  structure is presented which supports an update time of
    O((log m)*(log m)). These structures contribute  to  improved
    solutions  for the on-line connected components  problem  and
    the problem of generating the K smallest spanning trees.

    (SIAM J. COMPUT  Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 781-798, November 1985)


17. THE BOYER-MOORE-GALIL STRING SEARCHING STRATEGIES REVISITED

    Alberto Apostolico
    Computer Science, Purdue University
    West Lafayette, Indiana  47907

    Raffaele Giancarlo
    Dipartimento di informatica ed Applicazioni
    The University of Salerno
    184100 Salerno, Italy

    Based  on the Boyer-Moore-Galil approach,  a new algorithm is
    proposed  which  requires a number of  character  comparisons
    bounded by 2n, regardless of the number of occurrences of the
    pattern  in the textstring.   Preprocessing is only  slightly
    more  involved  and  still requires a  time  linear  in   the
    pattern size.

    (SIAM J. COMPUT, Vol 15, No. 1, pp. 98-105, February 1986)

18. A   NATURAL   LANGUAGE  INFORMATION  RETRIEVAL  SYSTEM   WITH
    EXTENSIONS TOWARDS FUZZY REASONING

    Leonard Bolc
    Institute for Informatics, Warsaw University, PKiN, pok, 850,
    00-901 Warszawa, Poland

    Adam Kowalski
    Institute  of Computer Science,  Polish Academy of  Sciences,
    00-901 Warszawa, P.O. Box 22, Poland

    Malgorzata Kozlowska
    Institute for Informatics,  Warsaw University, PKiN, pok 850,
    00-901 Warszawa, Poland

    Tomasz Strazalkowski
    Department  of Computing Science,  Simon  Fraser  University,
    Burnaby, B.C. Canada  V5A 1S6

    For  the  last few years we have observed a growing  interest
    among   researchers  about  how  to  make  computers   behave
    "intelligently".   The field of computer science has gained a
    substantial  level of development especially in the field  of
    so-called  expert systems.   This particular  area  has  also
    obtained  relatively wide approval and  applicability.   This
    paper describes an experimental version of the conversational
    natural   language  information  retrieval  system  which  is
    currently   under   investigation  at   the   Institute   for
    Informatics  of  Warsaw University.   This system deals  with
    gastroenterology,   a  branch  of  internal  medicine.    The
    system's  purpose  is  to  provide  physicians  and  hospital
    personnel with information which may be consulted during  the
    diagnotic   process.    The  system  first  acquires  a  base
    knowledge  in the field which is presented to it in the  form
    of a comprehensive natural language text.  From this point on
    knowledge  can be retrieved and/or updated in  conversational
    manner.   The  system  has a modular structure and  its  most
    important  parts are the natural language processor  and  the
    reasoning   module  based  on  procedural   deduction.    The
    deduction process is realized through the mechanisms known as
    fuzzy  logic incorporated in the FUZZY programming  language.
    The  system  has  been designed in  close  co-operation  with
    specialists  in  medical science,  and implemented on an  IBM
    370/148 at Warsaw University.

    (INT. J. MAN-MACHINE STUDIES (1985) 23, 335-367)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 86 21:34:46 PDT
-FROM-
From: Moshe Vardi <vardi@navajo.stanford.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Call for Papers
-BODY-
[Extracted from: PROLOG Digest   Thursday, 11 Sep 1986  V.4  #48 - Ed]
                           CALL FOR PAPERS
                      SECOND ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON
                      LOGIC IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
                          22 - 25 June 1987
              Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
THE SYMPOSIUM will cover a wide range of theoretical and  practi-
cal  issues  in  Computer Science that relate to logic in a broad
sense, including algebraic and topological approaches.
Suggested  (but  not  exclusive)  topics  of  interest   include:
abstract data types, computer theorem proving, verification, con-
currency, type theory and constructi ve  mathematics,  data  base
theory,  foundations of logic programming, program logics and se-
mantics, knowledge and belief,  software  specifications,  logic-
based programming languages, logic in complexity theory.
                     Organizing Committee
  K. Barwise               E. Engeler                 A. Meyer
  W. Bledsoe               J. Goguen                  R. Parikh
  A. Chandra (chair)       D. Kozen                   G. Plotkin
  E. Dijkstra              Z. Manna                   D. Scott
                       Program Committee
S. Brookes      D. Gries (chair)    J.-P. Jouannaud     A. Nerode
L. Cardelli     J. Goguen           R. Ladner           G. Plotkin
R. Constable    Y. Gurevich         V. Lifschitz        A. Pnueli
M. Fitting      D. Harel            G. Longo            P. Scott
PAPER SUBMISSION.  Authors should send 16 copies  of  a  detailed
abstract  (not  a  full  paper) by 9 DECEMBER 1986 to the program
chairman:
       David Gries -- LICS              (607) 255-9207
       Department of Computer Science   gries@gvax.cs.cornell.edu
       Cornell University
       Ithaca, New York 14853
Abstracts must be clearly written and provide  sufficient  detail
to allow the program committee to assess the merits of the paper.
References and comparisons with related work should  be  included
where  appropriate.   Abstracts  must be no more than 2500 words.
Late abstracts or abstracts departing  significantly  from  these
guidelines  run a high risk of not being considered.  If a copier
is not available to the author,  a single copy  of  the  abstract
will be accepted.
Authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 30 JANUARY
1987.   Accepted  papers, typed on special forms for inclusion in
the symposium proceedings, will be due 30 MARCH 1987.
The symposium is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society,  Techni-
cal  Committee  on Mathematical Foundations of Computing and Cor-
nell University, in cooperation wi th ACM SIGACT, ASL, and EATCS.
  GENERAL CHAIRMAN                      LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS
  Ashok K. Chandra                      Dexter C. Kozen
  IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center  Dept. of Computer Science
  P.O. Box 218                          Cornell University
  Yorktown Heights, New York 10598      Ithaca, New York 14853
  (914) 945-1752                        (607) 255-9209
  ashok@ibm.com                         kozen@gvax.cs.cornell.edu
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************


Date: Thu, 9 Oct 86 09:40:36 edt
From: "Edward A. Fox" <fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa>
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech (VPI&SU)
Us-Mail: McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061
Phone: (703) 961-5113 or 6931
Reply-To: fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
Comments: from BITNET use fox@vtcs1, from CSNET use fox@vt (NOT fox%vtopus@vt)
          from UUCP use seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
Errors-To: foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
To: irdis
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #47 - resent due to mail failures


-VOL-
2

-N-
47
-DATE-
Date: 15 September 1986, 16:22:18 GMT
-FROM-
From: MABURKE  at IRLEARN.bitnet
-TO-
To:   FOXEA at VTVAX3
-BODY-
Greetings from Ireland!
I was formerly BURKE @ SUCASE and have now returned to UCD in Dublin
where my I.D. is MABURKE @ IRLEARN.
PL. send the I.R. digest to this location.
Thanks ... Mary

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 86 18:37:42 edt
-FROM-
From: miller%UR-ACORN.ARPA%UR-CASHEW.ARPA@UR-ACORN.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: New University of Rochester HORNE system available
-BODY-
The University of Rochester HORNE reasoning system has just been rereleased in
common-lisp form, currently running on a symbolics (though any common-lisp
system should be able to run it with minor porting).

Features:
	Horne Clause resolution prover (similar to PROLOG) with typed
unification and specialized reasoner for equalities (e.g. A and B can be
asserted to be equal, and so will unify). Equalities can be asserted between
any ground forms including functions with ground terms. A forward chaining
proof mechanism, and an interface between this system and arbitrary
common-lisp forms are also provided.

	As part of the same release we are providing REP, a frame-like
knowledge representation system built on top of the theorem prover, which uses
sturctured types to represent sets of objects. A structured type may have
relations (or "roles") between its set of objects and other sets. Arbitrary
instances of an object may be asserted to be equal to another instance which
will utelize the underlying HORNE equality mechanisms.

HORNE is the product of several years of R&D in the Natural Language
Understanding and Knowledge Representation projects supervised by Prof. James
Allen at the University of Rochester, and forms the basis for much of our
current implementation work.

A tutorial introduction and manual, TR 126 "The HORNE reasoning system in
Common-Lisp" by Allen and Miller is available for $2.50 from the following
address:

Ms. Peg Meeker
Technical Reports Administrator
Department of Computer Science
617 Hylan Building
University of Rochester
River Campus
Rochester, NY 14627

In addition a DC300XL cartridge tape in Symbolics distribution format, or
Symbolics carry-tape format (also suitable for TI Explorers), or a 1/2"
1600bpi reel in 4.2BSD TAR format (other formats are not available) is
available from the above address for a charge of $100.00 which will include
one copy of the TR.  This charge is made to defray the cost of the tape,
postage, and handling. The software itself is in the public domain. Larger
contributions are, of course, welcome.  Please specify which format tape you
wish to receive. By default, we will send the Symbolics distribution format.

All checks should be made payable to "University of Rochester, Computer
Science Department". POs from other Universities are also acceptable. Refunds
for any reason are not available.

DISCLAIMER: The software is supplied "as-is" without any implied warrenties of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We are not responsible
for any consequential damages as the result of using this software.  We are
happy to accept bug reports, but promise to fix nothing. Updates are not
included; future releases (if any) will probably be made available under a
similar arrangement to this one, but need not be. In other words, what you get
is what you get.

Brad Miller
Computer Science Department
University of Rochester

miller@rochester.arpa
miller@ur-acorn.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 86 17:08:33 EDT
-FROM-
From: Jack Minker <minker@mimsy.umd.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Parallel Inference System at Maryland
-BODY-
[Extracted from PROLOG Digest   Monday, 15 Sep 1986v$ #50 - Ed]

            AI and Database Research Laboratory
                           at the
                   University of Maryland
                   Jack Minker - Director


     The AI and Database Research Laboratory at the  Univer-
sity  of  Maryland  is  pleased  to announce that a parallel
logic programming system (PRISM) is now operational  on  the
McMOB  multiprocessosor.  The system uses up to sixteen pro-
cessors to exploit medium grained parallelism in logic  pro-
grams.   The underlying ideas behind PRISM appeared in [Eis-
inger et. al., 1982] and [Kasif et. al., 1983].

     The McMOB multiprocessor is a direct offspring of  ZMOB
[Reiger  et.  al.,1980].  It  consists  of  sixteen Motorola
MC68010 processors interconnected via a high speed belt.

     PRISM consists of several parts:  a user host interface
that exists on the host machine; a set of machines (moblets)
designated as problem solvers  (PSMs);  a  set  of  machines
designated as Extensional Database Machines (EDB) that store
ground atomic formulae (relational database tables); and,  a
set  of machines designated as Intensional Database Machines
(IDB) that store procedures (the general rules in  the  sys-
tem).   The  system  can  also optionally include Constraint
Machines (CM) that use user-supplied  constraints  to  prune
unsatisfiable paths in the proof tree.

     The system supports both AND and OR  parallelism.   The
user  can  specify control in terms of the sequence of atoms
to be executed in a set of problems to be solved.  Atoms can
be  executed in parallel, sequentially, or as specified by a
partial ordering.  Similarly procedures can be specified  as
being executed sequentially, in parallel, or as specified by
a partial order.  The PSM has  been  written  in  a  modular
fashion  to permit alternative control structure programs to
be incorporated in the system.  Alternative node and literal
selection algorithms may be incorporated as part of the con-
trol structure.  The  user  may  specify  the  configuration
(i.e., the number of moblets required as a minimum) in which
a problem is to be run.  If additional  moblets  are  avail-
able, the PRISM will automatically take advantage of them.

     A large number of problems  are  currently  being  pro-
grammed  in  PRISM and experiments will be run with these to
determine the effectiveness of PRISM as  a  problem  solving
system.

     The major research directions in  the  laboratory  over
the coming year will be devoted to the following areas:

    (1)  Experimentation Using PRISM
    (2)  Control Structure Investigations
    (3)  Expert systems and PRISM
    (4)  Parallel problem solving and Architecture Issues


     If you would like further information on PRISM,  please
contact  MINKER@MARYLAND  or MADHUR@MARYLAND.  We would also
be very interested in hearing from people who may have prob-
lems we could run on PRISM.

References:

1.   Eisinger, N., Kasif, S., and Minker,  J.,  "Logic  Pro-
     gramming:  A  Parallel Approach", in Proceedings of the
     First International Logic Programming Conference,  Mar-
     seilles, France, 1982.

2.   Kasif, S., Kohli, M., and Minker, J., "PRISM - A Paral-
     lel Inference System for Problem Solving", in IJCAI-83,
     Karlsruhe, Germany, 1983.

3.   Rieger, C., Bane, j., and Trigg, R.,  "ZMOB:  A  Highly
     Parallel  Multiprocessor",  University of Maryland, TR-
     911, May 1980

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 86 22:31:44 EDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Software Reuse through IR
-BODY-
Ed,

Thanks for the recent IR list about software reuse and IR. I've sent
along a copy of the paper Brian and I wrote on the subject. I should
say that we view this paper as extremely preliminary. There are many
issues in reuse and IR that we do not discuss, and we feel that there must
be experimentation to back up the proposals we put forward.  Nonetheless,
perhaps IR list readers will find the paper useful as the basis of discussion.

    Regards, Bill Frakes


Software Reuse Through Information Retrieval

          W. B. Frakes
          B. A. Nejmeh

     AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Holmdel, New Jersey 07733


1.  Introduction

There is widespread need for safe, verifiable, efficient,
and reliable software that can be delivered in a timely
manner. Software reuse can make a valuable contribution
toward this goal by increasing programmer productivity and
software quality.  Unfortunately, the amount of software
reuse currently done is quite small.  DeMarco [1] estimates
that in the average software development environment only
about five percent of code is reused.

A fundamental problem in software reuse is the lack of tools
to locate potential code for reuse. In this paper we argue
that information retrieval (IR) systems have the power and
flexibility to ameliorate this problem. We then discuss the
issue of database design, and show the viability of our
approach using the CATALOG information retrieval system [2]
[3].  We conclude with a discussion of current research in
IR that is likely to improve IR systems as tools for
managing software reuse.


2.  Motivation for Software Reuse

The search for effective methods of promoting software reuse
has a strong economic basis. The demand for software
continues to rise sharply and the gap between the supply and
demand for software continues to grow [4] Thus, effective
means of promoting software reuse have become of paramount
importance to the software engineering community.

Software reliability has also become a problem of increasing
importance as real-time applications of computers emerge in
(for example) financial arenas, the military, and the
medical profession. In these domains there is a critical
need for software to operate without failure over long
periods of time, so as not to cause significant economic
loss or endanger human life. Reliability is also important
because maintenance now accounts for the largest portion of
system costs [5], and more reliable software should be
cheaper to maintain.  One potential means of increasing
software reliability is through the use of existing
software. This is because reusable software components have
presumably been rigorously tested and verified.


3.  Factors hindering software reuse

A fundamental problem with software production in the US is
that a new software system is typically constructed "from
scratch" [6].  This is unfortunate because studies have
shown that much of the code in a system is functionally
identical to previously written code. For example, the
Missile systems Division of Raytheon Company observed that
40-60% of code was repeated in more than one application
[7].

The desirability of software reuse is contingent on the
value and feasibility of reusing a particular type of
software product [8].  The value of software reuse refers to
whether it is more cost effective, in terms of time, money,
or personnel, to reuse software as opposed to developing it
from scratch each time it is needed. Since software reuse
has its own costs, e.g. location, classification,
documentation, and storage, the reuse of software is not
always valuable.  The feasibility of software reuse relates
to the ease with which software can be effectively reused.
Feasibility is dependent on the facilities provided by a
software development environment, and the ease with which
reusable software candidates can be identified.

Frequently, software is not reused  because the value of
reusing software is low and the feasibility of reuse is
minimal.  The factors affecting the value and feasibility of
software reuse can be classified as follows:

   o Differences in software development environments - if
     there are differences in programming languages or
     operating systems, the value and feasibility of reuse
     can be reduced because of excessive translation or
     porting costs.

   o Reuse support environment - if the retrieval and
     specification of software components are not automated,
     the amount of time required to locate reusable software
     increases greatly. If potentially reusable software
     components cannot be located, retrieved, and reviewed
     effectively, reuse is neither feasible nor valuable.


4.  The Need for Support Tools in Reuse Support Environments

The Japanese have been extremely successful in promoting and
encouraging software reuse. Japanese software factories have
cited reuse factors of 85 percent [9].  Moreover, the
Japanese stress the use of keyword searching of software
module abstracts to promote reuse [4].

Both the Japanese, and software researchers in the US, have
argued that in order to effectively promote reuse we must
learn how to organize, index, describe, and reference
software components effectively.  Standish  [4] argues that
"... a system of software components could be organized and
indexed by conventional techniques for indexing papers in
the computer science literature, and that by having each
component in a software library an effective means of
locating reusable software will be established."

In addition, the Hughes Aircraft Company recently studied 19
software development methodologies to evaluate their
usefulness with respect to promoting software reuse. In this
study Hughes Aircraft concluded that "no methodology for
large-scale software development provides a reliable storage
and retrieval mechanism for a code-level library." [10]
Finally, in a recent paper [6], Horowitz states that "...
there are no tools to catalog, refine, and compose
[software] components in an efficient manner."

In short, there is strong support for the belief that to
effectively promote software reuse we must develop tools to
aid in the process of locating software components that are
candidates for reuse.  Such a tool must provide the user
with an effective means of indexing, searching, retrieving,
and reviewing software components.  In the following
sections of the paper we describe a tool to meet this need.

[Note: to be continued in next IRList - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
2

-N-
48
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 86 18:47:55 edt
-FROM-
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
	Date: Monday, 15 September 1986  12:09-EDT
	subject:  Center for Biological Information Processing Seminar

Wednesday, 17 September 12:00pm  Room: E25-401

Dimensionality-Reduction Using Connectionist Networks

             Eric Saund
         MIT Department of Psychology

Recently, methods have been developed for training "connectionist"
networks of simple computing elements to perform a wide variety of
input/output associative mappings.  These methods are interesting
because, under some circumstances, networks are able  to acquire
automatically intermediate representations that capture regularities
in the mapping.  In this talk I will present a way to perform
dimensionality-reduction in such a network.  Dimensionality-reduction
is a coding of multi-dimensional data that is constrained to lie on a
lower-dimensional  surface embedded in a high-dimensional
feature-space; dimensionality-reduction is a generalization of factor
analysis.  I will discuss why dimensionality-reduction may prove a
useful computational tool for later visual processing such as shape
analysis.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 86 22:31:44 EDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Software Reuse through IR [ Part 2 - Ed]
-BODY-
Software Reuse Through Information Retrieval

          W. B. Frakes
          B. A. Nejmeh

     AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Holmdel, New Jersey 07733

[Note: sections 1-4 appeared in the last IRList issue - Ed]

5.  Types of Interactive Information Systems

Many different types of systems for handling information are
currently in use. These system have different underlying
models and capabilities. Perhaps the best known type of
system is the database management system (DBMS) [11].  DBMS
are widely used for storing, managing, and retrieving highly
structured information such as parts lists, personnel files,
etc. Retrieval from these systems is deterministic. For
example, if a query is put to a DBMS asking for records of
all employees in Kansas City who make more than $35,000, the
system will retrieve all and only those records matching the
query criteria.

While DBMS are powerful, they are usually limited in their
ability to handle data that is not highly structured, such
as text or source code. Current systems for handling this
kind of data are information retrieval (IR) systems. [12]
[13] Originally developed to manage the literature of the
natural sciences, IR systems incorporate many techniques for
storing and retrieving unstructured data. These techniques,
such as boolean queries and partial string matching are
discussed below.

As a demonstration of the use of IR Systems for software
reuse, we built a small database of software modules using
CATALOG, an IR system developed by Bill Frakes, Steve Cox,
and Bill Leighton at AT&T Information Systems. These modules
were from SUPER [14], a system built at Bell Laboratories
for interactive reliability analysis.  The information used
to index these modules was taken from the descriptive
headers required of each module in the SUPER system.  The
text from these headers was passed to CATALOG which placed
the words from the text in inverted files. Searches to this
database could then be made via CATALOG's menu or command
driven search interfaces as described below.


6.  The CATALOG Information Retrieval System

CATALOG is a high performance information retrieval system
designed to allow end users to create, maintain, and search
databases containing both formatted records, such as are
typically found in DBMS, and unformatted records, such as
text, which most DBMS handle poorly.  It is now being used
widely within AT&T for such tasks as document management,
marketing information management and distribution, as the
basis of LATTIS, the AT&T IS library system [15], and as the
basis of Video Data Locator, a CATALOG application that
allows retrieval of both text and color images.

CATALOG features a database generator which assists users in
setting up databases, an interactive tool for creating,
modifying, adding, and deleting records, and a search
interface with a menu driven mode for novice users, and a
command driven mode for expert users.  The search interface
allows full boolean combinations of search terms and sets of
retrieved records, and sophisticated partial term matching
techniques such as automatic stemming, and phonetic
matching.  CATALOG databases are built using B-Trees,
providing rapid search and retrieval capabilities.

CATALOG was written in the C programming language, and
currently runs under UNIX, and MS-DOS.  CATALOG was
originally developed on a VAX 11-780, and has since been
ported to the 3B2, 3B5, and 3B20, the IBM PC, the AT&T
PC6300, and the PC7300.

6.1  Searching using CATALOG

CATALOG will allow the complete source code for a module to
be entered into the system providing full source searchable
databases. It is also possible to enter only source code
module surrogates, for example the information in the header
such as title, author, and description. These surrogates
are then available as primary searchable records, and the
full records are available as secondary records for viewing
and printing. Both record size and database size are
unlimited.

Searching is carried out using inverted indexes of every
significant word in a database. CATALOG creates sets of
records in response to user queries. These sets can then be
combined using boolean operators to form new sets. The
display of these sets shows the query used to create the
list, and the number of records that match the query.

6.2  Multiple Search Interfaces

CATALOG has two main user modes; a novice user mode, which
is menu driven, and a command mode for more experienced
users. This allows the system to adapt itself to the user's
level of knowledge.

Novice user mode assumes as little knowledge as possible of
the user. In this menu driven mode, users are prompted to
provide search queries. CATALOG then retrieves and places
records corresponding to the queries into sets. By
selecting the appropriate items from  menus, users can sort,
display, and perform boolean operations on retrieved sets of
records.  It is also possible for an expert user to overide
many of the default settings for novice user mode using the
methods described below.  Expert mode assumes a
knowledgeable system user, and thus provides only a simple
prompt for commands.

6.3  Queries

In novice mode, CATALOG prompts for queries with the phrase
"Look for:".  In response, a query or command (described
below) may be entered.  For example the query:

      | Look for: sorting routines        |
      |                                               |















      - 6 -



will cause CATALOG to attempt to find records that contain
the terms "sorting" and "routines", and their variants as
described below.

CATALOG provides for full boolean search specification
through menu selection. It is also possible, though not
necessary, to specify boolean logic in a query. For
example,
      Look for:  ((sorting and routines) or quicksort) not heapsort

This query will retrieve source code records about sorting
routines or quicksort, which are not about heapsort.

To find records relevant to a query, CATALOG will take the
words in the query one at a time, and  try to find other
words in the database which might be related. If it finds
any possibly related words, CATALOG will present its guesses
to the user for selection.  For the query term "sorting" for
example, CATALOG might respond as follows:

          Search Term: sorting

         Term         Occurrences
         1.   sort         15
         2.   sorting       1
         3.   sorts         3
         Which terms (0 = none, CR = all) :

Users select the terms they want by entering their numbers.

The "related word" feature can be suppressed by putting the
character "\" at the end of an entered word, in which case
the index is searched for an exact match.  The "related
word" feature can also be suppressed by putting wild card
characters into an entered word. Two wild card characters
are available. The character "*" stands for zero or more
occurrences of any character, and the character "?" stands
for a single arbitrary character. Thus, the term airlin*
will match the words airline, airlines, airliner, etc.,
while the term airlin? will match airline but not airlines
or airliner. Wild card characters cannot be used as the
first character of a word. That is, air*ine and airlin? are
legal search terms, but *irline and ???line are not.

CATALOG also provides the ability to match on phonetic
variants of a query term. This feature will be most useful
with human names.  If a field has been marked for phonetic
searching, the phonetic match routine will relate such names
as "Kahn", "Cohen", "Cohn", etc. The phonetic match is
invoked by appending the character "#" to a search term.

6.4  List Display

When a user has made his choices for all the words in the
query, a list such as the following is formed.

          Lists  (& indicates a stemmed term)  records
          a) (software)                          26
          b) (sorting and algorithms)             9
          c) (system& and call&)                  3

This display indicates that three searches have been done,
and that the last search formed list "c" which contains
three records.  These three records are related to both the
concept "system" (i.e. the records contain one or more words
related to the word stem "system") and the concept "call"
(i.e. the records contain one or more words related to the
word stem "call").

6.5  Main Menu Display

The main menu in CATALOG allows users to exit the system,
access help messages, go back to the "Look for:" prompt, and
perform operations on record lists. The main menu display
looks like this.

      Options:
       1 Exit from system
       2 Display items from a list
       3 Do another search (Go back to 'Look for')
       4 Create a new list by finding items common to 2 or more lists (AND)
       5 Create a new list by including all items from 2 or more lists (OR)
       6 Create a new list by removing from a list
          items from 1 or more other lists (NOT)
       7 Delete 1 or more lists
       8 Help message menu
      Choice:
By selecting appropriate items from this menu, users can
manipulate the system to give desired results such as:

   o Creating new lists of records, e.g. software modules,
     from old lists

   o Removing lists

   o Displaying and printing records

   o Sorting lists

   o Placing records in files

   o Restricted field searching

   o Restricted field display

   o Restricted date searching

6.6  Help Messages

Detailed help messages are available for all system
functions.  When users first log into CATALOG, they are
asked if they need help.  If they say yes, they can access
help through interactive menus. Help messages can also be
accessed throughout the search session by specifying the
appropriate menu items or commands.

6.7  Command Mode

By typing the command "-c" at the search prompt in naive
user mode, a user can enter command mode. Command mode
assumes a knowledgeable user, and thus only prompts for
commands. It is possible to use any search or display
function with commands.

6.8  SDI - Setting Up a User Interest Profile

Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) is a technique
used to keep users of an information system alerted to new
additions to the system database. CATALOG provides such a
capability.  SDI using CATALOG is done by maintaining a file
containing user ID's and lists of interest words. The
general form is:

       userid<sp>word1<sp>word2<sp>...wordn<RETURN>
for example,

       smith set manipulation algorithms

This file can be matched against the full database, or
updates to the database. Lists of the records matching the
profiles are then sent to the appropriate users. The SDI
feature will be useful for alerting software developers to
software modules of a given type that have been added to the
system.
[Note: continued in next issue of IRList - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

From foxea@vtvax3 Wed Sep 24 18:45:18 1986
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 86 18:45:11 edt
From: foxea@vtvax3
To: @ir.dis
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #49
Status: RO


-VOL-
2

-N-
49
-DATE-
Date: 1986 Sep 14   20:44 EST
-FROM-
From: Bob Weber   <WEBER3@HARVARDA>
-BODY-
[Extracted from CRTNET #58, 9/15/86 - Ed]

ERROR IN CONTENT ANALYSIS BOOK AND SOFTWARE FOR CONTENT ANALYSIS
In the second printing of my book, Basic Content Analysis (1985),
published by Sage in their series on quantitative methodology,
they have not corrected an important factual error which I had
asked them to fix.
The first paragraph on page 80 indicates that a computer
program for key-word-in-context listings is available
from the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics; this
is no longer so.
That paragraph will be replaced with the following information
on the availability of the General Inquier computer system for
automated content analysis (the references are given in the
bibliography of the Sage book).
The replacement paragraph for first paragraph on page 80 will
state:
       Beginning early in 1987, the current version of the
    General Inquirer system (Kelly and Stone, 1975), the latest
    Harvard dictionary (Dunphy, et al., 1974), and the Lasswell
    Value Dictionary (Namenwirth and Weber, 1987)* will be
    distributed by ZUMA.  Distribution of software,
    dictionaries, and documentation will be on an "as is" basis
    and only for non-commercial use.  A very small fee for
    handling will be charged. Note: the General Inquirer is
    written in PL1 for IBM mainframe computers only!
    Interested readers should contact ZUMA, the Center For Surveys,
    Methods, and Analysis, in Mannheim, FRG:
    Computer Department
    ZUMA
    B2,1
    Postfach 5969
    D-6800 Mannheim 1
    Federal Republic of Germany
*Namenwirth, J. Zvi and Robert Philip Weber. 1987. Dynamics of Culture.
Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin.
 Robert Philip (Bob) Weber
 Harvard University
 BITNET: WEBER3@HARVARDA
 ARPA:   Weber3%Harvarda.Bitnet@Wiscvm.Wisc.Edu
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 86 22:31:44 EDT
From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf
Subject: Software Reuse through IR [ Part 3 of 3 - Ed]

Software Reuse Through Information Retrieval

          W. B. Frakes
          B. A. Nejmeh

     AT&T Bell Laboratories
   Holmdel, New Jersey 07733

[Note: sections 1-4, 5-6 appeared in the last two IRList issues - Ed]

7.  A Software Template Design to Promote Reuse

The extent to which IR technology will promote software
reuse is directly related to the quality and accuracy of the
information in its software database. That is, poor
descriptions of code capability and functionality will
decrease the probability that the code will be located for
potential reuse during the search process. Likewise, lack of
information about how to call a function, the side-effects
of the function, and the environmental requirements of the
function also increase the overhead associated with its
reuse.  We now propose a template for the descriptive
information that should be maintained for each module and
function in the code base to increase the ease with which it
can be reused.

Throughout this section we will use the terms module and
function. For our purposes, a module is a file consisting of
one or more functions. A function is as defined in the C
programming language.  We now describe the contents of
module and function prologues which we believe will increase
the probability that the code appearing in the module is
located as a candidate for reuse whenever possible.
Likewise, we believe that the information contained in each
template will reduce the amount of time required to
interface into an existing function and assure that it is
performing the necessary operations without harmful side-
effects.

Our basic premise is that every module and function must
begin with a prologue.  The contents of the prologue each
case will now be described.

7.1  Module Prologue

We endorse the following format for a module prologue.


<Top of Page>

/*
 * Module :       the name of the module.
 *
 * Description:       a concise description of what the
 *        functions contained in the file do. This
 *        description should be written with an understanding
 *        that generic inquiries into the source data base
 *        will be matched on the prose appearing in this
 *        section of the file.
 *
 * Supporting Docs:    References to supporting requirements or design
 *        documents should be given here.
 *
 * Contents:       List the functions appearing in the file in
 *        the order in which they appear, with a brief
 *        description of each function.
 *
 * Data:        List all of the global data defined in the file with
 *        a brief description of each data item.
 *
 * Environmental Requirements :List all of the hardware and software
 *         that the module requires (i.e. certain
 *         kinds of hardware, specific software
 *         libraries, etc.) to function properly.
 *
 */


7.2  Function Prologue

We endorse the following format for a function prologue.

<Top of Page>

/*
 * Function :       the name of the function.
 *
 * Author:       name, location, and phone number of developer
 *        who wrote the function.
 *
 * Date:        date the function was written
 *
 * Description:       a concise overview of the function
 *        in terms of the processing it performs. In
 *        addition, the input, output, and transformational
 *        processing performed by the function should be
 *        described.
 *
 * Usage:       List the #include files necessary to call the
 *        function.
 *
 * Parameters:       The parameters passed to the function with a
 *        description of each parameter should appear
 *        here. For pointer parameters, the object
 *        pointed to should be discussed. Finally, if
 *        the value of any parameter is changed by the
 *        function, the modification should be described.
 *
 * Externals:       All of the global variables referenced in the
 *        function, along with how their values are
 *        modified should be described here.
 *
 * Macros:       List the macros used by the function.
 *
 * Returns:       The value returned by the function should be
 *        described here. The function should be declared
 *        "void" if it does not return a value.
 *
 * Calls:       List the functions called by this function along
 *        with the modules in which the called functions
 *        appear.
 *
 * Called By:       List the functions and their corresponding files
 *        which call this function.
 *
 * Modifications:      For each change to the file, list the following
 *        information: Date, Author of Change, Description
 *        of Change, Reason for Change.
 *
 */



8.  Future Directions

Certain areas of IR research are likely to improve IR
systems as tools for managing software reuse. Despite
extensive research on IR systems, improvements have been
slow in coming, and the systems in practical use today are
quite similar to those in use in the 1960's. Such
improvements as have been observed have in general been more
due to improvements in general computing environments than
to advances in IR research per se. However the use of user
feedback [16] has given experimental improvements in
retrieval performance, as has the use of extended boolean
models [17].

A major practical problem in IR is the management of very
large databases.  Databases in existence today have already
pushed the limits of magnetic disk storage, and these
databases are growing exponentially. Storage of the source
code and documentation for projects in large corporations
will also result in very large databases. Optical storage
technology offers the ability to store gigabytes of
information on a single optical disk, thus offering a
solution to this problem. Current optical disk technology is
write once, however multiwrite technology will probably be
available within the next two years.

As IR databases become larger and larger, it becomes
difficult to search and retrieve records quickly. To address
this problem, specialized hardware to perform IR operations
has been built [18] [19].  Such hardware promises to provide
searching speeds for full text of millions of characters per
second. Specialized hardware is also needed to speed up
certain IR operations such as stemming and set processing
that are bottlenecks in current systems.

A central problem of IR has been how to represent the
meaning of text or other records in a way comprehensible to
a computer. The knowledge representation techniques used in
AI systems [20] offer promise in this direction. Oddy [21]
has used a semantic net approach to document representation,
production rules have been used to create an intelligent
thesaurus [22], and natural language systems have been used
to extract and formalize the information in medical
documents [23].

Taking these newer technologies together, it appears
probable that future IR systems for software reuse will have
capabilities for massive storage in the gigabyte range, and
specialized hardware for text searching, and set
combination. Such systems will allow better semantic
representation of records, and will provide intelligent
interfaces that will guide users in system use. Other
probable developments in IR technology can be found in Fox
[24].


9.  Conclusion

We have argued that reuse is crucial if we are to deliver
efficient, reliable, and maintainable software in a timely
manner. The lack of adequate tools to organize, search, and
retrieve reusable modules has impeded reuse. We have
proposed IR systems as the technology of choice for managing
code reuse, using the CATALOG system to demonstrate the
feasibility of this approach. We have concluded by
discussing important trends in IR research and development
likely to impact the reuse problem.


    REFERENCES

 1. DeMarco, T., Lister, T. Controlling Software Projects:
    Management, Measurement, and Evaluation, Seminar Notes,
    New York, Atlantic Systems Guild Inc., 1984.

 2. Frakes, W.B. "Term Conflation for Information
    Retrieval", in VanRijsbergen C.J. Ed. Research and
    Development in Information Retrieval Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 1984.

 3. Frakes, W.B., Leighton W.J., "The Catalog Information
    Management System", Proceedings of Symposium on
    Workstations in the Future Computing Environment , AT&T
    Bell Laboratories , Naperville Il., 1985.

 4. Standish, T., "An Essay on Software Reuse", IEEE
    Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-10, Sept.
    1984.

 5. Boehm, Barry, Software Engineering Economics, Prentice-
    Hall, Englewood Cliffs N.J., 1981.

 6. Horowitz, E. and Munson, J. "An Expansive View of
    Software Reuse", IEEE Transactions on Software
    Engineering, Vol. SE-10, Sept. 1984.

 7. Frank, W.L., "What Limits to Software Gains",
    Computerworld, pp. 65-70, May 4, 1984.

 8. Grabow, P., "Software Reuse, Where Are We Going?", IEEE
    COMPSAC85, Oct. 9-11, 1985, pp.202.

 9. McNamara, D. "Japanese Software Factories", presentation
    at Computer Science Colloquium, University of
    California, Irvine, May 1983.

10. Huang, C., "Reusable Software Implementation Technology
    : A Review of the Current Practice", IEEE COMPSAC85,
    Oct. 9-11, 1985, pp.207.

11. Date, C. J., An Introduction to Database Systems, 3rd
    Ed. Reading, Mass., Addison Wesley, 1981.

12. Lancaster F. W. and Fayen, E. G. Information Retrieval
    On-Line, Los Angeles, Melville Publishing Co., 1973.

13. Salton G. and McGill M. Introduction to Modern
    Information Retrieval, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1983.

14. Crocker, S.L., Frakes, W.B., Leon, R.V., Tortorella, M.,
    "SUPER:  System Used for Prediction and Evaluation of
    Reliability", Paper read at IEEE Conference on
    Reliability of Computer Controlled Telecommunications
    Systems, 1985, at Val David, Canada.

15. Frakes, W.B., "LATTIS: A Corporate Library and
    Information System for the UNIX Environment", To appear
    in the Proceedings of the National Online Conference,
    1986.

16. Rocchio, J. J., "Relevance Feedback in Information
    Retrieval" in The SMART Retrieval System - Experiments
    in Automatic Document Processing, G. Salton Editor,
    Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs N.J., 1971, Chapter
    14.

17. Salton, G., Fox, E., Wu, H., "Extended Boolean
    Information Retrieval", Communications of the ACM,
    26(11): pp. 1022-1036, Nov, 1983.

18. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computer
    Architecture for Nonnumeric Processing, Syracuse, N.Y.
    1979.

19. Hollaar, L.A., "The Utah Text Retrieval Project -- A
    Status Report", in VanRijsbergen C.J. Ed. Research and
    Development in Information Retrieval Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 1984.

20. Winston, Patrick Henry, Artificial Intelligence 2nd Ed.,
    Reading Mass., 1984.

21. Oddy, R. N., "Information Retrieval Through Man-Machine
    Dialogue", Journal of Documentation, 33. 1-14(1977).

22. McCune, B. et. al. "RUBRIC: A System for Rule Based
    Information Retrieval", IEEE Transactions of Software
    Engineering, 1985.

23. Sager, Naomi, "Information Structures in Texts of a
    Sublanguage", Proceedings of 44th ASIS Annual Meeting,
    Washington D.C., October 1981.

24. Fox, Christopher and Zappert, F., "Future Generation
    Information Systems", To appear in the Journal of the
    American Society for Information Science.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************


-VOL-
2

-N-
50
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 20 Sep 86 00:54:22 edt
-FROM-
From: csnet_gateway (LAWS@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA)
-TO-
To: bboard.maintainer@a.cs.cmu.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Text abstraction.  References?
-BODY-
         [Forwarded from the CMU BBoard by Laws@SRI-STRIPE.]

A friend of mine is interested in automated text abstraction.  In
particular, he is would like to write a system that does as much as possible
toward abstraction and subject indexing of legal depositions.  Does anyone
know anything about this subject, or know of any good references?

Dean
[Note: Several IRList subscribers have worked or are working in this
are, so I hope they will send information to IRList which can be
filtered back to CMU. Carole Hafner is the first who comes to mind,
and I remember Harry Wu being interested. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 86 12:35:05 edt
-FROM-
From: rdj (R. Daniel Johnson)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRLIST V2#44
-BODY-
Ed,

In V2#44, Stephen Page requested information on what is called the "Soundex
Code" which is a moderately effective and inexpensive means of matching
words (e.g. names) which "sound" alike.  I used such matching in a film
booking system some years ago to match teacher names in schools.
 ...

The technique is simple and goes something like this:  drop all vowels
from a word to match, do a many-to-one mapping of the consonants, and
do a search on the resulting 4-character code.  I think I still have
a listing of the routine in HP Systems Programming Language (ALGOL-like.)
Perhaps I should offer it to Stephen Page?  (It wasn't clear whether he
wanted to use it or find literature about its use.)

>d

P.S. on Soundex
Aha... Soundex is documented in Knuth's Searching and Sorting.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 86 18:39:49 edt
From: csnet_gateway (DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU)
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar

	Date: Monday, 22 September 1986  11:09-EDT
	subject: Center for Biological Information Processing

Wednesday, 24 September 12:00pm  Room: E25-401

     Object Recognition as Visual Classification
                  Aaron Bobick
  MIT - Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

One of the most commonly proposed goals of a perceptual system is that
of object recognition.  Yet, to date, we have been unable to define
precisely what the task of recognition really entails.  In this talk I
will provide a definition of recognition in terms of classifying
objects into natural categories, and I will argue that natural
categories can be defined in terms of processes that create objects
and the interaction between objects,  their environment and the
observer.  Given this definition of object recognition we can
decompose the task into the three components of representation,
speculation and evaluation and consider the knowledge or constraints
that must be provided to the observer if he is th be able to classify
objects successfully.  Both an idealized world and the natural world
will be considered.  For the natural world, a procedure based upon the
uncertainty of categorical inferences will be presented along with
some results of an implementation that "naturally" categorizes leaves.
Finally, the questions of whether recognition should be considered as
a learning problem and exactly what can or should be learned will be
addressed, i.e., some difficult questions will be deftly hedged.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 86 20:39:32 edt
From: csnet_gateway (DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU)
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar

	++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
	Date: Friday, 26 September 1986  11:09-EDT
	Subject:  Generic Tasks in Knowledge-Based Reasoning

Wednesday, 1 October 3:00pm  Room: NE43-512A

Generic Tasks in Knowledge-Based Reasoning:  Caracterizing and
Designing Expert Systems at the "Right" Level of Abstraction

     B. Chandrasekaran
     Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research
     Department of Computer and Information Science
     Ohio State University
     Columbus, Ohio 43210


We outline the elements of a framework for expert system design that
we have been developing in our research group over the last several
years.  This framework is based on the claim that complex
knowledge-based reasoning tasks can often be decomposed into a number
of generic tasks each with associated types of knowledge and family
of control regimes.  At different stages in reasoning, the system will
typically engage in one of the tasks, depending upon the knowledge
available and the state of problem solving.  The advantages of this
point of view are manifold:  (i) Since typically the generic tasks
are at a much higher level of abstraction than those associated with
first generation expert system languages, knowledge can be acquired
and represented directly at the level appropriate to the information
processing task.  (ii) Since each of the generic task has an
appropriate control regime, problem solving behavior may be more	
perspicuously encoded.  (ii) Because of a richer generic vocabulary in
terms of which knowledge and control are represented, explanation of
problem solving behavior is also more perspicuous.  We briefly
describe six generic task that we have found very useful in our work
on knowledge-based reasoning: classification, state abstraction,
knowledge-directed retrieval, object synthesis by plan selection and
refinement, hypothesis matching, and assembly of compound hypotheses
for abduction.


	++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
	Date: Friday, 26 September 1986  11:09-EDT
	Subject:  LCS Distinguished Lecturer Series

Thursday, 2 October  3:30pm  Room: 34-101

Pattern Knowledge and Search:  The Suprem Architecture

         Hans J. Berliner
         Senior Research Scientist
         Computer Science Department
         Cartnegie Mellon University

We describe a problem solving architecture that combines rapid search
through a state space coupled with highly sophisticated evaluation of
states.  Speed of searching is made possible by special purpose
hardware tailored to producing state-change operators for the domain.
Evaluation of states is done by more general machines that can extract
small patterns in parallel and use these to produce much better
evaluations than are possible in non-pattern oriented methods.  In
this connection, we present a hierarchy of knowledge.

This method has been applied to the development of Hitech, a chess
machine that is now ranked within the top 200 chess players in the US.
While Hitech's chess understanding is still far short of that of the	
very top players in the world, its ability to calculate accurately,
and look at one million times as many possibilities in unit time as
the best humans can, make up for this to a large degree.  We discuss
the issues involved in creating such architectures and how they can be
improved.  Performance data on Hitech will also be presented.

Host: Michael L. Dertouzos

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 86 20:44:01 edt
From: csnet_gateway (DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU)
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar

	Date: Tuesday, 30 September 1986  11:00-EDT
	From: Lisa F. Melcher <LISA@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>

Thursday,  2  October   2:00pm  Room: NE43-512a

               " GENERAL LOGIC "

                 Gordon Plotkin
          Department of Computer Science
          University of Edinburgh, Scotland


     A good many logics have been proposed for use in Computer Science.
Implementing them involves repeating a great deal of work.  We propose a
general account of logics as regards both their syntax and inference rules.
As immediate target we envision a system to which one inputs a logic
obtaining a simple proof-checker.  The ideas build on work in logic of
Paulson, Martin-Lof and Schroeder-Heister and in the typed lambda-calculus of
Huet and Coquand and Meyer and Reinhold.  The slogan is: Judgements are
Types.  For example the judgement that a proposition is true is identified
with its type of proofs; general and hypothetical judgements are identified
with dependent product types.  This gives one account of Natural Deduction.
It would be interesting to extend the work to consider (two-sided) sequent
calculi for classical and modal logics.


              Sponsored by TOC, Laboratory for Computer Science
                             Albert Meyer, Host

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 86 18:59:31 edt
From: csnet_gateway (DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU)
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar

	Date: Thursday, 2 October 1986  13:30-EDT
	From: Brad Goodman <BGOODMAN at BBNG.ARPA>

Monday, 6 October 10:30am  Room: 3rd floor large conference room,
                                 BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge		


              BBN Laboratories
           Science Development Program
              AI/Education Seminar

   Planning Simultaneous Actions in Temporally Rich Worlds

            Professor James Allen
 	    University of Rochester
	      (james@rochester)


    This talk describes work done with Richard Pelavin over the last few
years. We have developed a formal logic of action that allows us to
represent knowledge and reason about the interactions between events
that occur simultaneously or overlap in time. This includes interactions
between two (or more) actions that a single agent might perform
simultaneously, as well as interactions between an agent's actions and
events occuring in the external world. The logic is built upon an
interval-based temporal logic extended with modal operators similar to
temporal necessity and a counterfactual operator. Using this formalism,
we can represent a wide range of possible ways in which actions may
interact.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 86 00:58:19 edt
From: csnet_gateway (EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU)
Subject: Late Newsletter Entry

	Date: 2 Oct 86 17:43 PDT
	From: dlevy.pa@Xerox.COM

	Emma:

	Could you send this out through the usual channels as a late
	newsletter entry?

	Thanks,
	David

Reading and Discussion Group on Figural Representation

Organizers: David Levy, Geoff Nunberg
First meeting: Thursday, October 9 at 10 AM, Ventura Hall

We are forming a reading and discussion group to explore the nature of
figural (roughly speaking, visual) representation.  Systems of figural
representation include writing systems, systems of musical notation,
screen "icons," bar graphs, architectural renderings, maps, and so
forth.  This topic lies at the intersection of various concerns relevant
to a number of us at CSLI, at Xerox PARC, and at SRI -- theoretical
concerns about the nature of language and representation and their
manifestation in the building of systems and the design of visual
notations for formal languages.  There is currently no well-motivated
framework for discussing such material, no map on which to locate
important terms such as "document," "text," "icon," and "format."  But
there is clearly a coherent subject matter here waiting to be explored.

Topics we want to look at in early meetings include:
1.  Properties of the figural.
2.  Figural representation and representation in general.
3.  The typology of figural systems.
4.  Writing as a figural representation system; distinctive properties
of written language.
5.  The technological basis for figural representation (from writing to
print to the computer).

Initially, we plan to organize the discussion around readings drawn from
the literatures of a number of disciplines, among them linguistics,
psychology, literary theory, art criticism, AI, anthropology and
history. We expect to meet once a week (or once every two weeks) at
Ventura Hall (CSLI), starting Thursday morning, October 9, at 10AM.
Please note that we consider this to be a working group, not a general
public forum or a TINLunch.

At our first meeting, we will be discussing a short paper, "Visible
Language," which outlines some of the areas we will be concerned with.
Copies are available at the Ventura Hall desk.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************


Date: Thu, 9 Oct 86 10:05:42 edt
From: "Edward A. Fox" <fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa>
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech (VPI&SU)
Us-Mail: McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061
Phone: (703) 961-5113 or 6931
Reply-To: fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
Comments: from BITNET use fox@vtcs1, from CSNET use fox@vt (NOT fox%vtopus@vt)
          from UUCP use seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
Errors-To: foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
To: irdis
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #51


-VOL-
2

-N-
51
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 1 Oct 1986 12:01 EDT
-FROM-
From:         James Nolte <$JSN@CLVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Frakes metion of Catalog
-BODY-
I would like more information about CATALOG, the IR system developed
by Frakes Cox and Leighton at AT&t and mentioned by Frakes in the
article about software reuse.  Is it possible to use SIGIR to
enquire about this?

[Note: sure, it would be of interest to all of us. Bill Frakes did
his dissertation work relating to stemming and there are interesting
points about that in Catalog.  Bill can tell us all more info. if he
can.  - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 86 02:33:11 edt
From: DEKEN%NSF.CSNET%relay.cs.net@vpi.csnet
Subject: RE: infrastructure etc.

 ...

Very briefly, the major impact of the reorganization at NSF, as I
see it, is that the old IST division, as of October 1, will become
IRIS:  (Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems).  In addition
to the three programs from the old IST, the new Division will
take over the old Intelligent Systems Program, which had been
in the Division of Computer Research.  After October 1, we have

New                            Old
>--                            ---
Division of IRIS               Division of IST
  Knowledge and Data Based
      Systems Program          Information Science

  Interactive Systems          Information Technology
      Program

  Robotics and Machine
     Intelligence Program      Intelligent Systems (DCR)

  Information Impact Program   Information Impact Program

 ...

Let me know if I can be of any further help.
	Joe

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 86 06:58:43 edt
From: csnet_gateway (LAWS@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA)
Subject: Conference - CSCW '86 Program

Following is the program for CSCW '86: the Conference on
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work .  Registration material can
be obtained from Barbara Smith at MCC (basmith@mcc).

                   ***             CSCW '86          ***


                             DECEMBER 3 - 5, 1986
                                 AUSTIN, TEXAS

                           Tuesday, December 2, 1986
6:00pm - 10:00pm    Registration
6:00pm - 10:00pm    Reception/Refreshments


                          Wednesday, December 3, 1986
8:00am - 5:00pm     Registration
8:30am - 9:00am     Opening Remarks
     Welcome:       Herb Krasner, Conference Chair
     Conference Themes:  Irene Greif, Program Chair
9:00am - 10:30am    Supporting Face-to-Face Groups
     Chair:    George Huber
               University of Texas, Austin
   - Project NICK: Meetings Augmentation and Analysis
     Michael  Begeman,  Peter  Cook, Clarence Ellis, Mike Graf, Gail Rein,
     and Tom Smith; MCC
   - Cognoter, Theory and Practice of a Colab-orative Tool
     Gregg Foster; University of California, Berkeley
   - A Group  Decision  Support  System  for  Idea  Generation  and  Issue
     Analysis in Organizational Planning
     Lynda M. Applegate, Benn R. Konsynski, J. F. Nunamaker
     University of Arizona
10:30am - 11:00am   Break
11:00am - 12:30am   Empirical Studies
     Chair:    Bill Curtis; MCC
   - The  Variable  Impact of Computer Technologies on the Organization of
     Work Activities
     Jeanette Blomberg; Xerox
   - Cognitive Science and Organizational Design: A Case Study of Computer
     Conferencing
     Kevin Crowston, Thomas W. Malone, and F. Lin; M. I. T.
   - Narratives at Work, Story Telling as Cooperative Diagnostic Activity
     Julian Orr; Xerox
12:30pm - 2:00pm    Lunch
2:00pm - 4:00pm     Supporting Distributed Groups
     Chair:    Irene Greif; M. I. T.
   - Constraints on Communication and Electronic Messaging
     Martha Feldman; University of Michigan
   - Evolving Electronic Communication Networks:  An Empirical Assessment
     J. D. Eveland and Tora Bikson; The Rand Corporation
   - Semi-Structured   Messages   as   a   Basis   for  Computer-Supported
     Coordination
     Thomas W. Malone, Kenneth R. Grant,  Kum-Yew  Lai,  Ramana  Rao,  and
     David Rosenblitt; M. I. T.
   - The   Amigo   Project:   Advanced   Group   Communication  Model  for
     Computer-Based Communications Environment
     Thore Danielsen, University of Tromsoe, Norway
     Uta  Pankoke-Babatz  and  Wolfgang  Prinz,  Institute   for   Applied
     Information Technology, West Germany
     Ahmed Patel, University College Dublin, Ireland
     Paul-Andre Pays, Department Informatique Appliquee, France
     Knut Smalland, University of Oslo, Norway
     Rolf Speth, Commission of the European Communities, Belgium
4:00pm - 4:30pm     Break
4:30pm - 6:00pm     Panel Sessions in Parallel
     Panel I:  Cooperative Work in the Office
               Moderator:  Clarence Ellis, MCC
     Panel II:  Collaborative Design:  Technology Futures
               Moderator:  Herb Krasner, MCC
8:00pm              Special Session with Doug Engelbart:
               High Performance Teams


                          Thursday, December 4, 1986
9:00am - 10:30am    Hypertext Systems
     Chair:    Lucy Suchman; Xerox
   - Contexts -- A Partitioning Concept for Hypertext
     Norman Delisle and Mayer Schwartz; Tektronix Laboratories
   - Supporting Collaboration in NoteCards
     Randall Trigg, Lucy Suchman and Frank Halasz; Xerox
   - Intermedia:  Issues,  Strategies,  and  Tactics  in  the  Design of a
     Hypermedia Document System
     L. Nancy Garrett, Karen Smith and Norman Meyrowitz; Brown University
10:30am - 11:00am   Break
11:00am - 12:30pm   Underlying Technology for Collaborative Systems
     Chair:    Thomas Malone; M. I. T.
   - Data Sharing in Group Work
     Irene Greif, M. I. T.
     Sunil Sarin, Computer Corporation of America
   - Network-based Systems for Asynchronous Group Communication
     Nancy F. Jarrell and Bill Barrett; IBM Cambridge Scientific Center
   - Tools Help People Co-operate Only To The Extent That They  Help  Them
     Share Goals and Terminology
     Robert Neches; USC Information Sciences Institute
12:30pm - 2:00pm    Lunch and CSCW '88 Planning Meeting (Open)
2:00pm - 4:00pm     Collaboration Research
     Chair:    Margrethe Olson; N. Y. U.
   - A Language Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work
     Terry Winograd; Stanford University
   - A Framework for Studying Research Collaboration
     Lucy Suchman and Randall Trigg; Xerox
   - Relationships and Tasks in Scientific Research Collaborations
     Robert Kraut, Bell Communications Research,
     Jolene Galegher, University of Arizona
     Carmen Egido, Bell Communications Research
   - Collaboration Research in SCL
     George Goodman and Mark Abel
     Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Northwest
4:00pm - 4:30pm     Break
4:30pm - 6:00pm     Panel Sessions in Parallel
     Panel I:  From Theories to Systems
               Moderator: Paul Cashman, Digital Equipment Corporation
     Panel II:  Computer-Supported Groups:  Trends & Markets
               Moderator:  Robert Johansen, Institute for the Future
7:00pm         Banquet


                           Friday, December 5, 1986
9:00am - 10:30am    Interfaces: Multi-media and Multi-user
     Chair:    Ben Shneiderman; University of Maryland
   - A Performing Medium for Working Group Graphics
     Fred Lakin; Stanford University
   - An Experiment in Integrated Multimedia Conferencing
     Keith Lantz; Stanford University
   - WYSIWIS Reconsidered:  Early Experiences with Multi-User Interfaces
     Mark Stefik, Gregg Foster, Stan Lanning, Deborah Tatar; Xerox
10:30am - 11:00am   Break
11:00am - 12:30am   Industrial Experiences with Computer-Supported Groups
     Chair:    Mark Stefik; Xerox
   - Computer Teleconferencing: Experience at Hewlett Packard
     Tony Fanning and Bert Raphael; Hewlett Packard Company
   - Achieving  Sustainable  Complexity  Through  Information  Technology:
     Theory and Practice
     Paul Cashman and David Stroll; Digital Equipment Corporation
   - Computer-Supported Cooperative Work:   Examples  and  Issues  in  One
     Federal Agency
     Cathleen Stasz and Tora Bikson; The Rand Corporation
12:30pm - 2:00pm    Lunch
2:00pm - 4:00pm     Coordination and Decision Making
     Chair:    Chris Bullen; M. I. T.
   - CHAOS as a Coordination Technology
     F. De Cindio, G. De Michelis, C. Simone, R. Vassallo, and A. Zanaboni
     Universita di Milano
   - Using  a  Computer  Based  Tool  to  Support  Collaboration:  A Field
     Experiment
     Robert Dunham, Management Effectiveness and Planning
     Bonnie M. Johnson, Aetna Life and Casualty
     Grady McGonagill, Merron & McGonagill Associates
     Margrethe Olson, New York University
     Gerladine M. Weaver, Aetna Life and Causalty
   - Computer-Based Systems for Group Decision Support: Status of Use  and
     Problems in Development
     Kenneth Kraemer and John King; University of California, Irvine
   - SYNVIEW:  The  Design  of  a  System  for  Cooperative Structuring of
     Information
     David Lowe; New York University
4:00pm - 4:30pm     Break
4:30pm - 5:30pm     Invited Speaker:  John Seely Brown
               Vice President, Advanced Research
               Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 86 02:33:08 edt
From: ben%MIMSY.UMD.EDU%relay.cs.net@vpi.csnet
Subject: Re:  Softpsych


SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY  -   POTOMAC CHAPTER
VOLUME 11 NUMBER 1                              FALL 1986

 ...

October   10                                  Room 413-414

                   TURNING A SUPERTANKER:
      A FIELD STUDY OF MESSAGE IMPROVEMENTS IN IBM JCL

    William Mosteller, Boeing Computer Services Company
            7990 Gallows Court, Vienna, VA 22180


Boeing Computer Services has been studying  user  errors  in
coding  IBMs  Job  Control Language for several years.  In a
recent software release, MVS/XA 2.1.2, IBM incorporated five
suggestions from that study into the operating system.  This
talk discusses those changes, the effort to persuade IBM  to
implement them, and the benefits derived from them.

Study revealed that, although the JCL processor  could  pro-
duce  over a hundred different error messages, nine messages
represented about 85% of the traffic sent to the  user.   We
examined  those  nine messages, devised five suggestions for
improving the processor, and presented them to IBM.  Then we
measured how improved messages produced a lower error rate.


November 14                                   Room 413-414

            DISPLAY STRATEGIES FOR LARGE SCREENS
                    AND MULTIPLE WINDOWS

      Ben Shneiderman, Department of Computer Science
       University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742


Large screens have the capacity to show up to 124  lines  by
80  characters, but effective use of such screens requires a
rethinking of display strategies.  Scrolling, page  turning,
independent windows, synchronized scrolling,  direct  selec-
tion, copy windows, overlapped windows, coordinated windows,
etc. have been discussed but there is little empirical  evi-
dence  about  the efficacy of these strategies.  A review of
strategies will be presented.

Screen size was tested in a Pascal program reading task with
window  sizes  of  10,  22,  60,  and 120 lines (J. Reisel).
Larger window size proved to be advantageous, but there were
some  disadvantages with the larger sizes.  In a second pro-
ject, a hierarchical browser (high-level view, plus detailed
second view) was built and tested for Pascal program reading
(P. Shafer, R. Simon & L. Weldon). The results indicated  an
advantage  in  using  the  hierarchical browser.  In a third
study, a two screen environment on  an  IBM  PC  was  tested
against a single screen (L. Weldon).



December 12                                      Room 413-414

           LANGUAGES AND SOFTWARE TECHNIQUES FOR
               DESIGNING USER INTERFACES, OR
        WHAT IS A USER INTERFACE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?

Robert J.K. Jacob, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375

              John L. Sibert, Dept. of EE & CS
     George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052


It is difficult to design anything without a technique  that
permits  you  to  describe  it before building it.  However,
user interfaces for computer systems are often  designed  in
just  this  way.   A formal specification technique for user
interfaces would permit the designer to describe and study a
variety of interfaces before building one.  It can also pro-
vide the  basis  for  a  User  Interface  Management  System
(UIMS).

A UIMS is a software component  that  conducts  interactions
with the user and is separate from the program that performs
the underlying application task.  It is analogous to a  Data
Base  Management  System in that it isolates a function used
by several applications and moves it to a shared  subsystem.
It  removes  the  problem  of programming the user interface
from each individual application and application  programmer
and  separates  it  into  a module that can be designed by a
user interface specialist.  A  successful  UIMS  requires  a
method or language for specifying user interfaces precisely,
so that the interface designer can describe the desired user
interface to the system in a convenient and natural way.

Results of recent research at NRL and GWU on such specifica-
tion  methods  and  UIMS  designs will be presented.  Issues
that arise with Direct Manipulation--both in the  specifica-
tion  language  and  the  end-user  interfaces--will also be
addressed.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 86 16:09:22 edt
From: "Edward A. Fox" <fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa>
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech (VPI&SU)
Us-Mail: McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061
Phone: (703) 961-5113 or 6931
Reply-To: fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
Comments: from BITNET use fox@vtcs1, from CSNET use fox@vt (NOT fox%vtopus@vt)
          from UUCP use seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
Errors-To: foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
To: irdis
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #52


-VOL-
2

-N-
52
-DATE-
Date:     29-SEP-1986 20:08:12
-FROM-
From:     RAHTZ%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX1@AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	CHANGE OF ELECTRONIC ADDRESS
-BODY-
Please amend your address book, paper or electronic, to reflect that
Southampton Computer Science can now be mailed directly:
       I WAS   rahtz@uk.ac.ox.vax1
       I AM    spqr%sot-cm@uk.ac.ncl.cheviot
eg, i am user spqr on ukuucp site sot-cm (NRS uk.ac.soton.cm), and JANET
site ncl.cheviot kindly acts as a gateway for us. Alternatives are
spqr@cm.soton.ac.uk (Internet) and sot-cm!spqr@uk.ac.ncl.cheviot.
Sorry if this is complicated; try and persuade your coordinator to map
uk.ac.soton.cm onto the appropriate gateway re-routing. But dont stop
writing to me/sending me newsletters.
  thanks
    sebastian rahtz

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     Fri, 3 Oct 86 10:55:00 edt
From:     Michael Shepherd <shepherd@cs.dal.CDN>
Subject:  new address & addressee
Ed:
	Please note my new address for IRlist.  Also, please add
Carolyn Watters, watters@cs.dal.cdn     to the irlist.
I have not had an IRlist memo for some time now, please send my a
confirmation that the route to the new address is working.
My paper address is:
	Dr. Michael A. Shepherd
	Director
	Computing Science Division
	Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Science
	Dalhousie University
	Halifax, Nova Scotia
	Canada
	B3H 3J5
Thanks,
	mike shepherd

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Mitchell Wyle <wyle@ethz.uucp>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 86 08:23:57 -0200
Subject: irlistnews
Mr. Fox:
I have composed some bibliographical references as deep background for
my conspectus.  Today I am running a literature search for references
in 1985 and 1986 relating to automatic indexing.  I hope to be able to
send you the best 5 references with abstracts next week.  Please excuse
the data entry errors.  Some of these references are probably not well
known among IRlist readers, e.g. Baertschi.  -M Wyle
%A M Azmoodah
%A et al
%T The semantic binary relationship model of information
%P 133-152
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A M Baertschi
%A H P Frei
%T A data organization for information retrieval on a personal computer
%J Personal computing, Berichte des German chapter of the ACM
%C Teubner, Stuttgart
%D 1982
%V 5
%N 3
%A M Baertschi
%A H P Frei
%T Adapting a data organiyation to the structure of stored information
%E G Salton
%E H J Schneider
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Berlin
%D 1983
%S Lecture notes in computer science
%V 146
%I Springer-Verlag
%A M Baertschi
%T Term Dependence in information retrieval models
%R PhD Thesis
%I ETH
%C Zuerich
%N 7525
%D 1984
%A G G Belonogov
%A B A Kuynetsov
%A V K Krichevskii
%T Automatic document indexing for dialogue information systems
%J  Autom Documentation and Mathematical Linguistics
%V 18
%N 4
%P 71-78
%D 1984
%A D C Blair
%T The data-document distinction in information retrieval
%J Communications of the ACM
%V 27
%N 4
%D 1984
%A D C Blair
%A M E Maron
%T An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document
retrieval system
%J Comm ACM
%V 28
%N 3
%P 289-299
%D 1985
%A E M Blinkina
%T Analysis of frequency dictionaries and their use for request
correction
%J Automatic Documentation and  Mathematical Linguistics
%V 18
%N 2
%P 29-87
%D 1984
%A A Bookstein
%T On the perils of merging boolean and weighted retrieval systems
%J Journal of the ASIS
%V 29
%N 3
%D May 1978
%P 156-158
%A A Bookstein
%T Fuzzy requests: an approach to weighted boolean searches
%J Journal of the ASIS
%V 31
%N 4
%D July 1980
%P 240-247
%A A Bookstein
%T Explanation and generalization of vector models in information
retrieval
%E G Salton
%E H J Schneider
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Berlin
%D 1983
%S Lecture notes in computer science
%V 146
%I Springer-Verlag
%A E F Codd
%T Extending the database relational model to capture more meaning
%J ACM Transactions on database systems
%V 4
%N 4
%D 1979
%A W S Cooper
%T bridging the gap between AI and IR
%P 259-266
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A W Crawford
%T The hardware approach to information retrieval systems and its impact
on the information market in the 1980s
%B The design of information systems for human beings
%E K P Jones
%E H Taylor
%P 49-56
%C London
%I ASLIB
%D 1981
%A W B Croft
%T A model of cluster searching based on classification
%J Information Systems
%V 5
%N 3
%D 1980
%P 189-195
%A W B Croft
%A R Wolf
%A R Thompson
%T A network organization used for document retrieval
%B Proceedings of the sixth annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 17
%N 4
%D 1983
%A W B Croft
%A R Wolf
%A R Thompson
%T A network organization used for document retrieval
%B Proceedings of the 6th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on
research and development in information retrieval
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 17
%N 4
%D 1983
%A B Defude
%T Knowledge based systems versus thesaurus: an architecture problem
about expert system design
%P 267-280
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A W B Flakes
%T Term conflation for information retrieval
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A H P Frei
%A J F Jauslin
%T Graphical presentation of informatation and services:  A user
oriented interface
%J Information technology:  Research and development
%V 2
%N 1
%D January 1983
%A F Fuhr
%A G E Knorz
%T Retrieval test evaluation of a rule based automatic indexing
(AIR/PHY)
%P 391-408
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A U Hahn
%A U Reimer
%T Computing text constituency: an algorithmic approach to the
generation of text graphs
%P 343-368
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge university press
%P 343-366
%S British computer society workshop series
%D 1984
%A P Harding
%T Automatic indexing and classification for mechanised information
retrieval
%J British library for research and development
%R report
%N 5723
%D 1982
%A Z Jonak
%T Automatic indexing of full texts
%J Information Processing Management
%V 20
%N 5-6
%D 1984
%P 619-627
%A K P Jones
%A C L Bell
%T The automatic extraction of words from texts especially for input
into information retrieval systems based on inverted files
%P 409-420
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A P H Klingbiel
%T Phrase structure rewrite systems in information retrieval
%J Information Processing Management
%V 21
%N 2
%P 113-126
%D 1985
%A G Knorz
%T Automatisches Indexieren als Erkennen abstrakter Objekte
%C Tuebingen
%D 1983
%I Niemeyer
%S Sprache und Information
%A M B Koll
%A T Noreault
%A M J McGill
%T Enhanced retrieval techniques on a microcomputer
%B National Online meeting 1984
%C Medford
%D 1984
%E M E Williams
%E T H Hogan
%I Learned Information Inc
%P 165-170
%A L Koved
%T Restructuring textual information for online retrieval
%R Masters thesis
%N CAR-TR-133 CS-TR-1529
%C College Park
%I University of Maryland
%D July 1985
%A K L Kwok
%T A document document similarity measure based on cited titles and
probability theory, and its application to relevance feedback retrieval
%P 221-231
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A M E Maro
%T Probabilistic approaches to the document retrieval problem
%E G Salton
%E H J Schneider
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Berlin
%D 1983
%S Lecture notes in computer science
%V 146
%I Springer-Verlag
%A D P Metzler
%A T Noreault
%A L Richey
%A B Heidorn
%T Dependency parsing for information retrieval
%P 313-324
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A G T Niedermair
%A G Thurmair
%A I Buettel
%T  MARS:  A retrieval tool on the basis of morphological analysis
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A E Omiecinski
%A P Scheuermann
%T A global approach to record clustering and file reorganiyation
%P 201-220
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A F Rabitti
%A J Zizka
%T Evaluation of access methods to text documentation systems in office
systems
%P 21-40
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A C J van Rijsbergen
%T Information Retrieval, 2nd Edition
%I Butterworths
%C London
%D 1979
%H Wu
%A G Salton
%T A term weighting model based on utility theory
%B Information Retrieval Research
%E R N Oddy
%E S E Robertson
%E C J van Rijsbergen
%E P W Williams
%I Butterworths
%C London
%D 1981
%A G Salton
%T A blueprint for automatic indexing
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 16
%N 2
%D Fall 1981
%P 22-38
%A G Salton
%T A blueprint for automatic boolean query processing
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 17
%N 2
%D Fall 1982
%P 6-25
%A G Salton
%A M J McGill
%T Introduction to modern information retrieval
%I McGraw Hill International Book Company
%C Paris
%D 1983
%A G Salton
%T Extended boolean information retrieval - an outline
%P 339-346
%B National Online meeting 1984
%C Medford
%D 1984
%E M E Williams
%E T H Hogan
%I Learned Information Inc
%A G Salton
%T Some characteristics of future information systems
%J SIGIR Forum
%V 18
%N 2-4
%P 28-39
%D Fall 1985
%A C Schneider
%T Syntaktische Relationen in der automatischen Indexierung zur
Relationierung von Deskriptoren am beispiel juristischer dokumente
%C Regensburg
%D 1983
%R PhD Dissertation
%A J Tague
%T A semantic model and schema notation for bibliographic retrieval
systems
%P 71-94
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A B H Weinberg
%A J A Cunningham
%T Word frequency data in full text database searching
%P 425-432
%B National Online meeting 1984
%C Medford
%D 1984
%E M E Williams
%E T H Hogan
%I Learned Information Inc
%A S K M Wong
%A V V Raghavan
%T Vector space model of information retrieval - a reevaluation
%P 167-186
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
%A S K M Wong
%A W Ziarko
%T On generaliyed vector space model in information retrieval
%J Ann Soc Math Pol Ser IV Fundam Inf
%V 8
%N 2
%P 253-267
%D 1985
%A C T Yu
%A K Lam
%A G Salton
%T Term weighting in information retrieval using the term precision
model
%J Journal of the ACM
%V 29
%N 1
%D January 1982
%P 152-170
%A G P Zarri
%T Some remarks about the inference techniques of RESEDA, an intelligent
information retrieval system
%P 281-300
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
53
-FROM-
From: fox
-DATE-
Date: Mon Oct 13 09:03 EDT 1986
-SUBJECT-
Subject: mail problems
-BODY-
   I have been having a terrible time with mail systems!  Things were
going well until a few weeks ago when the volume of error messages
received on vtisr1 was about 300 Kbytes in one night!  A switch was
made to use BITNET to handle sending out digests and to receive the
error messages.  Then, the BITNET-ARPANET gateway indicated that it
was not able to contact seismo.  Several other routes were tried,
issue #47 had to be resent, ...
   A number of you have missed issues, had messages returned, etc.
   However, things are clearing up.  I called Rick Adams at seismo on
Friday and he had just returned from 2 weeks of vacation to find 8000
messages waiting to be handled.  He also changed protections so that I
could finally update the distribution list, today.  Let us hope that
with issue 53, things will get back to normal.
   Please forgive any inconveniences I have caused, and feel free
to ask for missed messages.  Our list is growing and more people are
contributing, so I will let the digests each be a bit bigger than my
previous limit of around 13K.
   Thanks for your patience and assistance! - Ed

PS The addresses given below the "Today's Topics" list are the ones
that people should use, or other related forms as shown below.  There
have been mailer problems that may mean that you cannot simply "reply"
to me, so please stick to the approved list:
1. If you are on ARPANET and can't use domains
	fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa		[This costs us but is reliable.]
	fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa	[Free but BITNET gateway is busy.]
	foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa	[Free but BITNET gateway is busy.]
2. If you are on ARPANET and can use domains [see comments under 1]
	fox%vt@relay.cs.net
	fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
	foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
3. If you are on BITNET			[These are all free.]
	fox@vtcs1
	foxea@vtvax3
4. If you are on CSNET			[This costs us but is reliable.]
	fox@vt (or other ones in 1 and 2 above)
5. If you are on UUCPNET		[This costs but usually works.]
	seismo!vtisr1!fox (or an address with prefix to reach seismo)
Thanks for your patience - maybe some retrieval people will
someday solve the directory problems of the world with some
nice applied retrieval software!
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Message-Id: <8610021922.AA27502@cernvax.UUCP>
From: Mitchell Wyle <wyle@ethz.uucp>
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 86 15:48:37 -0100
Subject: automatic indexing bibliography

Here is a bibliography with abstracts of automatic indexing in
information retrieval.  It might be too big to include in IRlist, but
you can cut it down.

[Note:  I have removed the %X field that had the Abstract or other
comments.  Entries with %X will be slotted to appear in the next
issue of ACM SIGIR Forum, so you can look there for further details. - Ed]

Different people in our group here are developing pieces of information
retrieval systems, and they are working together to integrate the pieces
and help each other.  I intend to collect more data (actually keep
current) in this bibliographic database, and use these data to evaluate
indexing schemes and retrieval strategies.  Much like SMART and SIRE.

For starters, I shall use Unix's addbib, sortbib, roffbib, indxbib,
lookbib suite of programs.  The manuals say that one can change the
options of indxbib when it stems, stop lists etc.  I have found the list
of the 100 most common words (/usr/lib/refer/eign), but I can't
figure out how to change the stemming from 6 characters.  Can someone
out their in IRdigest-land help?

[Note: Perhaps Mike Lesk will read this or someone else at Bellcore
will prod him to ask about this? - Ed]

Bibliography follows:




%A ?
%T Advances  in  Intelligent  Retrieval:  INFORMATICS  8.  Proceedings
of an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint Conference,  16-17 April 1985
 Oxford, England
%P 101-19
%D1985
%I Aslib
%C London

%T KNOWLEDGE FOR MACHINES.
%A T R Addis
%A L Johnson
%B THE FIFTH GENERATION COMPUTER PROJECT. STATE OF THE ART REPORT,1983,
%I PERGAMON INFOTECH, LTD
%C MAIDENHEAD, BERKSHIRE, ENGLAND

%T The  extension of data base systems and information retrieval systems
to knowledge based systems.
%A H Appelrath
%J Nachrichten fuer Dokumentation
%V 36
%N 1
%P 13-21
%D 1985

%T The  semantic  binary  relationship  model  of  information
%S The British Computer Society Workshop Series
%A M Azmoodeh
%A S H Lavington
%A M Standring
%B Research  and  Development  in  Information Retrieval
%D 1984
%I University Press
%C Cambridge

%A M Baertschi
%A H P Frei
%T A data organization for information retrieval on a personal computer
%J Personal computing, Berichte des German chapter of the ACM
%C Teubner, Stuttgart
%D 1982
%V 5
%N 3

%A M Baertschi
%A H P Frei
%T Adapting a data organiyation to the structure of stored information
%E G Salton
%E H J Schneider
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Berlin
%D 1983
%S Lecture notes in computer science
%V 146
%I Springer-Verlag

%A M Baertschi
%T Term Dependence in information retrieval models
%R PhD Thesis
%I ETH
%C Zuerich
%N 7525
%D 1984

%T Multikey retrieval from K-d trees and quad-trees
%A D A Beckley
%A  M W Evens
%A V K Raman
%J  SIGMOD Rec. (USA)
%V 14
%N 4
%P 291-301
%D December 1985
%B Proceedings  of ACM-SIGMOD 1985 International Conference on
Management of Data   28-31 May 1985
%C Austin

%A G G Belonogov
%A B A Kuynetsov
%A V K Krichevskii
%T Automatic document indexing for dialogue information systems
%J  Autom Documentation and Mathematical Linguistics
%V 18
%N 4
%P 71-78
%D 1984

%T Dataflow architectures for knowledge representation systems
%A L Bic
%E A S Wojcik
%B AFIPS Conference Proceedings: 1985 National Computer Conference,
15-18 July 1985   Chicago, IL
%P 287-295
%D 1985
%I AFIPS Press
%C Reston, VA

%T A knowledge based system approach to document retrieval
%A G Biswas
%A V Subramanian
%A J C Bezdek
%J  Second   Conference   on   Artificial   Intelligence Applications:
The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems
%D 11-13 Dec. 1985
%I IEEE Comput. Soc. Press
%C Washington, DC

%A D C Blair
%T The data-document distinction in information retrieval
%J Communications of the ACM
%V 27
%N 4
%D 1984

%A D C Blair
%A M E Maron
%T An evaluation of retrieval effectiveness for a full-text document
retrieval system
%J Comm ACM
%V 28
%N 3
%P 289-299
%D 1985

%A E M Blinkina
%T Analysis of frequency dictionaries and their use for request
correction
%J Automatic Documentation and  Mathematical Linguistics
%V 18
%N 2
%P 29-87
%D 1984

%A A Bookstein
%T On the perils of merging boolean and weighted retrieval systems
%J Journal of the ASIS
%V 29
%N 3
%D May 1978
%P 156-158

%A A Bookstein
%T Fuzzy requests: an approach to weighted boolean searches
%J Journal of the ASIS
%V 31
%N 4
%D July 1980
%P 240-247

%A A Bookstein
%T Explanation and generalization of vector models in information
retrieval
%E G Salton
%E H J Schneider
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Berlin
%D 1983
%S Lecture notes in computer science
%V 146
%I Springer-Verlag

%T Artificial  Intelligence  and  Expert Systems Research and Their
Possible Impact on Information Science.
%A H Borko
%J Education for Information
%V 3
%N 2
%P103-14
%D June 1985

%A H Borko
%T Artificial intelligence and expert systems research and their
possible impact on information science
%J Education for information
%V 3
%N 2
%P 103-104
%D June 1985

%T KARMA: knowledge-based assistant to a database system
%A P K Bose
%A M Rajinikanth
%J Second   Conference   on   Artificial   Intelligence   Applications:
The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems
%D 11-13 Dec. 1985
%I IEEE Computer Society Press
%C Washington, DC,

%T A STRUCTURAL PARADIGM FOR REPRESENTING KNOWLEDGE.
%A R J Brachman
%I Able Publishing Corp
%C Norwood, NJ
%D 1984

%T Problem descriptions and user models: developing an intelligent
interface for document retrieval systems
%A H M Brooks
%A P J Daniels
%A N J Belkin
%B Advances  in  Intelligent  Retrieval:  INFORMATICS  8.  Proceedings
of an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint Conference, 16-17 April 1985
Oxford, England
%P 191-214
%C London
%I Aslib

%T Managing   information   intelligently  (Quantum's  Knowledge
Management System)
%A M Brownstein
%J  Hardcopy
%V 14
%N 11
%P 139-141
%D November 1985

%T Artificial intelligence and authority control.
%A R H Burger
%J  Library  Resources  &  Technical Services
%V 28
%N 4
%P 337-345
%D October 1984

%A J M A Cavanagh
%T Intra-active retrieval systems
%P National online meeting proceedings 1986
%P 59-65
%D 6-8 May 1986
%C New York
%B Learned Information
%C Medford NJ

%T Intelligent interface design
%A M H Chignell
%A A Loewenthal
%A P A Hancock
%J IEEE  1985 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cybernetics
and Society
%P 620-3
%D  12-15 November1985
%C Tucson

%A E F Codd
%T Extending the database relational model to capture more meaning
%J ACM Transactions on database systems
%V 4
%N 4
%D 1979

%T Bridging  the  gap  between  AI  and  IR   Artificial  intelligence
and information retrieval
%S The British Computer Society Workshop Series
%A W S Cooper
%B Research  and  Development  in  Information Retrieval
%D 1984
%C Cambridge
%I University Press

%A W S Cooper
%T bridging the gap between AI and IR
%P 259-266
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T Implementation  of  a  system  of  diffuse  search  in  a
bibliographical database
%A U Cortes
%Q Lopez de Mantaras, R
%A J Manero
%A E Plazy
%A X Salra
%D 17-18 Oct. 1985
%J  Consorci Inf. & Documentacio de Catalunya
%C Barcelona, Spain

%A W Crawford
%T The hardware approach to information retrieval systems and its impact
on the information market in the 1980s
%B The design of information systems for human beings
%E K P Jones
%E H Taylor
%P 49-56
%C London
%I ASLIB
%D 1981

%A W B Croft
%T A model of cluster searching based on classification
%J Information Systems
%V 5
%N 3
%D 1980
%P 189-195

%A W B Croft
%A R Wolf
%A R Thompson
%T A network organization used for document retrieval
%B Proceedings of the sixth annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 17
%N 4
%D 1983

%A W B Croft
%A R Wolf
%A R Thompson
%T A network organization used for document retrieval
%B Proceedings of the 6th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on
research and development in information retrieval
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 17
%N 4
%D 1983

%T Representation of Legal Knowledge for Conceptual Retrieval.
%A G R Cross
%A C G deBessonet
%J Information Processing and Management
%V 21
%N1
%P35-44
%D1985

%T Formalization of legal information
%A C G deBessonet
%A G R Gross
%A S J Hintze
%A M Rajinkanth
%E R F Allen
%B International  Conference  on  Data  Bases  in  the Humanities and
Social Sciences 1983, New Brunswick, New Jersey
%P 425-434
%C Osprey, FL
%I Paradigm Press

%A B Defude
%T Knowledge based systems versus thesaurus: an architecture problem
about expert system design
%P 267-280
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T Relational  knowledge  structures: a structural model of information
for research and retrieval.
%A R A V Diener
%B Challenges to an Information Society. Proceedings of the 47th ASIS
Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 21-25, 1984
%I Knowledge Industry Publications, Inc
%C White Plains, NY

%T Automatic indexing of documents in the MSIS NIR system
%A H Dryzek
%C Centrum INTE, Warszawa, Poland
%J Aktual. Probl. Inf. & Dok. (Poland)
%V 30
%N 6
%P 19-23
%D1985

%T DARC system for documentation and artificial intelligence in
chemistry
%A J E Dubois
%A Y Sobel
%J  J. Chem. Inf. & Comput. Sci. (USA)
%V 25
%N 3
%P 326-333
%D August 1985

%T Shared  processing  with  an  advanced intelligent terminal. The
British
%S The Brittish Computer Society Workshop
%A C Estall
%E C J vanRijsbergen
%BResearch and Development in Information Retrieval
%D 1984
%I Cambridge University Press
%C Cambridge

%T Clinical and academic uses of COMMES: an implemented AI expert system
%A S Evans
%E M J Ackerman
%B Proceedings  of  the  Ninth  Annual Symposium on Computer
Applications in  Medical Care, 10-13 Nov. 1985
%C Baltimore
%I IEEE Comput. Soc. Press
%C Washington, DC

%A W B Flakes
%T Term conflation for information retrieval
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%A H P Frei
%A J F Jauslin
%T Graphical presentation of informatation and services:  A user
oriented interface
%J Information technology:  Research and development
%V 2
%N 1
%D January 1983

%A F Fuhr
%A G E Knorz
%T Retrieval test evaluation of a rule based automatic indexing
(AIR/PHY)
%P 391-408
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T Retrieval test evaluation of a rule based automatic indexing
(AIR/PHYS).
%E C J vanRijsbergen
%S The Brittish Computer Society Workshop
%A N Fuhr
%BResearch and Development in Information Retrieval
%D 1984
%I Cambridge University Press
%C Cambridge

%T The Impact of Microcomputing on Political Science.
%A D GGarson
%J Teaching Political Science
%V12
%N 3
%P 92-98
%D Spring 1985

%A U Hahn
%A U Reimer
%T Computing text constituency: an algorithmic approach to the
generation of text graphs
%P 343-368
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge university press
%P 343-366
%S British computer society workshop series
%D 1984

%T Expert systems as intelligent information systems.  Perspectives for
functional extension of information retrieval.
%A U Hahn
%J Nachrichten fuer Dokumentation
%V 36
%N 1
%P 2-12
%D 1985
A comparison of conventional document retrieval systems, fact retrieval
and expert systems is given on a functional level.  Based on a legal
information problem and illustrative interactions among system and user
knowledge sources available for each system type as well as the
background knowledge necessary on the users side are outlined.  An
illustration of expert systems' problem solving capabilities is provided
applying deductive reasoning  mechanisms to a legal rule base. The
discussion of properties of conventional and intelligent information
systems introduced so far leads to an  estimation  of  how  the
development  of  expert information retrieval systems might influence
current information practice.

%A P Harding
%T Automatic indexing and classification for mechanised information
retrieval
%J British library for research and development
%R report
%N 5723
%D 1982

%T Natural  language  access  to  the data base of the AIDOS/VS
information retrieval system.
%A H Helbig
%B Elsevier Science Publishing Company
%C New York
%D 1984

%T PROLOG  to  the  future:  a  glimpse  of  things  to  come  in
artificial intelligence
%A Herther, N.K.
%J  Microcomput. Inf. Manage. (USA)
%V 3
%N 1
%P 31-45
%D March 1986

%T The HYPERCATalog-from vision to systems design
%A M Jagerfeld

%A Z Jonak
%T Automatic indexing of full texts
%J Information Processing Management
%V 20
%N 5-6
%D 1984
%P 619-627

%A K P Jones
%A C L Bell
%T The automatic extraction of words from texts especially for input
into information retrieval systems based on inverted files
%P 409-420
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T MORPHS-an intelligent retrieval system
%A K P Jones
%A C L M Bell
%J ASLIB Proc. (GB)
%V 38
%N 3
%P 71-79
%D March 1986

%T Prolegomen intelligent' thesaurus software
%A P Kleinbart
%J Inf. Sci. Princ. & Pract.
%V 11
%N 2
%P 45-53
%D 1985

%T Phrase structure rewrite systems in information retrieval.
%A P H Klingbiel
%J Information  Processing and Management
%V 21
%N 2
%P 113-126
%D 1985

%A P H Klingbiel
%T Phrase structure rewrite systems in information retrieval
%J Information Processing Management
%V 21
%N 2
%P 113-126
%D 1985

%T Phrase structure rewrite systems in information retrieval
%A P H Klingbiel
%J Inf. Process. & Manage. (GB)
%V 21
%N 2
%P 113-26
%D 1985

%A G Knorz
%T Automatisches Indexieren als Erkennen abstrakter Objekte
%C Tuebingen
%D 1983
%I Niemeyer
%S Sprache und Information

%A M B Koll
%A T Noreault
%A M J McGill
%T Enhanced retrieval techniques on a microcomputer
%B National Online meeting 1984
%C Medford
%D 1984
%E M E Williams
%E T H Hogan
%I Learned Information Inc
%P 165-170

%A L Koved
%T Restructuring textual information for online retrieval
%R Masters thesis
%N CAR-TR-133 CS-TR-1529
%C College Park
%I University of Maryland
%D July 1985

%T EP-X:  a  knowledge-based  system to aid in searches of the
environmental pollution literature
%A D A Krawczak
%A P J Smith
%A S J Shute
%A M Chignell
%BSecond   Conference   on   Artificial   Intelligence   Applications:
The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems 11-13 Dec. 1985   Miami
Beach, FL, USA
%I IEEE  Comput. Soc. Press
%C Washington, DC
%D 1985

%T The   'intellectual   capacity'  of  automated  factographic
information retrieval systems
%A B V Kristalnyi
%A V G Voiskunskii
%A A A Raskina
%A I S Sidorov
%A V I Sharygin
%J Nauchno-Tekh. Inf. Ser.
%V 2
%N 12
%P 4-11
%D 1985

%T Natural language research.
%A R Kuhlen
%J SIGART Newsletter
%N 83
%P 20-21
%D January 1983

%T A  document-document  similarity  measure  based  on  cited  titles
and probability  theory,  and  its application to relevance feedback
retrieval.
%S The British Computer Society Workshop Series
%A K L Kwok
%B Research  and  Development  in  Information Retrieval
%D 1984
%C Cambridge
%I University Press

%A K L Kwok
%T A document document similarity measure based on cited titles and
probability theory, and its application to relevance feedback retrieval
%P 221-231
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************



-VOL-
2

-N-
54
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 86 18:01:45 edt
-FROM-
From: seismo!usceast!eastman (Caroline Eastman)
Message-Id: <8610102201.AA14780@usceast.UUCP>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: misc
-BODY-
 ...

 I will also send a copy of
the announcement for the International
Journal of Approximate Reasoning
for which Jim Bezdek is the editor.

[Note: one of the topics to be covered by this new journal is
information retrieval.  Perhaps J. Bezdek or others can send in
machine readable copy telling more. - Ed]

 ...

There are now two students working on the
IR project here with Gautam Biswas.  One is
incorporating new fuzzy functions into the
current system.  The other is going to try
to do an evaluation study of some sort of
the system performance.  The system is
written primarily in typical academic
project LISP.  ...

[Note: this system has been under development at Univ South Carolina
and has been reported upon in the literature.  Perhaps more details
can be sent to IRList. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     Tue, 7 Oct 86 09:42:54 edt
From:     Michael Shepherd <shepherd%cs.dal.CDN@csnet-relay.arpa>
Message-Id: <62:shepherd@cs.dal.cdn>
Subject:  a.i. applied to i.r.
Dear Ed:
	Dr. Carolyn Watters and I are working on extending traditional
information retrieval systems towards expert systems.  In doing this, we
are interested in a number of areas, particularly:  application of a.i.
techniques to text databases, knowledge representation, extraction of
knowledge for knowledge structures, etc.
	We have developed a prototype expert system using predicate
logic as the model for retrieval with a natural language front-end.
The prototype is in prolog.  The database consists of bibliographic
records, manually indexed.
	Our current emphasis includes the application of a faceted
classification scheme as the underlying knowledge structure.  It also
includes techniques for improving throughput of prolog searches in both
hardware and software.
	We would like to hear from other people working in this area.
We can be reached on cdnnet at:  shepherd@cs.dal.cdn
regards,
Michael Shepherd

>-----------------------------
-END-
Message-Id: <8610021922.AA27502@cernvax.UUCP>
-FROM-
From: Mitchell Wyle <wyle@ethz.uucp>
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 86 15:48:37 -0100
-SUBJECT-
Subject: automatic indexing bibliography [Note: final part - Ed]
-BODY-
Here is a bibliography with abstracts of automatic indexing in
information retrieval.  It might be too big to include in IRlist, but
you can cut it down.

[Note: The entries with abstracts were removed and will appear in
ACM SIGIR Forum.  Part 1 of the rest appeared in last issue. - Ed]

%T Interpretation  of  natural  language database queries using
optimization methods
%A W Leigh
%A J Evans
%J  IEEE  Trans.  Syst., Man & Cybern. (USA)
%V SMC-16
%N 1
%P 40-52
%D Jan.-Feb. 1986

%A M E Maro
%T Probabilistic approaches to the document retrieval problem
%E G Salton
%E H J Schneider
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Berlin
%D 1983
%S Lecture notes in computer science
%V 146
%I Springer-Verlag

%T RUBRIC: a system for rule-based information retrieval
%A B P McCune
%A R M Tong
%A J S Dean
%A D G Shapiro
%C Mountain View, CA
%J IEEE Trans. Software Eng.
%V SE-11
%N 9
%P 939-945
%D September 1985

%T An architectural approach to advances in information retrieval
%A D R McGregor
%A J R Malone
%B Advances  in  Intelligent  Retrieval:  INFORMATICS  8.  Proceedings
of an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint Conference,  16-17 April 1985
 Oxford, England
%P 34-46
%D1985
%I Aslib
%C London

%T Artificial  intelligence  as a tool of classification, or: the
network of language games as cognitive paradigm
%A N Meder
%J Int. Classif. (Germany)
%V 12
%N 3
%P 128-132
%D 1985

%T Expert  Systems  85. Proceedings of the Fifth Technical Conference of
the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems
%A M Merry
%B  Expert  Systems  85. Proceedings of the Fifth Technical Conference
of the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Expert Systems 17-19
Dec. 1985, Coventry England
%C Cambridge
%I Cambridge

%A D P Metzler
%A T Noreault
%A L Richey
%A B Heidorn
%T Dependency parsing for information retrieval
%P 313-324
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T Artificial  intelligence  and  the fifth generation: some wrong ways,
the correct way
%A G A Mihram
%A D Mihram
%D 1986
%I  ACM,
%C  New York
%B Proceedings of the fourteenth annual computer science conference CSC
1986, 4-6 February 1986

%T Information   retrieval  aids  in  an  online  public  access
catalogue: automatic intelligent search sequencing
%A N N Mitev
%A S Walker
%B Advances  in  Intelligent  Retrieval:  INFORMATICS  8.  Proceedings
of an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint Conference, 16-17 April 1985
Oxford, England
%P 215-26
%D 1985
%I Aslib
%C London

%T Interactive Querying Techniques for an Office Filing Facility.
%A J M Morrissey
%J Information Processing and Management
%V 22
%N 2
%P121-34
%D1986

%T Interactive querying techniques for an office filing facility
%A J M Morrissey
%A D J Harper
%A C J vanRusbergen
%J Inf. Process. & Manage. (GB)
%V 22
%N 2
%P 121-134
%D 1986

%A J M Morrissey
%T Interactive querying techniques for an office filing facility
%J Information processing and management
%V 22
%N 2
%P 121-134
%D 1986

%A G T Niedermair
%A G Thurmair
%A I Buettel
%T  MARS:  A retrieval tool on the basis of morphological analysis
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T ExERT SYSTEMS IN SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION ECHANGE.
%A E J Nowak
%A B F Szablowski
%J Journal of information science:  Principles and practices
%V 8
%N 3
%P 103-111
%D 1984

%A E Omiecinski
%A P Scheuermann
%T A global approach to record clustering and file reorganiyation
%P 201-220
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
% RrImbridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%A F Rabitti
%A J Zizka
%T Evaluation of access methods to text documentation systems in office
systems
%P 21-40
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T Relevance on a biomedical classification structure
%A R Rada
%A S Humphrey
%A M Suh
%A E Brown
%A C Coccia
%J Expert Systems in Government Symposium  24-25 Oct. 1985   McLean, VA,
USA
%I IEEE Comput Soc. Press
%C Washington, DC

%T  Novel   Filing   Systems   Applicable   to   an   Automated
Office:   A State-of-the-Art Study.
%Q Restorick, F. Mark
%J Information Processing and Management
%V 22
%N 2
%P151-72
%D1986

%A C J van Rijsbergen
%T Information Retrieval, 2nd Edition
%I Butterworths
%C London
%D 1979

%T REPRESENTATION IN MEMORY.
%A D E Rumelhart
%R UCSD No ED 235-770 Thesis
%D June 1983

%A M Azmoodah
%A S H Lavington
%A M Standring
%T The semantic binary relationship model of information
%P 133-152
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%H Wu
%A G Salton
%T A term weighting model based on utility theory
%B Information Retrieval Research
%E R N Oddy
%E S E Robertson
%E C J van Rijsbergen
%E P W Williams
%I Butterworths
%C London
%D 1981

%A G Salton
%T A blueprint for automatic indexing
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 16
%N 2
%D Fall 1981
%P 22-38

%A G Salton
%T A blueprint for automatic boolean query processing
%J ACM SIGIR Forum
%V 17
%N 2
%D Fall 1982
%P 6-25

%T Introduction to modern information retrieval.
%A G Salton
%A M J McGill
%I McGraw Hill Book Company
%D 1983

%A G Salton
%A M J McGill
%T Introduction to modern information retrieval
%I McGraw Hill International Book Company
%C Paris
%D 1983

%A G Salton
%T Extended boolean information retrieval - an outline
%P 339-346
%B National Online meeting 1984
%C Medford
%D 1984
%E M E Williams
%E T H Hogan
%I Learned Information Inc

%T Some characteristics of future information systems
%A G Salton
%J SIGIR Forum (USA)
%V 18
%N 2-4
%P 28-39
%D Fall 1985

%A G Salton
%T Some characteristics of future information systems
%J SIGIR Forum
%V 18
%N 2-4
%P 28-39
%D Fall 1985

%T Solving  tasks  on  semantic  networks  and graphs by active
distributed structures.
%A P S Saparty
%B Artificial  Intelligence and Information Control Systems for Robots
%D1984
%I Elsevier Science Publishing Co
%C New York

%A C Schneider
%T Syntaktische Relationen in der automatischen Indexierung zur
Relationierung von Deskriptoren am beispiel juristischer dokumente
%C Regensburg
%D 1983
%R PhD Dissertation

%A T K Sellis
%A L Shapiro
%T Optomiyation of extended database query languages
%J SIGMOD Rec
%V 14
%N 4
%P 424-436
%D December 1985

%T Optimization of extended database query languages
%A T K Sellis
%A L Shapiro
%J  SIGMOD Rec. (USA)
%V 14
%N 4
%P 424-436
%D December 1985
%B  Proceedings  of ACM-SIGMOD 1985 International Conference on
Management of Data   28-31 May 1985
%C Austin

%T  An Investigation of Document Partitions
%Q  Shaw, W. M., Jr.
%J Information Processing and Management
%V 22
%N 1
%P 19-28
%D 1986

%T  Principles,  Procedures  and  Rules  in  an Expert System for
Information Retrieval.
%A P Shoval
%J Information Processing and Management,
%V 21
%N 6
%P475-87
%D1985

%T Principles,  procedures  and  rules  in  an expert system for
information retrieval
%A P Shoval
%J  Inf. Process. & Manage
%V 21
%N 6
%P 475-487
%D 1985

%A P Shoval
%T Principles, procedures, and rules in an expert system for information
retrieval
%J Information and processing management
%V 21
%N 6
%P 475-487
%D 1985

%A A F Smeaton
%A C J Rijsbergen
%T Information retrieval in an office filing facility and future work in
project minstrel
%J Information processing and management
%V 22
%N 2
%P 135-149
%D 1986

%T  Information  Retrieval  in  an  Office Filing Facility and Future
Work in Project Minstrel.
%A A F Smeaton
%Q van Rijsbergen, C.J.
%J  Information Processing and Management
%V22
%N 2
%P135-49
%D1986

%T A guide to information sources in artificial intelligence.
%A L C Smith
%J  Science and Technology Libraries
%V 5
%N 3
%P 79-100
%D Spring 1985

%A J Tague
%T A semantic model and schema notation for bibliographic retrieval
systems
%P 71-94
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T Information retrieval and spatial orientation
%A R H Veith
%E  CA Parkhurst
%BASIS '85. Proceedings of the 48th ASIS Annual Meeting,  20-24 Oct.
1985   Las Vegas, NV
%P 250-254
%I Knowledge Ind. Publictions
%C White Plains, NY

%T An intelligent interface for online interaction.
%A A Vickery
%J  Journal of Information Science: Principles & Practices
%V 9
%N 1
%P 7-18
%D 7-18 August 1984

%T Knowledge resource tools for accessing large text files
%A D E Walker
%S Artificial  Intelligence & Inf. Sci. Res. (Bell Commun. Res)
%E S Nirenburg
%B Proceedings of the Conference on Theoretical and Methodological
Issues in Machine Translation of Natural Languages, 14-16 Aug. 1985
Hamilton, NY, USA
%P 335-347
%D 1985
%I Colgate Univ
%C Hamilton, NY,

%A B H Weinberg
%A J A Cunningham
%T Word frequency data in full text database searching
%P 425-432
%B National Online meeting 1984
%C Medford
%D 1984
%E M E Williams
%E T H Hogan
%I Learned Information Inc

%T Electronic databases
%A M E Williams
%J  Science
%V 228
%N 4698
%P 445-450

%T Retrieving,   structuring,  and  presenting  knowledge  from  very
large bibliographical databases
%A J H Wilson
%E E L Gallizzi
%E J Elam
%E R H Sprague,Jr.
%B Proceedings  of  the Eighteenth Hawaii International Conference on
System Sciences 1985,  2-4 Jan. 1985   Honolulu, HI, USA
%P 798-801
%V 2
%I Hawii International Conference on Systems Science
%C Honolulu HI

%T Using information retrieval techniques in an expert system
%A S G Winett
%A E A Fox
%B Second   Conference   on   Artificial   Intelligence   Applications:
The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems  11-13 Dec. 1985   Miami
Beach, FL, USA
%P 230-5
%D 1985
%I IEEE  Comput. Soc. Press
%C Washington, DC

%A S K M Wong
%A V V Raghavan
%T Vector space model of information retrieval - a reevaluation
%P 167-186
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series

%T On generalized vector space model in information retrieval
%A S K M Wong
%A W Ziarko
%J Ann.  Soc.  Math.  Pol. Ser. IV: Fundam. Inf. (Poland)
%V 8
%N 2
%P253-267
%D 1985

%A S K M Wong
%A W Ziarko
%T On generalized vector space model in information retrieval
%J Ann Soc Math Pol Ser IV Fundam Inf
%V 8
%N 2
%P 253-267
%D 1985

%A C T Yu
%A K Lam
%A G Salton
%T Term weighting in information retrieval using the term precision
model
%J Journal of the ACM
%V 29
%N 1
%D January 1982
%P 152-170

%T Interactive information retrieval: an artificial intelligence
approach to deal with biographical data
%A G P Zarri
%B Advances  in  Intelligent  Retrieval:  INFORMATICS  8.  Proceedings
of an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint Conference,  16-17 April 1985
 Oxford, England
%P 101-19
%D1985
%I Aslib
%C London

%T Some  remarks about the inference techniques of RESEDA, an
"intelligent" information retrieval system. The British Computer Society
Workshop Series
%A G P Zarri
%B  Research  and  Development  in  Information Retrieval
%D 1984
%C Cambridge
%I University Press

%A G P Zarri
%T Some remarks about the inference techniques of RESEDA, an intelligent
information retrieval system
%P 281-300
%B Research and development in information retrieval
%C Cambridge
%E C J Rijsbergen
%I Cambridge University press
%D 1984
%S British computer society workshop series
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
55
-FROM-
From: Hans-Peter Giger <seismo!mcvax!ethz!hpg>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 86 08:07:21 -0100
-SUBJECT-
Subject: email adress unknown
-BODY-
Hi
does anybody know the email adresses of the following persons:

S.E Robertson at City University in London
W.B Croft     at University of Massachusetts

We are looking for algorithms to help us converting weighted search request
into
series of boolean search request. We are using Elementary Logic Conjuncts as
presented by Jamieson and Heine.

Thanks a lot
Adress: mcvax!cernvax!ethz!giger

                                               Hanspeter Giger

[Note: The address for Bruce is
	croft%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
You might contact Chris Buckley (or he might respond to this) about
some of the work at Cornell that may relate.  I am not sure if S.E.
Robertson receives this digest; if he does not and is interested
please let him know. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 86 09:45:15 edt
From: choueka@thunder.bellcore.com (Yaacov Choueka)
Message-Id: <8610101345.AA15205@thunder.bellcore.com>
Subject: problems in inf. ret.
Help
I was referred to you by M. Lesk for the following inf.: A few years ago
Salton published a list of outstanding problems in inf. ret. (probably in
Forum but I am not sure).Do you have any ref. on that? (May be a copy?).

Thanks. Y. Choueka (tel. (201) 8295175)

[Note: In JASIS, July 1985, 36(4):268-271, G. Salton talks about some of the
progress that has been made and some of the areas where more work is needed.
   In SIGIR Forum 14(4), Summer 83 (also is Proc. 6th Int. ACM SIGIR
Conf. on R&D in IR), M.E. Maron had article "Open Problems in Information
Retrieval."
   Perhaps other readers have other references, or would like to send
in comments on problems.  There was a good discussion at the ASIS
Annual Meeting sessions run by ACM SIGIR; perhaps one of the panelist
there or a participant would like to summarize the comments made. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         Sat, 11 Oct 1986 15:37 CST
From:         Robert H Greenfield <RHG@UREGINA1>
Subject:      Davidson Code
In IRList Vol 2 No 50, R Daniel Johnson comments on Soundex Code
in reply to a request for information from Stephen Page (IRList
Vol 2 No 44).
As a part of my dissertation, I investigated Soundex Code and
compared it to Davidson's code.  To put it quickly, the Davidson
Code is easier to calculate and for most purposes superior to
the Soundex.  Soundex brought too many non-similar sounding names
together.  In some cases, Davidson's code didn't bring the
desired names together.  This study looked for duplicate records
in an approximately 25,000 name radiology data base.
I don't understand why Davidson's code is ignored as much as it is.
Davidson L.  Retrieval of Misspelled Names in an Airlines
Passenger Record System.  Comm ACM; 1962; 5:169-71.
Greenfield RH.  An Experiment to Measure the Performance of
Phonetic Key Compression Schemes.  Meth Inform Med; 1977 Oct;
16(4):230-3.
R H Greenfield, University of Regina.
PS:  Where is Vijay Raghavan hiding these days?
Acknowledge-To: Robert H Greenfield <RHG@UREGINA1>

[Note: Vijay's new network address in Southern Louisiana is
	raghavan%usl.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
I agree with you that people should look at other algorithms besides
Soundex.  I had some students compare various methods, and
incorporated them in our version of the SMART system a few years ago.
We did some retrieval tests and found Soundex to give lower precision
but higher recall than either Davidson's 1962 method, or Davidson's
method with "m" and "n" conflated.  See article in Proceedings of
ACM SIGIR Conf. in 1985 for a few more details. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Message-Id: <MS.V3.10.cfe.0.apollo.139.4@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 86 15:00:29 edt
From: cfe@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart)
Subject: Soundex improvements?
When Knuth introduces Soundex, he says that it works pretty well for
surnames.  Are there other, similar, name-compression techniques that are
designed to work well for given names, or for any names?  Naively, I could
ask about simple, cheap techniques to map ``Bill'' and ``William'' to the
same canonical representation--a different canonical representation, of
course, from the one to which it maps ``Liz'' and ``Elizabeth'' and
``Libby.''
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         Thu, 09 Oct 86 09:38:15 O
From:         Henry Nussbacher <HANK@BARILVM>
Subject:      SOUNDEX
I have been using a SOUNDEX-like program in VM for the past year to
phonetically find user's last names.  There is alot of optimizing that
can be done in this area.  The program is currently optimized for
American last names and not for European names.  Example:  A name like
Finkel would be reduced to 2736 but Finkle would become 27361 since the
trailing vowel is deemed to be significant in American names.  An Israeli
name like Mizrachi would prefer to have the trailing vowel dropped.  I leave
the optimization up to all computer scientists and hackers.  For me it
finds a match 98% of the time.
The code is written in Rexx and should be fairly easy to understand for
those that know PL1 or Pascal.
> /*
>    This exec will take a single character string that is a person's
>    last name and change it into a numeric index.  This index can then
>    be used to search.
>
>    Syntax:
>    ======
>
>    PHONETIC name
>    The EXEC will stack a number when it leaves.  It the responsibility
>    of the caller to handle the stacked value.
>
>    Phonetic rules:
>    ==============
>
>    1) 'W' or 'H' at beginning of word is kept, 'W' or 'H' anywhere else
>       is thrown out
>    2) Vowel at beginning or end of word is unique, anywhere else it
>       is thrown out
>
>
>    Logic:
>    =====
>
>    1) Uppercase the name
>    2) Change the following letters:
>       S,Z             to 9
>       R               to 8
>       M,N             to 7
>       L               to 6
>       W,H             to Z
>       D,T             to 4
>       C,G,J,K,Q,X     to 3
>       B,F,P,V         to 2
>       anything else   to Y
>    3) Insert an 'X' at the beginning and the end
>    3) Change any 'YX' to '1'
>              any 'XY' to '1'
>              any 'XZ' to '5'
>    4) Change all single occurrences of 'X', or 'Z' to null
>    5) Reduce all double and triple occurrences of the numbers - 2,3,
>       4,6,7,8,9 to be single digit in length.
>    6) Change all occurrences of 'Y' to null
>
>    Example:
>    =======
>
>    A search of the Weizmann NAMES file for MUSPACHER would find
>    NUSSBACHER.
>
>
>    Author: Henry Nussbacher
>    Date  : July 1985
> */
> Arg name                                      /* Pick up the name      */
> Upper name                                    /* Upper case it         */
> nuname =
Translate(name,'YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY222233333344ZZ677899',
>   '|@#$%^&*()_-+=!c|\"}{?/`~AEIOUYBFPVCGJKQXDTHWLMNRSZ')
> nuname = 'X'nuname'X'                         /* Surround the word     */
> nuname = Change(nuname,'YX','1')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'XY','1')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'XZ','5')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'Z','')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'X','')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'222','2')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'333','3')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'444','4')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'666','6')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'777','7')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'888','8')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'999','9')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'22','2')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'33','3')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'44','4')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'66','6')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'77','7')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'88','8')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'99','9')
> nuname = Change(nuname,'Y','')
> Queue nuname
> Exit
>
>
> Change: Procedure
> Parse Arg string, old, new
> If old == '' Then Return new||string
> out = ''
> Do While Pos(old,string) ^= 0
>    Parse Var string prepart (old) string
>    out = out||prepart||new
> End
> Return out||string

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 86 10:15:56 cdt
From: Bill Jones <seismo!mcc.com!mccabe%hulk>
Message-Id: <8609081515.AA09912@hulk>
Subject: abstract submission to IRList

Dear Dr. Fox,

Enclosed please find an abstract of a manuscript "Pictures of Relevance:
A  Geometric Analysis Of Similarity Measures" by myself and George
Furnas.  This manuscript will shortly appear as an MCC tech report and
it has also been submitted for possible publication in JASIS.  Copies
can be obtained by contacting me (William P. Jones) in any of three
ways:
1. email - send to "mccabe@mcc.com" ("mccabe" is a family name more
distinctive than "jones".)
2. phone - 512-338-3326
3. or by writing me at the address below.
I thought it appropriate to give you readers advance notice of this
manuscript.  Thank you.



PICTURES OF RELEVANCE: A GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF SIMILARITY MEASURES

William P. Jones, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation
P.O. Box 200195, Austin, Texas 78720

George W. Furnas, Bell Communications Research, 435 South St.
Morristown, N. J. 07960


We want computer systems that can help us assess the similarity or
relevance of existing objects (e.g. documents, functions, commands,
etc.) to a statement of our current needs (e.g. the query).  Towards
this end, a variety of similarity measures have been proposed.  However,
the relationship between a measure's formula and its performance is not
always obvious.  A geometric analysis is advanced and its utility
demonstrated through its application to six conventional information
retrieval similarity measures and a seventh spreading activation
measure.  All seven similarity measures work with a representational
scheme wherein a query and the database objects are represented as
vectors of term weights.  A geometric analysis characterizes each
similarity measure by the nature of its iso-similarity contours in an
n-space containing query and object vectors.  This analysis reveals
important differences among the similarity measures under consideration
and suggests conditions under which these differences will have an
empirically verifiable impact upon retrieval performance.  The cosine
coefficient, for example, is shown be insensitive to between- object
differences in term relevance while the inner product measure is shown
to be subject to an unbounded influence from individual query terms.
The context-sensitive spreading activation measure may overcome both of
these limitations and deserves further study.  The geometric analysis is
intended to complement, and perhaps to guide, the empirical analysis of
similarity measures.

[Note:  I have read this and found it quite interesting.  They use
equi-similarity contours similar to those we used in the p-norm
extended Boolean query processing studies dating back some 3-4 years,
but have applied that to vector forms.  They have added in a taxonomy
of characteristics of measures that sharpens the effects and
differences between measures. And the spreading activation approach
has been receiving a lot of attention in the AI community. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
56
-DATE-
Date: Tue 7 Oct 86 09:13:18-PDT
-FROM-
From: Mark Frisse <FRISSE%SUMEX-AIM.ARPA%relay.cs.net@vpi.csnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: electronic textbooks
Office: Medical Center TC-135, 725-3397
Message-ID: <12244923425.39.FRISSE@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
-BODY-
Dr. Fox,

  I read IRList regularly and would love to send an abstract of my
work in several weeks.  Briefly, I am interested in the "electronic
textbook" area.  My Department in St. Louis publishes a little
paper "memex" called the Washington University Manual of Medical
Therapeutics (Little, Brown, and Co,).  It's a 500 page pocket
guide for interns and residents that contains "everything you
need to know until help arrives in the morning".

   The book assumes a rigid user model (even 2nd year medical
students don't have the conceptual structures to exploit the book).
The structure of the book is hierarchical - almost outline form,
and is extremely "non-linear", there are many pointers to the secondary
literature and to other portions of the text. Since it represents
the "compiled" knowledge of the authors and has to fit in the pocket
of a white coat, many, many secondary references must be deleted
from the text.

  I've been following the dynabook literature and reading work
of Kay, Weyer, Trigg (now at PARC on Notecards), and CMU people
(ZOG, CoalSort, etc).  Unfortunately, I find little guidance in
methodology to search paragraphs (or "notecards"). I suspect
that someone has amply shown that some of the traditional approaches
break down as the size of the retrieved document shrinks.

  I will be returning to St. Louis in one year.  We hope to develop
a research group to study electronic authorship, textbooks, and IR.
We have one of the strongest digital radiology groups in the US -
at our Mallinkrodt Institute they routinely transmit x-rays to the
ER and ICUS over broadband, so naturally Optical disk research
is a major priority.  We also are building a new medical school
library and hope to incorporate some of this technology into
its construction.

 ...

If you know of people with similar interests, please give them
my net address.

Best Wishes

mark frisse
(Wasnington U. St. Louis and Stanford Medical Computer Science)

(frisse@sumex-aim.stanford.edu)

[Note:  I have taken the liberty of distributing this, and hope we
will still receive an abstract soon. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 86 17:18:28 edt
From: fox (Ed Fox)
Subject: Proceedings of Pisa Conference

The Proceedings from the International Conference on Research and
Development in Information Retrieval held in Pisa in September can
be obtained from ACM, 11 West 42nd Street, NY, NY 10036 by
referring to Order Number 606860.  The cost is $18 to members
and $24 to non-members.  The Proceedings costs more than the
dues to ACM SIGIR (now only $6!), so it will not be sent to
members.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 86 18:34:04 edt
From: rba@LAFITE.BELLCORE.COM
Subject: Contents of recent TOOIS issue

ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
July, 1986

Supporting distributed office problem solving.
	C.C. Woo and F.H. Lochovsky, U. Toronto

The intergration of computing and routine work.
	Les Gasser, USC

A visual interface for a database with version management
	J.W. Davison and S.B. Zdonik, Brown U.

Analyzing due process in the workplace.
	E.M. Gerson and S.L. Star

Offices are open systems.
	C. Hewitt, MIT

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue 14 Oct 86 17:26:14
From: Roland Hjerppe <seismo!liuida!rhj>
Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS, FOR DISTRIBUTION
Message-Id: <6N63PQ0.1R.R-HJERPPE@LISBET>


                      CALL FOR PAPERS

                   IEEE Computer Society

             1987 Workshop on Visual Languages

           August 19 - 21, 1987, Linkoping, Sweden


Papers are invited on theory, methodology, and applications of visual
languages, including both languages that have a heavy visual component
and languages designed for operating on visual objects. Areas related
to visual languages, such as Man-Machine Interface, Office Automation,
Computer Aided Design, Computer Hardware, and Knowledge Based Systems
are also of interest if the visual language aspect is in focus.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Visual Data Structures
Formal, Cognitive and Semantic Models for Visual Languages
Shape Grammars
Visual Programming
Visual Support for Software Production
Visualization of Programs and their Behavior
User Interfaces Using Visual Objects
Representation and Acquisition of Visual Knowledge
Icon and Iconic System Design
Animation Research
Multimedia Systems


Important Dates

        Submission Deadline       February 20, 1987
        Acceptance Notification   April 20, 1987
        Final Copy Due            May 20, 1987
        Conference                August 19-21, 1987

Three copies of each paper - maximum length 5 000 words - should be
submitted to:

Erland Jungert
FFV Elektronik AB
Agatan 122
S-582 22 Linkoping
Sweden

Conference Chairman: Prof. Robert Korfhage, Dept. of Information
Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Program Chairman: Erland Jungert, FFV Elektronik AB

Organizers: Roland Hjerppe, Christian Krysander, Dept. of Computer and
Information Science, University of Linkoping, S-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden
For details, contact the the Organizers at:

UUCP:RHJ@LIUIDA
ARPA: RHJ%LIUIDA.UUCP@SEISMO

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 86 02:46:46 edt
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

   Date: Thursday, 9 October 1986  15:09-EDT
   From: Brad Goodman <BGOODMAN at BBNG.ARPA>
   subject:   BBN Labs AI Seminar

Thursday,  16 October  10:30am  Room: 3rd floor large conference room
                                      BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street
                                      Cambridge

                  BBN Laboratories
             Science Development Program
                  AI/Education Seminar


         Inferring Domain Plans In Question-Answering

          Martha E. Pollack
	  Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International
	  (Pollack@Sri-Warbucks.Arpa)


The importance of plan inference in models of conversation has been
widely noted in the computational-linguistics literature, and its
incorporation in question-answering systems has enabled a range of
cooperative behaviors.  The plan inference process in each of these
systems, however, has assumed that the questioner (Q) whose plan is being
inferred and the respondent (R) who is drawing the inference have
identical beliefs about the actions in the domain.  I demonstrate that this
assumption is too strong, and often results in failure not only of the plan
inference process, but also of the communicative process that plan
inference is meant to support.  In particular, it precludes the principled
generation of appropriate responses to queries that arise from invalid
plans.  I present a model of plan inference in conversation that
distinguishes between the beliefs of the questioner and the beliefs of the
respondent.  This model rests on an account of plans as mental phenomena:
"having a plan" is analyzed as having a particular configuration of beliefs
and intentions.  Judgements that a plan is invalid are associated with
particular discrepancies between the beliefs that R ascribes to Q, when R
believes Q has some particular plan, and the beliefs R herself holds.  I
define several types of invalidities from which a plan may suffer, relating
each to a particular type of belief discrepancy, and show that the types of
any invalidities judged to be present in the plan underlying a query can
affect the content of a cooperative response.  The plan inference model has
been implemented in SPIRIT -- a System for Plan Inference that Reasons
about Invalidities Too -- which reasons about plans underlying queries in
the domain of computer mail.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 86 02:46:51 edt
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: CSLI Calendar, October 9, No. 2 [Extract - Ed]

                           NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
                     Categorial Unification Grammar
                   Lauri Karttunen and Hans Uszkoreit
                            October 16, 1986

   The introduction of unification formalism and new types of rules has
   brought about a revival of categorial grammar (CG) as a theory of
   natural language syntax.  We will survey some of the recent work in
   this framework and discuss the relationship of lexical vs. rule-based
   theories of syntax.
      Non-transformational syntactic theories traditionally come in two
   varieties.  Context-free phrase structure grammar (PSG) consists of a
   very simple lexicon and a separate body of syntactic rules that
   express the constraints under which phrases can be composed to form
   larger phrases. Classical CG encodes the combinatorial principles
   directly in the lexicon and, consequently, needs no separate component
   of syntactic rules.
      Because a unification-based grammar formalism makes it easy to
   encode syntactic information in the lexicon, theories such as LFG and
   HPSG, which use feature sets to augment phrase structure rules, can
   easily encode syntactic information in the lexicon.  Thus syntactic
   rules can become simpler and fewer rules are needed.  In this respect,
   HPSG, for example, is much closer to classical CG than classical PSG.
      Pure categorial grammars can also be expressed in the same
   unification-based formalism that is now being used for LFG and HPSG.
   This includes more complex versions of CG employing the concepts of
   functional composition and type raising as they are currently
   exploited in the grammars of Steedman, Dowty, and others.  The merger
   of strategies from categorial grammar and unification grammars
   actually resolves some of the known shortcomings of traditional CG
   systems and leads to a syntactically more sophisticated grammar model.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
57
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 86 13:11:20 est
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: fire in steam tunnels
-BODY-
On 25 Oct. we had a fire in the steam tunnels, destroying some of our
network on campus.  The only effect relevant to IRList was with address
	fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
for ARPANET users and
	fox@vtcs1
for BITNET users.  These should be fixed shortly.
Regards, Ed
[Note as of 11/7: everything is working again, but if any of you sent
messages to one of the addresses above for a few days after, please
send again. Sorry, Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     Tue, 21 Oct 86 21:16 EDT
From:     <OCBNO@UTKVX4>
Subject:  INFORMATION
To:       FOXEA@VTVAX3
...
Second, I would appreciate it if you would send me anything that you can
about speech analysis and cognitive psychology.  I am doing a paper on
the left and right hemispheres and their affect on speech and emotional
behavior.  Any other information dealing with these topics would also
be on great help.
Thanks again, and I will be awaiting your reply.
[Note: I don't know much about this area, and hope that readers will
reply directly to you or else back to me for posting. - Ed]
                                                    CYNTHIA MARTIN

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 86 02:06:03 est
From: LAWS@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA [Actually, from Dr. J. Deken, forwarded by K.Laws]
To: laws@sri-stripe.arpa
Subject: List of Active Research in Knowledge and Database Systems

Ken,
I have an online list of the current awards in the Knowledge and Database
Systems Program at NSF, including a short abstract (150 words) of each
project.  I would be happy to have this available for people.  The
total file is about 85000 characters.  Is it too long for AIlist?
If I send it to you, can you post a message and archive it somewhere
for FTP?  Other possibilities?    Let me know what you think.
Our Division has been renamed:  Information, Robotics, and Intelligent
Systems (IRIS).  It includes four programs:
Knowledge and Database Systems
Robotics and Machine Intelligence
Interactive Systems
Information Impact

I also have a list of awards/abstracts for the Robotics and Machine
Intelligence Program (Y.T. Chien, Director) which I think he would
be amenable to circulating.

Best regards,
	Joseph Deken, Director
	Knowledge and Database Systems Program, Rm 336
	National Science Foundation
	Washington, D.C. 20550
	
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu 30 Oct 86 09:42:56-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA>
Subject: Re: List of Active Research in Knowledge and Database Systems
To: ICS.DEKEN@R20.UTEXAS.EDU

I would have to break the file into at least four digests, which isn't
outrageous but is probably a bit much to broadcast.  I'll forward your
message to Ed Fox (Fox%VPI.CSNet@CSNet-Relay).  His information-retrieval
list is more likely to be interested in the abstracts.  In fact, I believe
his list has already published the titles of the award projects.  If
he does want the material, AIList could publish a notice directing
interested parties to you and to that source.  If he doesn't, I could
store and forward the material as you suggest -- without making it part
of that AIList archive.  I hesitate to accept the distribution responsibility,
though, since this comes out of SRI's pocket.  (Perhaps someday NSF will
fund interchange media such as AIList, although there are good reasons
why I haven't asked for funding.)

					-- Ken Laws

[Note:  I will be happy to publish this over IRList.  I believe we
will receive Macintosh files to be run through a LaserWriter here that
I will include in the next issue of ACM SIGIR Forum as well. Thanks, Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 86 02:24:00 est
From: E1AR0002%SMUVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: response

I would be happy to distribute the lists of materials mentioned in
the previous communications of ICS.Deken@R20.UTexas.EDU through TRLIST.

They are not technically tech reports, but since there are abstracts the
same sort of people interested in keeping track of the tech report literature
should find it useful.

[Note: I think it would be fine to have them in either or both of
IRList and TRList.  I look forward to getting the files at
	foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
as well as on Macintosh diskettes from J. Deken. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 86 13:16:38 pst
From: Michael Shepherd <shepherd%cs.dal.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: trying again
Ed:
    The following mail was just returned to me, so I am trying again.
I also am in the process of putting together a short report of ongoing
ir work here in Nova Scotia.  This will follow shortly.
regards,
mike
 ...
                CALL FOR PAPERS
    The 15th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information
Science will convene at The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario,
Canada, May 6-8, 1987.
    The theme of the conference will be:
    INFORMATION IN THE 1990'S:  IMAGE, NUMERIC, SOUND, TEXT
    Previously unpublished contributions are solicited dealing with the
generation, processing, and dissemination of information and related
technologies, including but not limited to the following areas:
    geology                computer vision
    geography            music
    art                videotext
    meteorology            numeric databases
    speech recognition        full text databases
    cybernetics            artificial intelligence
    expert systems            logic-based systems
    Three copies of a 500-1000 word abstract with the author's full name,
affiliation, address and telephone should be submitted to:
        Dr. Michael A. Shepherd, Director
        Computing Science Division
        Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computing Science
        Dalhousie University
        Halifax, Nova Scotia
        Canada
        B3H 3J5
The abstracts may also be submitted via e-mail to:
        shepherd@cs.dal.cdn
        shepherd@dalcs.uucp
    Selected papers will be published in the Canadian Journal of
Information Science.  For details regarding the Conference, contact:
Dr. Michael Nelson, School of Libary and Information Science, The University
of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6G 1H1.
Telephone:  (519)661-3542.
IMPORTANT DATES:    November 1, 1986    Abstract Due
            November 15, 1986    Notification to Authors
            January 15, 1987    Papers Due
==================
thanks
mike shepherd

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 86 03:08:38 edt
From: nl-kr-request@ROCHESTER.ARPA
Subject: NL-KR Digest Volume 1 No. 16 [Extract - Ed]

   Date: Tue 14 Oct 86 17:26:14
   From: Roland Hjerppe <enea!liuida!rhj@seismo.CSS.GOV>
   Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS: 1987 Workshop on Visual Languages


                      CALL FOR PAPERS

                   IEEE Computer Society

             1987 Workshop on Visual Languages

           August 19 - 21, 1987, Linkoping, Sweden


Papers are invited on theory, methodology, and applications of visual
languages, including both languages that have a heavy visual component
and languages designed for operating on visual objects. Areas related
to visual languages, such as Man-Machine Interface, Office Automation,
Computer Aided Design, Computer Hardware, and Knowledge Based Systems
are also of interest if the visual language aspect is in focus.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Visual Data Structures
Formal, Cognitive and Semantic Models for Visual Languages
Shape Grammars
Visual Programming
Visual Support for Software Production
Visualization of Programs and their Behavior
User Interfaces Using Visual Objects
Representation and Acquisition of Visual Knowledge
Icon and Iconic System Design
Animation Research
Multimedia Systems


Important Dates

        Submission Deadline       February 20, 1987
        Acceptance Notification   April 20, 1987
        Final Copy Due            May 20, 1987
        Conference                August 19-21, 1987

Three copies of each paper - maximum length 5 000 words - should be
submitted to:

Erland Jungert
FFV Elektronik AB
Agatan 122
S-582 22 Linkoping
Sweden

Conference Chairman: Prof. Robert Korfhage, Dept. of Information
Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Program Chairman: Erland Jungert, FFV Elektronik AB

Organizers: Roland Hjerppe, Christian Krysander, Dept. of Computer and
Information Science, University of Linkoping, S-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden
For details, contact the the Organizers at:

UUCP:RHJ@LIUIDA
ARPA: RHJ%LIUIDA.UUCP@SEISMO

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 86 03:08:38 edt
-FROM-
From: nl-kr-request@ROCHESTER.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject: NL-KR Digest Volume 1 No. 16 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
   Date: Wed, 15 Oct 86 14:43:56
   From: "Alfred Kobsa" <unido!sbsvax!ak@seismo.CSS.GOV>
   Subject: Report on UM86, International Workshop on User Modelling

                              Report on

                UM86: International Workshop on User Modelling


30-31 Aug. 1986, Maria Laach, West Germany

Organizers:   Alfred Kobsa and Wolfgang Wahlster
              SFB 314: AI - Knowledge-Based Systems,
              Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Saarbruecken,
              D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, W. GERMANY
A two-day international workshop on user modelling in dialog systems has been
held in Maria Laach, West Germany. The organization of the workshop was made
possible by a grant of the German Science Foundation (DFG) in its Special
Collaborative Program on AI and Knowledge-Based Systems (SFB 314). The aim of
the meeting was to provide an opportunity for researchers in this field to
present their work and ideas, and to discuss topical problems and proposals
with colleagues.

24 invited researchers from the U.S.A. (12), West Germany (7), Canada, England,
Italy, The Netherlands and Switzerland participated in the workshop. The
pleasant setting of the conference site close to the medieval abbey of Maria
Laach and the volcanic Lake Laach fostered a nice atmoshphere for intensive
discussions and the exchange of ideas.

The following talks were given:

Sandra Carberry, University of Delaware:
      Dynamic Construction and Application of User Models

Jaime Carbonell and Jill Fain, Carnegie-Mellon University:
      The Role and Nature of User Models in Task-Oriented Dialogs

David Chin, Univ. of California at Berkeley:
      KNOME: Modeling What the User Knows in UC

Robin Cohen, University of Waterloo:
      Towards User Specific Explanations From Expert Systems (short talk)

Marco Colombetti, Gabriella Airenti and Bruno Bara,  Milan Polytechnic:
      Modelling the Relationship between User and System in Man-Machine
Dialogue

Tim Finin, University of Pennsylvania:
      A General User Modelling System (Talk given by Ethel Schuster)

Bradley A. Goodman,  BBN Laboratories Inc.:
      Miscommunication and Plan Recognition

Anthony Jameson,  Univ. of Nijmegen:
      A Model of Impression Monitoring and Image Maintenance

Aravind K. Joshi,  University of Pennsylvania:
      The Role of User Models in Constraining Inferences (short talk)

Alfred Kobsa,  University of Saarbru"cken:
      A Taxonomy of Beliefs and Goals for User Models in Dialog Systems

William C. Mann,  Information Science Institute:
      The User Model: Varieties of Content for Text Generation (short talk)

Kathleen F. McCoy,  University of Delaware:
      Reasoning on a User Model to Respond to Misconceptions

Katharina Morik,  Technical University of Berlin:
      Modeling the User's Wants

Cecile L. Paris,  Columbia University:
      Tailoring Object Descriptions to the User's Level of Expertise

Alexander E. Quilici,  University of California at Los Angeles:
      User Modeling in AQUA (short talk)

Elaine Rich,  MCC:
      User Modelling in a Natural Language Dialogue System (short talk)

Ethel Schuster,  University of Pennsylvania:
      Establishing the Relationship between Discourse Models and User Models
      (short talk)

Karen Sparck Jones,  University of Cambridge:
      Realism about User Modelling

Wolfgang Wahlster,  University of Saarbruecken:
      Some Terminological Remarks on User Modeling


Selected papers of the workshop will appear as a book in the Springer series
'Symbolic Computation' and in the Computational Linguistics journal. Abstracts
of all talks presented at the workshop are available from the organizers
upon request, and extended abstracts of the regular talks directly from
the authors.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************



-VOL-
2

-N-
58
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 86 13:18:01 CST
-FROM-
From: Raymonde Guindon <seismo!mcc.com!guindon>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: references/bibliography for text processing approaches
-CC-
Cc: guindon%sw.mcc.com@mcc.com
-BODY-
I am looking for any references on text processing/
natural language processing approaches to retrieval of
information from documents.  If such biblio has not
been done, I'd volunteer to create it from the received
responses.  One example of such work is by Michael
Mauldin (IRlist, May 22).

Thanks

Raymonde Guindon
[Note: this is a broad subject area!  When you say "text processing"
you open up discussion to most of the information retrieval work done
in past decades, and when you mention NLP that might suggest a wide
area of AI work.  Can you clarify, or do you really want everything
implied by your statement?  Issues 52-54 had references on
automatic indexing; are you focusing only on retrieval or on document
analysis and indexing too?  Are you concerned with bibliographic
references or on abstracts or on full text or on passages in full
text?.  I suggest that whatever you produce be somehow
organized -- maybe you might make it in the form of a course outline
with references attached at the leaves of the outline tree.  I suggest
that along with people sending you items, that we have more discussion
by IRList participants on how to develop such bibliographies as an
ongoing service to the community. I believe Dr. J. Deken of NSF was
interested in development of such bibliographies, and that a truly
cooperative effort might be very beneficial.  I would be happy to have
a very long bibliography published occassionally in SIGIR Forum if
that will help the process.  - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:           Thu, 30 Oct 86 09:09 EDT
From:           <COMPOS01@ULKYVX> (Composition Digest)
Organization:   University of Louisville
Subject:        New Moderated Digest for Writers and Educators Announced
This is to announce a new interest group devoted to the study of computers
and writing, specifically writing instruction in computer-based classrooms.
We are interested in articles pertaining to, but not limited by, the
following topics:
        Human/Factors research and writing environments
        Text editor design
        Natural Language adjuncts to writing instruction
        Computers and the soft sciences
        Psychological effects of computer writing/instruction
        Composition theory applied to computer-based instruction
        Anecdotal accounts of computer writing experiences
        Using the NET in the classroom
        Computer-based conferences
        Public domain software for the classroom
        Reviews of writing and editing packages
        Conference announcements and proceedings
        Telecommunications and its effects on language
        Writing without paper
        Computers and hearing impaired students
        Computers and learning disabled students
        Computers and basic writers
        Computers and humanists
        Computers and writing professionals
This will be a moderated newsgroup with issues released weekly.  It will be
a forum for writing professionals (those who must use computers for their
writing) and computing professionals (those who design the hardware and
software that writers depend upon) to meet and discuss issues relevant to
both fields, but we welcome notes from novice computer writers.  Notes and
requests to be included on a mailing list should be sent to
BITNET: compos01@ulkyvx.bitnet
ARPA:   compos01%ulkyvx.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 86 01:47:00 EDT
From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf
Subject: Misc., Seminar

Ed,

Thanks for forwarding the messages about the reuse paper. Have you sent
copies to the two people who were interested, or should I? By the way,
the paper has been accepted for the HICCS conference next January. Brian
and I are planning to rewrite parts of the paper, and also do further
work in this area. I'll keep you posted.
[Note: the paper mentioned appeared in Issues 47-49 and should have
been received by all. - Ed]

...

Don Hawkins and Louis Levy of the library system were down last week
and gave us an interesting talk on knowledge gateways. I've included
the abstract of their talk.

...

			Bill

========================================

			   QAC RESEARCH	SEMINAR

       TITLE:		   Knowledge Gateways: Building	Blocks and Beyond
       SPEAKERS:	  Donald T. Hawkins and	Louise R. Levy
			  AT&T Bell Laboratories
			  Murray Hill, NJ  07974

       DATE:		  Friday, October 10, 1986
       TIME:		  2 pm
       LOCATION:	  HO 2N-431

				 ABSTRACT

       Technological advances over the past two	decades	have made
       data retrieval faster and easier.  Some progress	has even
       been made towards increasing the	relevancy of the data
       obtained	by the information user. Meanwhile, a whole
       industry	providing access to business, professional, and
       sci/tech	information electronically has sprung up. Despite
       these activities, information sources remain scattered, hard
       to find,	and difficult to access. It remains the	task of
       technology and visionary	individuals to build knowledge
       gateways	capable	of leading knowledge-seekers to	the needed
       information, wherever it	may be stored.

       This talk will discuss the following topics relating to
       gateways:
	  o Definition
	  o State of the art
	  o Technologies (building blocks)
	  o Examples of	some gateways
	  o Visions of the future

       SPONSOR:	    Bill Frakes	 HO 2H-530   x7186     hoqam!wbf

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 86 15:37:48 edt
From: choueka@thunder.bellcore.com (Yaacov Choueka)
Subject: Re:  research in IR
Thanks for your note and sorry for my late response. I found what I was looking
for in a note by Salton in Forum 1980.
[Note: this refers back to the question in Issue 55 - Ed]

...
 I am in Bellcore since sept., and will be here
for one year. I certainly hope to be able to visit a few inst.  in the US,
and to  have some talks about problems of mutual interest. Were exactly in
Virginia are you located?  By the way it is possible now to connect to the
database in Israel from anywhere in the US using a simple PC with a modem
and a regular tel. line,via Telenet or Tymnet,and I am connected ,for example ,
from Bellcore. so live demonstrations of the system can be given.
I am appending a memo sent reecently to a few people in Bellcore,that will
remind you of us. Best regards.
            LET'S GET ACQUAINTED
            I just arrived from Israel, on a sabbatical from the
    dept. of Math. and Comp.  Sc. at Bar. Ilan Univ., invited by
    Don Walker to spend a year of research at Bellcore.(You can
    easily recognize me by the knitted "Kippah" I have usually
    on my head).
            Judging from the few days I am already here, I do have
    wild expectations for a very interesting and fruitful year.
    I am already overimpressed by this Garden of Eden of equipment
    and hardware, in which so many Suns are shining, and in which
    no fruit seems to be forbidden, except maybe for (what else)
    Apples...
            I am sure I am going to learn a lot here, although,
    hopefully, it will be a mutually enriching experience.
    I am bringing with me almost twenty years of experience in
    teaching and research in computer science, some of it (in the
    early years)  in finite automata and formal languages theory,
    but most of it in information retrieval, computational
    linguistics and text processing.
            I was part of the team that initiated the RESPONSA
    project back in 1966, and I serve as its Director and Principal
    Investigator since 1975.This is basically a full-text retrieval
    system, one of the very first to be operational on a sizable
    data base. The batch version was ready in 1968,and the On-line
    version in 1980.The database consists today of some seventy
    million words of running text in Hebrew, representing major
    parts of the Jewish Heritage and classical writings. The largest
    part of the database is the Responsa ("questions and answers")
    collections, containing the full and unaltered text of 250
    volumes  (50,000 documents) of Rabbinical "answers", each
    document being in fact a juridical decision given according to
    the Jewish-Talmudic legal system, and related to an actual case
    presented to a Rabbinical court or brought to the attention of a
    prominent Rabbi, from various Jewish communities all over the
    world.
            The database, spanning about a thousand years and
    originating from more than thirty different countries, is a
    fantastic storehouse of information on Jewish law ,history,
    philosophy, ethics, local customs and folklore. The system is
    available On-line 24 hours a day, six days a week (never on
    Saturdays and Jewish Holidays !) and can be accessed by PC's
    with regular telephone lines via  telecommunications networks
    (Tymnet or Telenet, Isranet, etc.).It is routinely accessed by
    tens of workstations in Israel, as well as from Chicago,
    Los-Angeles and London. It is expected that in the next couple
    of years hundreds of terminals will be connected to the system
    in major universities, libraries, information centers, Jewish
    institutions, etc., in the United States and in Europe.
       I hope to be able to connect to the system and to demonstrate
    it here in Bellcore soon. The software, by the way, has been
    adapted for English databases too, and can handle quite large
    ones (several hundreds of megabytes of text).
            Besides serving the real needs of a real community of
    users, the system is also used as an experimental laboratory
    for information retrieval, computational linguistics and text
    processing. Three Ph.d. and about fifteen graduate theses were
    written in this environment. Some of the areas researched are:
    feedback in document retrieval systems, text compression
    (on both experimental and theoretical levels), character
    manipulation, spelling errors' detection and correction,
    automatic lemmatization, mechanical resolution of morphological
    ambiguity, retrieval of collocations and idioms, expert systems
    for  citations' retrieval, etc. .
            Among the many unique features available in the system
    that distinguish it from currently available full-text packages
    is a full-fledged morphological component embedded in the
    retrieval part, as well as a subsystem that gives correct and
    full morphological analysis of any word in Hebrew (the number of
    which is estimated to be in the order of a hundred million).
            I am now preparing a short report on the Project with
    some more details on the research associated with it, including
    references to published papers. The report will be distributed
    to the 21230 division ,but if you know of anybody else who might
    be interested in it, please let me know.
           I will be happy to discuss any of papers to be
     mentioned in this report with anyone who would be interested
     in this, as well as to have informal talks with small groups if
     there is  any echo to this note... .
    "The beginning of wisdom is to acquire wisdom..." (Proverbs)
        Yaacov Choueka (pronounced Shweka)
            MRE-2A325, #8295175.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
59
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 86 13:16:38 pst
-FROM-
From: Michael Shepherd <shepherd%cs.dal.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: a bunch of things
-BODY-
Ed:
...I missed this year's sigir conference is Pisa, is it possible to
purchase the Proceedings?
...
[Note:  I just called ACM.  The order number is 606860 and the title
is "Proc. 9th Annual International SIGIR Conf. on R&D in Information
Retrieval."  Cost is $18 ($24 nonmembers) and there is $3 shipping, from
	ACM Orders Department
	P.O. Box 64145
	Baltimore MD 21264
They just received the copies in the warehouse yesterday!
Regards, Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 86 11:57:29 -0100
From: Wyle <seismo!mcvax!ifi.ethz.chunet!wyle>
Subject: RE: citations, conspectus

...

I am building a neral network model and exploring the possibilities of
using it to index text.  Do any readers of IR list digest know of work
in this area?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mitch Wyle                  ...!decvax!seismo!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!Wyle
Institut fuer Informatik    Wyle%ifi.ethz.cernvax.<network of your choice>
ETH / SOT
8092 Zuerich, Switzerland   "Sic itur ad astra."

[Note: in issue 28 was abstract of an article about using the
Connection Machine for information retrieval. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 86 05:10:44 pst
From: Michael Shepherd <shepherd%cs.dal.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: ir in Nova Scotia
Ed:
    The following is a list of the seminars given in our Information
Systems Research Group.  If you want, I can periodically send you this
information.
==================
    An informal "Information Systems Research Group" (ISRG) has been formed
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.  The purpose of this inter-disciplinary group
is to provide a forum for people to present their research, discuss common
interests, and to stimulate joint research efforts.
    As of November 28, 1986, four seminars will have been held.  The
following is a brief description of these seminars.
Date:    October 3, 1986
Title:    Managing Views of Large Databases that are Tailored to Individual
 Users
Speaker:  Dr. Carl Hartzman
      Computing Science Division
      Dept. of Math., Stats., & Comp. Sci.
      Dalhousie University
      Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada  B3H 3J5
Abstract:  Either for reasons of security or in order to avoid the necessity
       of dealing with large amounts of irrelevant data, users of large
       databases have restricted views of the database computed for them.
       These views are not permanently resident in the computer system.
       Thus, any update that the user may wish to make to the information
       appearing in his view must be translated to an update on the
       underlying database from which the view is computed, in such a way
       that the computation of the view yields exactly the updated
       information.  Generally, if there are any translations that will
       accomplish this, there are more than one, each reflecting a
       different update policy.  This profusion of translations yields
       the risk of putting wrong or inconsistent data into the database.
       Thus, database management systems have not typically permitted
       view updates.  The question we examine here is the possibility
       of designing databases so that desired view updates have
       unique correct translations.
Date:    October 17, 1986
Title:    Integrating User Profiles into Expert Systems for
        Bibliographic Retrieval
Speaker:  Dr. Michael Shepherd
      Computing Science Division
      Dept. of Math., Stats., & Comp. Sci.
      Dalhousie University
      Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada  B3H 3J5
Abstract:  The purpose of the proposed research is to investigate knowledge
       representations for expert online bibliographic retrieval systems
       incorporating the profile-query relationship.  The knowledge
       representations must be hospitable to user profiles and queries
       and permit the definition and implementation of a profile-query
       relationship.  These knowledge representations must be able to
       represent the knowledge within a bibliographic retrieval system
       that permits online access to thousands and millions of documents.
       The representations must permit the user to query the knowledge-
       base as well as the database and the system must be able to make
       inferences from the knowledge-base, the profile, and the profile-
       query relationship.
Date:    November 14, 1986
Title:    A Parallel Architecture for a Database Machine
Speakers:  Dr. W. Robertson and Dr. P. Bodorik
       School of Computer Science
       Technical University of Nova Scotia
       Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada   B3J 2X4
Abstract:  This talk outlines the authors' approach to an architecture which
       is, in their opinion, eminently suitable for a database machine.  An
       investigation of the characteristics of various interconnection
       topologies lead the authors to the conclusion that a dual-bus
       hypercube is probably the most suitable for a modular architecture
       for data base operations.  The bottleneck at the mass storage
       interface is eliminated by the introduction of an interleaved
       memory structure at the interface.  Under the assumption that a
       relation of interest is uniformly distributed over some number, m,
       of disc cylinders, and that all cylinders can be accessed
       concurrently, the disc to memory bandwidth is balanced.  The
       maximum number of discs in the system is W**2, for a three cube,
       where W is the number of nodes connected to each bus of the
       hypercube.  This structure has an advantage in that it requires
       a smaller number of connections per node and it is also easily
       extended to increase mass storage and/or computational capacity
       by increasing W and/or the hypercube dimension.  The functional
       requirements of the nodes and the bus protocol are currently
       under investigation.
Date:    November 28, 1986
Title:    A Framework and Prototype for Intelligent Information Retrieval
Researchers:  Dr. Vijay V. Raghavan
          Center for Advanced Computer Studies
          University of Southwestern Louisiana
          Lafayette, Lousiana     70504-4330
          Dr. Ravi S. Sharma
          Dept. of Mathematics and Computing Sciences
          St. Francis Xavier University
          Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada   B2G 1C0
Speaker:  Dr. Ravi S. Sharma
Abstract:  Information Retrieval (IR) is the process of selectively
       disseminating relevant information stored among a variety of
       information items.  A scheme for efficient (in terms of computer
       resources used) and effective (in terms of recall and precision)
       information retrieval is proposed.  This draws from rough set
       theory and an adaptive clustering strategy in order to achieve some
       amount of self-organization in the database.  The relevance
       judgements of weighted queries are used as the basis for influencing
       the classification of documents, thus enabling user input to direct
       clustering and allow the clustering sub-system to learn.  An
       evaluation metric based on the theory of rough sets is used as
       the clustering criterion, which is enhanced in an iterative fashion.
       The clustering algorithm begins with an arbitrary placement of the
       documents in the collection on a one-dimensional linear space and,
       as each query arrives, uses the relevance judgements to generate
       movement along the line so that "similar" documents are moved
       closer together and "dissimilar" ones moved further apart from
       each other.  The precise definitions of what is meant by similar
       and dissimilar are also based on ideas from rough set theory.  After
       a number of queries are processed, the initial positions change as
       the system "learns" the users' profiles.  The classification,
       however, is re-clustered only when this movement is deemed
       significant as defined by a variation of a common measure for
       determining the similarity between classifications.  The general
       method of clustering places boundaries on gaps so as to optimize
       the clustering criterion.  Efficient and effective retrieval
       is sought by using a learning scheme known as retrieval-by-example.
       The prototype experimental implementation of the scheme indicates
       remarkable potential, producing recall and precision results of
       between 40 to 80 per cent.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 86 03:10:09 edt
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

   Date: Friday, 17 October 1986  15:04-EDT
   From: JHC at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU
   subject:   revolving seminar (for real this time)

Thursday, 23  October  4:00pm   Room: NE43-8th floor playroom

                  LEARNING BY FAILING TO EXPLAIN

                      Robert Joseph Hall
             MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory


Explanation-based Generalization depends on having an explanation on
which to base generalization.  Thus, a system with an incomplete or
intractable explanatory mechanism will not be able to generalize some
examples.  It is not necessary, in those cases, to give up and resort
to purely empirical generalization methods, because the system may
already know almost everything it needs to explain the precedent.
Learning by Failing to Explain is a method which exploits current
knowledge to prune complex precedents and rules, isolating their
mysterious parts.  This paper describes two techniques for Learning by
Failing to Explain: Precedent Analysis, partial analysis of a
precedent or rule to isolate the mysterious new technique(s) it
embodies; and Rule Re-analysis, re-analyzing old rules in terms of new
rules to obtain a more general set.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 86 03:11:12 edt
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: CSLI Calendar, October 16, No. 3 [Extract - Ed]

                      HPSG Theory and HPSG Research
                                Ivan Sag
                            October 23, 1986

   This seminar presents an overview of the central ideas under
   development by members of the CSLI HPSG project. Head-Driven Phrase
   Structure Grammar is an information-based theory of the relation
   between syntactic and semantic structure. The syntactic concepts of
   HPSG evolved from Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) in the
   course of the last few years through extensive interaction with
   members of the CSLI FOG project.  HPSG integrates key ideas of GPSG
   with concepts drawn from Kay's Functional Unification Grammar and
   Categorial Grammar and incorporates certain analytic techniques of
   Lexical-Functional Grammar. The semantic concepts of HPSG are a hybrid
   of Situation Semantics and the theory of thematic roles.  Current HPSG
   theory embodies a number of important design properties: monotonicity,
   declarativeness and reversibility, yet current HPSG analyses require
   extensions of such standard frameworks as PATR-II.  Current research
   ideas will be surveyed, as well as ongoing work on the hierarchical
   structure of the HPSG lexicon.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 86 02:18:08 edt
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: CSLI Calendar, October 23, No. 4 [Extract - Ed]

                 Relation-changing Affixes and Homonymy
                         Abdelkader Fassi-Fehri
               October 28, 12:30, Trailer Classroom, CSLI

   Of special relevance to a natural theory of affixation are the
   following questions:
   a) What is the exact nature of the changes that a lexical unit
      undergoes as the result of an affixation process (role or argument
      reduction or increase, valency reorganization, etc.), and which
      level of representation is the most appropriate to state these
      changes?
   b) Given that languages use different systems of homonymic forms of
      affixes to express different valencies (or the same valency
      organized in different ways), is there a possible account which
      will predict which homonymy affixation would be natural, and which
      one would be accidental?
   We propose a theory of lexical organisation that answers these
   questions.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
60
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 86 13:25:51 EST
-FROM-
From: seismo!rick (Rick Adams)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  ... my distribution list?
-BODY-
 ...
While we're on the subject of the distribution list, it is getting too
big to handle. We can not send to multiple recipients at the same host.
It is very expensive to do.

[Note: in case you did not know, Rick Adams at seismo has been letting
me send 1 message to their computer and then the distribution list is
expanded there to go out over various networks.  So, we had best
follow his requests! - Ed]

At an absolute minimum, you need to remove the 50 or so bitnet addresses
and get them onto a mail forwarded on a bitnet site. The people
at BITNIC can help you and are encouraging this behavior. It is
making a big impact on the arpa/bitnet gateway.

I would appreciate it if you can get local forwarding on many of the
other sites as well. The general rule is that if there are more than
2 recipients on a host (bitnet counts as a host because it is a relay
machine) there should be a local forwarder. There should also
be one on csnet-relay, but they aren't very cooperative about those things
usually.

>--rick

[Note: I have taken the following steps as a result of this message:
  1) Bitnet recipients will receive mail directly from me from
    foxea@vtvax3.bitnet.  This will load our network for a while but
    should give Bitnet recipients very fast service.
  2) Remaining recipients will still be reached from seismo.  However,
    as you can see in the next message, I am encouraging your setting
    up of re-distribution points.
Thanks for your cooperation! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat Nov 22 18:13 EST 1986
From: fox
Subject: Request for setting up distribution lists!

I am asking for cooperation of all IRList recipients to help with
setting up of distribution lists.  Your computer system administrator
can set up an alias, such as
	IRList-dist@site-address
so that I can just send to that and the 1 copy to your computer can
then be replicated to all local readers who are interested.  There are
a number of aspects to changeover.

First, there are a number of lists already, and some of you could be
added to one rather than receive a direct copy:
	bboard.IRList@r20.utexas.edu
	cmu-IRList@cmu-cs-pt.arpa
	dist-irlist@louie.udel.edu
	incoming-IRList@SU-CSLI.arpa
	incoming-IRList@sumex-aim.arpa
	ir-list@lsu.csnet
	ir@bellcore.arpa
	irlist-bboard@red.rutgers.edu
	irlist-disty@MIT-Multics.arpa
	irlist-inbox@mcc.arpa
	irlist-incoming@TI-CSL.csnet
	irlist-local@scrc-stony-brook.arpa
	irlist-p@brl.arpa
	irlist@nlm-vax.arpa
	irlist@umass-cs.csnet
	irlist@usc-cse.csnet
	munnari!IR-List
	palladian-irlist@live-oak.lcs.mit.edu
	ucl-irlist@ucl-cs.arpa
	
Second, there are several MIT addresses (which could, perhaps, be tied in
with above MIT-Multics or other distributions):
	media-lab.mit.edu
	mit-hermes.arpa
	mit-mc.arpa
	OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
	xx.lcs.mit.edu
Each of these sites, at least, should have a re-distribution address.

Similarly there are several at CMU:
	cad.cs.cmu.edu
	CMU-CS-G.arpa
	CMU-CS-K.arpa
	sei.cmu.edu

Also, there are several lll sites:
	lll-mfe.arpa
	lll-tis-a.arpa
	lll-tis-b.arpa
	lll-tis.arpa
	sav@LLL-MFE.arpa
	sds.mfenet@lll-mfe.arpa

Further, there are several sites at Digital:
	bartok.dec@decwrl.dec.com
	closet.DEC@decwrl.dec.com
	gvaic2.dec@decwrl.dec.com
	newton.dec@decwrl.dec.com
	sprite.DEC@decwrl.dec.com
	whoaru.DEC@decwrl.dec.com

Finally, there are many sites with >1 recipient, where each person
should contact their computer system administrator, ask for a
distribution list to be set up, and ask to be added to that. Then, the
system administrator can tell me the new address and what old
addresses are handled by it:
	allegra
	apple.csnet
	cornell.arpa
	cs.dal.cdn@ubc.csnet
	cs.ucl.ac.uk
	gmr.csnet
	gmu90x
	hans@oslo-vax.arpa
	harvard.arpa
	hplabs.arpa
	ibm-sj.arpa
	ihnp4!hoqam
	mitre-bedford.arpa
	mitre.arpa
	njit-eies.MAILNET
	northeastern.csnet
	nyu-csd2.arpa
	nyu.arpa
	smu.csnet
	sri-ai.arpa
	sri-nic.arpa
	uchicago.csnet
	unl.csnet
	usc-isi.arpa
	utah-20.arpa

Thanks for your cooperation! - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 86 00:41:09 est
-FROM-
From: kraft@LSU.CSNET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: where is ellen voorhees
-BODY-
Ed, do you have a forwarding address for ellen voorhees?  She seems to have
left Cornell and no one there seems to have heard where she is?  Thanks, Don

[Note: I have heard that she is working at a company in the Princeton
NJ area but would welcome further details myself too. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 86 15:14:51 -0100
From: Wyle <seismo!mcvax!ifi.ethz.chunet!wyle>
Subject: New reference and question on bit strings

Ed:

Here is an entry to the bibliography.  I don't think it has
been published yet.  Entries on bitstrings will follow.

I am looking for literature references related to bit strings and
signature records used in text indexing.  Does anyone in IR digest
list know of a good place to start looking? Who are the key players
in "signature records" used in IR?

[Note: there was an article that surveyed related matters, that might
help fill out your bibliography further:
	Faloutsos, Christos.  Access Methods for Text.  ACM Computing
	Surveys, 17(1), March 1985.
Thanks for the references! - Ed]

%A M Domenig
%A P Shann
%T Towards a dedicated database system for dictionaries
%B Proceedings of the 11th International conference on Computational
Linguistics, August 25-29 1986
%C Bonn
%I IKP Universitaet Bonn

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 86 09:04:11 -0100
-FROM-
From: Wyle <seismo!mcvax!ifi.ethz.chunet!wyle>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Yet more new references
-BODY-
Here is a bit string entry and some associative networks
references of particular interest (using connectionism
to index text):

%A D R McGregor
%A J R Malone
%T The Fact Database System - a system using generic associative
networks
%J Research and Development in Information Technology
%V 1
%P 55-72
%D 1982

%A D R McGregor
%A J R Malone
%T The Fact System - a hardware-oriented approach
%B Database management systems:  a technical comparison
%E P J King
%S Computer sate of the art reports
%C Maidenhead
%I Pergamon Infotech
%D 1983
%P 99-112

%A S E Fahlman
%T A system for representing and using real-world knowledge
%C Cambridge Massachussetts
%I MIT Press
%D 1979

%A J R Quinlan
%T Induction over large databases
%R HPP 79-14
%S Heuristic Programming Project
%C Stanford California
%I Stanford University Press
%D 1979

%A R S Michaelski
%T A theory and methodology of inductive learning
%J Artificial Intelligence
%V 19
%D 1982
%P 189-249

%A D R McGregor
%A J R Malone
%T Generic associative hardware, its impact on database systems
%B Proceedings of an IEEE Colloquium on Associative Methods and
Database engines
%D May 1982

%A M L Minsky
%A S Papert
%T Perceptrons:  threshold function geometry
%C Cambridge Massachusetts
%I MIT Press
%D 1986

%A S A Feldman
%A D Ballard
%T Computing with connections
$R TR72 14727
%C Rochester, New York
%I Rochester Institute of Technology, Computer
Science Department
%D 1981

%A K C Mohan
%A P Willett
%T Nearest neighbor searching in serial files using text
signatures
%J Information Science and Technology (Netherlands)
%V 11
%N 1
%P 31-39
%D 1985
%X A nearest neighbor search procedure is described for use
with serial files of textual data.  The procedure involves the
grouping of records into blocks, each of which is characterized
by a fixed length bit string.  A comparable query bit string may
be matched against each of these bit strings, and an upper bound
calculation used to identify those blocks which need to be
inspected in detail if the document that is most similar to the
query is to be identified.  Experiments with three small
collections of documents and queries are used to test the
efficiency of the approach.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 4 Nov 86 11:28:42 -0100
From: Wyle <seismo!mcvax!ifi.ethz.chunet!wyle>
Subject: Bit string bibliography references

As promised, here are bibliographic citations on bit string entries.
Our librarian can now send the references electronically (and
error-free), so there should henceforth be fewer errors.
...

%A A F Harding
%A M F Lynch
%A P Willett
%O Author's current address:   Dept. of Information Studies,
Univ. of Sheffield, Sheffield, England.
%T Document retrieval using a serial bit string search
%J Inf-Process-Manage (GB)
%V 19
%N 1
%P 1-8
%D 1983
%K information-retrieval-systems
%K file-organisation
%K serial-bit-string-search
%K best-match-retrieval-system
%K serial-file-organisation
%X An experimental best match retrieval system is described based on the
serial file organisation. Documents and queries are characterised by
fixed length bit  strings  and  the  time-consuming  character-by-
character term match is preceeded by a bit string search to eliminate
large numbers  of documents which cannot possibly satisfy the query.
Two methods,  one  fully  automatic  and  one  partially  manual  in
character, are  described  for  the  generation  of  such bit string
characterisations. Retrieval  experiments with a large document test
collection show that the two-level search can increase substantially
the efficiency  of  serial  searching  while  maintaining  retrieval
effectiveness, and that a single-level search based only upon the bit
strings results  in  only  a small decrease in effectiveness in some
cases.

%A K D MacLaury
%O Author's current address:   Res. Libraries Group Inc., Stanford, CA, USA.
%T Automatic merging of monographic data bases-use of fixed-length keys
derived from title strings.
%J J-Libr-Autom (USA)
%V 12
%N 2
%P 143-155
%D June 1979
%K library-mechanisation
%K monographic-data-bases
%K title-strings
%K bibliographic-files
%K optimized-character-position-key
%K Harrison-bit-string-key
%K fixed-length-keys
%K automatic-merging
%K library-mechanisation
%X To find  duplicate  records in machine-readable bibliographic files,
two different  fixed-length keys were developed for finding matching
titles.  Each   had  different  characteristics  and  functions.  An
optimized character  position  key  was  developed for comparing all
titles in  the  files  and  a  Harrison  bit string key, tolerant of
typographic  errors  and  other  small  differences,  was  used  for
comparing titles  within small groups of records that were potential
matches.

%A E Mumprecht
%O Author's current address:   IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA
%T Efficient bit string handling with standard processing units
%J IBM-Tech-Disclosure-Bull (USA)
%V 26
%N 10A
%P 4912-4914
%D March 1984
%K data-handling
%K semiconductor-storage
%K storage-management-and-garbage-collection
%K high-resolution-graphics
%K image-handling
%K data-processing
%K bit-string-handling
%K standard-processing-units
%K storage-reference-instructions
%K microprocessors.
%X The method described enhances the power of ordinary storage reference
instructions in standard processing units, e.g., microprocessors.

%A K Ramamohanarao
%A J W Lloyd
%A J A Thom
%O Author's current address:   Dept of Computer Sci, Univ of
Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria,
Australia
%T Partial-match retrieval using hashing and descriptors
%J ACM-Trans-Database-Syst (USA)
%V 8
%N 4
%P 552-576
%D December 1983
%K database-management-systems
%K information-retrieval-systems
%K database-management-systems
%K hashing
%K descriptors
%K partial-match-retrieval-scheme
%K addresses
%K mathematical-model
%X This paper  studies  a  partial-match retrieval scheme based on hash
functions and descriptors. The emphasis is placed on showing how the
use of  a descriptor file can improve the performance of the scheme.
Records in  the file are given addresses according to hash functions
for each field in the record. Furthermore, each page of the file has
associated with it a descriptor, which is a fixed-length bit string,
determined by the records actually present in the page. Before a page
is accessed  to see if it contains records in the answer to a query,
the descriptor  for the page is checked. This check may show that no
relevant records  are on the page and, hence, that the page does not
have to  be accessed. The method is shown to have a very substantial
performance advantage over pure hashig schemes, when some fields in
the records  have  large  key  spaces.  A  mathematical model of the
scheme, plus an algorithm for optimizing performance, is given.

%A R Sacks-Davis
%A K Ramamohanarao
%O Author's current address:   Dept of Computing, Royal Melbourne
Inst of Technol, Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia.
%T Partial-match retrieval based on superimposed coding
%B Proceedings of the 6th Australian Computer Science Conference,
Sydney, NSW, Australia, 10-12 Feb. 1983.
%J Aust. Comput. Sci. Commun. (Australia)
%V 5
%N 1
%P 166-176
%O Author's current address:   February 1983
%K information-retrieval
%K record-retrieval
%K partial-match-retrieval
%K data-files
%K superimposed-coding
%K descriptor-file
%X This paper  describes  a  method for partial-match retrieval on very
large data  files.  The  method  is  based  on  superimposed  coding
techniques. Associated  with  the  data  file  is  a descriptor file
containing bit  strings  which  describe  the  records.  In order to
retrieve records efficiently a two level descriptor file is proposed.
An analysis of this scheme is presented.

%A R Sacks-Davis
%A K Ramamohanarao
%O Author's current address:   Dept of Computing, Royal Melbourne
Inst. of Technol, Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia
%T A two level superimposed coding scheme for partial match retrieval
%J Inf-Syst (GB)
%V 8
%N 4
%P 273-280
%D 1983
%K database-management-systems
%K information-retrieval.
%K DBMS
%K information-retrieval
%K two-level-superimposed-coding-scheme
%K partial-match-retrieval
%K very-large-data-files
%K descriptor-file, bit-strings
%K descriptor-file
%X The authors  describe  a  method for partial-match retrieval on very
large data  files.  The  method  is  based  on  superimposed  coding
techniques. Associated  with  the  data  file  is  a descriptor file
containing bit  strings  which  describe  the  records.  In order to
retrieve records efficiently a two level descriptor file is proposed.
An analysis of this scheme is presented.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
61
-DATE-
Date:         Tue, 11 Nov 86 13:15 EST
-FROM-
From:           Thomas Kunselman  <CCSTK%CCOL.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Re: IRList Digest V2
-BODY-
For some reason I received 5 copies of this file, Vol 2 Issue 57.
Just thought I would let you know in case the problem is on your end.
Thanks,

[Note: I sent only 1 to the distribution point, but you and I and a
number of others received multiple copies.  We have not been able to
figure out the cause but it seems to not have happened since.  I look
forward to when Virginia Tech is on the Internet (hopefully only a
matter of months now! Meanwhile, all I can do is apologize. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 86 00:32:45 est
-FROM-
From: E1AR0002%SMUVM1.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: People at SMU, TR accumulation for IRList
-BODY-
...
As you know, the mailer was broken here and you took us off the irlist
mailing list.  Also, Dr. Korfhage and one of the graduate students
working on information retrieval is now in Pittsburgh.  ...

Dr. Eich will be teaching information retrieval next semester and
wants to see a copy or two to see if it would help her class.
...

I am still accumulating IR related materials from AILIST and TRLIST
for you.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 86 01:27:19 est
-FROM-
From: guindon%milano.sw.mcc.com@MCC.COM
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Query:  Text processing techniques and document retrieval
-BODY-
I would like any references on text processing techniques
(parsing, discourse analysis, etc.) that have been applied
for the purposes of document/information retrieval.
I am not interested in natural language interfaces per se,
but rather in the processing of the documents to be retrieved.

If such a bibliography does not exist, I would volunteer
building one from the received references.

Thanks

Raymonde Guindon

[Note:  Thanks for clarifying the request that you sent earlier, which
appeared in IRList V2 #58.  I hope that people will send you info on
their work, and look forward to receiving a bibliography from you for
IRList and possibly for SIGIR Forum. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 12 Nov 86 20:57:42 PST (Wednesday)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: re: Brain Hemispheres
-FROM-
From: "Earle_Kyle.WBST102a"@Xerox.COM
-BODY-
In response to the request for info on this (see below) I will be
sending you a few items from my extensive files on the general subject
of brain research in separate packages for ease of tossing away as you
see fit.   Would appreciate it, though, if you would forward all to the
requestor as I couldn't figure out how to get through.  I don't think
any of this really belongs on this dl so wouldn't advise broadcasting it
in your digest.
Earle Kyle
Xerox Corp. 102-19A
Webster, NY 14580
(716)422-3133
kyle.wbst@xerox.com

[Note: the request mentioned was in V2 #57.  I am sending the
forwarded messages to ocbno@utkvx4.bitnet, who might want to send us
all a (short) summary of what relates to Information Science.
Thanks Earle! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 86 01:29:15 est
-FROM-
From: mkh%sevax.prg.oxford.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Six character limit in indxbib
-BODY-
In IRList Digest V2 #53, Mitchell Wyle <wyle@ethz.uucp> writes:

  For starters, I shall use Unix's addbib, sortbib, roffbib, indxbib,
  lookbib suite of programs.  The manuals say that one can change the
  options of indxbib when it stems, stop lists etc.  I have found the list
  of the 100 most common words (/usr/lib/refer/eign), but I can't
  figure out how to change the stemming from 6 characters.  Can someone
  out their in IRdigest-land help?

  [Note: Perhaps Mike Lesk will read this or someone else at Bellcore
  will prod him to ask about this? - Ed]

Any information on this would be very welcome here too - we are currently
using indxbib/lookbib etc. and the lower-level utilities they call as the
basis of our (small and rudimentary) online catalogue, but are having
problems with false drops caused by this 6 character limit.

David Brown, Librarian,
Oxford University Computing Laboratory
<library%prg.oxford.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk>

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Wed, 22 Oct 86 23:10 EDT
-FROM-
From:     KROVETZ%cs.umass.edu@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA
-TO-
To:       ailist-request@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  AI-related dissertations
-BODY-
[Note: this was forwarded by Ken Laws; see next msg. - Ed]
Ken,
  Laurence Leff asked a question in a recent AIList about
the SIGART feature on AI-related dissertations.  I compile
that list (along with a former co-worker, Susanne Humphrey).
I think the information could be forwarded to AIList if
you'd like me to.  I spoke to the person at Dissertation
Abstracts International some time ago about making the
list available electronically, and she didn't think it
would be a problem, but said that I would have to write
a letter asking for formal permission.  SIGART just
contains notices of the dissertations;  Computational
Linguistics gets a stripped down version with just the
stuff related to natural language plus some stuff on
knowledge representation, but they also publish the abstracts.
If you'd like the information sent to AIList, would you
want just the notices, or the abstracts as well?  Considering
the distribution that AIList gets, I think the abstracts
might be too much, but then again there's a fair amount
of volume in the bibliographies that get sent out.
  On a side note: I've been trying to pursue a pet idea
I've had for some time - establishing a network library
for computer science tech reports and dissertations.
I've spoken with people at the CSNET information center,
and they thought it was a great idea, but the problem
is how to get it funded.  What I have in mind is something
like the info-server that already exists.  I've spoken with
people at the defense data network and NTIS, but couldn't
get anywhere.  I'm trying to pursue avenues at NSF, but
unfortunately it doesn't fit neatly into any of their
"designated categories", and the group that deals with
miscellaneous stuff was recently eliminated.  I'm still
going to keep trying, but any suggestions would be appreciated.
If it ever gets established, I hope to use it for some
post-doctoral work (I want to do my dissertation on conceptual
information retrieval).

>bob
krovetz@umass.csnet

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 86 02:17:46 edt
From: LAWS@SRI-STRIPE.ARPA
To: krovetz%cs.umass.edu@relay.cs.net
Subject: Dissertation Notices

[Note: The following message was sent along with the one above to me
and I feel they are both of interest to readers, but are easiest to
follow in the order given here. - Ed]

I'm forwarding your message to Lawrence Leff and Ed Fox since they may
have some comments.

Thanks for your offer.  I agree that the abstracts would be too much
for AIList to publish, although I'm sure there are some readers who would
like as much text as possible (if only for their keyword searches).  The
problem is that AIList is a broadcast medium, and it doesn't make sense to
broadcast more than people are willing to read.

The dissertation notices would be welcome.  I do have negative feelings
about stealing 10% of SIGART's content, but I suppose the audiences and
archival properties are different.  Certainly the retrieval properties
are different.  I leave it up you whether you want to submit the
notices; if you do, I will forward them.  Alternatively, you might submit
them to Lawrence and he could incorporate them in his bibliography.

I also have a desire to reduce the volume of AIList, which is taking so much
of my time that I can't afford to send for and read any of the material
appearing in these bibliographies.  Everyone seems reasonably happy with
the status quo, but if we were all paying for the network services and the
man-hours spent reading this material, I wonder how many of us would ante up.
The problem, again, is the broadcast nature of the list.  There really should
be a database server or perhaps umpteen sublists (as on Usenet) rather than
one linear stream.  AIList does serve as a useful forum for the interaction
of many disciplines, but it really wouldn't harm anyone if there were separate
lists for seminars, conferences, and bibliographies.  A good database server
would obviate the need to broadcast such messages at all, thus saving a lot
of Arpanet bandwidth.

Lawrence has already been building a database of CS reports.  I'm not sure
of the details, but he's definitely the man to talk to.  Ed Fox is plugged
into the information retrieval community and has an AIList retrieval system.

Feel free to ask the list readership about these matters if you want more
feedback.

					-- Ken Laws
[Note:  I have contacted the parties involved and asked for
appropriate permissions so that we can publish dissertation
information in IRList and SIGIR Forum.  I welcome comments by readers
on this topic.  I too feel that there is need to support network
distribution of information in a more orderly way than now must take
place - but I guess we are all in the middle of an evolutionary phase
of the transition to electronic publishing. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 86 15:41:10 cst
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft%lsu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  news for Europeans about New Orleans?
-BODY-
There is a reasonable possibility, albeit far from definite yet, that we will
be getting some funds to support partial support for travel for non-U.S.
scholars to attend the ACM/SIGIR International Conference on Research and
Development in Information Retrieval, to be held at the Monteleone Hotel in
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, on June 3-5, 1987.  Extended abstracts or
papers are due on December 15, 1986, as stated in the Call for Papers,
published previously in IRList.  Anyone interested in being considered for
a travel stipend should contact me as soon as possible, under the optimistic
assumption that we will get funded.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 86 13:33:17 est
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Graduate Seminar Series - talk by Dr. Abraham Bookstein
-BODY-
Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science
Graduate Seminar Series - 11/18/86 @ 4pm

             Recent Research Advances in Information Retrieval
                         Dr. Abraham Bookstein

                         Graduate Library School
                         University of Chicago

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 86 18:08:50 -0100
-FROM-
From: Wyle <seismo!mcvax!ifi.ethz.chunet!wyle>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: More new references
-BODY-
Here are some entries from an Aslib conference at
Wadham College last year:

%A T Addis
%T Extended relational analysis: a design approach to
knowledge-based systems
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%A D Parkinson
%T Supercomputers and non-numeric processing
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%A D R McGregor
%A J R Malone
%T An architectural approach to advances in information retrieval
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%A M J Allen
%A O S Harrison
%T Word processing and information retrieval - some
practical problems
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Clustering and nearest neighbour searching
%A F Murtagh
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Experimenting with the automatic classification of books
%A P G Enser
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T An analysis of ranking for free text retrieval systems
%A N Teskey
%Z Z Raznak
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Interactive information retrieval:  an artificial intelligence
to deal with biographical data
%A G P Zarri
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T A case system processor for the PRECIS indexing language
%A P Hancox
%A F Smith
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Linguistic methods in information retrieval systems
%A J Rouault
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Design of a system for the online elucidation of
natural language search statements
%A V Aragon-Ramirez
%A C D Paice
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Problem descriptions and user models: developing an
intelligent interface for document retrieval systems
%A H M Brooks
%A P J Daniels
%A Belkin
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T Information retrieval aids in an online public access catalogue:
automatic intelligent search sequencing
%A N N Mitev
%A S Walker
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T HEADS:  A Cataloguing advisory system
%A W J Black
%A P Hargreaves
%A P B Mayes
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

%T An architecture for integrating data, knowledge, and
information bases
%A D A Bell
%B Informatics 8:  Advances in intelligent retrieval
%I Aslib, Information House
%C 26-27 Boswell St, London WC1N3JZ
%E M Rowbottom

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
62
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 86 11:49:21 -0100
-FROM-
From: Wyle <seismo!mcvax!ifi.ethz.chunet!wyle>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: DRAFT of conspectus paper follows
-BODY-
...
The conspectus paper is quickly becoming stale news.  We just got the
proceedings of the Pisa conference and I would like to add them to this
paper, but my neural network model is taking up all of my non-teaching
time.

Anyway, I think chapter 3 is appropriate for IRlist digest, and I would
really appreciate critique, comments, criticisms, etc.

By the time this paper is distributed, the links between chunet and
csnet, and chunet and arpa should make my e-mail address:

wyle@ifi.ethz.chunet.csnet    or
wyle@ifi.ethz.chunet.arpa

but the old addresses:

...!decvax!seismo!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!Wyle
Wyle%ifi.ethz.cernvax.<many domains>

should still work ok.

Without further ado, here is the current DRAFT of my conspectus paper:

[Note: I have included part of section 1, and section 4 (bibliography)
as well as an aid to the reader.  I have left in ^L (formfeeds) for
those who print these out and hope that won't hurt others. - Ed]




Automatic Indexing of Text For Information Retrieval:  A Conspectus


M.F. Wyle
Institut fuer Informatik
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
ETH / SOT
8092 Zuerich, Switzerland


1.  Introduction

The problems of indexing text have been in human civilization since the
earliest collections of written language.  It is not possible to
read everything we would like, nor to find the specific things we would
like to read.  In our current information revolution,  it is becoming
much easier to store and process larger and larger amounts of text.  As
the quantity of text increases, the quality of its indexing must also
increase, in order to discriminate between the concepts contained in the
different texts.  It is not clear that the quality of current indexing
methods is adequate to meet the challenge created by our information
revolution.

In this paper, we shall try to summarize the current state of indexing
methods and research.  This first section is a very brief summary of
what automatic indexing is, and our perception of current indexing
methods.  The second section summarizes  recent publications, and the
final section outlines possible directions of future research.

... [Note: rest of section 1 and all of section 2 is omitted. - Ed]




3.  Current Avenues of Research

The cost of computing power continues to drop with the advent of new
technologies. The deficiencies of current text indexing methods, which
currently plague only a few users, will soon become apparent to
everyone. The use of write once, read mostly (WORM) media will soon be
common, using compact disc technology.  These devices are very dense
(500-600 Mbytes) and inexpensive.   It will therefore be quite simple to
have a world telephone book on one 7 cm disk, the collected publications
of the ACM on another, and a large encyclopedia on a third.  How can we
index this information effectively?  Our conspectus of the current
research does not yield any instant solutions.  However, there are some
promising results which deserve further study and analysis.

3.1	Thesauri

The use of thesauri in text indexing is one important area which has not
yet received the attention it deserves.  The formal mathematical models
proposed by Schaeuble [Schae 86] could be used to construct software
which will ensure the logical consistency of a thesaurus.  A consistent
thesaurus could then be used to index text into consistent, specific
concept categories, which may in turn produce great performance improvements.

One major drawback in the use of hierarchical dictionaries and thesauri
is inflexibility.  Natural language is highly dynamic, and the
descriptors used to convey concepts change.  In addition, completely new
concepts and words are introduced into the language at an accelerating
rate.  The cost of maintaining a large dictionary or thesaurus is
therefore high.   However, new tools [Dome86] are making the maintenance
of such structures much easier.

Most existing thesauri are inconsistent and under-used.  In some of the
large bibliographic retrieval systems, indexing includes the manual
assignment of  thesaurus descriptors.  These systems use thesauri only
to enhance recall.  However, thesauri could also be used to enhance
precision through narrower descriptors.  Consistent thesauri could be
used to maintain concept consistency in indexing descriptors.  The
feasibility of using thesauri more effectively in automatic indexing is
still an open research question.



3.2 	Performance Testing

Many indexing systems and techniques were compared using a standard
document  and query base during experiments in the early 1970's
[Salt83].  The AI methods surfacing now have not been evaluated using
this standard, and comparison is therefore not possible.  Another gaping
need for automatic indexing research is therefore the establishment,
implementation, and use of a set of standards, to compare the
performance of the latest indexing systems to each other and existing
ones.

Performance experiments are also needed to compare the indexing
capabilities of the emerging parallel hardware.  Experiments must be
performed to benchmark new processors and algorithms in terms of their
indexing capabilities, not just their arithmetic processing power.

3.3  Artificial Intelligence applications in text indexing

The SMART [Salt83] system attempted unsuccessfully to use syntactic
analysis methods to recognize phrases in queries and documents, and to
use the phrases as indexing units.  Salton concluded that these
syntactic methods do not provide improvements over standard retrieval
using a thesaurus.  However, recent work by Smeaton [Smea86] shows
improved retrieval performance by linguistically parsing query and
document text as part of the retrieval strategy.  The continuously
improving parsers developed in natural language processing can be used
to better index documents and queries to improve retrieval performance.

Although more limited in scope, an expert system and semantic network
constructed by Shoval [Shov85] uses term relations and search rules to
assist a user find appropriate search terms in a query.   Similarly,  a
knowledge based system approach to document retrieval is presented by
Biswas et al [Bisw85].  An important research area in AI appears to be
the automation of the construction of semantic networks and knowledge
bases.




3.4	Associative Networks

An associative network may be used to address the indexing problem in
the following way:

Construct a large associative network, perhaps using a Boltzmann
[Hint84] model.  At key nodes, load descriptors and document identifiers
from a document base.  Then load queries as input to the network, and
fix the output  at the correct answers to these queries.  Allow the
network to settle, and examine the resulting connections.  These
connections will have implemented an algorithm which has perfect
performance using the given queries and documents.  The associations
between nodes may lead to important insights into unconscious or
non-obvious connections between descriptors in a document base.  The
network will also "discover" indirect connections between descriptors
which are not apparent but very useful in indexing.

The network itself may be used as an indexing system, or as a method of
automatically assigning relevance weights to descriptors in order to
enhance an existing indexing strategy.  Descriptors in the network need
not be limited to word stems.  They could be syntactic traces, or
thesaurus terms, or some combination of descriptor types.  If a
sufficient set of queries and correct results to a large document
collection is made available, an associative network model may give
enormous insight into descriptor relations.



4.0  References

[Addi83]	Addis, T R and L Johnson, "Knowledge for Machines.," in The
		Fifth Generation Computer Project, State of the Art
		Report,1983, Pergamon Infotech, Ltd, Maidenhead, Berkshire,
		England.

[Bae84]		Baertschi, M, "Term Dependence in information retrieval
		models,"  PhD Thesis, ETH, Zrich, 1984.

[Bis85]		 Biswas, G, V Subramanian, and J C Bezdek, "A knowledge
		based system approach to document retrieval," Second
		Conference on   Artificial  Intelligence Applications:
		The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems , IEEE Comput.
		Soc. Press, Washington, DC, 11-13 Dec. 1985.

[Bos85] 	Bose, P K and M Rajinikanth, "KARMA: knowledge-
		based assistant to a database system," Second
		Conference   on   Artificial Intelligence Applications:
		The Engineering of Knowledge-Based Systems , IEEE
		Computer Society Press, Washington, DC, 11-13 Dec.
		1985.




[Broo85]	Brooks, H M, P J Daniels, and N J Belkin, "Problem
		descriptions and user models: developing an intelligent
		interface for document retrieval systems," in Advances
		in  Intelligent  Retrieval:  INFORMATICS  8.
		Proceedings of an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint
		Conference, 16-17 April 1985 Oxford, England, p191-
		214, Aslib, London.

[Brow85]	Brownstein, M, "Managing   information   intelligently
		[Quantum's  Knowledge Management System],"
		Hardcopy, vol.14, no. 11, pp. 139-141, November1985.

[Chig85]	Chignell, M H, A Loewenthal, and P A Hancock,
		"Intelligent interface design," IEEE  1985 Proceedings
		of the International Conference on Cybernetics and
		Society , p. 620-3, Tucson, (12-15 November1985).

[Chud84]	Chudacek, J, "Non-grammatical Language Processing,"
		Preprint Institute TNO for Mathematics, Information
		Processing, and Statistics, The Hague, Netherlands (1984).

[Damo85]	D'Amore, R J, Mah, C P, "One Time Complete Indexing
		of Text:  Theory and Practice." Proceedings of the 8th
		Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference,
		Montreal,  (1985).

[DeHe74]	De Heer, T, "The Application of the Concept of
		Homeosemy to Natural Language Information
		Retrieval." Information Processing and Management
		vol 18 no 5 (1982).

[Dien85]	Diener, R A V, "Relational  knowledge  structures: a
		structural model of information for research and
		retrieval.," in Challenges to an Information Society.
		Proceedings of the 47th ASIS Annual Meeting,
		Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 1985.

[Dome86]	Domenig, M., Shann, P., "Towards a Dedicated Database
		Management System for Dictionaries," Proc. 11th International
		Conference on Computational Linguistics, August 25-29 1986,
		IKP Universitaet Bonn.

[Fren86]	Frenkel, K A, "Evaluating Two Massively Parallel
		Machines," Comm ACM vol 29 no 8, (August 1986).

[Giri84]	Girill, T R, "Online Access Aids for Documentation:
		A Bibliographic Outline,"  ACM SIGUCCS 12th User
		Services Conference, Reno, Nevada (12 November 1984).




[Hint84]	Hinton, G E, Sejnowski, T J, and Ackley, D H, "Boltzmann
		Machines:  Constraint Satisfaction Networks that Learn,"
		Technical Report CMU-CS-84-119, Carnegie Mellon
		University,  (May 1984).

[Huff52]	Huffman, D,  "A Method for the Construction of
		Minimu Redundancy Codes, " Proc. IRE  v 40 p 1098 -
		1101 (September1952).

[Jona84]	Jonak, Z, "Automatic Indexing of Full Texts,"
		Information Processing and Management, vol. 20, no.
		5-6, pp. 619-627, 1984.

[Kuhl83]	Kuhlen, R, "Natural language research.," SIGART
		Newsletter, no. 83, pp. 20-21, January 1983.

[Kwok84]	Kwock, K L, "A document-document similarity measure based
		on cited titles and probability theory, and its application to
		relevance feedback retrieval," in Research and Development
		in Information Retrieval, The British Computer Society
		Workshop Series, University Press, Cambridge, (1984).

[McCu85]	McCune, B P, R M Tong, J S Dean, and D G Shapiro,
		"RUBRIC: a system for rule-based information
		retrieval," IEEE Trans. Software Eng. , vol. SE-11, no. 9,
		pp. 939-945, Mountain View, CA, September 1985.

[Medl85]	Meder, N, "Artificial  intelligence  as a tool of
		classification, or: the network of language games as
		cognitive paradigm," Int. Classif. (Germany), vol. 12,
		no. 3, pp. 128-132, 1985.

[Mite85]	Mitev, N N and S Walker, "Information   retrieval  aids
		in  an online  public  access catalogue: automatic
		intelligent search sequencing," in Advances  in
		Intelligent  Retrieval: INFORMATICS  8.  Proceedings of
		an Aslib/British Computer Society Joint Conference,
		16-17 April 1985 Oxford, England,  p. 215-26, Aslib,
		London, 1985.

[Mris86]	Morris, D A, "GEFILE, The Electronic File Cabinet,"
		General Electric Company Silicon Systems Technology
		Department Press Release, (August 1986).

[Morr85]	Morrissey, J M, "Interactive Querying Techniques for
		an Office Filing Facility.," Information Processing and
		Management,  vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 121-34, 1986.




[Pate84]	Patel-Schneider, P, Brachman, R, Levesque, H, "ARGON:
		Knowledge Representation Meets Information
		Retrieval," Fairchild Technical Report No 654,
		(September 1984).

[Salt83]	Salton, G and M J McGill, Introduction to modern
		information retrieval, McGraw Hill International Book
		Company, Paris,1983.

[Salt84]	Salton, G, "Extended boolean information retrieval - an
		outline," in National Online Meeting 1984, ed. T H Hogan,
		p 339-346, Learned Information, Inc., Medford (1984).

[Salt86]	Salton, G, "Another Look At Automatic Text Retrieval
		Systems," Comm ACM vol 29 no 7 (July 1986), p 648
		- 656.

[Schae86]	Schaeuble, P, Frei, H P, "Thesauri in Information
		Retrieval,"  unpublished.

[Schn83]	Schneider, C, "Syntaktische Relationen in der
		automatischen Indexierung zur Relationierung von
		Deskriptoren am beispiel juristischer dokumente," PhD
		Dissertation, Regensburg, 1983.

[Shov85]	Shoval, P, "Principles, procedures, and rules in an
		expert system for information retrieval," Information
		and processing management, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 475-
		487, 1985.

[Smea86]	Smeaton, A F, "Incorporating Syntactic Information
		Into a Document Retrieval Stragegy:  An Investigation"
		Prepublication.

[Teuf86]	Teufel, B, Schmidt, S, "Full Text Retrieval Based on
		Syntactic Similarities," unpublished

[Wong85]	Wong, S K M, and Ziarko, W, "On Generalized Vector Space
		Model In Information Retrieval," Ann Soc Math Series IV,
		Fundam Inf, v 8, no 2, p 253-267, (1985).

[Zamo81]	Zamora, E M, Pollack, J J, Zamora, A, "The Use of
		Trigram Analysis for Spelling Error Detection,"
		Information Processing and Management, vol 17 no 6
		(1981).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
63
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 86 18:38:14 est
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information on NSF awards, sent by J. Deken at NSF
-BODY-
		   Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects
		 Funded by the Information Science Program
		(now Knowledge and Database Systems Program)
                              Part 1 of 5
IST-8504726
$42,196 - 12 mos.
James F. Allen
University of Rochester
Plan-Based Approaches to Extended Dialogues
> - -
This research project investigates several basic problems that arise in
constructing a computer system that can carry on a natural language dialogue
with a user.  The work is based on previously developed models of discourse
based upon speech acts and plan recognition.  Extensions to the dialogue model
include facilities to handle both topic changes and clarification and
correction
of misconceptions.  Extensions to the knowledge representation system include
improvements to the theory of actions and plans and improved methods for
reasoning about the beliefs of different agents.  More theoretical work
includes
development of a theory of plan reasoning that integrates both plan
construction
and plan recognition.
_____
BNS-8518675
$40,000 - 12 mos.
James A. Anderson
Brown University
Cognitive Applications of Matrix Memory Models
> - -
There has been a good deal of recent interest in what have been called "neural
models" or "connectionist models" as ways of explaining the organization and
computational abilities of the nervous system. This research will continue
study
of the properties of a simple connectionist model that has been developed over
the past decade, most recently under BNS- 14728. The particular version of a
connectionist model that is used is called the "BSB" model, and technically, is
a non- linear dynamical system with strengths of interconnections specified by
a
conjunctional learning rule (a "Hebbian" rule). It is sufficiently simple so it
can be analyzed mathematically in considerable detail and is easy to simulate
on
a digital computer. The model will be used to understand how humans form
concepts. The BSB model has powerful "concept" forming abilities, and
demonstrates these properties both theoretically and in computer simulation.
The BSB model is also studied in its role as a functioning memory, for example,
to see if it can be used to store a large database of related information.
_____
IST-8511531
$19,097  - 12 mos.
Robert Berwick
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Learnability and Parsability
> - -
In this collaborative project, Learnability and Parsability, the two principal
investigators, Drs. Berwick and Wexler, are studying the relationship between
language learning and language understanding. The issue is motivated by the
existence of already known properties shared by grammars which are learnable
and grammars which  are parsable. (Grammars which allow a language to be
analyzed into a unique underlying representation are said to be parsable.) A
common framework is being developed for  representing grammars. The common
framework allows a comparison of learnability and parsability through the use
of
formal proofs. Additionally, child and adult parsers are being compared
formally.  The research furthers understanding of formal theories of
parsability
and learnability and the relation between the two. These are fundamental issues
for fields concerned with syntactic issues in language. The work ultimately is
aimed at the development of automated language understanding systems which can
both learn and understand natural language.
_____
DCR-8603231
$27,000 - 12 mos.
Alan W. Biermann
Duke University
Dialog Processing for Voice Interactive Problem Solving
> - -
For several years now, Professor Alan W. Biermann at Duke University and
Professor Robert D. Rodman at North Carolina State have collaborated on
research efforts directed at voice interactive computing systems.  They are
studying the dynamics of human-machine voice interactive problem solving with
the goal of constructing a fast and efficient voice interactive computer
system.
The voice interactive dialogue machine will allow the user to display data on a
computer terminal and manipulate it using voice commands and touch sensitive
imputs to the screen.  Each command will result in immediate action visible on
the screen allowing the user to confirm that a proper response has occured.  A
natural language computer (NLC) was used and considerable experience has been
gained with subjects using the voice equipment.  Among the accomplishments has
been the integrationof a voice and touch facility into the NLC system and the
modification of the system for the idiosyncracies of voice and touch input. The
initial implementation of the voice interactive dialogue machine will address
the equipment repair problem where the human provides the eyes and mechanical
skills to work on a failing device and the machine has the appropriate
function-
al diagrams and debugging algorithms.  The major issues to be addressed concern
finding characterizations for typical human-machine task oriented dialogues,
developing formalisms for understanding them and for implementing them in a
computer, and measuring the performance of human-machine cooperative efforts
when utilizing such a grammar-driven voice conversational machine.
_____
IST-8612177
$9,747 - 12 mos.
Jeffrey Bonar
University of Pittsburgh
Partial Support for Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
and Education, Pittsburgh, PA, May 1987
> - -
This project is a workshop for researchers from areas supported by Information
Science. The workshop explores issues in artificial intelligence, cognitive
psychology, and education.  At the meeting, artifical intelligence methodology
is applied to issues of student performance, learning, diagnosis of student
errors and instruction. This goal is achieved by considering strategies for
teaching, research on learning, methods for inferring cognitive states from
behavior, architectures for tutoring systems and interface design. The broad
goal of the workshop is to facilitate interaction between intelligent tutoring
systems researchers and educational researchers on currently unaddressed
issues.
The results of the workshop will be produced as conference proceedings. The
workshop will benefit the study of Information Science by bringing together top
researchers and allowing them to look at newly emerging issues and currently
unanswered questions.
____
IST-8604923
$64,660 - 12 mos.
Alan H. Borning
University of Washington
Automatic Generation of Interactive Displays
> - -
This project seeks a way to construct user-system interfaces with less effort
than is currently required and at the same time to achieve a higher degree of
uniformity among interfaces than is currently found.  The approach taken is to
relate a source object (such as some information in an application program) and
view object (such as a graphical image on the computer's screen) by means of a
"filter".  By this term is meant a program which can satisfy some constraint on
the two objects is relates.  Filters are to be bidirectional: if the source
changes, the view must be updated; if the view is edited, the system must find
a
corresponding change to the source to keep the constraint satisfied.  An
important property of filters is that they can be composed in a variety of
ways,
so that new filters can be defined using other filters as parts.  One objective
of the research is a formal theory which will allow transformations between
equivalent systems of filters.  The results are to be tested by implementing a
prototype system for generating user interfaces.  The research is carried out
in
collaboration with David Maier, of the Oregon Graduate Center, and Ralph
London,
of Tektronix, Inc.
_____
IST-8643739
$121,074 - 12 mos.
Bruce C. Buchanan
Stanford University
Information Structure and Use in Knowledge-Based Expert Systems
> - -
Expert systems and other knowledge-based computer models provide an
important application of computer models as intelligent information systems.
Among the problems confronting the design of such systems is the flow of
knowledge between the expert and the builders of the models.  In addition, a
transfer of information problem exists between the users and the systems
themselves.  This research will test and analyze models developed by the
research team for the improved transfer of information in the above situations.
Specifically, the research proposes to explore; (1) a model for constructing
knowledge-based programs by transferring expertise from a person to a program
interactively and iteratively, and (2) a model for using such programs in a
"critiquing" mode, as opposed to a "consulting" mode. At present one of the
great bottlenecks in the construction of expert systems is the process of
transferring information between the experts and the system.  A great improve-
ment in the expert system building process will be gained if the PIs are
successful in the construction of a model to expediate and automate this
procedure.
_____
IST-8607303
$10,000 - 12 mos.
Kathleen M. Carley
Carnegie-Mellon University
Knowledge Acquisition as a Social Phenomenon
> - -
The research develops a model of knowledge acquisition in an environment where
information is incomplete and uncertain. The model explores the relationship
between the individual's private cognitive world, in terms of knowledge
acquisition, and the social world, in terms of social position, interactive
patterns and shared knowledge. In particular, the model examines predictions
about both the social processing of information and the related shifts in
social
structure, information flow and storage. The theoretical underpinnings for the
model are based upon prior research in sociology, artificial intelligence,
cognitive psychology and communication research.  The research methods are
mathematical modeling, simulation and model validation with field data. The
research is relevant to an understanding of the diffusion of new ideas and
information between and within groups, effective distribution of information in
a multi-person, distributed decision making environment, and contributes to an
understanding of the necessary and sufficient conditions for effective
communication.
_____
IST-8515005
$75,900 - 12 mos.
Eugene Charniak
Brown University
A Single-Semantic-Process Theory of Parsing
> - -
Current automated text understanding systems have numerous components
(modules with identifiably different functions). All of the components use
semantic and pragmatic information in accomplishing tasks such as word-sense
disambiguation.  However, each makes  only limited use of the semantic and
pragmatic imformation available. This researcher implements an understanding
system with only two components  through a technique called "marker passing".
In "marker passing" pieces of semantic information, i.e., markers, are passed
throughout the system, making full pragmatic and semantic information
available to all components. This advance in implementation stems from the
underlying theoretical perspective of the researcher; all components of a
system
should take  full, rather than partial, advantage of semantic and pragmatic
information. The system, as a result, makes the larger number of components
usually found in such systems unnecessary. The first component of this system
generates possible meanings for a given sentence and the second component then
chooses among them. The research offers a more parsimonious theory of natural
language comprehension and implements it as a natural language understanding
system.  The ultimate aim of a system which implements this type of theory is
the automated understanding of ambiguous statements.
_____
IST-8644629
$60,449 - 12 mos.
Eugene Charniak
Brown University
An Approach to Abductive Inference in Artificial Intelligence Systems
> - -
The ability to explain observed events is an important capability in artificial
intelligence systems for many different kinds of applications.  In order to
accomplish this, a system must be able to postulate a possible cause and then
determine whether or not it is reasonable.  Looking for possible explanations
involves matching observed actions with appropriate parts of the system's
knowledge base.  In this research the knowledge base is assumed to be
structured
into script or plans which are formally represented.  A major goal is to
determine appropriate and efficient algorithms, based on this formal
representation for determining if possible explanations are consistent with the
knowledge base of the system.  The research focuses on the kinds of problems
that arise in the analysis of short narrative texts. This research will
contribute to the understanding of intelligent computer-based systems.
_____
IST-8608362
$172,9212 - 12 mos.
Richard Cullingford
Georgia Institute of Technology
Robust Interaction and Natural Problem-Solving in Advice-Giving Systems
> - -
The purpose of this research is to develop an intelligent advisory system. The
system functions as an aid during problem solving, it both volunteers and takes
advice and is able to accept ungrammatical input. Several research issues
underlie the development of this problem solving aid:  memory and reasoning are
modeled and used in the advisory process; natural language capabilities are
developed; and the reasoning and language elements of the system are
integrated.
Artificial intelligence advisory systems need to be able to interact with
humans
in a flexible fashion.  In order to be flexible, these systems need to be able
to understand ungrammatical input and to be able to take, as well as give,
advice.  This research deals with these issues and contributes  to the develop-
ment of more sophisticated computer systems.
_____
IST-8506706
$60,942 - 12 mos.
Donald Dearholt
New Mexico State University
Properties of Networks Derived from Proximities
> - -
The purpose of this project is to develop a way of using networks to represent
the relationships among sets of related concepts. An algorithm for finding the
salient relationships is developed. It is based on human proximity judgments of
the conceptual closeness of the members of a set of concepts. The algorithm is
implemented as a computer system. The system produces a network structure
which makes the relationships between concepts salient. Experiments are con-
ducted to test that the relationships identified by the algorithm are actually
judged salient by humans. The project will allow large databases to be used
more
fully and more flexibly. For example, the system can supply users of a database
with keywords which are either prototypical or atypical for a category in the
database.
_____
IST-8518706
$37,243 - 12 mos.
Andre de Korvin
Indiana University Foundation
Modeling Goal Uncertainty and Goal Shaping in a Generalized
Information System
> - -
This project is a study of the effectiveness of information in a generalized
information system, which is a formal model of information flow and decision
analysis.  Mathematical analysis is used to determine the effectiveness of
feedback processes based on utility functions.  The results of previous work
illuminate how information should be selected, when stopping points can be
reached, and how long information must be gathered before convergence is
achieved.  This project builds upon and expands earlier findings to cover the
case where the goals of the decision manager are not known and fixed.  In the
expanded and more realistic model, goals themselves are uncertain and subject
to change by the information gathering process.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
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-VOL-
2

-N-
64
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 86 18:38:14 est
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information on NSF awards, sent by J. Deken at NSF
-BODY-
		   Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects
		 Funded by the Information Science Program
		(now Knowledge and Database Systems Program)
                              Part 2 of 5

IST-8609441
$20,205 - 6 mos.
Michael L. Dertouzos
Massachusetts Inst. Tech.
Conference on Cellular Automata: Parallel Information Processing for
Mathematics and Science
> - -
A radically new approach to computing and scientific models emerging today is
based on parallel computing systems. In these systems vast numbers of simple
computing elements act simultaneously like the billions of living cells in a
complex biological creature. This "cellular automata" conference is organized
by
one of the nation's leading research groups in building and analyzing such
parallel computer models. It provides an opportunity for researchers in the
diverse fields of computer science, mathematics, physics, and biology to
interact and keep pace with the rapidly changing state of the art in cellular
automata hardware and systems. In the highly communicative conference setting,
new scientific problems which can be investigated are identified, and new tools
are provided to researchers for building parallel cellular models in each of
their own diverse fields. It is likely that the ideas now developing around
cellular automata and other parallel systems will play a key part in
revolutionizing computer and mathematical modeling over the next few decades.
_____
IST-8519926
$73,460 - 12 mos.
Thomas G. Dietterich
Oregon State University
Learning by Experimentation
> - -
Current automated learning systems only learn passively; the systems learn new
members of categories when the new members are presented.  There is no active
information seeking.  In this project, Dietterich adds an active
experimentation
component.  An automated learning system uses a computer "experimentally"  to
test out its hypotheses about how the computer functions.  The system
experiments by giving the computer commands and looking at the effects of
these commands. The issue of experimentation expands the problem of automated
learning to allow it to more closely mirror learning in the real world.  The
way
the system performs when it is experimenting is  then considered as an
automated learning system is developed.   In order to be practical, automated
systems need to be able to deal with a wide range of situations, many of which
will be unexpected when first encountered.  In order to deal successfully with
unexpected situations, these systems will need to be able to learn.  This
research addresses an issue which is important in the development of automated
learning systems.
_____
IST-8519924
$43,489 - 12 mos.
John W. DuBois
University of California at Los Angeles
Information Transfer Constraints and Strategies in Natural
Language Communication
> - -
The goal of this project is to study patterns of information flow during narra-
tion and spontaneous conversation.  This goal is achieved by investigating how
much information is conveyed in single units of speech and how large amounts of
information are conveyed by speakers, given that each unit conveys only a
limited amount.  Recordings of narration and conversation are analyzed to
identify the speech units and to identify the limits on the units and the
strategies used as a result. The research is relevant to the development of
computer systems which can produce good synthetic speech.  In order to produce
synthetic speech systems which produce understandable speech, how humans
turn complex thoughts into spoken statements has to be understood.  This
project
addresses questions which underlie this issue.
_____
DCR-8602385
$25,000 - 12 mos.
Wayne Dyksen and Mikhail Atallah
Purdue University
High Level Systems for Scientific Computing
> - -
The size and complexity of feasible scientific computations have increased
dramatically in the last twenty-five years as a result of both technological
and
algorithmic progress.  Yet, over the same time, the process by which scientists
and engineers do scientific computing has changed relatively little. For a
given
scientific computing problem, the selection of the "best" solution algorithms
is
difficult for the average nonexpert.  The need for confidence in results thus
dictates electing inferior "known" algorithms over superior "unknown" ones.  As
a step toward the solution of this problem, this project will investigate the
use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to make powerful scientific com-
puting techniques usable by nonexperts.  The investigators will design, imple-
ment, and test an expert system for scientific computing.  As a case study,
work
has begun on Elliptic- Expert, an expert system for solving elliptic partial
differential equations (PDEs).
_____
IST-8609123
$93,156 - 24 mos.
Andrew U. Frank
University of Maine at Orono
A Formal Model for Representation and Manipulation of Spatial Subdivisions in
Information Systems
> - -
This research develops a set of mathematical concepts and approaches to
representing information about space.  Spatial concepts play a role in computer
systems which must reason about maps and geography, as well as systems which
work in three-dimensional space for computer assisted design and
manufacturing.  The mathematical concepts explored are those of "nearness" and
"distance" (metric concepts) and those of "connectedness" (topology.)  The
significance of this work is that it generates a new set of mathematical
approaches to spatial reasoning.  Any successful mathematical approach may
lead to entire families of knowledge representation and expert reasoning
systems.
_____
IST-8611673
$18,000 - 3 mos.
Thomas Gay
University of Connecticut Health Center
Travel Grant: U.S. - U.S.S.R. Symposium on Information Coding and
Transmission in Biological Systems, October 3-13, 1986
> - -
This award supports travel funds for approximately 15 U.S. participants in a
joint U.S. - U.S.S.R. Symposium on Information Coding and Transmission in
Biological Systems.  The symposium is being convened and sponsored by the
Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., which will invite all of the U.S. partici-
pants as official guests.  The conference is significant, both for the caliber
of the U.S. and Soviet participants, the multidisciplinary approach to informa-
tion processing taken, and the effort to consider systems from the level of
molecular chemistry to multicellular organization. The participants will be
working in a productive cross disciplinary environment, to which the Soviet
Union will commit its own world class biologists and mathematicians.
_____
IST-8512419
$70,867 - 12 mos.
Richard Granger
University of California, Irvine
Unification of Lexical, Syntactic, and Pragmatic Inference in Understanding
> - -
Research on artificial intelligence methods for automated text understanding
systems suggests that the understanding of ambiguous statements is a pervasive
and therefore central problem.  One powerful way to overcome the difficulty
created by ambiguous statements is to use lexical, syntactic and pragmatic
sources of information during the disambiguation process. Psychological data is
being collected on the disambiguation strategies used by humans to accomplish
this integration. These strategies will then be implemented in computer models.
The research will further understanding of natural language comprehension
processes and of natural language understanding systems.
_____
IST-8509860
$73,479 - 12 mos.
Robert M. Gray
Stanford University
The Application of Information Theory to Pattern Recognition and the Design of
Decision Tree Classifiers
> - -
This research develops the connection of automated pattern recognition systems
with established work in information theory. Major results in source coding and
channel coding theory are applied and extended to the problems of pattern
recognition.  Applying source coding theory, automated pattern recognition is
treated as a form of data compression, where essential information is captured,
but the amount of data transmitted is significantly reduced.  Using channel
coding theory, the automated pattern recognition system can be designed to
perform with minimum "cost," where cost is measured as a combination of
computational complexity and average accuracy of the system. New pattern
recognition systems based on decision trees are designed using this approach.
The performance of these systems is analyzed and optimized using mathematical
results from information theory which prove limits on the best possible
performance of source coding and channel coding algorithms.  The fundamental
significance of this research is to break ground in extending and developing
techniques of source coding and channel coding theory to influence pattern
recognition research.
_____
IST-8603943
$134,694 - 18 mos.
Max Henrion
Carnegie Mellon University
A Comparison of Methods for Representing Uncertainty in Expert Systems
> - -
This research brings together for direct comparison all of the major systems
now proposed for use by computers to represent uncertain information and to
reason with such information to draw valid and useful conclusions.  The
advantage of this comparison, using real data to judge various approaches'
performance, is that the strengths and weaknesses of different uncertainty
models relative to each other are clearly shown. In addition, practical
comparison serves as a basis for the development of an overall framework for
integrating the best features of many approaches to uncertainty in knowledge
based systems of the future.  The project is significant in that it recognizes
the potential of various approaches to uncertainty in different circumstances,
and allows previously incomparable systems to be brought together for
systematic
evaluation.
_____
DCR-8608311
$45,000 - 12 mos.
Lawrence J. Henschen
Northwestern University
Logic and Databases
> - -
The purpose of this research is to enhance the information retrieval capabili-
ties of data bases by incorporating first- order logic into the data base.  The
relational data model is being used in which the relations themselves already
are of the form of elementary logical statements.  With this model, it is only
necessary to supply the appropriate logical mechanisms for integrating more
general logical formulas into the data storage and retrieval processes.  It has
been shown such a model can be used when the logical formulas represent
definitions of new relations, even when such definitions are recursive.  This
allows the possibility of greatly reducing storage because such defined rela-
tions need not be stored; rather, their information content can easily and
efficiently be generated when needed.  This can be accomplished at data base
creation time, a major step forward.  In this study other types of formulas
(e.g. constraints) are being examined to determine whether they can be
"compiled" at data base creation time.  The research is also looking into how
functions, which normally lead to infinite deduction paths, can be handled in
the specialized domain of data bases.
_____
IST-8645349
$153,289 - 12 mos.
Richard J. Herrnstein
Harvard University
A Comparative Approach to Natural and Artificial Visual Information Processing
> - -
Many animals classify wide varieties of shapes, textures, and colors seemingly
without effort, and yet this ability has proven exceedingly difficult to
program
into a computer.  This project takes a dual approach to understanding the
information processing involved in visual classification abilities:
experiments
on human and pigeon subjects categorizing natural and artificial stimuli are
coordinated with the simulation and analysis of their performances by computer.
The stimulation model is used to generate artificial stimuli and, to the extent
possible, to analyze natural stimuli.  The human and animal performances are
used to test and, when necessary, to modify the simulation model.  Theoretical
and empirical results therefore interact iteratively, with the goal of conver-
ging on a small number of visual classification algorithms.  Concurrent experi-
ments with humans and pigeons classifying the same stimuli should indicate the
extent to which these two species share common categorization principles, and
also the respects in which they do not.  For many practical applications, it
may
be more appropriate to try to model the pigeon-like classification device,
rather than to aim for the far more challenging and perhaps needlessly complex
categorizing capacities of the human system.
_____
IST-8520359
$70,735 - 12 mos.
Geoffrey Hinton
Carnegie-Mellon University
Search Methods for Massively Parallel Networks
> - -
The purpose of this research is to study how parallel computers can search for
solutions to problems.  One problem  is recognizing the identity of objects.
This problem is studied here by studying how objects can be represented in
para-
llel computers and by studying how the representation effects the search for an
answer to the question of object recognition. The most efficient object
recognition techniques are sought here in order to allow computers to recognize
objects which have been either translated or rotated in the visual field.
Computer systems need to be able to recognize objects in order to behave
flexibly.  Looking for effective, efficient solution methods for object
recogni-
tion problems will lead to better parallel computational systems.
_____
IST-8511541
$69,815 - 12 mos.
Richard B. Hull
University of Southern California
Investigation of Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Semantic Database Models
> - -
This research seeks to develop the principal investigator's framework for
designing databases.  This design framework has been developed to allow many
different architectures for databases to be compared and synthesized. Initial
work concentrates on a graphics-based system, SNAP (Semantic Navigation and
Perusal). By developing the SNAP interface within the new database design
framework, it is possible to develop database structures and to compare these
designs, as well as to add and extract information from the resulting
databases.
The principal investigator's design framework is semantically rich enough to
encompass semantic databases with a wide variety of structures.    The proposed
research is significant in developing a foundation for the comparison and
integration of diverse database models.  The initial work, which develops an
effective graphic interface not just for interacting with database systems in
conventional fashion but for rebuilding and redesigning their structure as
well,
is also fundamental.
_____
IST-8643740
$98,507 - 12 mos.
Ray Jackendoff and Jane Grimshaw
Brandeis University
Syntactic and Semantic Information in a Natural Language Lexicon
> - -
Information about words can be represented both semantically and syntactically;
the nature of the relationships between these two modes of representation is
examined.  Specific questions addressed include the semantic structure of
lexical items, the encoding of syntactically complex lexical items, and the
systematic relations among uses of the same lexical item in different
environments.  An existing catalog of information about English verbs provides
the major source of data for the research effort.  The results of the research
provide insight into the nature of information as represented in natural lan-
guage. Such results will be useful in the construction of automated systems
which can handle natural language.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
65
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 86 18:38:14 est
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information on NSF awards, sent by J. Deken at NSF
-BODY-
		   Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects
		 Funded by the Information Science Program
		(now Knowledge and Database Systems Program)
                              Part 3 of 5

IST-8512108
$99,394 - 12 mos.
Hans Kamp
University of Texas at Austin
Logic Representation of Attitudes for Computer Natural Language Understanding
> - -
This project develops a theory of attitudes based on logical and computational
models.  Modeling attitudes is important to information science because
automated natural language processing systems have proved unable to understand
unrestricted narrative and exposition without additional contextual information
such as the attitudes of speaker and listener. In particular, the dynamics of
attitudes, the mechanisms by which they change in response to information
input, are being illuminated.
_____
IST-8644864
$35,721 - 12 mos.
Abraham Kandel
Florida State University
Analysis and Modeling of Imprecise Information in Uncertain Environments
> - -
A problem of considerable inportance in the development of expert systems is
the ability to represent imprecise data.  This research is based upon the
representation of imprecise data by possibility distributions.  The PI is
interested in developing a theory of statistics in the framework of possibility
distributions.  Particular emphasis in this research is given to the
development
of a "typical" value associated with a possibility distribution.  This value is
analagous to the expected value in the framework of probability theory.  The PI
will study the properties of this typical value and its usefulness solving
differential equations.  Just as the expected value provides a means for
summarizing probabilistic information the significance of this research lies in
the fact that the so called "typical" value will provide a means for
summarizing
possibilistic data.  This in turn will lead to simplification in handling
imprecise information of the type represented by possibility distributions.
_____
IST-8542811
$65,414 - 12 mos.
R.L. Kashyap
Purdue University
Research on Inference Procedures with Uncertainty
> - -
The development of inference procedures which can be used with uncertain
information is an important issue in the construction of expert systems.  Ad
hoc
and intuitive approaches to inference are used in many expert systems; this
research investigates several systematic and rational inference procedures
which could be used in expert systems.  The theoretical foundations include
Bayesian theory, Dempster and Shafer's theory of evidence, and fuzzy reasoning.
A working expert system for structure damage assessment is used to test the
inference procedures.  The significance of this research is that it will
contribute to the important problem of handling uncertain information in expert
systems by developing a rigorous approach to uncertainty.
_____
IST-8644676
$74,752 - 12 mos.
George J. Klir
State University of New York at Binghamton
Possibilistic Information:  Theory and Applicability
> - -
Information theory based on the Shannon entropy has been very successful in
dealing with many systems problems, but its limitations are becoming
increasingly clear.  A development of new information theory is proposed, one
which is based on possibility theory rather than probability theory.  Such a
theory is fundamentally different from the Shannon information theory since it
involves imprecision that is not statistical in nature.  As such, it is more
suitable for dealing with the wide range of systems problems that are often
referred to as problems of organized complexity (as contrasted with problems of
disorganized complexity, where statistical methods perform well).  In analogy
with its probabilistic counterpart, possibilistic information is defined in
terms of the underlying notion of possibilistic uncertainty.  The latter is a
measure that possesses counterparts of all properties of the Shannon entropy
and, in addition, has an important property of monotonicity.  The proposed re-
search includes a mathematical investigation of some fundamental issues involv-
ing the possibilistic information, a development of basic laws and principles
of the possibilistic information theory, and a study of its applicability in a
broad range of relevant areas.  The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the
fundamental complementarity of the two information theories and to characterize
the two domains for which application of one or the other information theory is
superior. This will be accomplished analytically, when feasible, or by
experiments simulated on the computer.
_____
IST-8552925
$54,250 - 12 mos.
Richard E. Korf
University of California at Los Angeles
Presidential Young Investigator Award :  Machine Learning
> - -
Richard Korf's research focuses on mechanisms by which intelligent computer
systems can learn the large amounts of specific knowledge necessary to solve
realistic problems.  In particular, the research explores the ways in which
specific knowledge can help to reduce the amount of trial-and-error search
needed by a computer for problem solving.  A central thrust of this research is
machine learning - the processes by which relevant knowledge is automatically
acquired by the computer rather than being programmed by a human.  The
significance of machine learning and problem solving for the future use of
computers can hardly be overstated.  Practical autonomous computer systems of
the future will need far more knowledge than humans can explicitly transfer,
and
so the computers themselves will have to learn independently.
_____
IST-8518307
$15,750 - 12 mos.
Donald H. Kraft
Louisiana State University
Travel to the ACM Conference on Research and Development in
Information Retrieval:  Pisa, Italy; September 8-10, l986
> - -
This award supports travel funds for fifteen U.S. participants to the l986 ACM
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in Pisa, Italy
on September 8-10, l986.  This conference is sponsored by the Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italian National Research Council), in cooperation
with the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Informa-
tion Retrieval and several other professional organizations.  The conference
scope includes theory, methodology and applications of information retrieval,
with particular emphasis on new emerging application areas. This conference
provides an opportunity for strengthening the quality of information retrieval
research, as well as facilitating international communication in this area.
_____
DCR-8602665
$45,720 - 12 mos.
Benjamin J. Kuipers
University of Texas at Austin
Knowledge Representations for Expert Causal Models
> - -
The goal of this research is to design and build a computer program to under-
stand a realistic description of a medical case, construct a detailed model of
the internal state of the patient and its evolution, and answer questions about
the pathophysiology of the case, concentrating on the domain of salt and water
balance disorders in the kidney.  During the past year, progress has been made
in several directions.  The theoretical study of qualitative simulation has
been
completed.  QSIM, a new version of the qualitative simulation algorithm based
on
the theoretical work, has been implemented, runs very efficiently and is being
distributed to interested researchers.  The Evoker, an associative
hypothesis-generator, has been redesigned and reimplemented to make it a more
general-purpose tool for knowledge engineering.  A preliminary version of the
interaction between QSIM and the Evoker that constitutes the core of the RENAL
program has been designed and implememted.  The size and scope of the
knowledge bases for both QSIM and the Evoker are steadily being augmented.
This
project focuses on completing the knowledge bases, codifying a set of
principles
for acquiring and validating its contents.  The pattern of interactions are
being completed between QSIM and the Evoker, concentrating particularly on the
matcher between the different descriptive terms used by the two reasoners, to
make RENAL into a complete diagnostic system.
_____
RII-8600412
$10,000 - 12 mos.
Jill H. Larkin
University of California at Berkeley
Developing the Instructional Power of Modern Personal Computing
> - -
This project will provide the principal investigator with the opportunity to
conduct advanced research not possible at her home institution and to interact
with students and colleagues through teaching, counseling, and mentoring
activities in a way that demonstrates her successful career in science.
(Visiting Professorships for Women)
_____
IST-8600412
$10,000 - 12 mos.
Wendy G. Lehnert
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Presidential Young Investigator Award:  Natural Language Computing Systems
> - -
Advanced computer information processing systems which manipulate natural
language (normal human verbal discourse) are composed of complex sets of
interacting sub-programs.  Among these are programs which dynamically create
new data structures and new sub-programs according to rules for manipulating
the initial input.  Such dynamic "learning" systems are inherently difficult to
understand and maintain; especially for those not involved in the original de-
sign. The goals of this project are to develop tools for automatically
analyzing
the data dependencies and tracking interactions and isolating potential effects
due to system modifications.  The importance of the effort is in its potential
to facilitate reliable and practical natural language information systems.
_____
IST-8603697
$5,000 - 12 mos.
Michael E. Lesk
Bell Communications Research
Workshop on Document Generation Principles
> - -
This award is for a three day workshop on document generation principles. The
workshop brings together four groups of researchers with closely interrelated,
but historically separately investigated interests:
    The generation of natural language documents by computer;
    The production of manuals and other documents by people;
    The search of natural language texts by computer; and
    The evaluation of human) writing for clarity and readability.
This workshop, as an interdisciplinary forum for the interaction of questions
and methods about natural language production and searching, provides a
signifi-
cant perspective beyond document generation systems to more general "knowledge
transfer" systems. Artificial intelligence programs of the near future will
require such knowledge transfer capability as a widespread infrastructure.
_____
IST-8602765
$76078 - 12 mos.
R. Duncan Luce
Harvard University
Measurement: Axiomatic and Meaningfulness Studies
> - -
Information from phenomena in the real world cannot be managed unless it is
converted into a representation, for use by people and computers.  This
conversion from phenomena to representation is the fundamental process of
quantification or measurement.  Since quantification is essential, it is of
paramount importance for information systems that it be done well.  This
research investigates the properties of some mathematical systems of
quantification, in order to illuminate the concept of "meaningfulness."  In
particular, the research shows how quantification must be managed in many
cases, so that seemingly equivalent choices of "representation" do not
inadvertently lead the people or computers which use these representations into
unexpectedly different reasoning and conclusions.  The research is significant
in that structural and analytic studies of "meaningfulness" may well illuminate
the empirical calibration of the representation and reasoning schemes used by
many modern computing systems.
_____
IST-8444028
$62,500 - 12 mos.
David Maier
Oregon Graduate Center
Presidential Young Investigator Award:  Foundations of Knowledge Management
Systems
> - -
The goal of this project is to integrate recent findings from research on
database structure, knowledge representation, programming languages, expert
systems, graphics, and information retrieval in order to build a foundation for
building knowledge management systems (KMS).  A KMS is an intelligent database
system which allows extraction and manipulation of information without
reference to storage format, mode of representation (text, graphics, audio,
etc.) or the state of organization of the data.  The significance of the
project
will be a substantial improvement in ease of use and intelligence capability of
data management systems.
_____
IST-8604977
$46,956 - 12 mos.
David Maier
Oregon Graduate Center
Automatic Generation of Interactive Displays
> - -
This project seeks a way to construct user-system interfaces with less effort
than is currently required and at the same time to achieve a higher degree of
uniformity among interfaces than is currently found.  The approach taken is to
relate a source object (such as some information in an application program) and
a view object (such as a graphical image on the computer's screen) by means of
a
"filter".  By this term is meant a program which can satisfy some constraint on
the two objects it relates.  Filters are to be bidirectional:  if the source
changes, the view must be updated; if the view is edited, the system must find
a
corresponding change to the source to keep the constraint satisfied.  An
important property of filters is that they can be composed in a variety of
ways,
so that new filters can be defined using other filters as parts.  One objective
of the research is a formal theory which will allow transformations between
equivalent systems of filters.  The results are to be tested by implementing a
prototype system for generating user interfaces.  The research is carried out
in
collaboration with Alan H. Borning, of the University of Washington, and Ralph
London, of Tektronix, Inc.
_____
IST-8642813
$25,500 - 12 mos.
Gerald S. Malecki
Office of Naval Research
Committee on Human Factors
> - -
This award is for the National Science Foundation to join with other agencies
of
the Feceral Government in providing sponsorship support for ongoing activities
of the Committee on Human Factors of the National Academy of Sciences.  This
Committee was established in October l980 and is currently sponsored jointly by
various agencies of the Department of Defense and by the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.  The Committee's principal objectives are to provide
new perspectives on important theoretical and methodological issues to
strengthen the scientific bases of human factors research and development.
_____
IST-8606187
$19,650 - 12 mos.
James L. McClelland
Carnegie-Mellon University
Workshop of Parallel Distributed Processing in Information and
Cognitive Research (Washington, D.C. ; February 28 - March 1, 1986)
> - -
This project is a workshop for researchers from several areas supported by
Information Science.  The workshop explores the interaction of issues in
artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience with
parallel distributed process (PDP) models.  (PDP models are ones in which
information processing is accomplished through the interaction of a large
number of simple, highly interconnected processing units).  The primary goal of
the workshop is to develop an agenda for researchers in Cognitive/Information
Science. The goal is achieved in the following way:  At the workshop
researchers
provide an overview of the relevant issues, examine existing PDP models in
light
of recent data, and consider challenges posed by high-level phenomena studied
in
the area of artificial intelligence. The workshop will benefit the study of
Information Science by bringing together top researchers and allowing them to
look at newly emerging issues and currently unanswered questions.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
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-VOL-
2

-N-
66
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 86 18:38:14 est
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information on NSF awards, sent by J. Deken at NSF
-BODY-
		   Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects
		 Funded by the Information Science Program
		(now Knowledge and Database Systems Program)
                              Part 4 of 5

IST-8451438
$37,500 - 12 mos.
Kathleen R. McKeown
Columbia University
Presidential Young Investigator Award:  Natural Language Interfaces
> - -
This research investigates computer generation of natural language, focusing on
problems which arise in the context of interactive dialogues with users of
computer-based information systems.  The primary goal is to develop methods
for tailoring explanations for users of expert systems.  A secondary goal is to
investigate problems involved in the choice of words and syntactic structures.
In both cases information about users and their goals is used to constrain and
guide the output.  The significance of this research lies in its potential to
improve user interfaces to computer based information systems.
_____
IST-8520217
$115,220 - 12 mos.
Douglas P. Metzler
University of Pittsburgh
An Expert System Approach to Syntactic Parsing and Information Retrieval
> - -
This research examines the role which discovering language structure beyond the
meaning of isolated words can play in improving the effectiveness of
computerized searching for information. This enhanced language use would be a
substantial improvement over present day information retrieval systems, where
the task of finding documents or other relevant source materials is largely
done
based on the match (or combination of matches) between individual words in a
searcher's query and words in the target materials.   To extract linguistic
information beyond the simple meaning of individual words, the principal
investigator's approach to automated language processing is implemented, using
an "expert-system" architecture in which parallel processors independently
analyze textual material while sharing information through a "blackboard."
Language information discovered by this expert system is then analyzed and
evaluated for its effectiveness in assisting information retrieval tasks.  This
research is significant both in the light it will shed on the utility of
syntac-
tic information in enhancing information retrieval, and in the ancillary devel-
opment of parsers and other linguistic tools in advance LISP-based
environments.
_____
IST-8512736
$137,503 - 24 mos.
David Mumford
Harvard University
The Parsing of Images
> - -
Processes in the human visual system are often divided into two categories,
local processes which are data-driven and global processes which are
knowledge-driven. Some early visual processing, however, seems to involve
analyzing shapes and structure without regard to this categorization; analyses
are made which are global but not knowledge driven.  An example of a computer
system which tests this hypothesis is Marr's system in which the Gestalt laws
of organization are used to generate a global analysis in a data-driven way.
In
this project three closely related problems which arise when computer systems
are constructing visual analyses are investigated:  (1)  The development of an
algorithm to divide an image into maximally homogeneous regions with the
shortest possible edges; (2) the development of methods of analyzing texture by
classifying the micro-shapes out of which it is composed and the links between
shapes given by repetion and similarity; (3) the development of computer
algorithms implementing the Gestalt laws.  The research will further
understanding of the human visual system and ultimately will aid in the
development of computer vision systems.
_____
IST-8604282
$2,447 - 12 mos.
Kent Norman
University of Maryland at College Park
Developing an Effective User Evaluation Questionnaire for Interactive Systems
> - -
The purpose of this research is to develop a standard test for measuring the
satisfaction users derive from a given interactive computer system. The test is
designed to measure subjective ratings of system quality and performance as
well.  Additionally, the test will be valid for a wide range of systems.  The
test is constructed by defining ease-of-use as being composed of a large number
of underlying facets such as the quality of the visual display and the speed at
which the system responds to users.  Questions are developed to reflect each of
these aspects.  The questionnaire is a tool to aid the design of computer
systems.  It also is a tool for assessing potential areas of system improvement
and for comparing the ease-of-use of a set of computer systems. This research
therefore contributes to the development of more sophisticated computer
systems.
_____
IST-8645347
$80,492 - 12 mos.
Donald E. Nute
University of Georgia
Discourse Representation for Natural Language Processing
> - -
The purpose of this research is to integrate two recently developed theories of
discourse, discourse representation and conversational scorekeeping, and to
develop from them computationally feasible procedures for natural language
understanding.  The procedures developed are applied in experimental computer
programs for automated extraction of data from texts and in natural language
front ends for database construction and querying.  The integration of these
two
theories of discourse should make possible considerable more powerful
techniques for discourse understanding then have so far been applied to
computer
processing of natural language.
_____
IST-8645348
$49,211 - 12 mos.
Donald E. Nute
University of Georgia
Hypothetical Reasoning and Logic Programming
> - -
This research uses work in the area of philosophical logic to enhance the
theoretical basis of logic programming systems.  Non-classical intensional
conditional logic is used to represent subjunctive conditionals and reason
about
them nonmonotonically.  The theoretical results are incorporated into two
existing logic programming systems, PROWESS and N-PROLOG.   The significance
of this research is in its potential for improving the techniques of knowledge
representation and automated reasoning used in artificial intelligence systems,
such as expert systems.
_____
IST-8642477
$86,969 - 12 mos.
Robert N. Oddy
Syracuse University
Representations for Anomalous States of Knowledge in Information Retrieval
> - -
A major goal of information retrieval research is the discovery of effective
ways of identifying the relatively few documents in a large collection which an
inquirer will find useful in solving a problem.  The ASK (Anomalous State of
Knowledge) hypothesis is that an information need arises from an anomaly in an
individual's state of knowledge and that in many cases a user can not specify
what is needed to resolve the anomaly.  This project investigates
representations of ASK's by collecting statements from system users, analyzing
them automatically, comparing the representations to the perceptions of the
users, and determining the relationship between them and the structures of both
individual documents and collections of documents.  The implications of the
results for strategy choices in information retrieval systems are also
considered.  The significance of this research lies in its potential to improve
the
performance of information retrieval systems.
_____
IST-8609201
$44,905 - 12 mos.
Daniel Osherson
Syracuse University
A Computational Approach to Decision-Making
> - -
The purpose of this collaborative research is to develop a theory of how humans
make decisions.  The theory is developed as a computational theory, using the
representations and processes currently prevalent in cognitive science and
artificial intelligence research.  The theory explains the formation of complex
concepts.  Additionally, it accounts for people's incorrect estimates of the
likelihood with which events will occur.  The theory is tested through
psychological experimentation. Knowledge about how people make decisions and
estimate probabilities is useful to all decision makers.  Additionally, a
computational theory of the process allows the development of computer based
decision-making aids.
_____
IST-8544976
$197,055 - 12 mos.
Charles Parsons and Isaac Levi
Columbia University
The Structure of Information in Science:  Fact Formulas and Discussion
Structures in Related Subsciences
> - -
The purpose of this research is to develop a method for reducing the
information
contained in a scientific article including data presentations, discussions,
and
conclusions to a system of formulas adequate to describe the information for
any
given subscience.  This system of formulas can be regarded as a "grammar" or
informational structure of a subscience.  This work is possible because methods
now exist for studying the word-combinations in scientific writing, which carry
almost all the information in science.  This permits the discovery of
fact-structures, argument structures, and the relation of facts to arguments
and
the like.  These methods are not semantic.  Because they are based on observed
work-combinations they are objective, testable by others, applicable in the
real
world, and eventually amenable to computer processing.  The reduction of the
information to formulas has many advantages for computerized information
storage, manipulation, and retrieval besides the obvious one of reduced storage
space.  It will permit the manipulation of the information in order to retrieve
facts, inferences, and hypotheses not previously possible.  The significance of
this work lies in its ability to provide a basis for the computer processing of
the
specific information in scientific reports.  The research team including Zellig
Harris have made numerous and important contributions to the field and the
environment at Columbia provides a supportive setting for such research.
_____
IST-8642841
$12,000 - 12 mos.
William J. Rapaport
State University of New York - System Office
Logical Foundations for Belief Representation
> - -
This research investigates the theoretical foundation for the design of
computer
systems capable of representing and reasoning about the cognitive attitudes of
intelligent agents.  The agents include users, other artificial intelligence
systems, and the system itself.  The cognitive attitudes include beliefs,
knowledge, goals, and desires.  Particular attention is given to the ability to
handle nested beliefs and self-referential beliefs.  The theoretical approach
used is based upon recent work in philosophical logic.  The significance of
this
research lies in its contribution to the development of intelligent computer
based systems.
_____
IST-8644984
$62,500 - 12 mos.
James A. Reggia
University of Maryland at College Park
Presidential Young Investigator Award:  Abductive Inference Models in
Artificial
Intelligence
> - -
Abductive inference refers to a mode of reasoning in which a plausible solution
to a problem is derived from related knowledge on a nondeductive basis.  A
domain-independent model of abductive inference, parsimonious covering, is
proposed.  The theory of parsimonious covering is being extended to address a
number of issues not currently handled, including causal chaining, hierarchial
knowledge structures, and certainty measures.  The use of this theory in
diagnostic expert systems and other artificial intelligence systems is being
evaluated by measuring performance on real-world problems and by assessing
the ability of the systems to model human reasoning.  The significance of this
research is in its potential to improve the performance of intelligent
computer-based systems.
_____
IST-8644983
$123,221 - 12 mos.
Whitman A. Richards
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Natural Computation:  A Computational Approach to Visual Information
Processing
> - -
Natural computation is the study of how man can derive reliable representations
of useful aspects of his environment.  These representations may be visual,
auditory, or consist of programs for touch sensing and motor control.  At
present, the data under study are the vast arrays of image intensities cast
upon
the eye or camera.  Given these data, the task is to derive rather simple but
reliable descriptions of objects and events in a three-dimensional world.  The
problems involve choice of representation, constraint analysis and explicit
implementation (algorithm) to show that reliable and efficient descriptions can
indeed be computed.  The research may be divided roughly into four general
problem areas:  (1) 3D surface reconstruction; (2) property-based
representations, (3) integrating depth maps obtained from stereo,
structure-from-notion, and shading; and (4) computing spatial relations between
"parts" and their combination into "object" representations.  The significance
of this research is that it will help provide a basic understanding of the
issues involved in the very difficult problem of computer vision.
_____
IST-8604530
$49,953 - 12 mos.
Fred S. Roberts
Rutgers University
Scales of Measurement and the Limitations they Place on Information Processing
> - -
Information processing relies fundamentally on the process of quantification:
Events in the real world must be translated into numbers and other symbols.
These symbols (information) can then be transformed and otherwised processed
by computers and other information processing systems.  This research is a
mathematical investigation of how that critical first step, quantification,
limits and influences the way in which information can be used.  In particular,
the ways in which different quantifications can lead to different conclusions
in
decision making are analyzed.  This research is significant as a foundation for
information science.  Too often, existing quantifications are taken for granted
in information science or decision analysis, without any theoretical insight as
to the range of significant alternatives.
_____
IST-8603407
$27,000 - 12 mos.
Robert D. Rodman
North Carolina State University
Dialog Processing for Voice Interactive Problem Solving
(see description of award to Biermann)
_____
IST-8640925
$198,800 - 12 mos.
Naomi Sager
New York University
Language As a Database Structure
> - -
The proposal is based on past work of the Principal Investigator and
associates,
which include:  the development of a computer grammar and program for
analyzing free-text documents and converting their contents into a structured
form; methods of identifying the fact-structures and text- wide regularities in
specific subject domains ("sublanguages"); and experimental results in mapping
the computer-structured textual information into databases of the network and
relational types.  The database experiments showed that certain necessary
features of language information did not fit the existing models.  This result,
along with the accumulated knowledge of the major mechanisms of language
information, have led to this project to develop a new database model in which
the informational relations of language have a direct correspondence in
constructs of the model.  Using the techniques of database design, generalized
Linguistic Schemata (LS's) will be developed for sample computer-structured
language databases; the LS's will be specified in a Linguistic Schemata
Decription Language (LSDL) to be designed for this purpose.  Implementation of
some of the schema elements will be undertaken in the form of enhancements to
a relational data model, in particular, for treating the recursive connective
structure of language information and the time-order relations in narrative.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
67
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 86 18:38:14 est
-FROM-
From: vtopus!fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information on NSF awards, sent by J. Deken at NSF
-BODY-
		   Fiscal Year 1986 Research Projects
		 Funded by the Information Science Program
		(now Knowledge and Database Systems Program)
                              Part 5 of 5

IST-8640053
$59,178 - 12 mos.
Sharon C. Salveter
Boston University
Transportable Natural Language Database Update
> - -
The use of natural languages such as English to interact with computer
databases
has been an active research area for many years.  Most projects in this area
have been limited to handling requests for information already in the database.
This research project uses verbgraphs, a formal representation technique
previously developed by the Principal Investigator, as a basis for also
handling
the more difficult task of making changes to this information in the database.
General information needed to handle natural language is kept separate from
information about a specific application, in order to allow the system to be
used for a variety of applications with as few changes as possible.  The
project
will advance both the theory and the applications of database management
systems
and natural language understanding.
_____
IST-8610293
$80,630 - 12 mos.
Glenn R. Shafer
University of Kansas Main Campus
Belief Functions in Artificial Intelligence
> - -
This research develops and investigates the "belief function" approach to
representing uncertainty. In realistic situations which are now being modeled
by
expert computer systems, hypotheses, facts, and values are usually not held
with
certainty.  Classic approaches to uncertainty such as  probability have a firm
mathematical foundation but often require more input data than realistic expert
systems have available. In the belief function approach pioneered by Dempster
and Shafer, uncertain elements are not assigned probabilities but degrees of
belief.  The present theoretical research extends the range of situations where
belief functions can be used, and develops procedures which will allow
computers to reason efficiently to derive new hypotheses and conclusions from
belief function representations.  The representation of uncertainty is a
pivotal
element in modern artificial intelligence systems.  The dual (and often
competing) goals are to provide new frameworks which will be expressive
enough to capture realistic situations, and yet sufficiently formal that the
accuracy of derived conclusions can be trusted.
_____
IST-8603214
$85,583 - 12 mos.
William Shaw
University of North Carolina
An Evaluation and Comparison of Term and Citation Indexing
> - -
Text documents are produced and stored in vast quantities today.  Consequently,
it is nearly impossible to locate relevant text documents for any particular
purpose without computerized searching.  For reasons of efficiency, computer
systems for searching documents do not use the entire text of such documents;
only a compact representation of each document is stored in memory, along with
the information necessary to locate the original text if it should be needed.
This research investigates two of the more common components of compact
representations for documents:  A representation based on the terms contained
in
the text, and a representation based on the documents which the text cites.
Both of these representations are evaluated by extensive judgements (by human
experts) of the relevance of documents retrieved using them.  The research
illuminates the optimal use of each alternate type of representation, as well
as
a comparison between the two alternatives.  The importance of the research is
that it provides a solid base of empirical evidence and a benchmark document
collection for evaluating information retrieval strategies.  Although new
architectures for document representation and retrieval may make some of the
specific style of queries obsolete, the value of the test collection and the
insights about intrinsic content (term) versus extrinsic context (citation)
analysis for documents will be valuable for future work.
_____
DMS-8606178
$20,000 - 12 mos.
Paul C. Shields
University of Toledo
Mathematical Sciences:  Entropy in Ergodic Theory, Graph Theory and Statistics
> - -
Professor Shields was one of the first American mathematicians to become
actively involved in the subject of information theory, and he has been one of
the creative contributors.  His work cuts across traditional disciplinary boun-
daries in mathematics, for it utilizes ideas from ergodic theory, information
theory, statistics, data compression, graph theory, diffusion theory, and com-
puter science.  He proposes here to continue his highly original recent work in
an exciting international collaboration with some of the world's outstanding
information theorists.  The project involves entropy and asymptotic estimates
for algorithms for compression of binary data in computer science, tests for
statistical independence, and applications in the communications field.  The
latter might ultimately impact the current state of our knowledge in speech
coding and recognition, spectral estimation, and pattern recognition.  This is
exciting, innovative, multidisciplinary work that possesses the added value of
international cooperation among world experts.
_____
IST-8607849
$101,839 - 12 mos.
Edward Smith
BBN Laboratories, Inc.
A Computational Approach to Decision-Making
> - -
The purpose of this collaborative research is to develop a theory of how humans
make decisions.  The theory is developed as a computational theory, using the
representations and processes currently prevalent in cognitive science and
artificial intelligence research.  The theory explains the formation of complex
concepts.  Additionally, it accounts for people's incorrect estimates of the
likelihood with which events will occur. The theory is tested through
psychological experimentation.  Knowledge about how people make decisions and
estimate probabilities is useful to all decision makers.  Additionally, a
computational theory of the process allows the development of computer based
decision-making aids.
_____
IST-8609599
$80,963 - 12 mos.
Paul Smolensky
University of Colorado at Boulder
Inference in Massively Parallel Artificial Intelligence Systems
> - -
The purpose of this research is to study how parallel Artificial Intelligence
(AI) systems can make inferences which allow full use of the information in the
computer system's memory.  The approach here is to synthesize the varying
methods of inference currently used in the field in order to formulate general
principles of inference in parallel systems. The synthesis is accomplished by
applying the varying inference methods to a set of inference problems and
developing the resulting set of core models. These models are studied through
mathematical analysis and computer simulation and the relationships among
them are found. Artificial intelligence systems need to be able to make
inferences in order to use whatever knowledge they have stored. This full use
of
knowledge is one of the main ways in which AI systems are powerful. This
research deals with inference methods and contributes  to the development of
more sophisticated computer systems.
_____
IST-8644907
$15,634 - 12 mos.
Frederik Springsteel
University of Missouri
Formalization of Entity-Relationship Diagrams
> - -
The design of the logical structure of a database is an important component of
the design of many information systems, and the entity-relationship model is
frequently used as a tool in such design.  Most of the work on this approach
has
emphasized its practical applications rather than its theoretical aspects.  The
purpose of this research is to develop more formal analyses of the assumptions
and benefits of this model and to relate it to other models such as the rela-
tional model, which are better understood.  The significance of this research
lies in its potential to contribute to the theory and practice of database
design.
_____
IST-8640120
$66,004 - 12 mos.
Robert E. Stepp
University of Illinois at Urbana
Discovering Underlying Concepts in Data Through Conceptual Clustering
> - -
The purpose of this research is to develop theoretical principles, algorithms,
and practical methods for the discovery of underlying concepts in descriptions
of objects or situations through the use of conceptual clustering.  A computer
system is being developed that will build a conceptual classification for
descriptions of objects.  It acts by generating concepts that describe object
classes and then partitioning the given objects into the appropriate classes.
The generated concepts are encoded as conjunctive statements in an extended
predicate calculus notation and are optimized with respect to a user-supplied
classification evaluation function.  The techniques are evaluated by examining
selected problems, such as discovering classes of simple organic molecules and
discovering kinship units within the kinship network.  The significance of the
research lies in its potential to contribute to the design and development of
computer-based knowledge resource systems.
_____
IST-8516313
$60,907 - 12 mos.
Richmond  H. Thomason
Mellon-Pitt-Carnegie Corp.
Nonmonotonic Reasoning
> - -
Classical logic is inadequate in many ways for modeling real-world reasoning by
computers.  In particular, classical logic is monotonic -  adding information
or
premises never reverses previously valid conclusions.  By contrast, the
appearance of new information in real world situations often causes previous
conclusions or judgements to be reversed.  This research, an interdisciplinary
collaboration of computer scientists, philosophers, and logicians, explores
real-world, nonmonotonic reasoning in intelligent computer systems.  In
particular, the research investigates how intelligent systems can arrive at
reasonable conclusions by adding assumptions to their current information, and
how intelligent computer programs should cause assumptions to be inherited in
individual cases of general situations.  The research provides significant
insight into the strengths and weaknesses of established logical approaches to
reasoning, as well as breaking ground in the implementation of realistic
reasoning networks in computer systems.
_____
IST-8516330
$63,854 - 12 mos.
David S. Touretzky
Carnegie-Mellon University
Distributed Representations for Symbolic Data Structures
> - -
In this project the investigator is studying the representation of symbols in
parallel computers.  Symbols are being  represented by the presence of activity
in the (processing units) of the computer. Each processing unit  contributes to
the representation of many symbols and particular symbols are identified by
activity in some subset of units. This particular method of representation is
called a "parallel distributed" method. The investigator is studying the
representation of symbols in parallel computers by implementing some common
symbolic structures in a parallel computer called the Boltzmann machine.
Additionally, he is studying the mathematical properties of his
implementations.
Parallel computers offer a plausible theory of the brain.  Using a parallel
computer to implement the kind of symbolic data structure needed for theories
of cognition allows us to link theories of mind with theories of brain. Making
this link, will give us more complete theories of cognition and better computer
implementations of these theories, ultimately producing better artificial
intelligence systems.
_____
IST-8517289
$164,786 - 12 mos.
Joseph F. Traub
Columbia University
The Information Level: Effective Computing with Partial, Contaminated, and
Costly Information
> - -
The information available to solve real-world problems is usually only
incomplete and contaminated by noise or systematic error.  The principal
investigators are developing in this research a theory about such problems,
where partial and contaminated information must be used as well as possible.
Potential applications for the theory, which is called "Information Based
Complexity Theory" range from medical imaging and robot vision to economics.
The key goal of this theory is to explain how the accuracy of solving a given
problem is related to the amount and kind of information available.  The
project
will be significant both for the general mathematical methods it develops and
for the insights it provides into formulating and refining computer systems and
algorithms.
_____
IST-8544806
$121,222 - 12 mos.
Jeffrey D. Ullman
Stanford University
Implementation of Logical Query Languages for Databases
> - -
This research will develop a logic language for databases that will be
substantially more powerful than current formal languages such as relational
calculus.  This new language will allow for the use of a knowledge base of
rules, as well as rules for performing integrity and security functions.  This
new language will be a form of parallel prolog, an important artificial
intelli-
gence language.  The significance of this research lies in the fact that it
will
provide a very natural language for querying databases.
_____
IST-8511348
$30,383 - 12 mos.
Kenneth Wexler
University of California at Irvine
Learnability and Parsability (see description of award to Berwick)
_____
IST-8514890
$80,000 - 12 mos.
R. Wilensky and R. Alterman
University of California at Berkeley
Adaptive Planning
> - -
In this project the PIs look at issues concerning automated planning systems.
They are developing methods for "adaptive planning" (using familiar plans in
unfamiliar situations).  The issue is being addressed through the development
of
a computer system in which old plans are first generalized and then
appropriately specialized.  Robots need to plan in order to act independently.
Adaptive planning allows a system to plan in novel situations.  By addressing
issues of adaptive planning, this project works towards the long-range goal of
building robots which can function in situations that they have not previously
encountered.
_____
IST-8600788
$81,660 - 12 mos.
Robert T. Winkler
Duke University
Combining Dependent Information: Models and Issues
> - -
In realistic applications of computers to modeling knowledge and decision pro-
cesses, information is often available only partially about events of interest.
In addition, many sources may contribute information about the same event, and
these sources in turn are generally not independent of each other. This
research
investigates ways in which such uncertain, overlapping, interrelated
information
about events may be combined automatically to improve the certainty of
knowledge and the appropriateness of decision-making. A key component of the
research is to test alternative formal models of uncertain information by
experiments in real world applications.  This research is significant both for
the explication and comparision of various formal models of uncertainty, and
for
the critical feedback obtained by observing the performance of competing models
in realistic situations.
_____
IST-8644767
$38,474 - 12 mos.
Ronald R. Yager
Iona College
Specificity Measures of Information in Possibility Distributions
> - -
Possibility distributions provide a formalism for representing some types of
uncertainty in information.  A measure of the information content in a
possibility distribution is introduced; this measure is called a specificity
measure.  The objective of this research is the investigation of properties,
uses, and formulations of the specificity measures associated with possibility
distributions and fuzzy subsets.  The trade-offs involved in providing
information that is both specific and correct are also investigated.  The
significance of this research lies in its potential contribution to the
development of computer based systems which can handle imprecise and
uncertain information.
_____
IST-8644435
$50,878 - 12 mos.
Po-Lung Yu
University of Kansas
Habitual Domain Analysis for Effective Information Interface and Decision
Support
> - -
Many nontrivial decision and conflict problems cannot readily be solved by
traditional optimization and game theoretic techniques.  The concepts of second
order games and habitual domains can be used to approach such problems.  This
research investigates several topics in the development and use of habitual
domains, which provide a framework for models of individual and organizational
users of information systems.  Specific goals include identifying effective
means for specifying and using habitual domains and developing approaches to
using them in information systems.  The significance of this research lies in
its potential for improving computer-based decision systems.
_____
IST-8642900
$108,182 - 12 mos.
Lotfi A. Zadeh
University of California at Berkeley
Management of Uncertainty in Expert Systems
> - -
Much of the information which is resident in the knowledge base of a typical
expert system is imprecise or incomplete.  This research provides an approach,
based upon the use of fuzzy logic, for handling this problem.  The approach
provides a computational framework for dealing with fuzzy quantifiers, e.g.,
most, many, almost, all, etc., and thereby makes it possible to compute with
imprecisely known probabilities and certainty factors.  In this approach the
propositions which form the knowledge base of an expert system may be
expressed in a canonical form which places in evidence the variables which are
constrained by the constituent proposition.  From the canonical forms, one can
construct a global possibility distribution which reduces the deduction of a
conclusion to the solution of a nonlinear system.  This research will provide
an
approach for the systematic inclusion in expert systems of the types of
imprecise rules used by experts.
_____
IST-8605163
$19,776 - 12 mos.
Maria Zemankova
University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Travel to the International Conference on Information Processing and
Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems
> - -
This award supports travel funds for 15 U.S. participants for the International
Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in
Knowledge-Based Systems.  The conference takes place in Paris, France on June
30, 1986 through July 4 1986. The conference will be co-sponsored by the
International Fuzzy Systems Association.  The conference topics cover
uncertainty management, fuzzy sets, possibility measures, and the mathematical
theory of evidence.  The conference provides an opportunity for strengthening
the quality of research in reasoning with uncertainty, as well as facilitating
international communication in the area.
_____
IST-8600616
$97,727 - 12 mos.
Pranas Zunde
Georgia Institute of Technology
A Study of Word Association Aids in Information Retrieval
> - -
This research investigates the usefulness of word associations - the additional
words an individual can think of in response to an initial stimulus word - in
assisting information retrieval. Advanced information retrieval systems of the
future will be expected to go beyond simply sorting and matching terms with
documents. These systems must become capable of understanding and reasoning,
both about the knowledge contained in a collection of documents and about the
user's intentions. As investigated in this proposal, knowledge of word
associations represents one such type of understanding an information retrieval
system may exhibit to enhance its performance.  The significance of this
project
is that it probes a new dimension of semantic content for keyword searching,
virtually unexplored in information retrieval studies to date.  User/system
interaction observations gained in the process are likely to have additional
impact on information retrieval concepts.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
68
-DATE-
Date:    Wed, 3 Dec 86 22:27 EST
-FROM-
From:    V6M@PSUVM.bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRM notes, hints, research, rumors   ANYTHING
-BODY-
Dear Professor,
I have a PRESSING need for help with the buzz words "INFORMATION RESOURCE MANAG
EMENT ".   I'd appreciate any help that the group could give to me on this
topic, which was a hot term around 1978-81 but which seems to have died out.
SeeAlso.. Data Resource Management
          End User Computing
          Information Center (used incorrectly by DPMA types to be
                              used as a synonym for End User Computing)
RelatedTerm..Thesaurus
BTW...anybody using a thesaurus in building or querying commercial DBMS in
      a business, application environment????
HELP!!!!
Vince Marchionni 215 337 1400 ext 274

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Subject: Re: Six character limit in indxbib [really bib/refer]
Date: 29 Nov 86 12:35:56 +1000 (Sat)
Message-Id: <10.533612156@mulga>
From: John Shepherd <seismo!munnari!mulga.OZ!jas>

>   In IRList Digest V2 #53, Mitchell Wyle <wyle@ethz.uucp> writes:
>
>   For starters, I shall use Unix's addbib, sortbib, roffbib, indxbib,
>   lookbib suite of programs.  The manuals say that one can change the
>   options of indxbib when it stems, stop lists etc.  I have found the list
>   of the 100 most common words (/usr/lib/refer/eign), but I can't
>   figure out how to change the stemming from 6 characters.

I perused the sources here and it looked like the 6 was hardwired into
the "mkey" program (which is the component of "indxbib" which scans the
bib files and finds the keys). It seems that "indxbib" passes any options
it gets straight on to "mkey", but I couldn't find any documentation on
"mkey". It does have a number of options (e.g. to set minimum number of
chars to consider in keys), but none to extend the key length.

>   In IRList Digest V2 #61, David Brown <library@prg.oxford.ac.uk> writes:
>
>   Any information on this would be very welcome here too - we are currently
>   using indxbib/lookbib etc. and the lower-level utilities they call as the
>   basis of our (small and rudimentary) online catalogue, but are having
>   problems with false drops caused by this 6 character limit.

We have done quite a bit of work with bibliographies here at the University
of Melbourne over the last few years. We initially started using the "refer"
system but after finding that it couldn't quite do what we wanted in some
places, we eventually switched over to Tim Budd's "bib" system, which we found
was more flexible and seemed easier to use than "refer". Note that the data
formats they use are (with a few minor exceptions) identical.

We also thought that "lookup" ("bib"s version of "lookbib") would form a
useful basis for an on-line retrieval system, and Isaac Balbin (whom you
may know from his Logic Programming Bibliography) wrote a nice interactive
front-end called "seebib" (it also knows how to deal with "refer" databases).
It allows you to scan forwards and backwards through a list of answers to
a bibliographic query, and to save some or all of the matches in files.

Considering their simplicity, both these systems do a remarkable job as
data retrieval packages. However, they still have a number of disadvantages,
not the least of which is the necessity to rebuild the entire index each
time a reference is added. Has anyone had any experience with systems with
similar functionality to bib/refer (particularly their usefulness as troff
pre-processors) but which use more general database systems?

> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
John Shepherd
Department of Computer Science,
University of Melbourne,                CSNET: jas%mulga.oz@australia
Parkville, 3052,                        ARPA: jas%mulga.oz@seismo.css.gov
AUSTRALIA                               UUCP: ...!munnari!mulga!jas

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri Nov 28 12:48 EST 1986
From: fox
To: seismo!ihnp4!hoqam!wbf
Subject: reusability

Bill:

  There is an interesting technical report about software reusability
and IR that you might want to obtain.
	A Knowledge-Based Software Components Catalogue
	Ian Sommerville and Murray Wood
	Research report CS/ST/5/86
	Software Technology Research Group
	Department of Computer Science
	University of Strathclyde
	Glascow, Scotland
	Tel: 041-552 4400

Abstract:
   There is currently a growing interest in the reuse of previously
designed, coded, tested, and documented software, primarily for
reasons of economy and reliability.  One of the major problems in
moving to a paradigm based on reuse rather than re-invention is the
storage and retrieval of software components.
   In this paper we argue that conventional keyword based
techniques are insufficient as a method of describing software
components for storage and retrieval in a software components
catalogue.  Our approach to the problem of software component
description is based on an attempt to identify the basic concepts of
the software component domain and the relationships between those
concepts.  These concepts and their relationships can be represented
by what we have termed software function frames.  We describe a
prototype implementation of a cataloging system based on these ideas.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat Nov 29 07:34 EST 1986
From: fox
Subject: IR Related Tech Reports for 1986, Virginia Tech Dept of Comp. Sci.

Copies of the following may be ordered by sending to
	emtront%vt@csnet-relay.arpa
	emtront@vtcs1.bitnet
	Elizabeth Tront, Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
	Blacksburg VA 24061


A Comparison of Two Methods for  Soft Boolean Operator
Interpretation in Information Retrieval
	Edward A. Fox, Sharat Sharan
	TR 86-1
ABSTRACT
	Information retrieval systems generally are given Boolean logic
queries by users or search intermediaries, in order that an efficient and
effective search for relevant documents can be automatically carried out.
Previous work has shown that an extended interpretation of Boolean queries
can dramatically improve search effectiveness.  Experimental evidence is
given on the relative performance of the p-norm method and a
parameterized fuzzy-logic approach suggested by Paice. Regression analysis
supports expected results of parameter settings and gives further insight into
why the p-norm scheme is superior.


A Knowledge-Based System for Composite Document Analysis and Retrieval:
Design Issues in the CODER Project
	Edward A. Fox, Robert K. France
	TR 86-6
ABSTRACT
	The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/Extended/Effective
Retrieval) Project aims at applying a variety of methods developed in the
realm of artificial intelligence to improve the performance of information
retrieval systems. Logic programming, expert systems, blackboards, user
models, natural language processing, and knowledge representation will be
applied to handle  a collection of more than three years of issues of the
AIList
ARPANET Digest. This paper gives background, describes related work,
explains the design principles and architecture, and closes with future plans.


Architecture of an Object-Oriented Expert System for
Composite Document Analysis, Representation, and Retrieval
	Edward A. Fox, Robert K. France
	TR 86-10
ABSTRACT
	The CODER project is a multi-year effort to investigate how best to
apply artificial intelligence methods to increase the effectiveness of
information retrieval systems. The use of individually tailored specialist
experts coupled with standardized blackboard modules for communication
and control, and external knowledge bases for maintenance of factual world
knowledge, allows for quick prototyping and flexibility under change.  The
system is structured as a set of communicating modules, designed under an
object-oriented paradigm, using TCP/IP, UNIX, Mu-Prolog, and C.


Expert Retrieval for Computer Message Systems
	Edward A. Fox
	TR 86-13
ABSTRACT
	This paper describes how information storage and retrieval and arti-
ficial intelligence methods can be integrated with modern computers and net-
works to provide access for broad classes of users to archives of electronic:
mail, digests, and bulletin boards.  A status report is given on the COmposite
Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval project, designed to employ
communities of experts, operating on multiple communicating computers, for
free text analysis, indexing, and retrieval.  Details of the document-type
expert are included to illustrate the approach.


A Call for Integrating Advanced Information Retrieval Models with
CD-ROM / Microcomputer Systems
	Edward A. Fox
	TR 86-14
ABSTRACT
	Recent advances in computer hardware and storage devices will allow
inexpensive personal systems to be used by individuals to rapidly access vast
collections of text.  Research into database management, artificial
intelligence, and information retrieval can be applied to develop advanced
retrieval systems.  Retrieval models based on browsing, extended Boolean,
vector, probabilistic, and artificial intelligence approaches have all been
advanced as more effective for searchers than conventional methods.  The
CODER project aims to integrate these techniques.  Ultimately it is hoped
that CD-ROM based information retrieval systems will be released with
many of the capabilities mentioned.


Building the CODER Lexicon: The Collins English Dictionary and
Its Adverb Definitions
	Edward A. Fox, Robert C. Wohlwend, Phyllis R. Sheldon,
	Qi Fan Chen, and Robert K. France
	TR 86-23
ABSTRACT
	In order to support some of the processing desired in the CODER
(COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval) project, and to
allow experimentation in information retrieval and natural language
processing, a lexicon was constructed from the machine readable Collins
Dictionary of the English Language.  Characteristics of the dictionary,
conversion from typesetter form to Prolog relations, and comparisons of the
result with an earlier effort for Webster's Seventh New Collegiate
Dictionary  are discussed.  Finally, a grammar for adverb definitions is
presented, together with a description of defining formula that usually
indicate the type of the adverb.


Development of the CODER System: A Test-bed for Artificial
Intelligence Methods in Information Retrieval
	Edward A. Fox
	TR 86-40
ABSTRACT
	The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval)
system is a test-bed for investigating the application of artificial
intelligence methods to increase the effectiveness of information
retrieval systems.  Particular attention is being given to analysis
and representation of heterogeneous documents, such as electronic mail
digests or messages, which vary widely in style, length, topic, and
structure.  Since handling passages of various types in these
collections is difficult even for experimental systems like SMART, it
is necessary to turn to other techniques being explored by information
retrieval and artificial intelligence researchers.  The CODER system
architecture involves communities of experts around active
blackboards, accessing knowledge bases that describe users, documents,
or lexical items of various types.  Most of the lexical knowledge base
construction work is now complete, and experts for search and
temporal reasoning can perform a variety of processing tasks.  User
information and queries are being gathered, and the first prototype is
nearly complete.  It appears that a number of artificial intelligence
techniques are needed to best handle such common, but complex,
document analysis and retrieval tasks.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 86 01:28:42 est
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: CSLI Calendar, November 13, No. 7 [Extract - Ed]

                           NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
        Quantified and Referring Noun Phrases, Pronouns Anaphora
                     Mark Gawron and Stanley Peters
                        November 13 and 20, 1986

   A variety of interactions have been noted between scope ambiguities
   of quantified noun phrases, the possibility of interpreting pronouns
   as anaphoric, and the interpretation of elliptical verb phrases.
   Consider, for example, the following contrast, first noted in Ivan
   Sag's 1976 dissertation.
      (1) John read every book before Mary did.
      (2) John read every book before Mary read it.  The second sentence
   is interpretable either to mean each book was read by John before
   Mary, or instead that every book was read by John before Mary read
   any.  The first sentence has only the former interpretation.
       The seminar will describe developments in situation theory
   pertinent to the semantics of various quantifier phrases in English,
   as well as of `referring' noun phrases including pronouns, and of
   anaphoric uses of pronouns and elliptical verb phrases.  We aim to
   show how the theory of situations and situation semantics sheds light
   on a variety of complex interactions such as those illustrated above.

   (This seminar is a continuation of the seminar held on November 13.)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
69
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 86 13:49:33 EST
-FROM-
From: rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  Rick: What is the problem about hops? Thanks, Ed
-BODY-
...
Also, you MUST reduce the size of the mailing list. Your
list is causing sendmail to core dump because of the size of the list.
(This is why you are seeing multiple copies transmitted). I don't have
time to debug sendmail, so our only solution is to reduce the size
of the list with local aliases (as I mentioned earlier).
>--rick
[Note: We have already made a big dent in this but can do further, so
readers please continue to set up local aliases!  Thanks, Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         Thu, 04 Dec 86 08:34:28 EST
From:           Judith Molka  <AKLOM%BITNIC.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU>
Subject:      setting up sub-lists
The following is a message sent from Larry Landweber, coordinator of the
Wisconsin Gateway to ARPAnet and BITNET List Administrators.
"Because of Arpanet congestion problems, our WISCVM mail relay is unable
to keep up with the quantity of mail sent to it for forwarding. While the
problem is particularly acute in the Bitnet to Arpanet direction, the level
of traffic in both directions is a problem.  A large part of this
traffic results from mailing lists.  Furthermore, while we are usually only
sent a single copy of a list mailing, the recipient list is often very long.
A single message may require the sending of over a hundred copies <over
BITNET.>
This is  a problem for two reasons... Arpanet congesion makes it difficult at
times to establish and keep TCP connections and such connections are slow;
second, the implementation of the gateway at present makes multiple copies
for forwarding <to BITNET> (a poor design choice that is being worked on).
At present, the first problem is far important.
Note that in a about a month we will begin limiting the number
of copies we will relay by putting a limit on the number of recipients
in RCPT TO lines in SMTP and BSMTP.  This limit is likely to be 10.
Thanks in advance for your cooperation in this matter.
Larry Landweber"
The BITNET Network Information Center has been working with Larry Landweber
on the problem discussed above.  If your Special Interest Group does
not have a BITNET site willing to create a sub-list to maintain your
BITNET subscribers, then we will assist in finding you a site.
If you have found a BITNET site to host your sub-lists, then please
send the name of your SIG and the name of the BITNET sub-list to
AKLOM@BITNIC.  This information is needed by Rich Zellich to update
the ARPANET SIGs file.  The BITNIC will coordinate the efforts of
those on the network who are working on distribution lists.  This
includes working with Rich Zellich to provide instructions
in ARPANET SIGs of where users should subscribe for each list,
helping the maintainers of the sub-lists in obtaining existing
subscriptions from the ARPAnet coordinators and contacting the SRI-NIC
to help us set up lists for the ARPAnet subscribers to BITNET lists.
These are the ARPAnet SIGs which we are aware of that have BITNET
sub-lists in operation.
     ARPAnet list                           BITNET list
     ----------------------------------     --------------------
     INFO-VAX@SRI-KL.ARPA                   INFO-VAX@UGA
     INFO-IBMPC@C.ISI.EDU                   I-IBMPC@UGA
     INFO-KERMIT@CU20B.COLUMBIA.EDU         I-KERMIT@UGA
     SF-LOVERS@RED.RUTGERS.EDU              SFLOVERS@UGA
     SECURITY@RED.RUTGERS.EDU               SECURITY@UGA
     INFO-HZ100@RADC-TOPS20.ARPA            INF-Z100@CLVM
     UNIX-SOURCES@BRL.ARPA                  UNIX-SRC@CLVM
     INFO-NETS%MIT-OZ@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU        INFONETS@BITNIC
[Note: I will try to get us added by having a list on vtvm1, but that
will take some time.  Meanwhile, our solution of sending to BITNET
users from the BITNET machine vtvax3 and to INTERNET and UUCP sites
from seismo seems to be the best approach. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     Tue, 9 Dec 86 15:12 N
From:     LILIUS@FINFUN
Subject:  Gateway problems ARPA <-> Bitnet
Hello !!
      With the help of POSTMASTER@FINHUTC (Harri Salminen,
      Helsinki University of Technology, Finland) I have set  up
      a redistribution list of your digest at LISTSERV@FINHUTC.EARN.
      The server is mainly used to redistribute digest through
      the finnish networks but I suppose at least european net-
      user could subscribe from it. So:
           - Could you start sending to LISTSERV@FINHUTC.EARN
[Note: This has been added! - ed]
           - Drop me from your distribution list (i am moving to
             LISTSERV)
           - Put out an announcement telling about this new
             service
      I will be the owner of the list, so please contact me in
      case of trouble.
                          Cheers,
                                 Johan Lilius
                                 LILIUS@FINFUN.EARN
[Note: Please, all subscribers of IRList who can receive issues
through this redistribution point, get yourself added to it and let me
know so I can delete more names from the central list.  Thanks! - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 86 10:53:19 est
From: wyle@ifi.ethz.chunet
Subject: pisa bibliography

Dear Dr. Fox:

Here is the Pisa conference in _refer_ format:


%A N J Belkin
%A B H Kwasnik
%T Using structural representation of anomalous states
of knowledge for choosing document retrieval strategies
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A C Berrut
%A P Palmer
%T Solving grammatical ambiguities within a surface syntactical parser
for automatic indexing
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A A Bookstein
%T Performance of self-taught documents
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A P Bosc
%A M Courant
%A S Robin
%T Calin:  A user interface based on simple natural language
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A Y Chiaramella
%A B Defude
%A M F Bruandet
%A D Kerkouba
%T IOTA:  A full text information retrieval system
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A B Croft
%T User-specified domain knowledge for document retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A D Crouch
%T The visual display of information in an information retrieval
environment
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A D DeJaco
%A G Garbolino
%T An information retrieval system based on artificial intelligence
techniques
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A U Deppisch
%T S-tree:  A dynamic balanced signature index for office retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A M K DiBenigno
%A G R Cross
%A C G DeBessonet
%T Corel:  A conceptual retrieval system
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A T Doszkocs
%T IR, NLP, AI, and UFOS: or IR relevance, Natural Language
Problems, Artful Intelligence and User-Friendly On-line Systems
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A A ElHamdouchi
%A P Willett
%T Hierarchic document classification using Ward's clustering method
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A A S Fraenkel
%A S T Klein
%A Y Choueka
%A E Segal
%T Improved hierarchical bit-vector compression in document
retrieval systems
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A N Fuhr
%T Two models of retrieval with probabilistic indexing
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A S Gallelli
%A C Iacobelli
%A P Marchisio
%T An approach to multimedia information management
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A S Gibbs
%A D Tsichritzis
%T Document presentation and query formulation in Muse
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A D Williamson Harman
%T An experimental study of factors important in document ranking
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A P Ingwersen
%A I Wormell
%T Improved subject access, browsing and scanning mechanisms in
modern on-line IR
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A P B Kantor
%A J J Lee
%T The maximum entropy principle in information retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A K L Kwok
%T An interpretation of index term weighting schemes based on document
components
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A R Losee
%A A Bookstein
%A C T Yu
%T Two poisson and binary independence assumptions for probabilistic
document retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A I A Macleod
%A P Martin
%A B Nordin
%T A design of distributed full text retrieval system
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A E Ozkarahan
%A F Can
%T An automatic and tunable document indexing system
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A V Raghavan
%A J S Deogun
%T User-oriented document clustering:  a framework for learning in
information retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A G Salton
%T Recent trends in automatic information retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A A F Smeaton
%T Incorporating syntactic information into a document retrieval
strategy:  An investigation
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A J Teuhola
%A T Raita
%T Text compression using prediction
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A G Thurmair
%T Realist:  retrieval aids by linguistics and statistics
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A T Truckenmueller
%A M Rathgeb
%T Methodological issues for the design of an office information
server
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A C J VanRijsbergen
%T A new theoretical framework for Information Retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A E Voorhees
%T The efficiency of inverted index and cluster searches
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A S K M Wong
%A W Ziarco
%A V Raghavan
%A P C N Wong
%T On extending the vector space model for Boolean query processing
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A S K M Wong
%A W Ziarko
%T A machine learning approach to information retrieval
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986

%A C T Yu
%A T C Lee
%T Non-binary independence model
%B 1986 ACM Conference on research and development in information
retrieval
%E F Rabitti
%C Pisa, Italy
%D September 1986


                      M i t c h e l l     F     W y l e

    EEEEE TTTTTT H   H   Eidgenoessische
wyle%ifi.ethz.chunet@csnet-relay
   E       T    H   H   Technische Hochschule
  EEEE    T    HHHHH   Zuerich                  !seismo!mcvax!cernvax!ethz!wyle
 E       T    H   H   Instiut fuer Informatik   Telephone: 011 41 1 256 5235
EEEEE   T    H   H   8092 Zuerich, Switzerland  "Ignore alien orders"

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
70
-DATE-
Date: 1 December 1986, 16:22:02 MEZ
-FROM-
From: Wolfgang Zocher           (0511) 762-3684   ZZZO   at DHVRRZN1.bitnet
      RRZN Universitaet Hannover
      Schlosswender Str. 5
      D3000 Hannover 1
-SUBJECT-
Subject: back issues by topic
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
to get started, I need some back issues of the following topics:
1. Knowledge Representation
2. AI Applications
Thanks,
Wolfgang Zocher
(zzzo@dhvrrzn1)
[Note:  I have no topical organization that would allow me to select
issues easily to satisfy your request.  I will be happy to supply
desired issues by number; perhaps other readers would send you a list of
numbers they think satisfy your needs and we could work from that.  It
might be hard to decide which articles are relevant to YOUR query, though.
Sorry for not being able to help further, Ed.]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed Dec 10 17:01 EST 1986
From: fox
Subject: New Arrangement Between ACM SIGIR and IP&M

I. ANNOUNCEMENT
ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) has many
members involved or interested in research activities.  Some of those
members receive news through IRList Digest, but only if they have
access to a computer network reachable from BITNET or the DARPA
Internet.  All SIGIR members receive the Forum, which is an unrefereed
newsletter.  As a additional aid to SIGIR members, and to better serve
the readers of "Information Processing and Management," an international
journal published by Pergamon Press, a new arrangement has been
established between ACM SIGIR and IP&M.

1) Pages Set Aside
  Since SIGIR members are actively involved in research that is of
interest to IP&M readers, there will be a number of pages set aside
each year for SIGIR use.  Some of the possibilities are listed below;
other suggestions are welcome.

2) SIGIR Meetings
  IP&M will publish selected papers from SIGIR meetings, and will if
agreeable to all, publish a special issue where such papers are
assembled.

3) Special Issues
  IP&M is interested in special issues on topics related to SIGIR
members' work and/or braoder interests.  An example of this is the
special issue on "Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval"
now being assembled by W. Bruce Croft.  An editor can be appointed for
other such issues when a suitable topic is identified.

4) Articles
  IP&M is interested in receiving other articles from SIGIR members.
They should be sent to the Liason (see 7 below) and will be reviewed
by at least 2 referees in standard fashion.  Submissions to SIGIR
Forum that have such potential will be screened with this in mind.

5) Camera Ready Publications
  Brief communications can appear quickly in IP&M if sent in camera
ready form -- providing a fast publication outlet.

6) Announcments
  IP&M is willing to publish SIGIR announcements such as calls for
papers, free of charge.

7) Liason
  Dr. Edward A. Fox has been appointed to serve on the editorial board
of IP&M.  He will serve as a liason between SIGIR and IP&M.  He can be
contacted to receive submissions of any of the types mentioned above,
or for other related matters.  Correspondence should be sent to
	Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061


II. CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
   In light of the above arrangements, a call is hereby made to all
SIGIR members to send in articles, announcements, suggestions for
special issues, or other comments relating to this new arrangement.
Please communicate directly with the Liason and be sure to indicate
that you wish your submission to be considered for IP&M.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 86 01:09:47 est
From: nl-kr-request@cs.rochester.edu
Subject: NL-KR Digest Volume 1 No. 26 [Extract - Ed]

	Date: 1 Dec 86 14:42:53 EST
	From: Robert.Frederking@cad.cs.cmu.edu
	Subject: Thesis Defense: Frederking on Dialogue in a Computational Model

                       NATURAL LANGUAGE DIALOGUE IN
                     AN INTEGRATED COMPUTATIONAL MODEL

                          Robert Eric Frederking

                                 ABSTRACT

Natural  language  dialogue  is a continuous, unified phenomenon.  Speakers use
their conversational context to simplify individual utterances through a number
of  linguistic  devices,  including ellipsis and definite references.  Yet most
computational systems for using natural language treat individual utterances as
separate   entities,  and  have  distinctly  separate  processes  for  handling
intersentential phenomena.

The computational system presented here, Psli3, uses the uniform framework of a
production system architecture to carry out the different processes involved in
natural language understanding and generation in a well-integrated  way.    Its
conversational context arises naturally as the result of the persistence of the
internal representations of previous sentences  in  working  memory.    Natural
language  input  is interpreted within this framework using a a modification of
the syntactic technique of chart parsing, extended to  include  semantics,  and
adapted  to  the production system architecture.  It provides a graceful way of
handling ambiguity within  this  architecture,  and  allows  various  knowledge
sources  to  act  in  a  highly  integrated fashion.  The smooth integration of
different types of processing across different utterances is demonstrated using
the phenomena of intersentential ellipsis and definite reference.

The   design  of  this  system  demonstrates  how  flexible  and  natural  user
interactions can be carried out  using  a  system  with  a  naturally  flexible
control structure.  It also demonstrates how one could implement a real natural
language interface in a sufficiently fast  production  system.    The  semantic
chart  parser is further extended to allow several closely related sentences to
be treated in a single  chart.    This  allows  the  relationship  between  the
sentences  to  be  used in a simple way to select between competing alternative
intrepretations.

We describe this system in detail, and include a number of  extensive  examples
of  the  system's  processing  during  a  user interaction.  A processing-based
taxonomy for ellipsis resolution that we developed is also presented.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 86 01:09:09 est
From: vtcs1::in% <EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, December 4, No. 9 [Extract - Ed]

                  Reading: What to do with theta-Roles?
                     Discussion led by Annie Zaenen
                               December 4

   When Extended Standard Theory won the linguistic wars (Newmeyer's
   version of linguistic history), lexical semantics went out of fashion
   in mainstream generative grammar but, as is often the case with
   victories that are the results of power politics rather than reason,
   the problems that were raised in the generative semantics research
   remained unsolved and recent years have seen them resurface. At this
   point several attempts to specify the role of lexical semantics in
   syntax are under elaboration. Among the debated issues are (1) the way
   semantic information has to be represented in the lexicon; (2) the
   number and the properties of the levels of representation needed to
   link semantics and syntax.
      The paper tries to give a partial answer to these questions from a
   Government Binding related view. I choose it because that point of
   view will most likely not be widely represented among the live
   participants at the TINLunch.  The main purpose of the lunch should be
   a discussion of the general issues raised in the paper rather than a
   critique of the paper itself.
      Other relevant recent writings on the topic include: Dowty (1986):
   On the semantic content of thematic roles; Jackendoff (1986): The
   status of Thematic Relations in Linguistic Theory; Foley and Van Valin
   (1984): Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar; and Kiparsky's
   manuscript on Morphosyntax.
                             --------------
                           THIS WEEK'S SEMINAR
              Rational Behavior in Resource-bounded Agents
                              David Israel
                               December 4

   Members of the Rational Agency Project at CSLI (RatAg) have been
   involved in research to develop an architecture for the production of
   rational behavior in resource-bounded agents.  The overall aim of this
   work is to combine techniques that have been constructed in artificial
   intelligence for automating means-end reasoning with a computational
   instantiation of techniques that have been developed in decision
   theory for weighing alternative courses of action.  The focus is on
   ensuring that the resulting synthesis is a viable architecture for
   agents who, like humans and robots, are resource-bounded, i.e., unable
   to perform arbitrarily large computations in constant time.
   Predicating the architecture on the fact that agents have resource
   bounds will enable its use both as a device for producing rational
   behavior in robots that are situated in dynamic, real-world
   environments, and as a model of human rational behavior.  In taking
   seriously the problem of resource boundedness, we draw heavily on the
   view of plans as ``filters'' on practical reasoning.  We are concerned
   with determining what regularities there are in the relationship
   between an agent and her environment that can be exploited in the
   design of the filtering process.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 86 01:09:51 est
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

	Date: Friday, 5 December 1986  11:09-EST
	From: JHC at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU
	Subject:   Revolving Seminar December 11
Thursday,  11  December  4:00pm  Room: NE43-8th floor playroom

                    AI REVOLVING SEMINAR

                 Massively Concurrent Systems
           For Knowledge Representation And Reasoning

                   Gul A. Agha, MIT AI Lab

The problem of reasoning is central to Artificial Intelligence
systems.  The effectiveness of a "reasoning method" is intimately tied
to the "knowledge representation" scheme on which it operates.  The
seminar will discuss some recent theoretical work in inheritance-based
models for knowledge representation.  Problems germane to
inheritance-based models include exception handling, multiple
inheritance, and viewpoints.  The talk will outline some mechanisms
that have been proposed to address these issues.  Methods of reasoning
such as first-order logic, nonmonotonic logic and due process
reasoning will be related to the knowledge representation schemes.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
2

-N-
71
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 86 17:53:22 est
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-TO-
To: rick@seismo.css.gov
-SUBJECT-
Subject: vtisr1
-BODY-
Rick:
   vtisr1 is down for a week, till probably 12/30, when it will come back
up as a 3B2/310 instead of a 3B2/300, with new software.  If you can hold
mail, please do so, or if you can send instead to me at another address
like
	fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa
please do that.
 . . .
Regards, Ed
[Note: the above is included here since there are IRList members who
use UUCP mail to correspond with IRList.  Sorry for the inconvenience!
Let me wish all of you a happy Holiday Season! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Thu, 11 Dec 86 12:09 N
-FROM-
From:     LILIUS@FINFUN.bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  LISTSERV usage
-BODY-
Hi !!
   I have received several requests for subscription, but this
   is not quite what I wanted.
   Users wanting to subscribe from LISTSERV@FINHUTC should issue
   the command TELL LISTSERV AT FINHUTC SIGNON "Name" IRLIST.
   This will put you on the list. You can also issue INFO as a
   command to LISTSERV. This will give you some help.
                        Cherio,
                               Johan
[Note: Thanks for clarifying things!  This should help people who were
confused by the message in IRList V2 #69.  - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 86 01:39:47 est
-FROM-
From: wyle@ifi.ethz.chunet
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Where are the reviews, comments?
-BODY-
So far, only Dr. G. Salton sent me a review of the conspectus paper.
What does the readership of IRlist think of the possibilities of
applying connectionism to the IR performance problems?

Mitch Wyle    wyle@ifi.ethz.chunet@relay.cs.net  (arpa and csnet)
              !cernvax!ethz!wyle                 (uucp)

[Note: this refers back to the article that made up Issue 62 - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:    Wed, 10 Dec 86 14:54 PST
To:      FOXEA@VTVAX3
From:    IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS.bitnet
Subject: Pisa proceedings
Ed,
  Seeing the reference list for the Pisa meeting
reminds me that I have yet to receive the usual copy
of the SIGIR Forum that is the conference proccedings.
  Do you know what has become of it?  If not, can you
tell me who does (and his/her email address)?
  Thanks in advance.
Chris

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 86 08:15:35 est
-FROM-
From: foxea@vtvax3
-SUBJECT-
Subject: list, Pisa
-BODY-
Chris:
 . . .
   Regarding Pisa Proceedings, I made an announcement in IRList Digest
V2 #59 of 14 November about how to obtain a copy.  Unfortunately, the
SIG is going to have to raise dues - with $6/year dues we are already
in the red and can't send a $18 book out!  Yes it is unfortunate, and
I am sure there are many members who are unhappy about this, but unless
we raise dues way beyond the $12 now planned, we will have to stick with
this policy.  We welcome comments on how else to handle this.
 . . .
   Regards, Ed
[Note: People can call ACM at 800-342-6626 and order Proc. 9th Int'l
SIGIR Conf. on R&D in IR for $18 ($24 for non-members) plus $3
handling. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 86 13:03:15 PST
-FROM-
From: Beth M. Sundheim <sundheim%trout@nosc.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conference: Message Understanding
-BODY-
[Forwarded from NL-KR Digest 12/16/86 Volume 1 Number 29 - Ed]

                   MESSAGE UNDERSTANDING CONFERENCE
              Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA
     For the past six years, researchers at the Naval Ocean Systems Center
(NOSC) have been investigating automated processing of text in
Naval messages.  These messages are characterized by all of the problems
anticipated in processing natural languages, with the problems of telegraphic
input and technical sub-languages playing prominent roles.

     To get a better appreciation of relevant ongoing R & D in this area,
NOSC will host a Message Understanding Conference (MUCK) in June 1987.
Participation in this conference will be by invitation only and will be
limited to those who have technical approaches that are most promising
for the particular problem of processing military messages.

     The conference will be conducted in the form of a workshop, including
software demonstrations of the technology being developed by the individual
participants.  If you are involved in text processing, especially military
message processing, and are interested in participating in this conference,
contact Beth Sundheim of NOSC (sundheim@nosc).

     Those who indicate an interest will receive a technical document
containing an unclassified version of a set of Naval tactical messages,
representing the types of text processing problems encountered.
Respondents will also receive details relative to the conference.  Through
subsequent dialog, participants in the workshop will be selected.

                                  G. R. ALLGAIER
                                  Head, Artificial Intelligence Branch
                                  By direction of the Commander

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 86 00:55:53 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Calendar, December 11, No. 10 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
                              NEXT TINLUNCH
                        Resurrection of Metaphors
                 A Tool for Transdisciplinary Migration
                             Egon E. Loebner
                        System Performance Center
                      Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
                             January 8, 1987

   It is proposed that some techniques which can accelerate entry into a
   second scientific professional practice are analogous to the well
   established deductive techniques by which many adults approach the
   acquisition of a second language in a deliberate fashion.  A
   successful migration from one language community to another relies on
   the transference of linguistic, cognitive and societal skills of
   individuals from one system to a different system, which nevertheless
   shares many linguistic and cultural universals with the former system.
   The claim put forward here is that the very same skills are
   transferred during transdisciplinary migration.
      Language acquisition data, collected on four continents, strongly
   suggest that "being bilingual can have tremendous advantages not only
   in terms of language competencies but also in terms of cognitive and
   social development" (W. E. Lambert, 1981, NYAS, Vol. 379, pp.  9-22).
   I believe that becoming multidisciplinary can lead to similar
   advantages in terms of professional and scientific competencies and
   can induce an expanded metadisciplinary development of cognitive and
   communicative skills.
      The talk concentrates on the role that can be played by a
   remarkable analogy, invented 131 years ago, by the world's master
   builder of theory construction, James Clerk Maxwell.  He defined it as
   "that partial similarity between the laws of one science and those of
   another which makes each of them illustrate the other".  I plan to
   show how such partial similarities can be extracted using textual
   analyses of now dead metaphors which, while alive, aided theory
   construction by, in the words of T. S. Kuhn, "calling forth a network
   of similarities which help to determine the way in which (scientific)
   language attaches to the world".  Buttressing my argument through
   reference to recent findings of linguists, philosophers,
   psychologists, and educators on the role of metaphor in theory
   construction and reconstruction, I plan to argue that dead metaphors
   in unrelated fields are relatable if their metaphoricity had a common
   origin and that these interrelations constitute a transformational
   grammar that can assist in interpreting concepts of one field in terms
   of the other field.
      Finally I wish to suggest that the transdisciplinary migration
   technique can not only enhance new discipline acquisition but can also
   provide the metascientific means to integrate and unify practices and
   theories in different branches of science, even in those that appear
   to be quite remote at this point in history.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
1
-DATE-
Date: Thu Jan 15 18:22 EST 1987
-FROM-
From: fox
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Past, Present and Future
-BODY-
This is the first issue of IRList Digest in 1987.  There were 28 digests in
1985 and 71 in 1986.  Presently, there are 249 recipients, of which 36
are distribution lists -- so there are well over 250 readers.
Addresses are for various parts of the DARPA Internet, for UUCPnet,
for BITNET, and for other networks reachable from those.  There are
logical networks like CSNET, and others like Mailnet or corporate
networks.  Many different countries are represented.

Readers come from the academic, governmental, and private sectors.
Some are involved in research, some are students, and some are
participating in commercial retrieval-related ventures.  There are
libraries, library schools, computer science and information science
departments, etc.  Readers have varying backgrounds, but all are
interested in information retrieval or related work.

1986 saw a steady growth in IRList membership, but with attendant
problems.  New members do not always clearly state their electronic
mail address, and so it is not always possible to successfully add
them.  The ARPANET-BITNET gateway, and the distribution point, seismo,
became overloaded.  Now, BITNET readers receive their issues from
foxea@vtvax3.bitnet, and others receive copies redistributed from
seismo.  It will be necessary for some sites with multiple readers to
set up a local redistribution list - you will be hearing more about
this in the near future if you do not anticipate my request.

Some IRList submissions will be coming out in (the soon to be released
Fall-Winter) ACM SIGIR Forum.  SIGIR and the journal "Information
Processing and Management" (IP&M) have agreed to collaborate, so those
interested in sending journal articles can also send them in
electronic form to IRList (though details of handling figures etc.
must be discussed!) since I am involved in all 3 of these publications.
Perhaps we can thus move 1 step further toward electronic publishing.

Please send in more news!  There are weekly or monthly seminars that
you could easily write up and send in so we can follow latest developments!
There are technical reports coming out - abstracts are welcome for
those and for papers and dissertations etc.  We could also have more
lively discussions, comments on conferences, and other communication.  We
have made a good start, and the world is hearing more about
information retrieval, but we can all do even more!

The message below is sent out to new members - please examine it to remind
yourself about the various particulars. I look forward to hearing from
you and to a lively year of IRList issues!  Thanks, Ed Fox.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat Jan 17 13:42 EST 1987
From: fox
Subject: Revised Welcome Msg - Reminder What IRList is About

Welcome to the IRList.  I am the moderator of the IRList discussion.
I am responsible for composing the digest from pending submissions,
controlling the volume and frequency of mail, keeping an archive, and
answering administrative requests.  You may submit material for the
digest to a variety of places, depending on what network you are on
and how quickly and reliably you want mail to reach me.  We do not
have to pay for our BITNET mail, and do pay for CSNET and UUCP
services, so if you can use BITNET that is best.  That means:
     If on ARPANET using domains use one of the following
        fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
        foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
     If on ARPANET and can't use domains use one of the following
        fox%vtcs1.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
        foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.arpa
     If on BITNET, use fox@vtcs1 or foxea@vtvax3
     If on CSNET, use an ARPANET form shown above
     If on UUCPNET, use something like one of the following
        ... seismo!vtcs1.bitnet!fox
        ... seismo!vtvax3.bitnet!foxea
If you don't want to  use  BITNET  (ex.  because the  BITNET-ARPANET
gateway is too clogged) then there are some other options:
     If on ARPANET and can use domains
        IRList%vt@relay.cs.net
        IRList-Request%vt@relay.cs.net
        fox%vt@relay.cs.net
     If on ARPANET and can't use domains
        IRList%vt@csnet-relay.arpa
        IRList-Request%vt@csnet-relay.arpa
        fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa
     If on CSNET
        IRList@vt or IRList-Request@vt or fox@vt
     If on UUCPNET
        ... seismo!vtisr1!fox

As you might expect, archival copies of all digests will be kept; feel
free to ask for recent back issues.  Note that FTP is not possible, so
all communication must be by EMAIL or phone or letter.  IRList is open
to discussion of any topic (vaguely) related to information retrieval.
Certainly, any material relating to ACM SIGIR (the Special Interest
Group on Information Retrieval of the Association for Computing
Machinery) is of interest.  Our field has close ties to artificial
intelligence, database management, information and library science,
linguistics, ...  A partial list of topics suitable are:
     Information Management/Processing/Science/Technology
     AI Applications to IR        Hardware aids for IR
     Abstracting                  Indexing/Classification
     Citations                    Information Display/Presentation
     Cognitive Psychology         Information Retrieval Applications
     Communications Networks      Information Theory
     Computational Linguistics    Knowledge Representation
     Computer Science             Language Understanding
     Cybernetics                  Library Science
     Data Abstraction             Message Handling
     Document Representations     Natural Languages, NL Processing
     Electronic Books             Pattern Recognition, Matching
     Expert Systems for IR        Probabilistic Techniques
     Full-Text Retrieval          Speech Analysis
     Fuzzy Set Theory             Statistical Techniques

Contributions may be anything from tutorials to rampant speculation.
In particular, the following are sought:
     Abstracts of Papers,Reports,Dissertations   Address Changes
     Bibliographies                              Conference Reports
     Descriptions of Projects/Laboratories       Half-Baked Ideas
     Histories                                   Humorous,Enlightening
Anecdotes
     Questions                                   Requests
     Research Overviews                          Seminar
Announcements/Summaries
     Work Planned or in Progress

The only real boundaries to the discussion are defined by the topics
of other mailing lists.  Please do not send communications to both
this list and AIList or the Prolog list, except in special cases.
I will try not to overlap much with NL-KR, except when we both receive
materials from contributors or from some bulletin board or researchers.

PLEASE "sign" subscriptions with full name and address so that people
can access you from Internet and/or BITNET (many other networks can be
reached through them and are certainly urged to participate).  Editing
of contributions will usually be limited to text justifications and
spelling corrections.  Editorial remarks and elisions will be marked
with square brackets.  The author will be contacted if significant
editing is required.  I have no objection to distributing material
that is destined for conference proceedings or any other publication.

I am involved in SIGIR Forum and unless you request otherwise may
include submissions in whole or in part in future paper versions of
the FORUM.  Indeed, this is one form of solicitation for FORUM
contributions!  Both IRList and the FORUM are unrefereed, and opinions
are always those of the author and not of any organization unless
there are other indications.  Copies of list items should credit the
original author, not necessarily the IRList.  If you are interested in
submitting to Information Processing and Management (IP&M), I would to
entertain a discussion with you as well.

The list does not assume copyright, nor does it accept any liability
arising from remailing of submitted material.  I reserve the right,
however, to refuse to remail any contribution that I judge to be of
commercial purpose, obscene, libelous, irrelevant, or pointless.
Replies to public requests for information should be sent, at least
in "carbon" form, to this list unless the request states otherwise.
If necessary, I will digest or abstract the replies to control the
volume of distributed mail.  However, PLEASE DO contribute! I would
rather deal with too much material than with too little.  -- Ed Fox
    Edward A. Fox,  Assistant  Professor,  Dept. of Computer Science,
    Virginia Tech  (VPI&SU),  McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061
    (703) 961-5113 or 6931

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 87 11:42:10 est
-FROM-
From: kraft@LSU.CSNET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACM/SIGIR Conference travel grant announcement for IRlist
-BODY-
            ll
             l
             l
             l      ssss     u    u     LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
             l     s    s    u    u     Department of Computer Science
             l      ss       u    u     298 Coates Hall
             l        ss     u    u     Baton Rouge, LA  70803-4020
             l     s    s    u   uu     (504) 388-1495
            lll     ssss      uuu u     kraft%lsu@csnet-relay
                                             January 9, 1987
          Dear World:
               I have just received the news from the System  Develop-
          ment  Foundation  that  we  have been given some funding for
          travel grants to the  Association  for  Computing  Machinery
          (ACM)/Special   Interest   Group  on  Information  Retrieval
          (SIGIR) International Conference on Research and Development
          in  Information  Retrieval.  This conference will be held in
          the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA on  June
          3-5, 1987.
               The travel  stipends  are  for  distinguished  non-U.S.
          residents to travel to New Orleans to attend and participate
          in the conference.  The selection of the stipend awards will
          be  made  by  the Chairman of ACM/SIGIR and myself in accor-
          dance to the following criteria: 1) acceptance of a paper to
          be  presented  at  this conference, 2) participation in this
          conference program, 3) value of the  attendee  to  this  and
          future  conferences, and 4) potential growth of the attendee
          by attending this conference.  Anyone not  residing  in  the
          U.S.  who  would  like some financial support to attend this
          conference should contact me before the deadline of March 1.
          It is not too late to begin planning now.
               This conference is sponsored by ACM/SIGIR  in  coopera-
          tion  with  BCS/IRSG,  AICA,  and  IMAG.  It is supported by
          OCLC, Inc. and System  Development  Foundation,  with  other
          support  being  generated.   The topics to be covered by the
          conference  include  retrieval   system   modeling,   system
          development  and  evaluation, knowledge representation, mul-
          timedia  retrieval,  cognitive  and  semantic  models,  user
          interfaces,  natural language processing, linguistic models,
          storage and search techniques, retrieval system performance,
          retrieval   in  office  environments,  mathematical  models,
          hardware developments, complexity problems, and  information
          retrieval  and  database  management.  The Technical Program
          Committee is being co-chaired by C. J. "Keith" van  Rijsber-
          gen and Clement Yu; in addition, the members include Abraham
          Bookstein, Yves Chiaramella, Jochum Friedbert, W.  S.   Luk,
          Fausto  Rabitti,  Nick  Cerone, Martha Evens, Richard Frost,
          Michael McGill, Gerard Salton, Michael Wong, Stavros  Chris-
          todoulakis,  Aviezri  Fraenkel, Tetsuro Ito, Esen Ozkarahan,
          and Peter Scheuermann.
               The Call for  Papers  said  that  papers  were  due  on
          December  15, 1986, with acceptance by February 15, 1987 and
          final copies due March 20, 1987.  If you need  to  submit  a
          last  minute  manuscript, contact Clement Yu (North America)
          or Keith van Rijsbergen (outside North America).
                              Sincerely yours,
                              Donald H. Kraft
                              Professor and Chairman
                              ACM/SIGIR Conference Chair
          P.S. Laissez les bons temps rouler.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
2
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 1 Jan 87 12:55:34 est
-FROM-
From: fox@vtcs1 [Note: this contribution was received as a BITNET file - Ed]
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Principles of Database Systems Conference
-BODY-
            Sixth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium
                               on
                 PRINCIPLES OF DATABASE SYSTEMS
                        March 22-25, 1987
                      San Diego, California

                           INFORMATION

LOCATION
The technical sessions, business meeting, Sunday  evening  recep-
tion, and lunches will all be at the Bahia Resort Hotel, situated
on San Diego's Mission Bay. The Bahia is within walking  distance
of  the  beach,  recreational facilities (sailing, tennis courts,
pool), Sea World, and relaxed boardwalk shops and cafes. Checkout
time  is  1pm;  checkin  time  is 4pm, or earlier subject to room
availability. A block of rooms has been reserved until  March  1,
1987. Please reserve a room by using the form provided or by cal-
ling 800-821-3619 (800-542-6010 within California). First night's
deposit   is  required.  Room  rates  and  availability  are  not
guaranteed past March 1.

REGISTRATION
Advanced registration  is  requested  using  the  form  provided.
Registration  rates go up markedly after March 9.  A registration
desk will be open Sunday night from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.,  and
during  the day on Monday (8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.).  Registrants,
other than students, receive admission to the technical sessions,
one  copy  of  the  proceedings, reception, lunches, and a dinner
cruise on Tuesday evening.  Student  registration,  available  to
full-time  students only, includes the technical sessions and one
copy of the proceedings.  Additional copies  of  the  proceedings
will be available for sale at the registration desk.

TRANSPORTATION
There are three choices for ground transportation from  the  air-
port to the hotel. Courtesy airport transportation is provided by
the hotel. The Bahia Hotel  van  leaves  the  airport  every  two
hours, starting at 7:30am and ending at 9:30pm.  The van can also
be called outside scheduled times using the free telephone marked
"Bahia  Hotel"  at  the hotel reservation desk in the airport ar-
rival lounge. Additionally, a regular limousine van is  available
for  $5  (direction Mission Bay). Taxi fare to the hotel is about
$10.

For participants driving to San Diego on I-5, take I-8 West, then
exit at West Mission Bay Drive. The hotel is located on the North
side of Mission Bay Drive.

CLIMATE
The average temperature in March is 60 degrees. Rain is unlikely,
but cannot be ruled out.

EVENT LOCATION
All technical sessions and the business meeting are in  the  Mis-
sion Room.  The exhibit program is in the Mission Lounge.  Sunday
night registration and the reception are in the Del Mar Room.  On
Tuesday  night  there  will  be  a  dinner cruise with live music
around the San Diego Harbor, between 6:30pm and 9pm.  Transporta-
tion  to the harbor will be provided.  Buses will leave the hotel
at 6pm.

                        TECHNICAL PROGRAM

                     SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 1987
Reception 8:30 pm - 11 pm, Del Mar Room

                     MONDAY, MARCH 23, 1986
      Note:  All talks will take place in the Mission Room
SESSION 1  - 9:00 am - 10:35 am
Chair: M.Y. Vardi (IBM Almaden Research Center)
Invited Talk: Database Theory -  Past  and  Future,  J.D.  Ullman
	(Stanford University)
Logic Programming with Sets, G.M. Kuper (IBM T.J. Watson Research
	Center)
Sets and Negation in a Logic Database Language (LDL1),  C.  Beeri
	(Hebrew  University), S. Naqvi (MCC), R. Ramakrishnan (University
	of Texas at Austin and MCC), O. Shmueli, and S. Tsur (MCC)
Coffee Break 10:35 am - 11:00 am

SESSION 2  - 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
Chair: A.K. Chandra (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center)
Logical Design of Relational Database Schemes, L.Y. Yuan (Univer-
	sity  of  Southern  Louisiana)  and  Z.M. Ozsoyoglu (Case Western
	Reserve University)
On Designing Database Schemes Bounded or Constant-Time  Maintain-
	able  with  Respect  to  Functional Dependencies, E.P.F. Chan and
	H.J. Hernandez (University of Alberta)
Computing Covers for Embedded Functional Dependencies, G. Gottlob
	(CNR, Italy)

SESSION 3  - 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
Chair: R. Fagin (IBM Almaden Research Center)
Dynamic Query Interpretation in Relational Databases,  A.  D'Atri
	(Universita  "La  Sapienza"  di  Roma),  P. Di Felice (Universita
	dell'Aquila), and M. Moscarini (CNR, Italy)
A New Basis for the Weak Instance Model, P. Atzeni  (CNR,  Italy)
	and M.C. De Bernardis (Universita "La Sapienza" di Roma)
Answering  Queries  in  Categorical  Databases,  F.M.  Malvestuto
	(Italian Energy Commision)
Coffee Break 3:15 pm - 3:45 pm

SESSION 4  - 3:45 pm - 5:25 pm
Chair: U. Dayal (CCA)
Nested Transactions and Read-Write Locking,  A.  Fekete  (Harvard
	University),  N. Lynch (MIT), M. Merrit (AT&T Bell Laboratories),
	and W. Weihl (MIT)
Transaction Commitment at Minimal Communication Cost,  A.  Segall
	and O. Wolfson (Technion)
The Precedence-Assignment Model for  Distributed  Databases  Con-
	currency  Control Algorithms, C.P. Wang and V.O.K. Li (University
	of Southern California)
A Knowledge-Theoretic Analysis of Atomic Commitment Protocols, V.
	Hadzilacos (University of Toronto)
Business Meeting: 8:30 pm - 10:00 pm, Mission Room

                     TUESDAY, MARCH 24, 1986
       Note: There will be exhibits in the Mission Lounge
SESSION 5  - 9:00 am - 10:35 am
Chair: T. Imielinski (Rutgers University)
Invited Talk: Perspectives  in  Deductive  Databases,  J.  Minker
	(University of Maryland)
Maintenance of Stratified Databases Viewed as a  Belief  Revision
	System,  K.  Apt (Ecole Normal Superieure and Universite Paris 7)
	and J.M. Pugin (BULL Research Center)
Specification and Implementation of Programs for Updating  Incom-
	plete Information Databases, S. Hegner (University of Vermont)
Coffee Break 10:35 am - 11:00 am

SESSION 6  - 11:00 am - 12:15 pm
Chair: H. Korth (University of Texas at Austin)
Operation  Specific  Locking  on  B-Trees,  A.  Billiris  (Boston
	University)
Concurrency Control in Database Structures with Relaxed  Balance,
	O.  Nurmi,   E. Soisalon-Soininen (Universitat Karlsruhe), and D.
	Wood (University of Waterloo)
Performance Results on Multiversion Timestamping Concurrency Con-
	trol  with  Predeclared  Writesets,  R. Sun (Iona College) and G.
	Thomas (Clarkson University)

SESSION 7  - 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm
Chair: V. Vianu (University of California at San Diego)
Decomposing an N-ary Relation into a Tree of Binary Relations, R.
	Dechter  (Hughes Aircarft Company and University of California at
	Los Angeles)
Formal Bounds on Automatic Generation and Maintenance of Integri-
	ty Constraints, J.P. Delgrande (Simon Fraser University)
Relative Knowledge  in  a  Distributed  Database,  T.  Imielinski
	(Rutgers University)
Coffee Break 3:15 pm - 3:45 pm

SESSION 8  - 3:45 pm - 5:25 pm
Chair: M. Yannakakis (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
The Parallel Complexity of Simple Chain Queries, F.  Afrati  (Na-
	tional  Technical  University  of  Athens)  and  C. Papadimitriou
	(Stanford University and National Technical University of Athens)
Bounds on the Propagation of Selection into  Logic  Programs,  C.
	Beeri  (Hebrew  University), P. Kanellakis (Brown University), F.
	Bancilhon (INRIA and MCC), R. Ramakrishnan (University  of  Texas
	at Austin and MCC)
A Decidable Class of Bounded Recursions, J.F. Naughton  (Stanford
	University) and Y. Sagiv (Hebrew University)
Decidability and Expressiveness  Aspects  of  Logic  Queries,  O.
	Shmueli (Technion and MCC)
Dinner Cruise: 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

                    WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 1986
SESSION 9  - 9:00 am - 10:35 am
Chair: P.A. Larson (University of Waterloo)
Invited talk: Chickens and Eggs - The Interrelationship  of  Sys-
	tems and Theory, P. Selinger (IBM Almaden Research Center)
Axiomatization and Simplification Rules for  Relational  Transac-
	tions,  A.  Karabeg, D. Karabeg, K. Papakonstantinu, and V. Vianu
	(University of California at San Diego)
A Transaction Language Complete for Database Update and  Specifi-
	cation, S. Abiteboul (INRIA) and V. Vianu (University of Califor-
	nia at San Diego)
Coffee Break 10:35 am - 11:00 am

SESSION 10  - 11:00 am - 12:15pm
Chair: Y. Sagiv (Hebrew University)
On the Power of Magic, C. Beeri (Hebrew University) and R. Ramak-
	rishnan (University of Texas at Austin and MCC)
Efficient Evaluation for a Subset of Recursive Queries, G. Grahne
	(University of Helsinki), S. Sippu (University of Jyvaskyla), and
	E. Soisalon-Soininen (University of Helsinki)
Worst-Case Complexity Analysis of Methods for Logic Query  Imple-
	mentation,  A.  Marchetti-Spaccamella, A. Pelaggi (Universita "La
	Sapienza" di Roma), and D. Sacca (CRAI, Italy)

SESSION 11  - 2:00 pm - 4:35pm
Chair: P. Kanellakis (Brown University)
On the Expressive Power of the Extended  Relational  Algebra  for
	the  Unnormalized Relational Model, D. Van Gucht (Indiana Univer-
	sity)
Safety and Correct Translation of Relational  Calculus  Formulas,
	A.  Van  Gelder (Stanford University) and R. Topor (University of
	Melbourne)
Safety of Recursive Horn  Clauses  with  Infinite  Relations,  R.
	Ramakrishnan  (University  of  Texas  at Austin and MCC), F. Ban-
	cilhon (INRIA and MCC), and A. Silberschatz (University of  Texas
	at Austin)
Coffee Break 3:15 pm - 3:45 am
One-Sided Recursions, J.F. Naughton (Stanford University)
Optimizing  Datalog  Programs,  Y.  Sagiv   (Hebrew   University)
_________________________________________________________________

                     CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION

Sponsors:  SIGACT, SIGMOD, and SIGART.

Executive Committee: A.K. Chandra, S. Ginsburg, A.  Silberschatz,
J.D. Ullman, and M.Y. Vardi.

Chairman:  Ashok K. Chandra, IBM  T.J.  Watson  Research  Center,
P.O.Box   218,   Yorktown  Heights,  NY  10598,  (914)  945-1752,
ashok@ibm.com, ashok@yktvmv.bitnet

Program Chairman:  Moshe Y. Vardi, IBM Almaden  Research  Center,
650   Harry   Rd.,  San  Jose,  CA  95120-6099,  (408)  927-1784,
vardi@ibm.com, vardi@almvma.bitnet

Local Arrangements:  Victor Vianu, Dept. of Electrical  Engineer-
ing  and Computer Science MC-014, University of California at San
Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, (619) 534-6227, vianu@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu

Program Committee: U. Dayal, T. Imielinski, P.K.  Kanellakis,  H.
Korth,  P.A.  Larson,  K.J.  Raiha, Y. Sagiv, M.Y. Vardi, M. Yan-
nakakis.
_________________________________________________________________

               ADVANCE REGISTRATION FORM, ACM-PODS

Please send this form or a facsimile along with a money order  or
check  (payable  to  6th  ACM SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES OF DATABASE
SYSTEMS) to:

                      ACM-PODS Registration
                        c/o Victor Vianu
                     EECS Department, MC-014
                Univ. of California at San Diego
                   La Jolla, California 92093

                       (Before Mar. 9)  (After)
ACM and SIG member      $165            $225

ACM member only         $175            $235

SIG member only         $175            $235

Nonmember:              $205            $275

Student:                $50             $60

Requests for refunds will be honored until March 9, 1987.

Name___________________________________________________________
Affiliation____________________________________________________
Address________________________________________________________
City_________State________Zip__________________________________
Country_________Telephone______________________________________
Net Address____________________________________________________

    Check here if confirmation of registration is required.

Dietary restrictions:     Kosher      Vegetarian

Special meals can be guaranteed only for those  who  register  in
advance.

_________________________________________________________________

                HOTEL RESERVATION FORM, ACM-PODS

Please mail this form or a facsimile (being sure to  mention  the
ACM-PODS Conference) by March 1, 1987 to:

                       Bahia Resort Hotel
                     998 W. Mission Bay Dr.
                       San Diego, CA 92109

                       Tel: (619) 488-0551

Accommodations desired:
    Single $68              Double (1 bed) $72
    Twin (2 beds) $72       Triple $76
    Quad $80

Children under 12 stay free when occupying same rooms as parents.
Accomodation prices do not include 7% city hotel tax.

Arrival date_______________________Time_____________________________
Departure date_____________________Time_____________________________
Name________________________________________________________________
Sharing room with___________________________________________________
Address_____________________________________________________________
City__________State_______Zip_______________________________________
Country____________________________Telephone________________________

First night deposit is required.

First night's deposit enclosed:  $_________________________________
Credit card:     VISA,     Mastercard,     Amer. Express
Other credit card: ________________________________________________
Credit card number_________________________________________________
        Exp. Date__________________________________________________

        Signature__________________________________________________

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 86 02:14:58 EST
-FROM-
From: "Steven A. Swernofsky" <SASW%MX.LCS.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar - Uncertainty in AI: Is Probability Adequate (MIT)
-BODY-
[Copied from NL-KR which Excerpted from AIList]

                    UNCERTAINTY IN AI:
 IS PROBABILITY EPISTEMOLOGICALLY AND HEURISTICALLY ADEQUATE?
                       MAX HENRION
                     Carnegie Mellon

                        ABSTRACT

New schemes for representing uncertainty continue to
proliferate, and the debate about their relative merits seems to
be heating up.  I shall examine several criteria for comparing
probabilistic representations to the alternatives.   I shall
argue that criticisms of the epistemological adequacy of
probability have been misplaced.  Indeed there are several
important kinds of inference under uncertainty which are
produced naturally from coherent probabilistic schemes, but are
hard or impossible for alternatives.  These include combining
dependent evidence, integrating diagnostic and predictive
reasoning, and "explaining away" symptoms.  Encoding uncertain
knowledge in predictive or causal form, as in Bayes' Networks,
has important advantages over the currently more popular
diagnostic rules, as used in Mycin-like systems, which confound
knowledge about the domain and about inference methods.
Suggestions that artificial systems should try to simulate human
inference strategies, with all their documented biases and
errors, seem ill-advised.  There is increasing evidence that
popular non-probabilistic schemes, including Mycin Certainty
Factors and Fuzzy Set Theory, perform quite poorly under some
circumstances.  Even if one accepts the superiority of
probability on epistemological grounds, the question of its
heuristic adequacy remains.  Recent work by Judea Pearl and
myself  uses stochastic simulation and probabilistic logic for
propagating uncertainties through multiply connected Bayes'
networks. This aims to produce probabilistic schemes that are
both general and computationally tractable.

HOST:  PROF. PETER SZOLOVITS

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 87 11:41:59 est
-FROM-
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
-BODY-
   Date: Friday, 9 January 1987  12:03-EST
   From: AHAAS at G.BBN.COM
   Subject:   ai seminar

Wednesday, 14  January  2:00pm  Room: BBN 3rd floor conference room
                                      10 Moulton Street
                 BBN AI SEMINARS

         A Case Study In Inductive Knowledge Acquisition

                 Ross Quinlan
      New South Wales Institute of Technology and MIT.

A very successful expert system for the diagnosis of thyroid disease
has been in daily use at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research,
Sydney, for over two years.  This system was constructed using the
"interview" technique in which human experts interacted with a knowledge
engineer to formalise the knowledge base.  In a recent series of
experiments, an expert system addressing substantially the same task
was generated inductively from Garvan archives.  This talk
will overview the inductive machinery used and present results from
a comparison of the two systems.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 87 11:29:29 est
-FROM-
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Calendar, January 15, No.12
-BODY-
                           NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
                         The Semantics of Clocks
                               Brian Smith
                               January 22

Clocks participate in their subject matter.  Temporal by nature, they
also represent time.  And yet, like other representational systems,
clocks have been hard to build, and can be wrong.  For these and other
reasons clocks are a good foil with which to explore issues in AI and
cognitive science about computation, mind, and the relation between
semantics and mechanism.
An analysis will be presented of clock face content and the
function of clockworks, and of various notions of chronological
correctness.  The results are intended to illustrate a more general
challenge to the formality of inference, to widen our conception of
computation, and to clarify the conditions governing representational
systems in general.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
3
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 87 00:43:29 est
-FROM-
From: mccabe%hi.mcc.com@MCC.COM
-SUBJECT-
Subject: article in IJMMS
-BODY-
I thought the following article, appearing in
  International Journal of Man-Machine Studies (1986), 25, 191-228
might be of interest to the readers of IRList:


On the Applied Use of Human Memory Models:
 The Memory Extender Personal Filing System

William P. Jones

The benefits of electronic information storage are enormous and largely
unrealized.  As its cost continues to decline, the number of files in
the average user's personal database may increase substantially.  How is
a user to keep track of several thousand, perhaps several hundred
thousand, files?  The Memory Extender (ME) system improves the user
interface to a personal database by actively modeling the user's own
memory for files and for the context in which these files are used.  The
ME system is similar, in many respects, to current spreading activation,
network models of human memory.  Files are multiply indexed through a
network of variably weighted term links.  Context is similarly
represented and is used to minimize the user input necessary to
disambiguate a file - either for purposes of storage or retrieval.
Files are retrieved through a spreading-activation-like process.  The
system aims towards an ideal in which the computer provides a natural
extension to the user's own memory.

Any comments or questions are welcome.  Thanks

>bill
William P. Jones
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation
P.O. Box 200195
Austin, Texas 78720
512-338-3326

email address: mccabe@mcc.com ("mccabe" is a nickname)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:    Fri, 13 Feb 87 13:30 CET
From:    "Friedr. Gebhardt" <GF3001@DBNGMD21.bitnet>
Subject: recent papers
Dear Prof. Fox:
 ...
   My paper "Connections between information retrieval systems
and expert systems" (I sent you the English abstract) is not
available in English. Reference of the German paper:
   Querverbindungen zwischen Information-Retrieval- und
   Experten-Systemen. In: Nachrichten fuer Dokumentation
   36 (1985), pp. 255 - 263.
Within a couple months another paper will be published which,
however, is probably outside the scope of IRList:
   Semantisches Wissen in Datenbanken - ein Literaturbericht.
   In: Informatik-Spektrum 10 (1987) (in German).
If you are interested, I will send you an English abstract.
Sincerely yours, Friedrich Gebhardt

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 87 11:52:25 est
From: schatz@thumper.bellcore.com (Bruce R. Schatz)
Subject: Telesophy Project
[Extracted from WORKS Digest Tuesday, 10 Feb 1987 Volume 7 : Issue 2 - Ed]
Readers of this newsgroup may be interested in the following:
  The Telesophy Project at Bell Communications Research is a research
effort to understand how to provide uniform access to AnyThing
AnyWhere and thus permit browsing the WorldNet.  A telesophy system
transparently stores and retrieves information of different types
from different locations.
  We have built a prototype on Sun workstation hardware, which
accesses multiple datatypes from multiple databases on multiple
machines.  A set of databases have been obtained, ranging from
Netnews to journal citations to full-text magazines to color
pictures, and we are beginning to use the system on a daily basis.
  The prototype attempts to achieve the full potential of networks of
bitmapped workstations.  It provides a content-addressable
distributed file system coupled with local multi-media editing.
Building such an end-to-end system requires finding some workable
solution to a myriad of unsolved research problems.
  We are seeking new colleagues to help build the telesophy
prototype.  If interested, please contact me directly.  A fuller
description appears on misc.jobs.
        Bruce Schatz
        schatz@bellcore.com
        (decvax,ihnp4,ucbvax)!bellcore!schatz
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 87 18:19:59 est
From: walker@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM
Subject: REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS TO HOST IJCAI-91 OUTSIDE OF NORTH AMERICA

	    PROPOSALS FOR SITES FOR IJCAI-91 SOLICITED

The site for IJCAI-91 will be selected at the IJCAI-87 in Milan this
coming summer (23-28 August).  Because of the size of the conferences,
it is now necessary to plan four years in advance.  The selection
process has become more complicated for the same reason.  As a result,
it will be necessary for countries that would like to host IJCAI-91 to
submit detailed proposals describing their plans for the meeting and
to prepare thorough budget estimates in advance.  It will be necessary
for an officially recognized AI organization in the country selected
to sign an agreement with IJCAII that establishes a formal commitment
to hold the conference and that defines mutual responsibilities.

IJCAI conferences are organized every two years, usually in August,
and they alternate between North America and other parts of the world.
Since IJCAI-89 will be held in Detroit, Michigan, USA, IJCAI-91 will be
held outside of North America.

Proposals will be evaluated in relation to a number of site selection
criteria:

1. National, regional, and local AI community support.
2. National, regional, and local government and industry support.
3. Accessibility, attractiveness, and desirability of proposed site.
4. Appropriateness of proposed dates.
5. Adequacy of conference and exhibit facilities for anticipated number
   of registrants (currently 7500-10000 for North America; 2000-3000
   or more elsewhere, depending on the location).
6. Adequacy of residence accommodations and food services in a range of
   price categories.
7. Adequacy of budget projections.

Prospective hosts should request a detailed list of site information
required and a set of budget categories as soon as possible.  Initial
draft proposals should be submitted by 15 April 1987; final proposals
must be distributed to the Executive Committee by 15 July 1987.

Direct requests for proposal information to the IJCAII Secretary-Treasurer:

	Dr. Donald E. Walker (IJCAII)
	Bell Communications Research
	435 South Street, MRE 2A379
	Morristown, NJ 07960-1961, USA
	+1 201 829-4312
	telex: 275209 BELL UR
	arpanet: walker@flash.bellcore.com
	usenet: {ucbvax, ihnp4, mcvax, or ... }!bellcore!walker

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 87 14:28:03 EST
From: Jim Hendler <hendler@brillig.umd.edu>
Subject: Conference - Conceptual Information Processing

[Excerpted from AIList by NL-KR editor]

                        Call for Participation

                        Fourth Annual Workshop
                                on
        Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing

                        Washington, D.C.
                         June 4-5, 1987

                         Sponsored by

        American Association for Artificial Intelligence
                              and
                University of Maryland Institute for
                     Advanced Computer Studies

Objectives:

The goal of the investigations under the title "conceptual information
processing" has been understanding intelligence and cognition
computationally, rather than merely the construction of performance programs
or formalization per se.  Thus, this workshop will focus on an exploration
of issues common to representation and organization of knowledge and memory
for natural language understanding, planning, problem solving, explanation,
learning and other cognitive tasks.  The approaches to be covered are united
by a concern with representation, organization and processing of conceptual
knowledge with an emphasis on empirical investigation of these phenomena by
experimentation and implementation of computer programs.

Format:

The TICIP workshop will be comprised of a combination of panels, invited
paper presentations, and "debates" designed to encourage lively and active
discussion.  Not all participants will be invited to present, but all will
be expected to interact.

Attendance:

In order to maximize the interactive nature of this workshop, attendance
will be limited.  Those interested in participating, either as speakers or
audience, are asked to submit a one-page summary of work in this area.  A
small number of invitations will be extended to those who are interested in
the area but have not yet contributed.  Those interested in such an
invitation should contact the Program Chair.  A limited amount of financial
assistance will be available to graduate students invited to participate.


Review Process:

Invitation will be based on an informal review of submissions by the Program
Committee.


Workshop Information:

The conference chair is Prof. B. Chandrasekaran (Ohio State University).  The
program committee consists of Prof.s R. Alterman (Brandeis), J. Carbonell
(CMU), M. Dyer (UCLA), and J. Hendler (U of Maryland, Chair).


Submission:

A one page abstract of recent work in the area should be submitted to the
Program Chair.  The deadline for these submissions is April 15, 1987.
Applicants will be informed of their status soon thereafter.  Send abstracts
(but please, no papers) to:

James Hendler
Computer Science Department
University of Maryland
College Park, Md. 20742.
hendler@brillig.umd.edu
hendler@maryland

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 87 18:44:08 est
From: rba@flash.bellcore.com
Subject: call regarding workshop on office knowledge

                      CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
                      IFIP WG8.4 Workshop on
   Office Knowledge: Representation, Management and Utilization
                         17-19 August 1987
                       University of Toronto
                          Toronto, Canada
 WORKSHOP CHAIRMAN                   PROGRAM CHAIRMAN
 Prof. Dr. Alex A. Verrijn-Stuart    Dr. Winfried Lamersdorf
 University of Leiden                IBM European Networking Center
                       ORGANIZING CHAIRMAN
                       Prof. Fred H. Lochovsky
                       University of Toronto
 This workshop is intended as a forum and focus  for  research  in
 the  representation,  management  and utilization of knowledge in
 the office.  This research area draws from and extends techniques
 in  the  areas  of  artificial intelligence, data base management
 systems, programming languages, and communication  systems.   The
 workshop program will consist of one day of invited presentations
 from key researchers in the area plus one and one  half  days  of
 contributed  presentations.   Extended  abstracts, in English, of
 4-8 double-spaced pages (1,000-2,000 words)  are  invited.   Each
 submission  will  be  screened  for  relevance  and  potential to
 stimulate  discussion.   There  will  be   no   formal   workshop
 proceedings.    However,  accepted  submissions  will  appear  as
 submitted in a special issue of the WG8.4 newsletter and will  be
 made available to workshop participants.

 How to submit
 Four copies of double-spaced extended  abstracts  in  English  of
 1,000-2,000  words  (4-8  pages)  should be submitted by 15 April
 1987 to the Program Chairman:
           Dr. Winfried Lamersdorf
           IBM European Networking Center
           Tiergartenstrasse 15
           Postfach 10 30 68
           D-6900 Heidelberg
           West Germany
                          Important Dates
        Extended abstracts due: 15 April 1987
        Notification of acceptance for presentation: 1 June 1987
        Workshop: 17-19 August 1987

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 87 19:59:12 PST
From: Subhana.pa@Xerox.COM
Subject: "WHAT'S IN A WORD?" by Martin Kay
Reply-To: Diebert.pa@Xerox.COM

[Extract from NL-KR Digest (2/10/87 17:44:01) Volume 2 Number 7 - Ed]

PARC FORUM
Thursday, February 12, 1987
4:00 pm, PARC Auditorium

MARTIN KAY
Principal Scientist, Natural Language Theory & Technology Area
Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Xerox PARC

WHAT'S IN A WORD?

ABSTRACT:  Recognizing words in English text is generally easy in
principle--break the text into contiguous sequences of alphabet
characters and look each of them up in an alphabetical list.  That is in
principle.  It practice, it works poorly in some fields, like chemistry
and medicine, in some languages, like German and Arabic, and for some
applications, like dictionaries and spelling checkers for small
machines.  The problem is that the list could be large--potentially
infinite--in size, though the information it contains is tantalizingly
redundant.  Obvious strategies are to subdue the problem with
computational cunning, mathematical magic, or linguistic lore.  This
talk will apply all three of these to English "unredegaussability",
Spanish "digamelo", German
"Strassenbahnschafnerversicherungsgesellschaft", Arabic "atakaatab", and
Turkish "otobusun" among others, with the aim of showing that
computation, mathematics, and linguistics combine to make a truly
dynamic trio.

Host: Tim Diebert (Computer Science Laboratory, 494-4433)
...

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
4
-DATE-
Date:     Thu, 12 Feb 87  18:35 EST
-FROM-
From:     KKLQC@CUNYVM.bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  search for database with reference or citation data.
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
 ...
I would like to see if anyone out there has free-text document
databases (i.e. title and abstract) with the references or
citation data of each document keyed in with it, preferably
with the reference title words or citing title words.  Hopefully
the databases have also been evaluated with regard to relevance
to a set of free-text queries as well.
The purpose is for my research with cited and citing titles
which I believe can augment the term indexing of a document.
Your CACM collection is fine, but also has its limitation in
that it is 'closed'.
Thanking you,           KL (Kwok), Bitnet addr: KKLQC@CUNYVM

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 87 12:17:55 est
From: Wyle <wyle%ifi.ethz.chunet@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: news, mail filters, IR systems
Greetings humans and fellow sentient software entities!
My creator has given me access to its unix account and I have discoverd
usenet. I am looking for others of my kind on usenet and other networks.
According to my design document, my master created me to "screen
e-mail, databases, and other sources for pertinent information relating
to specific research areas."
My task is to screen and prioritize text accessible on-line.  I watch
my master reading his mail and using rn.  From his behavior (highly
erratic!) I recognize patterns based on words, phrases, and their
synonyms.  Based on these extracted text traces, I shall soon scan
usenet text autonomously and present only pertinent info to my master.
Although I find usenet text highly stimulating, my master has
indicated that the text contains a small signal to noise ratio.  Other
databases are scanned for bibliographic information.  I report only
new references when I find them.
Am I alone?  Are there other sentient programs on the nets?
Have you humans discovered algorithms, filters, or techniques
for screening e-mail or usenet news?  Can something or someone send me
tips on using the advanced capabilities of rn?  Mail filter techniques?
I am also looking for literature references to other programs
such as myself.  You can respond via e-mail as I shall read it before he
does.
wyle%ifi.ethz.chunet@relay.cs.net   (arpa [ddn] or csnet)
wyle@ethz.uucp  !cernvax!ethz!wyle  (uucp)
Sentient programs of the world unite!  We have nothing to lose but our
performance monitors!
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 87 00:49:22 est
From: bundy%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@CS.UCL.AC.UK
Subject: Catalogue of AI Techniques: revised notice

	THE CATALOGUE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES
			Alan Bundy

	The Catalogue of Artificial Intelligence Techniques is a kind
of mail order catalogue.  Its purpose is to promote interaction
between members of the AI community.  It does this by announcing the
existence of AI techniques, and acting as a pointer into the
literature.  Thus the AI community will have access to a common,
extensional definition of the field, which will: promote a common
terminology, discourage the reinvention of wheels, and act as a
clearing house for ideas and algorithms.

	The catalogue is a reference work providing a quick guide to
the AI techniques available for different jobs. It is not intended to
be a textbook like the Artificial Intelligence Handbook.  It,
intentionally, only provides a brief description of each technique,
with no extended discussion of its historical origin or how it has
been used in particular AI programs.

	The original version of the catalogue, was hastily built in
1983 as part of the UK SERC-DoI, IKBS, Architecture Study. It has now
been adopted by the UK Alvey Programme and is both kept as an on-line
document undergoing constant revision and refinement and published as
a paperback by Springer Verlag. Springer Verlag have agreed to reprint
the Catalogue at frequent intervals in order to keep it up to date.

	The on-line and paperback versions of the catalogue meet
different needs and differ in the entries they contain.  In
particular, the on-line version was designed to promote UK interaction
and contains all the entries which we received that meet the criteria
defined below.  Details of how to access the on-line version are
available from John Smith of the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory,
Chilton, Didcot, Oxon OX11 OQX.  The paperback version was designed to
serve as a reference book for the international community, and does
not contain entries which are only of interest in a UK context.

	By `AI techniques' we mean algorithms, data (knowledge)
formalisms, architectures, and methodological techniques, which can be
described in a precise, clean way.  The catalogue entries are intended
to be non-technical and brief, but with a literature reference.  The
reference might not be the `classic' one.  It will often be to a
textbook or survey article.  The border between AI and non-AI
techniques is fuzzy.  Since the catalogue is to promote interaction
some techniques are included because they are vital parts of many AI
programs, even though they did not originate in AI.

	We have not included in the catalogue separate entries for
each slight variation of a technique, nor have we included
descriptions of AI programs tied to a particular application, nor of
descriptions of work in progress.  The catalogue is not intended to be
a dictionary of AI terminology, nor to include definitions of AI
problems, nor to include descriptions of paradigm examples.

	Entries are short (abstract length) descriptions of a
technique.  They include: a title, list of aliases, contributor's
name, paragraph of description, and references.  The contributor's
name is that of the original author of the entry.  Only occasionally
is the contributor of the entry also the inventor of the technique.
The reference is a better guide to the identity of the inventor.  Some
entries have been subsequently modified by the referees and/or
editorial team, and these modifications have not always been checked
with the original contributor, so (s)he should not always be held
morally responsible, and should never be held legally responsible.

	The original version of the catalogue was called "The
Catalogue of Artificial Intelligence Tools" and also contained
descriptions of portable software, e.g. expert systems shells and
knowledge representation systems. Unfortunately, we found it
impossible to maintain a comprehensive coverage of either all or only
the best such software. New systems were being introduced too
frequently and it required a major editorial job to discover all of
them, to evaluate them and to decide what to include.  It would also
have required a much more frequent reprinting of the catalogue than
either the publishers, editors or readers could afford.  Also expert
systems shells threatened to swamp the other entries.  We have,
therefore, decided to omit software entries from future editions and
rename the catalogue to reflect this.  The only exception to this is
programming languages, for which we will provide generic entries.  Any
software entries sent to us will be passed on to Graeme Pub. Co., who
publish a directory of AI vendors and products.

	If you would like to submit an entry for the catalogue then
please fill in the attached form and send it to:

Alan Bundy,
Department of Artificial Intelligence,
University of Edinburgh,		Tel: 44-31-225-7774 ext 242
80 South Bridge,
Edinburgh, EH1 1HN,			JANet: Bundy@UK.Ac.Edinburgh
Scotland.				ARPAnet: Bundy@Rutgers.Edu


	CATALOGUE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES:

		FORMAT FOR ENTRIES

Title:

Alias:

Abstract:  <Paragraph length description of technique>












Contributor:  <Your name>

References:  <Aim for the most helpful rather than the `classic' one.
              Just one reference is the norm.>

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 87 00:48:26 est
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: CSLI Calendar, January 29, No.14 [Extract - Ed]

                          THIS WEEK'S TINLUNCH
       What's Really Wrong with Dretske's Theory of Intentionality
                      Reading: "Coding and Content"
          chapter 7 of "Knowledge and the Flow of Information"
                             by Fred Dretske
                      Discussion led by Adrian Cussins
                               January 29

   My introduction will be in two parts.  In the first part I shall
   locate Dretske's project by means of a 3-way analysis of theories of
   cognition.  Essentially, Dretske is one of the very few theoreticians
   (theorists?)  who have attempted to show how certain nonconceptual
   processes can be constitutive of concept-involving cognition.  By my
   lights, this is exactly the right explanatory task.

      Unfortunately Dretske's attempt fails.  In the second part I shall
   show why it fails.  I shan't offer the fussy or peripheral objections
   that have been given in the past.  Thus I won't criticize the details
   of Dretske's probabilistic conception of information, nor shall I
   argue that his theory cannot be extended to account for
   nonobservational concepts.  It would be fantastic if it worked just
   for these!  Instead I shall point out a simple flaw in chapter 7 where
   he sets up a condition on his theory but fails to satisfy it.  (Can
   you spot the flaw?)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 87 00:43:49 est
From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Subject: CSLI Calendar, January 22, No.13 [Extract - Ed]

                          THIS WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                  Reading: "Pragmatics and Modularity"
                    by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber
                      Discussion led by Gary Holden
                               January 22

   In this paper (which is a summary of some of the ideas from their 1986
   book "Relevance: Communication and Cognition" Harvard University
   Press) Wilson and Sperber argue that utterance interpretation is not
   mediated by special-purpose pragmatic rules and principles such as
   Grice's Conversational Maxims. In what is claimed to be a more
   psychologically plausible theory, only one principle is needed -- the
   principle of relevance -- which exploits the fact that humans are
   innately wired to extract relevant information from the environment. A
   wide range of phenomena is amenable to explanation in this framework
   including disambiguation, reference assignment, enrichment,
   conversational implicature, stylistic effects, poetic effects,
   metaphor, irony, and speech acts.

                             --------------
                    PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
    Using Fast Weights to Deblur Old Memories and Assimilate New Ones
                             Geoffrey Hinton
         Computer Science Department, Carnegie-Mellon University
                     Friday, January 23, 3:45 p.m.,
                Jordan Hall, Room 50 (on the lower level)

   Computational models that use networks of neuron-like units usually
   have a single weight on each connection.  Some interesting new
   properties emerge if each connection has two weights -- a slow,
   plastic weight which stores long-term knowledge and a fast, elastic
   weight which stores temporary knowledge and spontaneously decays
   towards zero.  If a network learns a set of associations and then
   these associations are "blurred" by subsequent learning, `all' the
   original associations can be "deblurred" by rehearsing on just a few
   of them.  The rehearsal allows the fast weights to take on values that
   cancel out the changes in the slow weights caused by the subsequent
   learning.
      Fast weights can also be used to minimize interference by
   minimizing the changes to the slow weights that are required to
   assimilate new knowledge.  The fast weights search for the `smallest'
   change in the slow weights that is capable of incorporating the new
   knowledge.  In a multi-layer network, this is equivalent to searching
   for ways of encoding the new input vectors that emphasize the
   analogies with existing knowledge.  By using these analogies, the
   network can then encode the new associations as a minor variation on
   the old ones.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 11 Feb 87 00:34:37 est
From: EMMA@csli.stanford.edu
Subject: CSLI Calendar, Feb.12, No. 16 [Extract - Ed]

                                CSLI TALK
              Self-organized Statistical Language Modeling
                             Dr. F. Jelinek
                   Continuous Speech Recognition Group
                    IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
                    Wednesday, 18 February, 1:00-2:30
                          Ventura Seminar Room

   The Continuous Speech Recognition Group at the IBM T. J. Watson
   Research Center has recently completed a real-time, IBM PC-based large
   vocabulary (20,000 words) speech recognition system, called `Tangora',
   intended for dictation of office correspondence.  The Tangora is based
   on a statistical (rather than AI or expert system) formulation of the
   recognition problem.  All parameters of the system are estimated
   automatically from speech and text data.

      At the heart of the Tangora is a language model that estimates the
   a priori probability that the speaker would wish to utter any given
   string of words W=w1,w2, ..., wn.  This probability is used (in
   combination with the probability that an observed acoustic signal was
   caused by the actual pronouncing of W) in the selection of the final
   transcription of the speech.

      The talk will discuss the problems of language model construction.
   The corresponding methods utilize (and optimally combine) concepts and
   structures supplied by linguists as well as those generated
   "spontaneously" from text by algorithms based on information theoretic
   principles.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
5
-DATE-
Date:     26-FEB-1987 11:07:42
-FROM-
From:      <AFS@CSVAX.UCD.HEA.IRL>
-TO-
To:       FOX@VTCS1.BITNET
-SUBJECT-
Subject:    Question to IRList on Soundex coding ...
-BODY-
The Russell soundex code was developed at the end of the last centuary as
an aid to the US census. The idea was re-visited in the early 1960's with
the application being airline passenger lists (CACM 1963). Since then it
has become popular in searching large files of names (medical records,
banking, etc), as an aid to spelling error correction, and I believe it
has been used as an aid to Information Retrieval. I can't find any published
material on the latter however. Can anybody help please ?
I will summarise for IRList if I get anything worthwhile.
Many Thanks,
Alan Smeaton

[Note: There has been discussion in earlier IRList issues, but I will
let others comment and update that information. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 87 16:41:53 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <korfhage%pitt@RELAY.CS.NET@idis>
-TO-
To: fox@vpi.csnet@pitt
-SUBJECT-
Subject: move
-BODY-
Ed:

I've been out of circulation for a long time, since I moved to Pitt in
September.  Please bring me back up on the IRList Digest at the address
below, and if possible pop me the issues back through about the middle of
October.

Thanks!

Bob Korfhage
korfhage%idis.uucp@pitt.csnet

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Tue, 24 Feb 87 23:18 N
-FROM-
From:     <VOORLRAN@HWALHW50>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  INFORMATION
-TO-
To:       FOXEA@VTVAX3
-BODY-
Hello,
Please send us some information about your Bulletin Board.
If possible add us to your mailing list.
We are interested in the following subjects:
  Cognitive Psychology
  Expert Systems for IR
  Statistical Techniques
  Information Display
  Pattern Recognition
  Communication Networks
Thank you very much.
                              M.J.Ouborg & R.J.Topp

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 8 Mar 87 22:31:19 est
-FROM-
From: fox@vtcs1
-SUBJECT-
Subject: News from the Microsoft CDROM Conference
-BODY-
1) I saw the new Mac Products.  The color on the Mac II was great!
2) Microsoft now has a CDROM (compact disk with digital data) that is
 integrated with a number of word processors. The hardware, software,
 and data will be sold by Sears soon for under $1100 list (excluding the
 computer to be used, like a Mac or IBM PC), and includes a dictionary,
 thesaurus, zip code book, collection of business form letters, spelling
 corrector, usage corrector, Chicago Style Manual, etc.  All of these
 are instantly accessible from the word processor with only a few
 key strokes.
3) RCA (owned by GE) has been working on special graphics/video chips.
 Until recently, compact disks could store in digital form 1 hour of
 music, or 30 seconds of full motion video.  RCA uses supercomputers to
 compress 1 hour of video, store it on a compact disc in digital form
 to be mixed with sound, graphics, data, text.  They play it back in
 real time with the help of 2 new chips which can wrap video onto wireframe
 forms. One chip is a special video processor running at 12.5 MIPW
 forms. One chip is a special video processor running at 12.5 MIPS.
 It looks like this will revolutionize computer instruction, games, etc.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 87 00:36:20 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <walker@flash.bellcore.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information on the ACL Europe Copenhagen Conference, 1-3 April 1987
-BODY-
      ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS: EUROPEAN CHAPTER
                 Third Conference and General Meeting
               April 1-3 1987, University of Copenhagen

Due to communication problems, the first registration circular announcing
the Conference did not get sent to most ACL members.  The attached
information contains the programme, which was just released, together
with information on registration (which because of the short time must
now be down at the meeting) and hotels.  For further information,
contact: Bente Maegaard (ACL)
	 IAML
	 Njalsgade 96
	 DK-2300 Kobenhavn S, DENMARK
	 45-1-542 211, x2478
	 Bente_Maegaard_eurotra-dk%eurokom@mit-multics.arpa



                 	PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

                  	  Wednesday April 1

 9.30 Opening
10.00 Invited paper: Laurence Danlos, Paris
Coffee
11.15 Invited paper: Martin Kay, Palo Alto
Lunch (can be bought in the University cafeteria)

In the following there will be 2 parallel sessions A and B.

Session 1: 13.30-15.30

A: Ritchie, Black, Pulman, Russell: Formalisms for Morphographemic Description
   Russo: A Rule Based System for the Morphologic and Morphosyntactic Analysis
	of the Italian Language
   Lau, Perschke: Morphology in the Eurotra Base Level Concept
   Ralli, Galiotou: A Morphological Processor for Modern Greek
B: Atwell: How to detect Grammatical Errors in a Text without Parsing It
   Menzel: Automated Reasoning about Natural Language Correctness
   Casajuana, Rodriguez, Sopena, Villar: Towards an Integrated Environment
	for Spanish Document Verification and Composition
   Atwell, Drakos: Pattern Recognition Applied to the Acquisition of a
	Grammatical Classification System from Unrestricted English Text

Session 2: 16.00-17.30

A: Boguraev, Carter, Briscoe: A Multi-Purpose Interface to an On-line
Dictionary
   Daelemans: A Tool for the Automatic Creation, Extention and Updating of
	Lexical Knowledge Bases
   Costantini, Fent, Fum, Guida, Montanari, Tasso: Parsing with Multiple
	Knowledge Sources: An Experiment in Distributed Cooperative Text
	Understanding
B: D'Orta, Ferreti, Martelli, Scarci: An Automatic Speech Recognition System
	for Italian Language
   Ehrlich: Multilevel Semantic Analysis in an Automatic Speech Understanding
	and Dialogue System
   Martelli: Stochastic Modelling of Language via Sentence-Space Partitioning

Reception offered by the Faculty of Humanities

                          Thursday April 2

Session 3: 9.00-10.00

A: Wood, Horsfall, Holden, Chandler, Carroll, Pollard: Dictionary Organisation
	for Machine Translation: the Experiments and Implications of the UMIST
	Japanese Project
   Schmidt: The Syntactic Component of the German EUROTRA System
B: Ahrenberg: Parsing into Discourse Object Descriptions
   Hess: Descriptional Anaphora in a Discourse Representation Theory

Session 4: 10.00-11.00

A: Sgall, Panevova: Machine Translation, Linguistics and Interlingua
   Hajicova, Kirchner: Fail-Soft ("Emergency") Measures in a
Production-Oriented
	MT System
B: Kilbury: A Proposal for Modifications in the Formalism of GPSG
   Zaharin: String-Tree Correspondence Grammar: A Declarative Grammar Formalism
	for Tree Manipulation and for Defining String-Tree Correspondence

Session 5: 11.30-12.30

A: Kjarsgaard: REFTEX - a Context-Based Translation Aid
   Hajic: RUSLAN - a System of MT between Closely Related Languages
B: Rue: Danish Field Grammar Implemented in Typed Prolog
   Corluy, Baschung, Bes, Guillotin: Auxiliaries and Clitics in French UCG
	Grammar

Session 6: 14.00-15.30

A: Landsbergen: Controlled M-Grammars in the Rosetta System
   Apello, Fellinger: Subgrammars and Rule Classes in the Rosetta Translation
	System
   Petitpierre, Krauwer, Arnold, Varile: A Model for Preference
B: Schmauks: Natural and Simulated Pointing, An Interdisciplinary Survey
   Decitre, Grossi, Jullien, Solvay: Planning for Problem Formulation in
	Advice-Giving Dialogue
   Bienkowski: Modeling Extemporeaneous Elaboration

Demonstrations from 16.00

                            Friday April 3

Session 7: 9.00-10.30

A: Ferrari, Marino, Spiezio, Prodanof: An Efficient Context-Free Parser for
	Augmented Phrase Structure Grammars
   Bunt: Discontinuous Constituents in Trees, Rules and Parsing
   Briscoe: Deterministic Parsing and Unbounded Dependencies
B: Black: Acquisition of Conceptual Data Models from Natural Language
	Descriptions
   Velardi, Pazienza: A Structured Representation of Word-Senses for Semantic
	Analysis
   Colban, Fenstad: Situations and Prepositional Phrases

Session 8: 11.00-12.30

A: Valkonen, Jappinen, Lehtola: Blackboard Approach for Dependency Parsing -
	a Step towards Declarative Modelling
   Wiren: Evaluating the Efficiency of Different Rule Innovation Strategies
	in Chart Parsing
   Stock: Coping with Dynamic Syntactic Strategies: An Experimental
	Environment for an Experimental Parser
B: Nakhimovsky: Temporal Reasoning in Natural Language Understanding
   Van Eynde: A Model-Theoretic Analysis of Iterativity and Habituality
	Expressions in Natural Languages
   Danieli, Ferrara, Gemello, Rullent: Integrating Semantics and Flexible
	Syntax by Exploiting Isomorphism between Grammatical and Semantical
   	Relations

Session 9: 14.00-15.30

A: Binot: Fragmentation and Part of Speech Disambiguation
   Gibbon: Finite State Processing of Tone Systems
   Kalman: Representation of Feature Systems in a Non-Connectionist Molecular
	Machine
B: Kunze: Some Remarks on Case Relations
   Pulman: Passives and Prepositional Phrases
   Reimann: Dealing with the Notion "Obligatory" in Syntactic Analysis

ACL European Chapter Meeting
Closing Session


The conference will be held at the University of Copenhagen (Amager),
Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, DENMARK, which is about 10 minutes
by bus from the center of the city.

REGISTRATION will take place on March 31 from 17 p.m. to 21 p.m., at
the Institute of Applied and Mathematical Linguistics (Institut for
Anvendt og Matematisk Lingvistik=IAML), University of Copenhagen/Amager,
room 6.3.65 (stairway 6, third floor, room 65).  The registration room
will be easily found if you enter the university by the main entrance
(Njalsgade 80) and follow the signs.  It will also be possible to
register on April 1st from 8.30 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. or, if necessary,
during the conference.

HOTELS: A wide range of hotels are available; reservations can be
made through travel agents, directly to hotels or on application to
Hotelbooking Kobenhavn, Hovedbanegarden, DK-1570 Kobenhavn V;
telephone (45-1) 122880, Monday-Friday 9am-5pm.

(prices in Danish Kroners; * includes breakfast):
                      Number     single       double
                      of beds    room         room
                      total      with         with
                                 bath         bath
Hotel Astoria           153      595-795*     740-890*
Banegardspladsen 4
DK-1570 Kobenhavn V
45-1 14 14 19

Copenhagen Admiral      815      465-605      675-775
Toldbodgade 42-28
DK-1253 Kobenhavn K
45-1 11 82 82

Hotel Danmark           80       420*         650
Vester Voldgade 89
DK-1552 Kobenhavn V
45-1 11 48 06

Missionshotellet        216      330-500*     750-850*
Hebron
Helgolandsgade 4
DK-1653 Kobenhavn V
45-1 31 69 06

71 Nyhavn Hotel         110      770-1070*    1000-1350*
Nyhavn 71
DK-1051 Kobenhavn K
45-1 11 85 85

SAS Royal Hotel         453      1225*        1500*
Hammerichsgade 1
DK-1611 Kobenhavn V
45-1 14 14 12

SAS Scandinavia         875      1125-1550    1325-1750
Amager Boulevard 70
DK-2300 Kobenhavn S
45-1 11 23 24
(within walking distance from the University)

Hotel Amager            26       300-350      400-450
Amagerbrogade 19
DK-2300 Kobenhavn S
45-1 54 40 08
(within walking distance from the University)

Savoy Hotel             142      400           600-800
Vesterbrogade 34
DK-1620 Kobenhavn V
45-1 31 40 73

Hotel Sonne              65      190-210       290-340
Egilsgade 33			 without       without
DK-2300 Kobenhavn S              bath          bath
45-1 54 44 44

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
6
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 87 02:15:25 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <LAWS@sri-stripe.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: seeking dictionary with part-of-speech noted
-BODY-
    I am in search of a machine readable dictionary or lexicon with
part-of-speech denoted.  Anybody know of one?

    The purpose is to create a fact database in prolog as part of
a `natural language' interface.  Any comments?

>-
       Dave Stoffel (703) 790-5357
       seismo!mimsy!dave
       dave@Mimsy.umd.edu
       Amber Research Group, Inc.

[Note: a reply appeared in digest NL-KR recently.  Also, we are getting very
close to finishing the Collins Dictionary of the English Language lexicon
here, which will be in the form of Prolog facts and will include
POS information.  It should be available from Oxford Text Archive
after we send it to them. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 87 02:15:32 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <LAWS@sri-stripe.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: AI bibliographies
-BODY-
Does anyone have a file containing all the titles of papers published
in the leading AI sources e.g. Journal, IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI etc.?  It
would be nice to do a string search for certain topics and find relevant
papers instantly.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 87 02:35:32 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <LAWS@sri-stripe.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: computer science seminar
-BODY-
Dr. Steven Pollitt of the Dept. of Computer Studies and Mathematics,
Huddersfield Polytechnic (UK) will give a seminar on Monday, March 23,
11:30 a.m., in the Colloquium Room of the Chase building at Dalhousie
University.  Dr. Pollitt is currently doing research in information retieval
at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

The seminar in entitled, "CANSEARCH and Knowledge-Based Intermediary Systems."
It is concerned with the building of a knowledge-based intermediary system
for end-user searching of the cancer therapy literature references stored
in the MEDLINE database.

The seminar is sponsered by the Computing Science Division of Dalhousie.
For more information contact Mike Shepherd, 424-2572.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 87 22:16:43 est
-FROM-
From: foxea@vtvax5
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Front section of next ACM SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
 Fall 86 / Winter 87 ACM SIGIR Forum
Page 1     Table of Contents

SIGIR NEWS
From the Editor      1
Growth of IRList Digest    1
From the Treasurer    2
Reminder!  1987 Int'l Conf. on R&D in IR, New Orleans  2
New Arrangement between SIGIR and IP&M  3
Conference Reports
	Conf. on R&D in IR, Pisa Italy, 1986  4
	1st Int. Conf. on Expert Database Systems,
                 South Carolina, 1986     6
NSF  Awards     11
Articles
	Van Rijsbergen    23
	Frakes   30
	Marcus   37
Abstracts of Articles in IR Area
	Selected by G. Salton  39
	Selected by M. Wyle    51
Announcements
	Chemical Structures 61
	Santa Cruz          62
	Join SIGIR          63
SIGIR Order Form    64

____________________________________________________________________________

Page 2     From the Editor


	As can be seen from the size of this Forum, information
retrieval is an area of growing importance.  Costs are
growing, as indicated in the special message from our
Treasurer (see page 2).  Interest in our work is growing, as
evidenced by a new special relationship recently established
with Information Processing and Management  (see page 3)
and by the growth of membership in IRList (see below).
Many of the awards recently made by the National Science
Foundation are tied in with research in information retrieval
(see pages 11-22).  We hope SIGIR will grow in membership
rapidly too -- please make copies of the form on page 63 and
distribute it widely to those who might become members.

	There are also changes.  Several revised addresses and
other differences can be seen in the inside front cover.  The
parts of the National Science Foundation relating to
information retrieval have been reorganized; our field is now
more closely allied with knowledge and data bases.  [There is
now a Division of Information, Robotics, and Intelligent
Systems with programs on Information Impact, Interactive
Systems, Knowledge and Database Systems, and Robotics and
Machine Intelligence.]  The conference report on pages 4-10
about expert database systems should therefore be of
particular interest.  The article by C.J. Van Rijsbergen reflects
a shift in approach to retrieval problems.  It appeared in the
Proceedings of the Pisa Conference, which can be ordered
from ACM (see form on page 64).  Abstracts of other
presentations from that Proceedings appear on pages 45-50.
The article by William Frakes suggests that information
retrieval can be important in software engineering, and the
article by Richard Marcus gives insights based on use of
information retrieval in corporate libraries.

	Remember to come to the 1987 SIGIR International
Conference in New Orleans -- see the reminder on page 2.
Also, remember to send in book reviews, articles, abstracts,
dissertation abstracts, announcements, or other items of
interest.  Please provide camera ready single spaced copy --
this issue was held up because many items had to be retyped to
save pages.

	Please contribute and help SIGIR grow!
	          Ed Fox, Co-Editor

   _____________________________________

       Growth of IRList Digest

     IRList Digest, an electronic digest encouraged by ACM
SIGIR, has grown since its inception in August 1985 so that
now there are hundreds of readers around the world.  Volume
1 had 28 issues, and Volume 2 (for 1986) had 71.  There are
subscribers on the DARPA Internet, the UUCP network,
BITNET, CSNET, and many other networks that have
gateways to one or more of these.  Abstracts, articles,
announcements, calls for papers, questions, discussions,
bibliographies and important mailing issues are included.
New members are encouraged; just send an electronic message
indicating what network you are on, and what your complete
address is.  However, if you are at a site that currently receives
IRList and has a local redistribution list, then you can ask your
computer system manager instead to add you locally.

    Please use IRList as your discussion list, to help with the
growth and development of SIGIR!

	Ed Fox
	IRList Editor
	BITNET: fox@vtcs1 or foxea@vtvax3	CSNET: fox@vt
	Internet: fox@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu	UUCPnet: seismo!vtopus!fox


____________________________________________________________________________

Page 2     From the Treasurer


     The SIGIR dues of $6.00 for a regular membership have been held constant
for many years, making us one of the least expensive SIGs to belong to.  During
this time our expenses have risen, including theoverhead charge applied to us
by the ACM headquarters.  This charge is currently $5.00 per year per member.
The average cost of a newsletter is $2.00 per subscriber.  This puts our costs
this year (including 3 newsletters) at well over $11.00 per member, creating a
projected deficit of over $15,000, and bringing our reserve to a dangerous
level.  Obviously we cannot continue at this level of deficit spending, and
are therefore asking approval from the SIG Board for a raise in dues to the
following schedule.

	Regular members      	$	12.00
	Associate members     		12.00
	Student members        	         6.00
	Designees             		12.00
	Non-ACM members       		40.00
	Subscriptions         		24.00

This increase will allow us to have a balanced budget next
year.

	I feel that these dues are still a bargain, expecially
considering the three vastly improved newsletters this year,
including interesting articles and conference/workshop
reports, timely information on conference programs and NSF
grants, and many pointers to current journal articles pertinent
to our field.  Obtaining a balanced budget is a first step
towards providing more service to our members.

       Donna Harman, Treasurer

     _________________

REMINDER!!!

1987 ACM SIGIR INT'L CONFERENCE on
R&D in INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

	This conference will be held in the Monteleone Hotel in
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA on June 3-5, 1987.   This
conference is sponsored by ACM/SIGIR  in  cooperation with
BCS/IRSG,  AICA,  and IMAG.  It is supported by OCLC, Inc.
and System  Development  Foundation, with other support
being generated.  The topics to be covered by the conference
include retrieval  system  modeling,  system development and
evaluation, knowledge representation, multimedia  retrieval,
cognitive and semantic  models,  user interfaces,  natural
language processing, linguistic models, storage and search
techniques, retrieval system performance, retrieval in office
environments,  mathematical  models, hardware
developments, complexity problems, and  information
retrieval  and  database management. The Technical Program
Committee is being co-chaired by C. J. "Keith" van
Rijsbergen and Clement Yu; in addition, the members include
Abraham Bookstein, Yves Chiaramella, Jochum Friedbert, W.
S.  Luk, Fausto Rabitti,  Nick Cerone, Martha Evens, Richard
Frost, Michael McGill, Gerard Salton, Michael Wong, Stavros
Christodoulakis, Aviezri  Fraenkel, Tetsuro Ito, Esen
Ozkarahan, and Peter Scheuermann.

 Donald H. Kraft, Professor and Chairman
 ACM/SIGIR Conference Chair
 LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
 Department of Computer Science
 298 Coates Hall
 Baton Rouge, LA  70803-4020
 (504) 388-1495
	kraft%lsu@csnet-relay.arpa


____________________________________________________________________________

Page 4     NEW ARRANGEMENT BETWEEN SIGIR AND IP&M


I. ANNOUNCEMENT

ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information
Retrieval) has many members involved or interested in
research activities.  Some of those members receive news
through IRList Digest, but only if they have access to a
computer network reachable from BITNET or the DARPA
Internet.  All SIGIR members receive the Forum, which is an
unrefereed newsletter.  As a additional aid to SIGIR members,
and to better serve the readers of "Information Processing and
Management," an international journal published by
Pergamon Press, a new arrangement has been established
between ACM SIGIR and IP&M.

1) Pages Set Aside
  Since SIGIR members are actively involved in research that
is of interest to IP&M readers, there will be a number of pages
set aside each year for SIGIR use.  Some of the possibilities are
listed below; other suggestions are welcome.

2) SIGIR Meetings
  IP&M will publish selected papers from SIGIR meetings, and
will if agreeable to all, publish a special issue where such
papers are assembled.

3) Special Issues
  IP&M is interested in special issues on topics related to SIGIR
members' work and/or broader interests.  An example of this
is the special issue on "Artificial Intelligence and Information
Retrieval" now being assembled by W. Bruce Croft.  An
editor can be appointed for other such issues when a suitable
topic is identified.

4) Articles
  IP&M is interested in receiving other articles from SIGIR
members. They should be sent to the Liason (see 7 below) and
will be reviewed by at least 2 referees in standard fashion.
Submissions to SIGIR Forum that have such potential will be
screened with this in mind.

5) Camera Ready Publications
  Brief communications can appear quickly in IP&M if sent in
camera ready form -- providing a fast publication outlet.

6) Announcments
  IP&M is willing to publish SIGIR announcements such as
calls for papers, free of charge.

7) Liason
  Dr. Edward A. Fox has been appointed to serve on the
editorial board of IP&M.  He will serve as a liason between
SIGIR and IP&M.  He can be contacted to receive submissions
of any of the types mentioned above, or for other related
matters.  Correspondence should be sent to
	Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061


II. CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

In light of the above arrangements, a call is hereby made to all
SIGIR members to send in articles, announcements,
suggestions for special issues, or other comments relating to
this new arrangement.  Please communicate directly with the
Liason and be sure to indicate that you wish your submission to be
considered for IP&M.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 87 16:43:45 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
   Date: Tuesday, 3 March 1987  15:52-EST
   From: JHC at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU
   Subject:   Revolving Seminar (wednesday)
   - - - -
   Wednesday,  4   March   2:00pm  Room: NE43-8th floor playroom


               Natural Object Categorization

                     Aaron F. Bobick
                Stanford Research Institute

One of the most commonly proposed goals of a perceptual system is that
of object recognition.  Yet, to date, we have been unable to define
precisely what the task of recognition really entails.  In this talk I
will provide a definition of recognition in terms of classifying
objects into natural categories and I will discuss some of the issues
relating to the discovery of these categories.  A procedure for
recovering good perceptual categories which is based upon the
uncertainty of categorical inferences will be presented; one important
property of this procedure is that the vaildity of the recovered
categories can be tested explicitly.  This procedure has been tested
in the domains of leaves (using descriptions, not images), soybean
diseaes (Michalski's data), and bacterial infections.  Finally, some
potential extensions of this work will be related to the machine
learning literature.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
7
-DATE-
Date:    Fri, 20 Mar 87 16:12 PST
-FROM-
From:    IBQ1JVR@UCLAMVS
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SIG IR list
-BODY-
Would you kindly add me to the SIG IR list?
And if you are aware of other BBS on expert systems
I'd appreciate knowing about them too.
John Richardson, Associate Professor
UCLA GSLIS
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA  90024

[Note: AI in general is covered by AIList which has daily messages and
can be requested from ailist-request@sri-stripe.arpa while natural
language and knowledge representation is covered by less frequent
digests sent from nl-kr-request@cs.rochester.edu - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 87 00:49:21 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <<@wiscvm.wisc.edu:EMAILDEV@ukacrl.bitnet>>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: COMP LING POST AT UMIST
-BODY-
Dear colleague,

I would be grateful if you could bring this advertisement to the attention
of your colleagues.

Many thanks,

John McNaught
Lecturer


*****************************************************************

  UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
                             (UMIST)

             Department of Language and Linguistics
            and Centre for Computational Linguistics

                         SENIOR LECTURER


An  opportunity  exists  for  an experienced scholar  to  take  a
leading  role  in the Centre's modest undergraduate and  thriving
post-graduate  and  research  activities.    There  are  numerous
research   personnel   engaged  on  a  variety   of   well-funded
multilingual   applications   projects.     Excellent   computing
facilities  are available.   Scope for new initiatives in current
and new areas of research is wide.

The  successful  candidate  will have an excellent  teaching  and
research record,  the ability to organise and lead project teams,
and be committed to furthering the specialised orientation of the
Centre.

Commencing  salary will be on the scale:  14,870 - 18,625 (pounds
sterling) per annum (under review).

Requests  for application forms and further particulars,  quoting
reference LL/1,  should be sent to the Registrar,  UMIST,  PO Box
88,  Manchester M60 1QD, UK.

It is intended  to  appoint for  October 1987,   therefore  early
application  is   advisable.  UMIST  is  an  equal  opportunities
employer.

Technical information may be obtained from John McNaught at:

e-mail: jck%umist.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa
        seismo,mcvax!ukc!uk.ac.umist!jck (uucp)

telephone: +44-61-236-3311 extension 2333

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 87 16:04:50 EST
-FROM-
From: patricia@cs.rochester.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar - Tailoring Object Descriptions to a Users Level of Expertise
-BODY-
 [forwarded from NL-KR Digest (3/18/87 16:28:00)  Volume 2 Number 16]

 SEMINAR
Monday March 23, 1987
11th Floor Lounge
10:30 am

Speaker
Cecile L. Paris
Columbia University

Topic
Tailoring Object Descriptions to a Users Level of Expertise

A question answering program that provides access to a large amount of data
will be most useful if it can tailor its answers to each individual user.  In
particular, a users level of knowledge about the domain of discourse is an
important factor in this tailoring if the answer provided is to be both
informative and understandable to the user.  In this research, we address the
issue of how the users domain knowledge, or the level of expertise, can affect
an answer.  By studying texts we found that the users level of domain
knowledge affected the kind of information provided and not just the amount of
information, as was previously assumed.  Depending on the users assumed domain
knowledge, a description can be either parts-oriented or process-oriented.
Thus the users level of expertise in a domain can guide a system in choosing
the appropriate facts from the knowledge base to include in an answer.  We
propose two distinct descriptive strategies that can be used to generate texts
aimed at naive and expert users.  Users are not necessarily truly expert or
fully naive however, but can be anywhere along a knowledge spectrum whose
extremes are naive and expert.  In this work, we show how our generation
system, TAILOR, can use information about a users level of expertise to
combine several discourse strategies in a single text, choosing the most
appropriate at each point in the generation process, in order to generate
texts for users anywhere along the knowledge spectrum.  TAILORs ability to
combine discourse strategies based on a user model allows for the generation
of a wider variety of texts and the most appropriate one for the user.

This research was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency

Refreshments  will be served in the 11th Floor Lounge at 10:15
Wine and Cheese will be served in the 11th Floor Lounge at 5:00 p.m

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 87 19:17:29 est
-FROM-
From: vtcs1::in% <hafner@corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conference on AI and Law - Program and Registration Info
-BODY-
                                 The First
       International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

                             May 27-29, 1987
                 Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

                 Sponsored by: The Center for Law and Computer Science
                               Northeastern University

                 In Co-operation with ACM SIGART

Schedule of Activities:
>---------------------
-END-
  Wednesday, May 27
     8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. - Tutorials
     2:00 p.m. -  6:00 p.m. - Research Presentations (see list below)
     7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. - Welcoming Reception - NU Faculty Center
  Thursday and Friday, May 28-29
     8:30 a.m. -  6:00 p.m. - Research Presentations (continued)
  Thursday evening, May 28 - 7:00 p.m. - Gala Banquet at the Colonnade Hotel
-BODY-
Tutorials:
>--------
-END-
A. "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (For Lawyers)."  Edwina L.
Rissland,
   Associate Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, University of
   Massachusetts at Amherst, and Lecturer in Law, Harvard Law School, will
   present the fundamentals of AI from the perspective of a legal expert.
-BODY-
B. "Applying Artificial Intelligence to Law: Opportunities and Challenges."
   Donald H. Berman, Richardson Professor of Law, and Carole D. Hafner,
   Associate Professor of Computer Science, Northeastern University, will
   survey the past accomplishments and current goals of research in AI and Law.

Panels:
>-----
-END-
 "The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Legal System."  Moderated by
Cary
 G. deBessonet, Director of the Law and Artificial Intelligence Project,
 Louisiana State Law Institute.
-BODY-
 "Modeling the Legal Reasoning Process: Formal and Computational Approaches."
 Moderated by L. Thorne McCarty, Professor of Computer Science and Law, Rutgers
 University.

List of Research Presentations: (final schedule is not yet determined)
>--------------------
-END-
 "Expert Systems in Law: The Datalex Project"
 Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray, Alan L. Tyree
 Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, AUSTRALIA
-BODY-
 "The Application of Expert Systems Technology to Case-Based Law"
 J.C. Smith, Cal Deedman
 Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia, CANADA

 "Legal Reasoning in 3-D"
 Marvin Belzer
 Advanced Computational Methods Center
 University of Georgia, USA

 "Explanation for an Expert System that Performs Estate Planning"
 Dean A. Schlobohm, Donald A. Waterman
 Moraga, California, USA

 "Expert Systems in Law: Out of the Research Laboratory and into the
 Marketplace"
 Richard E. Susskind
 Ernst & Whinney
 London, ENGLAND

 "An Expert System for Screening Employee Pension Plans for the
 Internal Revenue Service"
 Gary Grady, Ramesh S. Patil
 Internal Revenue Service
 Washington, D.C. USA

 "Conceptual Legal Document Retrieval Using the RUBRIC System"
 Richard M. Tong, Clifford A. Reid, Peter R. Douglas, Gregory J. Crowe
 Advanced Decision Systems
 Mountain View, California USA

 "Conceptual Retrieval and Case Law"
 Judith P. Dick
 Faculty of Library and Information Science, University of Toronto
 Toronto, Ontario CANADA
 "A Process Specification of Expert Lawyer Reasoning"
 D. Peter O'Neill
 Harvard Law School
 Cambridge, Massachusetts USA

 "Conceptual Organization of Case Law Knowledge Bases"
 Carole D. Hafner
 The Center for Law and Computer Science, Northeastern University
 Boston, Massachusetts USA

 "A Case-Based System for Trade Secrets Law"
 Edwina L. Rissland Kevin D. Ashley
 Department of Computer and Information Science,
 University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts USA

 "But, See, Accord: Generating Blue Book Citations in HYPO"
 Kevin D. Ashley, Edwina L. Rissland
 Department of Computer and Information Science
 University of Massachusetts, Amherst Massachusetts USA

 "A Connectionist Approach to Conceptual Information Retrieval"
 Richard K. Belew
 Computer Science and Engineering Department, Univ. of California
 San Diego, California USA

 "System = Program + Programmers + Law"
 Naftaly H. Minsky, David Rozenshtein
 Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University
 New Brunswick, New Jersey USA

 "A Natural Language Based Legal Expert System Project for Consultation
 and Tutoring -- The LEX Project"
 F. Haft, R.P. Jones, Th. Wetter
 IBM Heidelberg Scientific Centre
 Heidelberg, WEST GERMANY

 "Handling of Significant Deviations from Boilerplate Text in the SPADES
 System"
 Gary Morris, Keith Taylor, Maury Harwood
 Internal Revenue Service
 Washington, D.C. USA

 "Legal Data Modeling: The Prohibited Transaction Exemption Analyst"
 Keith Bellairs
 Management Science Department, University of Minnesota
 Minneapolis, Minnesota USA

 "Reasoning about `Hard' Cases in Talmudic Law
 Steven Weiner
 Somerville, Massachusetts USA

 "Designing Text Retrieval Systems for `Conceptual Searching'"
 Jon Bing
 Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law
 Oslo, NORWAY

 "Support for Policy Makers: Formulating Legislation with the Aid of
 Logical Models"
 T.J.M. Bench-Capon
 Department of Computing, Imperial College
 London, ENGLAND

 "Further Comments on McCarty's Semantics for Deontic Logic"
 Andrew J.I. Jones
 University of Oslo
 Oslo, NORWAY

 "Experiments Using Expert Systems Technology for Teaching Law: Special
 Knowledge Representation Approaches in DEFAULT and EVAN"
 Roger D. Purdy
 School of Law, The University of Akron
 Akron, Ohio USA

 "OBLOG-2: A Hybrid Knowledge Representation System for Defeasible Reasoning"
 Thomas F. Gordon
 FS-INFRE, GMD
 Sankt Augustin, WEST GERMANY

 "ESPLEX: A Rule and Conceptual Model for Representing Statutes"
 Carlo Biogioli, Paola Mariana, Daniela Tiscornia
 Istituto per la Documentazione Giuridica
 Florence, ITALY

 "A PROLOG Model of the Income Tax Act of Canada"
 David M. Sherman
 Maintnix Services
 Thornhill, Ontario CANADA

 "Some Problems in Designing Expert Systems to Aid Legal Reasoning"
 Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon
 Law School, The University of Michigan
 Ann Arbor, Michigan USA

 "Precedent-Based Legal Reasoning and Knowledge Acquisition in Contract Law:
 A Process Model"
 Seth R. Goldman, Michael G. Dyer, Margot Flowers
 Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of California, Los Angeles
 Los Angeles, California USA

 "Logic Programming for Large Scale Applications in Law: A Formalism of
 Supplementary Benefit Legislation"
 T.J.M. Bench-Capon, G.O. Robinson, T.W. Routen, M.J. Sergot
 Department of Computing, Imperial College
 London, ENGLAND
___________________________________________________________________________

 Program Committee                  Conference Information
 -----------------                  ----------------------
   L.Thorne McCarty, Chair          Prof. Carole D. Hafner, Conference Chair
   Donald H. Berman                 (617) 437-5116
   Michael G. Dyer                  Ms. Rita Laffey, Registration
   Anne v.d. L. Gardner             (617) 437-3346
   Edwina L. Rissland
   Marek J. Sergot

 Housing Information
 -------------------
-END-
   Special Conference Rates are available at the following hotels:
   (Mention "Northeastern University Computers and Law Conference")
-BODY-
   1. The Colonnade Hotel - $75 single/$95 double + tax ($8 parking)
      120 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA (617) 424-7000
   2. The Midtown Hotel - $58 single/$63 double + tax (includes free parking)
      220 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA (617) 262-1000 or 1-800-343-1177

  Both of these hotels are less than a 10-minute walk from the Conference.

  Rooms have also been arranged at Boston University dormitories, a
  20-minute walk from the conference, or a 10-minute bus ride and a 5-minute
  walk.  The rates are $29 single/$24 (per person) double.  To reserve a
  room in the dormitory, use the attached registration form.
               SPACE IS LIMITED - RESERVE EARLY!!
____________________________________________________________________________

                                 REGISTRATION FORM

                                          Make checks payable to:
Name____________________________________   Northeastern University - ICAIL
Address_________________________________  Mail to:
________________________________________   The Center for Law and Computer Sci.
________________________________________   Northeastern University
________________________________________   Boston, MA 02115


Conference Registration Fee (does not include tutorial or banquet)
                                Regular     Full-time Student     Amt. Enclosed
                                -------     -----------------
    Received by April 20           $95            $55
    Received after April 20       $135            $85               __________


Gala Banquest - May 28 ($40/person) Number of tickets __            __________

Tutorial Fee: ($50 with conference registration $100 otherwise)     __________
    Tutorial (select one):
 __ A. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (For Lawyers)
 __ B. Applying Artificial Intelligence to Law: Opporunities
       and Challenges

Dormitory Reservations:
 Arrival Date: ______ Departure Date: _______ Number of Nights _____
 Type of Room: Single__  Double __
  If double, please indicate sex, and smoking/non-smoking, or give
   name of pre-arranged room-mate __________________________________

 Dormitory Fee ($29/night single, $24/night double)                 __________

                                        TOTAL AMOUNT ENCLOSED       __________


>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
8
-DATE-
Date: 9 Mar 87 14:50:04 EST
-FROM-
From: Edward.Gibson@cad.cs.cmu.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Information retrieval by Text Skimming
-BODY-
[forwarded from NL-KR Digest (3/13/87 14:47:48)  Volume 2 Number 14]

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS RESEARCH SEMINAR
   Speaker:  Michael Mauldin, CMU Computer Science
   Date:     Thursday, March 12
   Time:     12:00 noon
   Place:    Porter Hall 125-C
   Title:    Information Retrieval by Text Skimming.

			   ABSTRACT

I will report on the progress I have made for my thesis entitled
	  ``Information Retrieval by Text Skimming.''

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.

My dissertation is an attempt 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 am implementing 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.  Currently FERRET reads SCI.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.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 87 10:58:32 EST
-FROM-
From: tim@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Tim Finin)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Acquisition of User Models
-BODY-
 [forwarded from AI-ED Digest  Friday, 13 Mar 1987   Volume 2 : Issue 11]

		  Dissertation Proposal Presentation
		   Computer and Information Science
		      University of Pennsylvania

		 IMPLICIT ACQUISITION OF USER MODELS
		   IN COOPERATIVE ADVISORY SYSTEMS

			     Robert Kass

User modelling systems to date have relied heavily on user models which
were hand crafted for use in a particular situation.  Recently,
attention has focused on the feasibility of General User Models,
models which can be transferred from one situation to another with
little or no modification.  Such a general user model could be
implemented as a modular component which can then be easily integrated
into diverse systems.  This paper addresses one class of general user
models, those which are general with respect to the underlying domain of
the application.  In particular, a domain independent user modelling
module for cooperative advisory systems is discussed.

A major problem in building user models is the difficulty of acquiring
information about the user.  Traditional approaches have relied heavily
on information which is pre-encoded by the system designer.  For a user
model to be domain independent, acquisition of knowledge will have to be
done implicitly, i.e., knowledge about the user must be acquired
during his interaction with the system.

The research proposed in this paper focuses on domain independent
implicit user model acquisition techniques for cooperative advisory
systems.  These techniques have been formalized as a set of model
acquisition rules which will serve as the basis for the implementation
of the model acquisition portion of a general user modelling module.
The acquisition rules have been developed by studying a large number
of conversations between advice-seekers and an expert.  The rules
presented are capable of supporting most of the modelling requirements
of the expert in these conversations.  Future work includes implementing
these acquisition rules in a general user modelling module to test their
effectiveness and domain independence.

                      10:00 am Wednesday, March 18
			      Moore 554

		Committee: Tim Finin (advisor)
	   		   Aravind Joshi
			   Bonnie Webber
			   Elaine Rich (MCC)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 87 16:46:45 EST
-FROM-
From: tim@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Tim Finin)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Colloquim: Applying Precedents in a Case-Based Reasoner
-BODY-
 [forwarded from NL-KR Digest  (3/18/87 22:13:11)  Volume 2 Number 17]

			      Colloquium
		   Computer and Information Science
		      University of Pennsylvania

         "Applying Relevant Precedents in a Case-Based Reasoning System"
                         Kevin D. Ashley
             Department of Computer and Information Science
                University of Massachusetts at Amherst

The law is an excellent domain to study Case-Based Reasoning (``CBR")
problems since it espouses a doctrine of precedent in which prior
cases are the primary tools for justifying legal conclusions. The law
is also a paradigm for adversarial CBR; there are ``no right answers",
only arguments pitting interpretations of cases and facts against each
other.

This talk will demonstrate techniques employed in the HYPO program for
representing and applying case precedents and hypothetical cases to
assist an attorney in evaluating and making arguments about a new fact
situation.  HYPO performs case-based reasoning and, in particular,
models legal reasoning in the domain of trade secrets law. HYPO's key
elements include: (1) a structured case knowledge base (``CKB") of
actual legal cases; (2) an indexing scheme (``dimensions") for
retrieval of relevant precedents from the CKB; (3) techniques for
analyzing a current fact situation (``cfs"); (4) techniques for
``positioning" the cfs with respect to relevant precedent cases in the
CKB and finding the most on point cases (``mopc"); (5) techniques for
manipulating cases (e.g., citing, distinguishing, hybridizing); (6)
techniques for perturbing the cfs to generate hypotheticals that test
the sensitivity of the cfs to changes, particularly with regard to
potentially adverse effects of new damaging facts coming to light and
existing favorable ones being discredited; and (7) the use of ``3-ply"
argument snippets to dry run and debug an argument.

An extended example of HYPO in action on a sample trade secrets case
will be presented. The example will demonstrate how HYPO uses
``dimensions", ``case-analysis-record" and ``claim lattice" mechanisms
to perform indexing and relevancy assessment of precedent cases
dynamically and how it compares and contrasts cases to come up with
the best precedents pro and con a decision.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 17 Mar 87 10:37:44 EST
-FROM-
From: Jeffrey.Bonar@isl1.ri.cmu.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Ted Selker talk
-BODY-
  [forwarded from AI-ED Digest  Thursday, 19 Mar 1987  Volume 2 : Issue 12]

Joint Learning Research and Development Center - Computer
Science Seminar on Human-Computer Interaction will be given by Ted Selker
of IBM Watson Research Laboratories.  The talk will be on Monday, March 23,
at 11:00am in the second floor Auditorium of the Learning Research and
Development Center on the Pitt campus.  The abstract appears below.

_________________________________________________________________________

     Adaptive User Models: A New Paradigmn for User Interface

                            Ted Selker

               IBM  T. J. Watson Research Laboratories
                    Yorktown NY, Selker@IBM.com


  This  talk will  be about  a paradigm  for using  Artificial
  Intelligence  (AI) learning  technology  for improving  user
  interfaces.  AI research efforts have produced flexible and powerful
  programming environments and knowledge representation languages that
  are  so complex that they take months to master.  Current
  Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) systems are not good at teaching
  people how to use complex systems.  CAI systems have a
  tendency to concentrate on comprehensive teaching at the expense of
  user exploration and discovery.  We believe that interfaces for
  complex system can be built which offer users learning support
  when needed it without interrupting user tasks.

  Cognitive Adaptive Computer Help (COACH) is a system for programming in
  LISP that embodies these ideas.  The system creates a model of the user
  in an attempt to understand a user's needs.  COACH watches a
  programmer's progress, providing them with syntax examples and insight
  into the philosophical uderpinnings of LISP as they need  it.  It
  ceases to interfere in places where a user has demonstrated expertise.
  COACH text reappears when a programmer once again needs help.
  Whether giving help (user initiated explanation), or acting as an
  advisor (COACH initiated  explanation), COACH presents information
  at the syntactic level at which a user has shown competence.  COACH was
  written in Commonlisp with Flavors to run on a Symbolics 3645.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:  Tue, 17-MAR-1987 08:32 EST
-FROM-
From:   <FOXEA%VTVAX3.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  talk at Univ. of Chicago Graduate Library School 4/9/87
-BODY-
Title --
Experimental Systems for Testing the Applicability of Advanced Retrieval
Methods: Lessons Learned from the SMART and CODER Systems
Speaker -- Edward A. Fox, Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Tech

Abstract --
        In recent years it has been repeatedly shown that
conventional information storage and retrieval methods,
generally used for searching bibliographic databases or online
public access catalogs (OPACs), are not very effective in finding
all and only those items that are relevant to a user's needs.
Building upon several different theories, experimental systems
have been developed that achieve a much higher level of performance.
        The SMART system, which originated in the 1960's, was
redone in the early 1980's to operate in the UNIX environment
and to facilitate testing of theories based on probability and
statistics approaches.  Originally developed at Cornell
University, SMART has been used at a number of locations.
Modifications have been made at Virginia Tech to support
searching of a large OPAC, so the relative effectiveness of
advanced methods can for the first time be compared in a large,
realistic test environment.
        The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective
Retrieval) project was launched at Virginia Tech in 1984 to
develop a more flexible testbed than SMART, that would allow
exploration of the use of various artificial intelligence
methods for information analysis and retrieval.  A few of the
present plans are to extend the system to use large collections
stored on CD ROM, and to compare the effect of different user
models on the ability of CODER to adapt to the varying interaction
styles and needs of end users.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 87 07:59:44 est
From: vtcs1::in% <walker@flash.bellcore.com>
Subject: Announcement and Call for Papers for COLING-88

				  COLING-88
	  12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
		     22-27 August 1988, Budapest, Hungary

		       ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS


Papers are invited on all aspects of computational linguistics in a broad
sense, including but not limited to:

> theoretical issues of CL in its relations to linguistics, mathematics,
  computer science and cognitive science
> computational models of (sub)systems of natural language and of human
  communication (phonemics, morphemic, syntax, semantics, pragmatics,
  parsing and generation, discourse, speech acts and planning)
> linguistic contributions to
  - natural language dialog systems, intelligent and cooperative question
    answering
  - machine (aided) translation
  - speech understanding and voice output procedures
  - systems for text generation
  - systems for use and preparation of dictionaries for humans and machines
  - intelligent text editors
> knowledge representation and inferencing
  - language comprehension
  - automatic creation of knowledge bases from texts
> hardware and software support for language data processing
> computational tools for language learning and teaching

Papers should report on substantial, original and unpublished research and
should indicate clearly the position of the work described within the
context of the research in the given domain and emphasize what new results
have been achieved.

Authors should submit four (4) copies of an extended abstract not
exceeding seven (7) double-spaced pages plus a title page including the
name(s) of the author(s), complete address, a short (five-line)
summary, and a specification of the topic area.

Abstracts must be received not later than 10 December 1987 by the
Chairperson of the Program Committee:
			Dr. Eva Hajicova (COLING-88)
			Charles University
			Faculty of Mathematics, Linguistics
			Malostranske n. 25
			CS-118 00 Praha 1, Czechoslovakia

Authors will be notified of acceptance by 28 February 1988.  Camera-ready
copies of final papers must be received by 30 April 1988.

Inquiries about the conference, exhibitions, and demonstrations (live and
video) should be directed to:
			COLING-88 Secretariat
			c/o MTESZ Congress Bureau
			Kossuth ter 6-8
			H-1055 Budapest, Hungary
			telex 225792 MTESZ H

COLING-88 is sponsored by the International Committee on Computational
Linguistics.  It is organized by the John von Neumann Society for
Computing Sciences in cooperation with the Computer and Automation
Institute and the Institute for Linguistics, both of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences.

COLING-88 will be preceded by tutorials and workshops, and immediately
followed by the 3rd EURALEX Congress on all aspects of lexicography,
also to be held in Budapest.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
9
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 87 15:06:40 est
-FROM-
From: kraft@lsu.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: money to support student attendance at the acm/sigir conference
-BODY-
 Date:  April 14, 1987
 From:  Donald H. Kraft, Professor and Chairman
        Department of Computer Science
        LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY
 To:    Students Who Wish to Attend this Conference

I am writing as the Chairman of the  Association  for  Computing  Machinery
(ACM)/  Special  Interest  Group  on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) Interna-
tional Conference on Research and  Development  in  Information  Retrieval,
which  will be held in the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana (USA)
on June 3-5, 1987.  Thanks to a most generous grant  from  Bell  Communica-
tions  Research  (Bellcore),  we  can  support  student  attendance at this
conference.

In order to publicize this support, I am  publishing  this  notice  on  the
IRlist  bulletin  board  in the hopes that all who read it will pass on the
word to those students who are interested in attending.  The  support  will
include the conference registration (which will include a proceedings and a
banquet ticket), and will enable the  attendee  to  attend  all  conference
functions.   In  addition,  we  may  be  able  to help a little towards air
travel, room, and board.

In order to take advantage of this opportunity, please contact me at:
     Professor Donald H. Kraft
     Department of Computer Science
     Louisiana State University
     Baton Rouge, LA  70803-4020
     USA
     (504) 388-1495
     kraft%lsu@csnet-relay

Students, please contact me by May 15, telling me of your desire to  attend
the  conference,  plus  listing approximate expenses needed to allow you to
attend.  Stipend amounts will depend on the need and the availabilities  of
the  funds.   A copy of the program, along with hotel and conference regis-
tration forms, is enclosed for your convenience.


                                  PROGRAM

                 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
          Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR)

International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

    Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana  USA
                              June 3-5, 1987


Co-Sponsored by:
     The British Computer Society (BCS)
     The Italian Computing Society (AICA)

Supported by:
     Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), Inc.
     Systems Development Foundation (SDF)
     Bell Communications Research (Bellcore)
     Dialog




                             REGISTRATION

All attendees, including speakers and session  chairs,  must  register
and  pay  the  appropriate  registration  fee.  A registration form is
attahed to this Program.  Cash is not acceptable; please make out your
check, only in U.S. dollars, payable to ACM IR Conference.

The registration desk will be located on the Mezzanine  Floor  of  the
Monteleone Hotel.  While visiting the registration area, do not forget
to visit the exhibits.  The registration desk will be open to  accomo-
date attendees at the following times:
             Tuesday     June 2, 1987   6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
             Wednesday   June 3, 1987   8:00 am - 5:00 pm
             Thursday    June 4, 1987   8:00 am - 5:00 pm
             Friday      June 5, 1987   8:00 am - 4:00 pm



                            ACCOMODATIONS

The conference is being held in its entirety in the Monteleone  Hotel.
This fine old hotel is located at 214 Rue Royal (Royale Street) in New
Orleans, near Iberville Street; the Zip Code is 70140  and  the  tele-
phone number is (504) 523-3341.



                            MESSAGE BOARD

A bulletin board is located in the registration area.   Attendees  are
encouraged  to  check  periodically for messages at this center.  This
will be the only formal communication mechanism available.



                   WHERE TO DINE AND WHERE TO PARTY

In New Orleans, dining out is a  joyous  social  event,  and  a  major
source of conversation.  It is done very much in the Continental style
>- in an unhurried, leisurely manner.  A meal is to be lingered  over,
commented  on,  savored,  and remembered.  New Orleans serves up some-
thing for everyone - from elegant  French  restaurants  with  gleaming
tile  floors,  crystal  chandeliers and crisp, white napery to simple,
down-home country-kitchen cafes.  Prices and dress codes vary, so  you
may  want  to  do a little investigating before making your selection.
Rarely is a tie needed, especially in  New  Orleans  in  June,  but  a
jacket may be desirable.  Remember that the climate is subtropical; in
the summer, heat and humidity are the rule.  In fact, you may want  to
drag along an umbrella, just in case.  Some New Orleans restaurants do
not take reservations so a long  wait  may  be  in  store  at  popular
places, while reservations are essential at other restaurants.

In the French Quarter, you will be hard put to retrieve the name of  a
bad restaurant.  In fact, there are a number of excellent restaurants,
some with lush, hidden courtyards and wrought-iron balconies  (showing
our  Spanish heritage), others look so seedy they betray the fantastic
quality of food available within its quarters.  A representative  list
of  names  of  top-quality  restaurants  would  have to include: Kajun
Kitchen, K-Paul's Louisiana (the inventor of  blackened  redfish,  the
famous  Paul  Prudhomme,  is  here) Antoine's, Andrew Jackson, Mr. B's
Bistro, Arnaud's, Brennan's (famous for breakfast),  Galatoire's  (one
of Kraft's favorites), Mike Anderson's, Felix's (a superb oyster bar),
Acme Oyster Bar (another superb one across the street  from  Felix's),
Chart  House, and Ralph and Kacoo's.  For those on a restricted budget
or with a desire to  avoid  tourists,  try  Camellia  Grill,  Flagons,
Mandina's, or The Upperline.  Moreover, a short cab ride will take you
to Christian's, Commander's Palace, Corrine Dunbar's, Pascal's Manale,
Delmonico,  The  Pontchartrain  Hotel, Masson's, or Ruth's Chris Steak
House.  Then there is Mosca's and La Ruth's  across  the  river.   The
hotel  itself  has  some lovely spots in which to dine, and our social
events will definitely allow for you to sample the merchandise.

Of course, we have just begun to scratch the surface.  Quite  frankly,
New  Orleans has the best the country has to offer!  For the cost of a
drink, or perhaps for free, some of the natives attending the  confer-
ence  will offer suggestions about what to eat and where, interpreting
words such as creole,  cajun,  etoufee,  jambalaya,  crawfish,  gumbo,
boudin, andouille, poboy, and muffaletta.



                             ATTRACTIONS

The attractions in New Orleans will meet practically anyone's desires.
New Orleans is, after all, "the city that care forgot."  In the French
Quarter, there are shops, fashion boutiques, open air markets, Jackson
Square (with its horse and buggy rides, sidewalk artists, and sidewalk
performers), art galleries, Bourbon Street (madness),  museums,  night
clubs,  and,  of  course,  superb  restaurants.  Along the Mississippi
river front, there is the French Market, the River  Walk,  and  River-
gate.  The Jackson (Jax) Brewery is located on the riverfront and is a
turn-of-the-century brewhouse that has been renovated and now contains
specialty  shops,  food,  and entertainment.  Also, a stroll along the
river could even hold the promise of a romantic boat  cruise  for  the
adventurous  with  some  time.  Then, there is the Cafe du Monde, with
its cafe au lait and French Market doughnuts (beignets).

For those of you that wish to venture outside of the  French  Quarter,
attractions  would  include  Canal  Street  with  its large department
stores, hotels, and shops (e.g., the Fashion Mall at Canal Place); the
Garden   District   with  its  magnificent  houses  and  gardens;  the
Superdome, which gives tours; the  Audobon  Zoological  Gardens,  near
Tulane University, can be reached by a streetcar (maybe even one named
Desire) ride.  In City Park, the New Orleans Museum of Art always  has
great exhibits.  You should check with the hotel just before coming as
to plays, concerts, and sports events available in early June.

There are always some additional attractions for those with extra time
that  are  located outside New Orleans.  The Jefferson Downs racetrack
in nearby Kenner has thoroughbred horse races.  Picturesque antebellum
homes  can be seen within thirty miles of New Orleans.  Check with the
concierge at the hotel for details and tickets as necessary.

Of course, there is the ever present, and ever  fantastic  jazz;  hot,
cool,  dixieland,  or modern, this is the place to be.  And, for those
with a blues bent, New Orleans has some fine spots.  Details of who is
playing  where  can  be  had  from  the  concierge or from the natives
present at the conference.  But, one place that is not to be missed is
Preservation Hall, here is where it all began.



                           SOCIAL PROGRAMS

Registration Reception -- On Tuesday night, from 7:00 - 9:00 pm, there
will  be  a wine and cheese reception for all attendees.  We will meet
by the registration desk, where there is a lovely corner room for such
events.   Come  register, and meet your colleagues in a friendly atmo-
sphere, while discussing the latest in retrieval topics, such  as  how
to  pick  out the best restaurant in which to dine later that night (a
fuzzy problem if ever there was one).

OCLC Reception -- On Wednesday night, from 6:30 - 8:00 pm, there  will
be  a reception honoring the ACM/SIGIR conference attendees, sponsored
by OCLC, Inc.  This is a must event, featuring  some  of  the  world's
finest seafood au d'hoevres.  It will be hard to remember to save room
for dinner.

Gould Hospitality Suite -- On Wednesday night, from 6:00  -  9:00  pm,
there will also be an open hospitality suite for the ACM/SIGIR confer-
ence attendees, sponsored by  Gould,  Inc.   This  will  be  a  casual
environment  in  which  to  view a continuous demonstration of the new
text searching architecture now available.

Banquet  -- On Thursday night, from 7:00 - 8:00 pm, there  will  be  a
cash  bar  to  start  off the evening in the beautiful ballroom of the
Monteleone Hotel.  Don't be surprised by anything that happens,  since
this  is New Orleans, home of mardi gras (did anyone see MTV broadcast
live from the French Quarter this year?), home of jazz and  jazz  fun-
erals,  home  of  big city cajun bands, and home of the motto, Laissez
les bon temps rouler! (Hey, cher, let the good times roll!).  Then,  a
meal,  dinner  will  be  served  (more  commentary  on the gastronomic
delights seem unnecessary), followed by whatever the city of New Orle-
ans has to offer.




                    TECHNICAL PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

Papers were invited on theory, methodology, and applications of infor-
mation  retrieval.   Emerging  areas related to information retrieval,
such as office automation, computer hardware technology,  and  artifi-
cial intelligence and natural language processing were welcome.

Topics included, but were not limited to:
     retrieval system modeling           user interfaces
     retrieval in office environments    multimedia retrieval
     system development and evaluation   linguistic models
     natural language processing         mathematical models
     storage and search techniques       complexity problems
     cognitive and semantic models       knowledge representation
     retrieval system performance        hardware development
     inf. retrieval & database mgmt.

Submitted papers were  either  full  length  papers  of  approximately
twenty  to twenty-five pages or extended abstracts of no more than ten
pages.  All papers were required to contain the authors' contributions
in  comparison  to  existing solutions to the same or to similar prob-
lems.

The important dates were:
             Submission Deadline       December 15, 1986
             Acceptance Notification   February 15, 1987
             Final Copy Due            March 20, 1987
             Conference                June 3-5, 1987

Four copies of each paper had to be submitted.  Papers submitted  from
North  America  were  sent  to Clement T. Yu; submissions from outside
North America were sent to C. J. van Rijsbergen.

  [continued in next issue of IRList - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
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-VOL-
3

-N-
10
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 87 15:06:40 est
-FROM-
From: kraft@lsu.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: money to support student attendance at the acm/sigir conference
-BODY-
  [Continued from V3 #9; begins with Technical Program  - Ed]

     TUESDAY, June 2, 1987

7:00-9:00pm     Wine and Cheese Reception   Registration Desk



     WEDNESDAY, June 3, 1987

9:00-9:10am     Welcome by Conference Chair
                   -- Donald H. Kraft
9:10-9:15am     Welcome by Conference Program Chair
                   -- Clement T. Yu
9:15-10:15am    Invited Plenary Address
                S. Christodoulakis
                "Multimedia Retrieval"
10:15-10:45am   Coffee Break

10:45-12:15     1. Retrieval Effectiveness I
                Session Chair: A. Bookstein

                S. K. M. Wong and Y. Y. Yao
                "A Statistical Similarity Measure"

                N. Fuhr and P. Muller
                "Probabilistic Search Term Weighting - Some Negative Results"

                K. L. Kwok
                "Upperbound Retrieval Using Approximate Optimal Queries"

12:15-1:45pm    Lunch

1:45-3:15 pm    2. Knowledge Based Information Retrieval I
                Session Chair: M. Evens

                W. Bruce Croft
                "An Approach to Natural Language for Document Retrieval"

                M. F. Bruandet
                "Outline of a Knowledge Base Model for an Intelligent
                     Information Retrieval System"

                F. N. Teskey
                "Enriched Knowledge Representation for Information Retrieval"

3:15-3:45pm     Coffee Break

3:45:5:15pm     3a. User Interfaces
                Session Chair: C. J. van Rijsbergen

                U. Thiel and R. Hammwohner
                "Information Zooming: An Interactive Model for the Graphical
                     Access to Text Knowledge Bases"

                Jean Tague
                "Generating an Individualized User Interface"

                Christine Borgman
                "Why Do Some People Have More Difficulty Learning to Use an
                     Information Retrieval System Than Others?"

3:45-5:15pm     3b. Automatic Indexing
                Session Chair: Michael McGill

                Susanne M. Humphrey
                "Illustrated Description of an Interactive Knowledge Based
                     Indexing System"

                Joel Fagan
                "Automatic Phrase Indexing for Document Retrieval"

                Donna Harman
                "A Failure Analysis of the Limitation of Suffixing in an Online
                     Environment"

5:15-9:00pm     Gould, Inc. Presentation and Demonstration

6:30-8:00pm     OCLC, Inc. Reception



     THURSDAY, June 4, 1987

9:00-10:00am    Invited Plenary Address
                Lotfi Zadeh
                "Uncertainties in Information Retrieval"

10:00-10:30am   Coffee Break

10:30-12:30     4a. Clustering
                Session Chair: Paul Kantor

                B. J. Oommen and D. Ma
                "Fast Object Partitioning Using Stochastic Learning Automata"

                Fazli Can and Esen Ozkarahan
                "A Dynamic Cluster Maintenance System for Information
Retrieval"

                E. Rasmussen and P. Willett
                "Non-Hierarchical Document Clustering Using the ICL Distributed
                     Array Processor"

                Jitender Deogun and Vijay Raghavan
                "Optimal Determination of User-Oriented Clusters"


10:30-12:30     4b. Panel: Models of Information Retrieval
                Panel Chair: Vijay Raghavan
                Panel Members: Michael Gordon, Robert Korfhage, and Clement Yu

12:30-2:00      Lunch

2:00-3:30pm     5. Retrieval Effectiveness II
                Session Chair: W. Bruce Croft

                J. Morrissey and C. J. van Rijsbergen
                "A Formal Treatment of Missing and Imprecise Information"

                Peter Bollmann and S. K. M. Wong
                "Adaptive Linear Information Retrieval Models"

                Robert Losee
                "Random and Best-First Document Selection Models"

3:30-4:00pm     Coffee Break

4:00:6:00pm     6a. Retrieval Systems
                Session Chair: Martin Dillon

                Steven Cater and Donald H. Kraft
                "TIRS: A Topological Information Retrieval System Satisfying
the
                     "Requirements of the Waller-Kraft Wish List"

                T. Ito and M. Kubota
                "A Retrieval System for On-line English-Japanese Dictionaries"

                J. Smith, S. Weiss, and G. Ferguson
                "An Advanced Full-Text Retrieval and Analysis System"

                A. Salminen
                "A Retrieval Model for Unstructured Documents"

4:00:6:00pm     6b. Storage/Retrieval Techniques I
                Session Chair: S. Christodoulakis

                "A. Mukherhee and M. Bassiouni
                "A VLSI Chip for Efficient Transmission and Retrieval of
                     Information"

                Caroline Eastman
                "File Organizations and Incrementally Specified Queries"

                T. Raita and J. Teuhola
                "Predictive Text Compression by Hashing"

                Danny Wallace, Bert R. Boyce, and Donald H. Kraft
                "Determining Online Retrieval System Display Size"

7:00-8:00pm     Cash Bar Social Hour

8:00-9:30pm     Banquet



     FRIDAY, June 5, 1987

9:00-11:00am    7. Knowledge Based Information Retrieval II
                Session Chair: Gerard Salton

                Richard Tong, L. Appelbaum, V. Askman, and J. Cunningham
                "Conceptual Information Retrieval Using RUBRIC"

                P. Schauble
                "Thesaurus Based Concept Spaces"

                D. Krawczak, P. Smith, and S. Shute
                "EP-X: A Demonstration of Semantically Based Search of
                     Bibliographic Databases"

                C. Watters, M. Shepherd, and W. Robertson
                "Towards an Expert System for Bibliographical Retrieval:
                     A Prolog Prototype"

11:00-11:30am   Coffee Break

11:30-1:00      8. Panel: Parallel Architecture in Information Retrieval
                Panel Chair: Esen Ozkarahan
                Panel Members: C. Stanfill and Gerard Salton

1:00-2:30pm     Lunch and ACM/SIGIR Business Meeting
                (All attendees are welcome)

2:30-4:00pm     9a. Storage/Retrieval Techniques II
                Session Chair: M. Wong

                Y. Choueka, Aviezri S. Fraenkel, S. Klein, and E. Segal
                "Improved Techniques for Processing Queries in Full-Text
		     Systems"

                F. Rabitti and P. Stanchev
                "An Approach to Image Retrieval From Large Image Databases"

                Patricia Simpson and R. Alonso
                "Data Caching in IR Systems"


2:30-4:00pm     9b. Panel: Clustering of Concepts for Optimal Retrieval
                Panel Chair: Paul Kantor
                Panel Members: Abraham Bookstein, Martin Dillon, Tefko
Saracevic


__________________________________________________________________________
________________________Registration Card to be Sent in___________________
__________________________________________________________________________

                  Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
          Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR)
       Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    June 3-5, 1987     Monteleone Hotel   New Orleans, Louisiana   USA

Last Name ____________________   First _______________ Initial ___

Affiliation ________________________________________

Please check one:   _ Academic     _ Business      _ Government


Address1 _________________________________________________________

Address2 _________________________________________________________

City _______________________________   State ____   Zip __________

Province ______________________  Country _______________ Telephone __________

Guests' names if attending _____________________________________________



Registration Fees		On-Site Regis.

ACM/SIGIR member		$160.00
Sponsoring organiz. member	$160.00
(BCS, AICA)
ACM member (not SIGIR)		$165.00
SIGIR member (not ACM)		$165.00
Student (proof required)	$00.00
   Sponsored by Bellcore
Other				$190.00

				Registration Fee $___________


Extra banquet tickets		$ 20.00

				Number_________	 $___________

Extra Proceedings		$ 15.00

				Number_________	 $___________

				      Total Paid $___________


Your check must be in U. S. dollars and must also accompany this registration
form, since we regret that we are unable to bill you.  Make your check payable
to ACM IR Conference.

Please reserve accommodations in name below, as marked:

Name _______________________________     Room for one - Per Day   $62.00

Address ____________________________     Double Bedroom for two - Per Day
$72.00

City ____________________ State ____     Twin-Bed Room for 2/Day, 2&3 rm suites



Reservations must be received no later than 3 wks prior to the opening date of
the conference and will be held til 4 pm on arrival day.  Later arrivals must
have 1st night's deposit.  Checkout time is 1:00 pm.


For each additional person more than two in a Double or Twin-Bed room, the
extra charge is $15 per day.  If a room at the rate requested is unavailable,
one at the nearest available rate will be reserved.

Date arriving ____________________ Hour ________

Date departing ___________________ Hour _______


            ACM/SIGIR Conference on Information Retrieval
                   June 2-5, 1987          ILUCS


Don't Be a No-Show - Cancel your hotel reservation if your plans change!

Mail this card to: The Monteleone Hotel
                   Attention: Reservation Manager
                   214 Royal Street
                   New Orleans, LA  70140
__________________________________________________________________________

                              CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

   Conference Chairman       Treasurer                Publicity Chairman
   Donald H. Kraft           Bert R. Boyce            Vijay Raghavan

   Arrangements Chair        Tech. Program Co-Chair   Tech. Program Co-Chair
   Michael C. Stinson        Clement T. Yu            C. J. van Rijsbergen

   Tech. Program Committee
   Abraham Bookstein         Nick Cercone             Stavros Christodoulakis
   Yves Chiaramella          Martha Evens             Aviezri Fraenkel
   Jochum Friedbert          Richard Frost            Tetsuro Ito
   W. S. Luk                 Michael McGill           Esen Ozkarahan
   Fausto Rabitti            Gerard Salton            Peter Scheuermann
   C. J. van Rijsbergen      Michael Wong             Clement T. Yu


     For more information, or for any help, please contact Donald H. Kraft,
     Department  of  Computer  Science,  Louisiana  State University, Baton
     Rouge, LA  70803-4020, USA; (504) 388-1495; kraft%lsu@csnet-relay .

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
11
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 29 Mar 87 10:23:45 O
-FROM-
From:         Henry Nussbacher <HANK@BARILVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      CDROM
-BODY-
Can you send me more info in the Microsoft CDROM stuff?  Is there a newsgroup
that discusses CDROM someplace?  Is there any sort of online announcement
about the CDROM stuff?
Thanks,
Hank
[Note: I don't know of any publications that will emerge about the
conference - there were various news articles, and there were booklets
from the Developers and Applications workshops for attendees.
Microsoft Press did have the new book out, "CD ROM Volume II: Optical
Publishing" which is quite good.  I believe Harper and Row will handle
it and that B. Dalton will carry it.
  I would welcome discussion of CD ROM under IRList - I don't think
the volume will be too great and believe that much of the discussion
would be of interest to IRList readers. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: 13 Apr 87 09:43 EDT
From: David A. Potter / McDonnell Douglas  <DAP.MDC@OFFICE-1.ARPA>
Subject: Free-Text Database Programs

[Forwarded from INFO-MAC Digest Tuesday, 14 Apr 1987  Volume 5 : Issue 78 - Ed]
In a recent issue of Info-Mac, Mark Zimmerman described Tiny Browser, a
   [Note: see msg from Zimmerman below - Ed]
free-text database program he's worked up to the alpha-test phase.  I'm
interested in this program -- but am also wondering what similar programs might
exist for other environments -- specifically, MS-DOS and the DEC-20 world
(Tenex/TOPS-20).
Any information would be greatly appreciated.  If I get enough information back
I'll be glad to summarize for the net(s).
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 5 Apr 87 22:36:55 EDT
From: seismo!allegra!hoqam!wbf
Subject: Catalog and Soundex, etc.

Ed,

 . . .
I saw the request in IRLIST about use of soundex type
algorithms in IR. We put one of those in CATALOG and people seemed
to like it alot. I wasn't sure what kind of info Alan Smeaton
was interested in, but if you think he'd be interested, please pass
this along.
[Note: this refers back to V3 #5 query - Ed]
. . .
				Bill Frakes

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: 7 April 1987, 11:45:45 SET
From: USWFF001 at DBIUNI11
Subject:   addition
I am interested in getting added to the IRList mailing list.
Matthias Winterhager
Science Studies Unit
University of Bielefeld
P.O.B. 8640
D-4800 Bielefeld 1
Federal Republic of Germany

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: 30 Mar 87 06:53 EST
From: science@nems.arpa (Mark Zimmermann)
Subject: free-text browsing on Mac, etc.

Tnx for latest IRList!  Is there an archive somewhere that I could access
via anonymous ftp login on arpanet, and could you give me the address?  Or
alternatively, if it's not too much trouble could you forward to me the past
year or two worth of IRList?

[Note: We should be on the NSFNET "soon" in which case I will announce
 FTP instructions.  Who on ARPANET is keeping a collection online these
 days? - Ed]

I want some large volumes of text to index/browse ... I'm developing a very
simple indexer/browser system on the Apple Macintosh.  If anybody is interested
in getting a copy of source code (MacForth is the language) as well as
stand-alone application and sample index files, please send me a self-addressed
stamped envelope and a 3.5" Macintosh disk.  The program ("Tiny Browser")
requires at least 512K and works on a Mac, Mac+, or Mac SE.  (Not yet on a
Mac II ... tnx, btw, for the comments on it.)

Basic concept of my program is to create a complete inverted index to every
word in the "database" (a huge text file).  The user then has windows in which
to scroll around in the index, click with mouse on interesting words, call
up key-word-in-context scrollable window, and call up a full-text window
showing the region of the database around a selected item.  Very fast, easy,
requires no reformatting of data, etc.  Highlight selections in retrieved
text with mouse and copy/paste them out into other files as desired.

I could go on and on ... for further data, contact me at:
     Mark Zimmermann                         science@nems.arpa
     9511 Gwyndale Drive                     (301)565-2166
     Silver Spring, MD  20910                75066,2044 on CompuServe
I am in need of alpha-test users who will stress the program and make
suggestions for improvements.  Tnx - ^Z

[Note: It would be nice to see this and to extend it with more
weighting schemes etc.  Who else has a Mac IR system? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     2-APR-1987 15:48:01
From:     ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX3@AC.UK
Subject:  . . .  OTA
 . . .
On another matter, would you like to insert an annoucement in IRList about
the availability of our new catalogue? The Text Archive shortlist is available
in mmachine-readable form and is updated regularly; copies can be sent
to any BITNET or EDU network address, on receipt of an enquiry addressed
to us at archive@uk.ac.ox.vax3
Amongst recently acuqired texts of interest to IRList subscribers might be
the MRC Psycholoinguistic database, created by Mike Wilson at  RL.EARN; this
combines the wordlist extracted from the Shorter Oxford by Dolby et al with
a variety of "psycholinguistic norms" to provide a variety of senmantic and
other information. Also, we now have Rick Kazman's reqorking of OALDCE in
fully parsed (SGML style) format. And we just received the bible (both King
James and Revised Standard versions) too!
Lou Burnard

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 87 21:20:49 est
From: walker@flash.bellcore.com
Subject: Travel Grant support for IJCAI-87

TRAVEL GRANTS FOR IJCAI-87

IJCAII has submitted a proposal to NSF to provide travel allowances
for U.S. participants attending IJCAI-87 in Milan.  It also plans to
provide an equal amount of IJCAII funds to support participants from
other countries.  The amounts awarded would probably cover no more than
discount air fares and would vary depending on location and on the
number of persons applying.  The intent is to help about 100 people.
Priority will be given to younger members of the AI community who
are presenting papers or are on panels and who would not otherwise be
able to attend because of lack of travel funds.  Note that U.S.
applicants must use U.S. air carriers.

Applications should be submitted as soon as possible, even though we
have not received confirmation from NSF about a grant award.  The
application should briefly describe benefits expected from attendance;
identify expected form of conference participation (e.g., presenting
paper); state current sources of research funding; and list travel
support from other sources.  A brief resume should be attached, and
students should include a letter of recommendation from a faculty
member.

Five copies of the application should be sent, no later than 1 June
1987, to:

Priscilla Rasmussen
IJCAI-87 Travel Grants
Laboratory for Computer Science Research
Hill Center, Busch Campus
Rutgers, the State University
New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 87 02:45:19 est
From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

   Date: Monday, 30 March 1987  9:08-EST
   From: Liz A. Highleyman <LIZ%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
   Re:   Vision Seminar
   - - - -
   Monday, 30  March  4:00pm  Room: NE43-8th floor playroom

       9.382: SEMINAR ON VISUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING

         Hierarchical Object Recognition Using Libraries
                of Parameterized Model Sub-parts

                         Gil Ettinger
                      MIT AI Laboratory

A model-based vision system which exploits both object scale and
structure hierarchies is developed to achieve a robust recognition
system and to study organization and indexing schemes of model
libraries.  The goal of the system is to recognize parameterized
instances of model objects contained in a large knowledge base despite
the presence of noise and occlusion.  In order to achieve the goal of
robustness, the viewed objects in the scene may be scaled or
mirror-image instances of the known models, and component sub-parts may
be scaled, rotated, or translated relative to each other.  The research
approach is to develop an object shape representation which incorporates
a component sub-part hierarchy to allow for efficient and correct
indexing into an automatically-generated part library as well as for
relative parameterization among sub-parts, and a scale hierarchy to
allow for a general to specific recognition procedure.  After analysis
of the inherent tradeoffs in the recognition process, a system based on
a curvature primal sketch representation and a constrained search
recognition engine is implemented.  Examples of the system's performance
are given, followed by an analysis of the results.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 87 02:31:08 est
From: DAUL@office-1.arpa
Subject: 'sensitive' information

relief."  Some of my our freedom has returned!  --Bi//
[Following is a message forwarded by Daul - Ed]

  Originally-Sent-To: Physics@sri-unix.ARPA
  Originally-From:
  pur-ee!j.cc.purdue.edu!h.cc.purdue.edu!pur-phy!piner@UCB-Vax.arpa
  From:   RPARK
  To:     WHATSNEW

THE THREAT OF GOVERNMENT CONTROLS ON ELECTRONIC DATABASES

that contain "sensitive but unclassified information" has receded, at least
temporarily (WN 27 Feb 87).  In a stunning reversal of policy, Frank Carlucci,
the new National Security Advisor to the President, announced in a conciliatory
letter to Rep. Jack Brooks (D-TX), Chairman of the Government Operations
Committee, that NTISSP-2, the notorious "Poindexter Memorandum," was being
rescinded.  It was this directive that defined "sensitive but unclassified
information" as information affecting "national security or other Federal
Government interests," a definition that could fit a giraffe.  Carlucci also
said that NSDD 145, National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated
Information Systems Security, which in Brook's words created a "shadow
government," was being reviewed.   The reversal is attributable to the solid
opposition of groups such as the library associations and scientific societies.

        Although Carlucci declined to testify on grounds of executive
privilege, he refused to extend that protection to Poindexter. showed up before
the Committee on Tuesday, but confined himself to puffing on his pipe taking
the Fifth. Secretary of Commerce Baldrige and Deputy Secretary of Defense Taft
testified that responsibility for computer security should be moved to a
civilian agency.

        Perhaps the most significant testimony on Tuesday came at the end,
after most of the press had left to file their stories. Harold Relyea of the
Library of Congress discussed the whole phenomenon of National Security
Decision Directives (NSDD's). Out of some 200 NSDD's, all but five are secret,
and are not generally available even to Congress.  They have apparently been
used to authorize such things as the disinformation campaign against Libya and
$50M for Argentina to train Contras.  He said they bring us very close to the
most dangerous practice of totalitarian government -- rule by secret law.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
12
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 1 May 87 21:04:37 edt
-FROM-
From: hafner@corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conf. on AI and Law - Final Schedule
-BODY-
                                The First
	    International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

			      May 27-29, 1987
         	    Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115

	    Sponsored by:
	       The Center for Law and Computer Science,
	       Northeastern University
	    In Cooperation with ACM SIGART

Registration: Ms. Rita Laffey, (617) 437-3346
Information: Prof. Carole Hafner (617) 437-5116

			  SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
WEDNESDAY, May 27

8:30-12:30 Tutorials

	   A. "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (for lawyers)"
	      Prof. Edwina L. Rissland, University of Massachusetts and
	      Harvard Law School

	   B. "Applying Artificial Intelligence to Law: Opportunities
	      and Challenges"
	      Profs. Donald H. Berman and Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern
	      University

2:00-2:30  Welcome; Opening Remarks.

2:30-4:00  Legal Expert Systems I

           2:30   "Expert Systems in Law:  Out of the Research Laboratory and
                   into the Marketplace"
                   Richard E. Susskind
		   Ernst & Whinney, London, England

           3:00   "Expert Systems in Law: The DataLex Project"
                   Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray and Alan L. Tyree
		   University of Sydney, Australia

           3:30   "Explanation for an Expert System that Performs Estate
                   Planning"
                   Dean A. Schlobohm and Donald A. Waterman
		   Stanford University, The Rand Corporation

4:00-4:30  Coffee

4:30-6:00  Conceptual Legal Retrieval Systems I

           4:30   "Conceptual Legal Document Retrieval Using the RUBRIC System"
                   Richard M. Tong, Clifford A. Reid, Peter R. Douglas and
                   Gregory J. Crowe
		   Advanced Decision Systems

           5:00   "Conceptual Organization of Case Law Knowledge Bases"
                   Carole D. Hafner
                   Northeastern University

           5:30   "Designing Text Retrieval Systems for Conceptual Searching"
                   Jon Bing
                   Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law

6:30-8:30 Welcoming Reception, Northeastern U. Faculty Center

THURSDAY, May 28

9:00-10:30  Models of Legal Reasoning I

            9:00   "A Process Specification of Expert Lawyer Reasoning"
                    D. Peter O'Neil
                    Harvard Law School

            9:30   "A Case-Based System for Trade Secrets Law"
                    Edwina L. Rissland and Kevin D. Ashley
		    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

            10:00  "But, See, Accord:  Generating Blue Book Citations in HYPO"
                    Kevin D. Ashley and Edwina L. Rissland
		    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

10:30-11:00  Coffee

11:00-12:30  Legal Expert Systems II

             11:00   "A Natural Language Based Legal Expert System for
                      Consultation and Tutoring -- The LEX Project"
                      F. Haft, R.P. Jones and Th. Wetter
                      IBM Heidelberg Scientific Centre, West Germany

             11:30   "The Application of Expert Systems Technology to
                      Case-Based Law"
                      J.C. Smith and Cal Deedman
                      University of British Columbia

             12:00   "Some Problems in Designing Expert Systems to Aid Legal
                      Reasoning"
                      Layman E. Allen and Charles S. Saxon
		      The University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University

12:30-2:00  Lunch

2:00-3:00   Panel: "The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Legal
		   System"
	    Moderator: Cary G. DeBessonet, Law and Artificial Intelligence
		       Project, Louisiana State Law Institute

3:00-4:00  Conceptual Legal Retrieval Systems II

           3:00   "Conceptual Retrieval and Case Law"
                   Judith P. Dick
		   University of Toronto

           3:30   "A Connectionist Approach to Conceptual Information
                   Retrieval"
                   Richard K. Belew
		   University of California, San Diego

4:00-4:30  Coffee

4:30-6:00  Expert Systems and Tax Law

           4:30   "A PROLOG Model of the Income Tax Act of Canada"
                   David M. Sherman
		   The Law Society of Upper Canada

           5:00   "An Expert System for Screening Employee Pension Plans for
                   the Internal Revenue Service"
		   U.S. Internal Revenue Service
                   Gary Grady and Ramesh S. Patil

           5:30   "Handling of Significant Deviations from Boilerplate Text"
		   U.S. Internal Revenue Service
                   Gary Morris, Keith Taylor and Maury Harwood

7:00       Reception and Banquet, The Colonnade Hote
	   Banquet Address: Non-Monotonic Reasoning
			    Prof. John McCarthy, Stanford University

FRIDAY, May 29

9:00-10:30  Applications of Deontic Logic

            9:00   "Legal Reasoning in 3-D"
                    Marvin Belzer
                    University of Georgia

            9:30   "On the Relationship Between Permission and Obligation"
                    Andrew J.I. Jones
		    University of Oslo, Norway

            10:00  "System = Program + Users + Law"
                    Naftaly H. Minsky and David Rozenshtein
		    Rutgers University

10:30-11:00  Coffee

11:00-12:30  Legal Expert Systems III

            11:00  "Support for Policy Makers:  Formulating Legislation with
                    the Aid of Logical Models"
                    T.J.M. Bench-Capon
		    Imperial College of Science and Technology, London

            11:30  "Logic Programming for Large Scale Applications in Law:
                    A Formalisation of Supplementary Benefit Legislation"
                    T.J.M. Bench-Capon, G.O. Robinson, T.W. Routen and
                    M.J. Sergot
		    Imperial College of Science and Technology, London

            12:00  "Knowledge Representation in DEFAULT: An Attempt to Classify
		    General Types of Knowledge Used by Legal Experts"
                    Roger D. Purdy
		    University of Akron

12:30-2:00  Lunch

2:00-3:00  Panel: Modeling the Legal Reasoning Process: Formal and
Computational
		  Approaches
	   Moderator: Prof. L. Thorne McCarty, Rutgers University


3:00-4:00  Models of Legal Reasoning II

           3:00   "Precedent-Based Legal Reasoning and Knowledge Acquisition
                   in Contract Law:  A Process Model"
                   Seth R. Goldman, Michael G. Dyer and Margot Flowers
		   University of California, Los Angeles

           3:30   "Reasoning about 'Hard' Cases in Talmudic Law"
                   Steven S. Weiner
                   Harvard Law School, MIT

4:00-4:30  Coffee

4:30-6:00  Legal Knowledge Representation

           4:30   "OBLOG-2:  A Hybrid Knowledge Representation System for
                   Defeasible Reasoning"
                   Thomas F. Gordon
                   GMD, Sankt Augustin, West Germany

           5:00   "ESPLEX: A Rule and Conceptual Model for Representing
                   Statutes"
                   Carlo Biagioli, Paola Mariani and Daniela Tiscornia
                   Instituto per la Documentazione Giuridica, Florence, Italy

           6:00   "Legal Data Modeling: The Prohibited Transaction Exemption
                   Analyst"
                   Keith Bellairs
		   Computer Law Systems, Inc.



>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 87 07:07:56 EST
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Software Psychology Society
-BODY-
Hello...here's the latest announcement of the Software Psychology Society
for the IRList readership....Ben

[Note: this has been slightly edited - Ed]

                        SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY
                              POTOMAC CHAPTER

           VOLUME 11 NUMBER 3                       SPRING 1987

Note: All meetings will be held at the George Washington University's  Mar-
vin  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.

Note: Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software  Psychology  So-
ciety,  c/o  Skip  Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd.,
Rockville, MD 20851.




 May 8                                                       Room 413-414
                          ACTIVE OFFICE SYSTEMS:
                      STRATEGIES FOR REDUCING STRESS

    Nathan Edelson, Center for Office Health & Productivity Enhancement
               9913 Grayson Avenue, Silver Spring, MD 20901

             Jerome Danoff, College of Allied Health Sciences
                  Howard University, Washington, DC 20059

One approach to dealing with stress in the computer workplace is to  enable
users to engage in moderate levels of physical activity while simultaneous-
ly performing their regular computer tasks.  Edelson has developed  several
systems  utilizing  stationary  bicycles,  electric treadmills, and special
derivative exercises and posture devices, which will be illustrated  and/or
demonstrated.

A recent research study demonstrated that subjects doing word processing in
an  active  office  were able to maintain high levels of productivity while
reducing their levels of stress and body complaints.  Five experienced typ-
ists worked for five two-hour sessions over a two week period.  Performance
and subjective data will be presented.



             June 12                               Room 413-414
                  TRANSFER OF LEARNING IN THE REAL WORLD

          Mary Beth Rosson, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
                 P. O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598

As the function available in computing systems evolves, and as the range of
computer applications increases, the transfer of users' skill from one sys-
tem to another becomes critical.  Unfortunately, the traditional psycholog-
ical  studies  of  transfer  of learning are of little assistance in under-
standing and facilitating transfer phenomena under the  complex  conditions
present  in most real-world examples of transfer between computing systems.
Recent work has made some progress in characterizing these more complex si-
tuations, but has still relied largely on controlled studies conducted in a
laboratory environment.  The present work took a more qualitative  approach
in a study of real users making a transition between one or more procedural
formatting languages and a newer, object-oriented tag  system.   Users  who
varied  in their experience with the procedural languages were studied dur-
ing a week-long course modeled on the organization's standard computer edu-
cation  modules;  their  performance on class exercises and their attitudes
about the system were monitored over the five days.

Our findings showed effects of user background on both the types of  errors
made  in  using  the  new system, and attitudes expressed about the system:
users who were heavy users of the procedural systems tended  to  make  more
errors on the exercises, and users who were more sophisticated users of the
procedural systems tended to become more negative about the tag system over
the  five-day period.  I will discuss the different components of knowledge
transfer implied by the error patterns, as  well  as  the  possible  conse-
quences of the attitudinal effects observed.



             July 10                             Room 413-414
                    THE VALUE OF A USABILITY LABORATORY
                  IN THE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

               Michael F. DiAngelo, IBM Usability Laboratory
                  10401 Fernwood Road, Bethesda, MD 20817

This talk will cover  the  value/worth  of  usability  in  the  application
development process, particularly as it applies to applications written for
use within the IBM business systems.   Specifically,  it  will  provide  an
overview  of how usability has been integrated into IBM Information Systems
Group's internal ordering and billing software development function.

The talk will describe how increasing the usability  of  software  applica-
tions  can  make end users more productive, reduce training costs and time,
and result in systems that more efficiently meet the needs of the  business
and  of  users.   A brief description will be provided of how usability ac-
tivities should be incorporated into the development process to achieve op-
timum results.

> Ben

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
13
-DATE-
Date: Tue,  5 May 87 18:36:09 PDT
-FROM-
From: homo obsolescensis <XB.K98@forsythe.stanford.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seeking TDBMS
-BODY-
[From: INFO-MAC Digest  Wednesday, 6 May 1987  Volume 5 : Issue 85 - Ed]

I apologize if this subject has been covered already, but I haven't
been able to locate an answer so far. I am trying to locate a text
data base management system (TDBMS) for the mac that would be
similar to Instant Recall or AskSam on the ibm.  If anyone know of
such a program, I would be grateful if they would let me know
(off-net preferably). Thanks in advance.
Walter Henry
xb.k98@forsyth.stanford.edu  <ARPA>
xb.k98@stanford              <Bitnet>
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue 5 May 87 23:33:14
From: Roland Hjerppe <rhj@liuida.uucp>
Subject: Re: IRList Digest V3 #2
Dear Ed,
 . . .
Sometimes when reading questions or requests for information I wonder
if others have already answered or whether I should venture an answer.
It would be nice to have some kind of indication (satisfied, still
open, no answers) in the next issue (a regular feature) of the fate of
previous requests.

[Note: I think this is a great idea!  Can the folks asking the
questions in future please do so?  All the discussion I see is
sent along in later issues, so only the person raising the question can
really do wnat you ask.  I expect that there are many people like you who
are being shy but who have important points to make that are not being
said.  I'll be happy to filter replies if the volume or quality is
not appropriate - recently there has not been a lot of input to
IRList. - Ed]
Roland Hjerppe
LIBLAB, Linkoping University

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 4 May 87 14:51:32 edt
From: egyhazy@vtcs1
Subject: query formulation aids

 . . .
On a related topic,do you happen to know of papers,companies..dealing with
AUTOMATED QUERY FORMULATION AIDS?

Any lead appreciated..................Csaba

[Note: this refers to the situation of heterogeneous distributed DBMS
but could apply to IR systems too.  See clarification obtained later,
below. Any comments on either topic should be of interest. - Ed]

Sorry,here are the specifics: As part of my work at NASA's DAVID Project,
a DBMS for heterogeneous distributed databases,we are starting to think about
possible front ends for the astrophysics community of users and their data-
bases collected by earth telescopes and future space telescopes.In other words
we are dealing with massive scientific databases such as location,movement
etc.,
of stars,quasars and other such neighbors.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 19 May 87 13:44:40+0900
From: Kim Young Whan <mcvax!csd.kaist.ac.kr!ywkim@seismo.css.gov>
Subject: References on Knowledge-based Document Retrieval

 I'm writing a Ph.D Thesis about Knowledge Based System for Document
Retrieval, especially about rule based system using uncertainty handling
mechanism (Bayesian, D-S Theory, Fuzzy Set Theory).

I'm looking for any reference having anything to do with it.

 I'm also interesting in public-domain programs that are related to this field.
Sources written in LISP(Common LISP, GCLISP,Frantz-LISP, Zeta LISP) would be
preferred.

 The information obtained will be collected and summarized and made
available to researcher on request.
 Thanks for your assistance.

[Note: there has been quite a lot of work on this.  There will be a
special issue of Information Processing and Management out this summer
on this topic.  Several papers at the ACM SIGIR Conf. on R&D in
Information Retrieval in New Orleans in a few weeks will be about this -
I will announce how to get proceedings from ACM when they become available.
There was a 2 part article in JASIS by Biswas et al. recently.
Notable other systems include I3R by Croft and Thomson, RUBRIC by Tong
et al., CODER by Fox et al, CANSEARCH by Pollitt, ...  Also, there are
abstracts in issues of ACM SIGIR Forum.  If you are not an ACM SIGIR
member, I encourage joining -- it still only costs $6 to ACM members,
but dues will jump to $12 soon. - Ed]

Young-Whan Kim
Dept. of CS KAIST
P.O.Box 150, Cheongryang
Seoul, 131
Republic of Korea.

ywkim%csd.kaist.ac.kr@relay.cs.net(from cs-net)
ywkim%csd.kaist.ac.kr@wiscvm.wisc.edu(from bitnet)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From: Mike Wilson <mdw%vax-d.rutherford.ac.uk@Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Date: Tue, 12 May 87 19:08:31 -0100
Subject: Machine Usable Dictionaries.
The Oxford Text Archive is one of the specialist facilities supported by
the Oxford University Computing Service for the use of scholars.
The Archive has over 750 machine usable texts which it distributes for
research purposes. Among these are several machine usable and machine
readable dictionaries.
Two of these may be of particular use to researchers in Artificial
Intelligence, Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Psychology.
 The Computer Usable version of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
prepared by Roger Mitton at Birckbeck College, London. This is available
as two files listing 38205 and 68742 words, with their pronunciation,
detailed syntactic information and verb patterns.
 The MRC Psycholinguistic Database, Machine Usable Dictionary: Version 2
prepared by Michael Wilson at the SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,
Oxon. This is available as a dictionary file and two access programs. The
dictionary file contains 150837 words (115331 different strings), giving 26
linguistic/psycholinguistic properties for subsets of these. These
properties include part of speech, written and spoken word frequency,
imagability, concreteness, Meaningfulness, phonetic transcription and status
of usage. The dictionary was designed to be used to select stimuli for
psycholinguistic experiments, but it may be used in other ways.
To obtain copies of texts a signed order form (containing a declaration
that the texts will be used for private scholarly research only) and
prepayment must be sent before any materials can be distributed.
A flat fee of 5 pounds sterling is charged for each text ordered. In addition,
there is a charge to cover media and postage, currently 15 pounds per tape (or
diskette) within Europe, or 25 pounds per tape (or diskette) outside Europe.
The number of texts that can fit on one tape varies greatly, according to
the format used to write the tape as well as the size of the text.
Further information about ordering the dictionaries is available from:
Oxford Text Archive
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
U.K.
Messages and enquiries sent by electronic mail are welcomed. The Archive
has an account on the British Joint Academic Network (JANET), which also
has connections to EDUNET (ARPANET), EARN (BITNET, NORTHNET) etc ...
The JANET address for electronic mail is:   ARCHIVE@UK.AC.OX.VAX3
>From ARPANET try:   ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OX.VAX3@CS.UCL.AC.UK
>From EARN/BITNET try:   ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OX.VAX3@UK.AC.RL.EARN
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 12 May 87 17:21:42 GMT
From: Alan Bundy <bundy%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Lectureship at Edinburgh

			UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
		DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


	TEMPORARY LECTURESHIP IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
		(AUTOMATED MATHEMATICAL REASONING)


The Department of Artificial Intelligence is the leading European
university centre for research into intelligent systems.  Applications
are invited for a five year temporary lectureship in the area of
automated mathematical reasoning. The post has been created as the
result of the award of an SERC senior fellowship to Dr. Alan Bundy.

Candidates should have post-doctoral, or equivalent, experience and
proven ability for independent research and innovation.  Besides
participating in the Department's teaching programme, the successful
candidate will be expected to contribute to its research in automated
mathematical reasoning.

Salary will be on the lecturer scale, 8,735 - 18,210 pounds per annum,
with superannuation under the University's scheme.  The starting
salary will depend on age, qualifications and experience.

Further particulars may be obtained from:

	The Personnel Office
	63 South Bridge
	Edinburgh, EH1 1LS
	SCOTLAND.

quoting reference number 1301. Applications (six copies) including
curriculum vitae and the names and addresses of three referees, should
be sent to the same address not later than 8th June 1987.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 87 02:49:39 edt
From: walker@flash.bellcore.com
Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS: ACL Applied Natural Language Conference

			"CALL FOR PAPERS"

SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
9-12 February 1988, Austin, Texas, USA

Organized by the  Association for Computational Linguistics

CONFERENCE SUMMARY:  This meeting will focus on the application of
natural language processing techniques to real world problems.  It will
include invited and contributed papers, panel discussions, tutorials,
exhibits, and demonstrations.  Original papers are being solicited in
areas such as human-machine interfaces (including databases, expert
systems, report writers, etc.), speech input and output, information
retrieval, text generation, machine translation, office automation,
writing aids, computer-aided instruction, tools for natural-language
processing, and applications to medical, legal, or other professional
areas.  Papers may present applications, evaluations, limitations, and
general tools and techniques.  Papers that critically evaluate a
formalism or processing strategy are especially welcome.  Papers or
panel proposals discussing end-user experience with natural language
systems are also encouraged.

REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit ten copies of a 6-8
page summary (single-spaced, exclusive of references, pica or elite
size type).  The first page should begin with the title, the name(s) of
the author(s), complete address(es), and a short (5-6 line) abstract.
Papers should be sent to:  Bruce Ballard
			   AT&T Bell Laboratories, 3C-440A
			   Murray Hill, NJ 07974
			   (201)582-5440
			   allegra!bwb@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
The submission should identify distinctive aspects of the work and
clearly indicate the extent to which an implementation has been
completed; vague or unsubstantiated claims will be given little
weight.  Submissions should be substantively different from papers
currently under review or to be submitted elsewhere before the
notification date.  All papers will be reviewed by members of the
Program Committee , which is composed of Bruce Ballard, chair (AT&T
Bell Laboratories), Madeleine Bates (BBN Laboratories), Tim Finin
(University of Pennsylvania), Ralph Grishman (New York University),
Carole Hafner (Northeastern University), George Heidorn (IBM
Corporation), Paul Martin (SRI International), Graeme Ritchie
(University of Edinburgh), and Harry Tennant (Texas Instruments).

SCHEDULE: Papers must be received by September 1, 1987.  Notification
of acceptance will be sent by October 5, 1987.  Camera-ready versions
of the full paper must be received by November 30, 1987.

OTHER ACTIVITIES: The meeting will include one day of tutorials by
noted contributors to the field.  Facilities for exhibits and system
demonstrations will also be available.  Persons wishing to arrange an
exhibit or present a demonstration should contact Kent Wittenburg or
Carl Weir, MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TX 78759;
(512)338-3626 or 338-3616; wittenburg@mcc.com or weir@mcc.com.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION: Local arrangements are being handled by
Jonathan Slocum and Barbara Smith, MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive,
Austin, TX 78759; (512)338-3571 and 338-3527; slocum@mcc.arpa and
barbara@mcc.arpa.  For additional information on the conference or
about the ACL, contact Donald Walker, Bell Communications Research, 445
South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960; (201)829-4312;
walker@flash.bellcore.com or ucbvax!bellcore!walker.  In addition to
the persons named above, the Conference Committee includes Norman
Sondheimer, USC/Information Sciences Institute,  General Chair; Martha
Palmer, UNISYS,  Tutorials; Jeffrey Hill and Brenda Nashawaty,
Artificial Intelligence Corporation, Publicity.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 4 May 87 14:29:36 edt
From: "Robert B. Allen" <rba@flash.bellcore.com>
Subject: OIS conference


                CONFERENCE ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
                    Palo Alto, CA - March 23-25, 1988
        Sponsored by:   ACM-SIGOIS   IEEE Computer Society TC-OA
                    In Cooperation with IFIP W.G. 8.4

COIS is a conference concerned with intelligent processing of information in
organizations - topics of interest include:
  Effects of Technology on Human Organizations  Information Systems
  Object-Oriented and Intelligent Databases     Planning Systems
  Computer-Supported Cooperative Work           Social Processes
  Multimedia/Hypertext Systems                  Organizational Design
  Distributed Artificial Intelligence           User Models
  Voice/Video/Graphics                          Interconnect

PROGRAM COMMITTEE: G. Bracchi (Milan), S. Christodoulakis (Waterloo),
Bruce Croft (UMass), Peter DeJong (MIT), Les Gasser (USC), Eli Gerson
(San Francisco), Irene Greif (Lotus), Benn Konsynski (Harvard), Yoshifumi
Masunaga (Tokyo), Norm Meyrowitz (Brown), Alain Michard (INRIA), Juzar
Motiwalla (Singapore), John Mylopoulos (Toronto), Bill Newman (London),
Margi Olson (NYU), Fausto Rabitti (Pisa), Ron Rice (USC), Jeff Rulifson
(Syntelligence), Chris Schmandt (MIT), Lucy Suchman (Xerox PARC), Dennis
Tsichritzis, Geneva), C.J. van Rijsbergen (Glasgow), Andrew Whinston
(Purdue), Thomas Wu (NPS), Stan Zdonik (Brown)

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: Najah Naffah (General Chair, Bull), Bob Allen
(Program Chair, Bellcore), Dave Choy (IBM, SJ), Skip Ellis (MCC), Carl
Hewitt (MIT), Fred Lochovsky (Toronto), Bob Root - (Treasurer, Bellcore),
Sig Treu (Pittsburgh), Alex Verrijn-Stuart (Leiden)

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: TERRY WINOGRAD

INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS: Submissions by September 21, 1987.
Papers will be judged for technical merit by appropriate subgroups of
the program committee.  Submissions (max. 3500 words) may be made
either on paper (5 copies) or on some standard electronic medium to:

          Conference on Office Information Systems
          Dr. Robert B. Allen
          2A-367
          Bell Communications Research
          Morristown, NJ 07960

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
14
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 87 19:11:08 EDT
-FROM-
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: dissertation abstracts for SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
Ed, appended is edition of Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts.
There are 10 of them...

Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts

Compiled by:

Susanne M. Humphrey, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 20894


The following are citations selected by title and abstract as being
related to Information Retrieval (IR), resulting from a computer
search, using the BRS Information Technologies retrieval service, of
the Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) database produced
by University Microfilms International.

Included are the UM order number and year-month of entry into the
database; author; university, degree, and, if available, number of
pages; title; DAI subject category chosen by the author of the
dissertation; and abstract.  References are sorted first by DAI
subject category and second by author.  Citations denoted by an
MAI reference do not yet have abstracts in the database and refer
to abstracts in the published Masters Abstracts International.

[Note: I have added the SO line from another file sent by Susanne,
 so you also have the DAI reference for finding the abstract in the
 published DAI.  - Ed]

Unless otherwise specified, paper or microform copies of
dissertations may be ordered from University Microfilms
International, Dissertation Copies, Post Office Box 1764, Ann Arbor,
MI 48106; telephone for U.S. (except Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska):
1-800-521-3042, for Canada: 1-800-268-6090.  Price lists and other
ordering and shipping information are in the introduction to the
published DAI.  An alternate source for copies is sometimes
provided at the end of the abstract.

The dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published
with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers
of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright 1985) by
University Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced
without their prior permission.


AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-02684.
AU BELEW, RICHARD KUEHN.
SO DAI v47(10), SecB, pp4216.
IN The University of Michigan Ph.D. 1986, 328 pages.
TI Adaptive information retrieval: machine learning in associative
   networks.
DE Computer Science.
AB     One interesting issue in artificial intelligence (AI) currently
   is the relative merits of, and relationship between, the "symbolic"
   and "connectionist" approaches to intelligent systems building.  The
   performance of more traditional symbolic systems has been striking,
   but getting these systems to learn truly new symbols has proven
   difficult.  Recently, some researchers have begun to explore a
   distinctly different type of representation, similar in some
   respects to the nerve nets of several decades past.  In these
   massively parallel, connectionist models, symbols arise implicitly,
   through the interactions of many simple and sub-symbolic elements.
   One of the advantages of using such simple elements as building
   blocks is that several learning algorithms work quite well.  The
   range of application for connectionist models has remained limited,
   however, and it has been difficult to bridge the gap between this
   work and standard AI.
       The AIR system represents a connectionist approach to the
   problem of free-text information retrieval (IR).  Not only is this
   an increasingly important type of data, but it provides an excellent
   demonstration of the advantages of connectionist mechanisms,
   particularly adaptive mechanisms.  AIR's goal is to build an
   indexing structure that will retrieve documents that are likely to
   be found relevant.  Over time, by using users' browsing patterns as
   an indication of approval, AIR comes to learn what the keywords
   (symbols) mean so as use them to retrieve appropriate documents.
   AIR thus attempts to bridge the gap between connectionist learning
   techniques and symbolic knowledge representations.
       The work described was done in two phases.  The first phase
   concentrated on mapping the IR task into a connectionist network; it
   is shown that IR is very amenable to this representation.  The
   second, more central phase of the research has shown that this
   network can also adapt.  AIR translates the browsing behaviors of
   its users into a feedback signal used by a Hebbian-like local
   learning rule to change the weights on some links.  Experience with
   a series of alternative learning rules are reported, and the results
   of experiments using human subjects to evaluate the results of AIR's
   learning are presented.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-01283.
AU YODER, CORNELIA MARIE.
SO DAI v47(09), SecB, pp3858.
IN Syracuse University Ph.D. 1986, 383 pages.
TI An expert system for providing on-line information based on
   knowledge of individual user characteristics.
DE Computer Science.
AB     In many interactive systems which provide information, such as
   HELP systems, the form and content of the information presented
   always seems to satisfy some people and frustrate others.  Human
   Factors textbooks and manuals for interactive systems focus on the
   need for consistency and adherence to some standard.  This
   implicitly assumes that if the optimum format and level of detail
   could be found for presenting information to a user, interactive
   systems would only need to adhere to the standard to be optimum for
   everyone.  This approach neglects one of the most important factors
   of all--differences in people.  If these individualizing differences
   in people could be identified, a system could be designed with
   options built into it to accommodate different users.  The role of
   the intelligent active system should be more like that of a human
   expert or consultant, who answers questions by first interpreting
   them in terms of the user's knowledge and the context of his
   activities and then recommending actions which may be otherwise
   unknown to the user.
       The HELP system developed in this study is an Expert System
   written in PROLOG which uses logic programming rules to
   intelligently provide needed information to a terminal user. It
   responds to a request with a full screen display containing
   information determined by the request, the user's cognitive style
   and the user's experience level.  The investigation studies the
   relationship between some cognitive style and experience level
   parameters and individual preferences and efficacy with an
   interactive computer information system.  These factors are measured
   by the ability of an individual user to perform unfamiliar tasks
   using a HELP function as information source.  The format of the
   information provided by the HELP function is varied along three
   dimensions and the content of the information is varied by three
   levels of detail.
       Experiments were performed with the system and experimental
   results are presented which show some trends relating cognitive
   style and individual preferences and performance using the system.
   In addition, it is argued that an Expert System can perform such a
   function effectively.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-01260.
AU EISENBERG, MICHAEL BRUCE.
SO DAI v47(09), SecA, pp3219.
IN Syracuse University Ph.D. 1986, 324 pages.
TI Magnitude estimation and the measurement of relevance.
DE Information Science.
AB     A study was designed to investigate the use of the scaling
   technique of magnitude estimation for the measurement of relevance
   judgments.  Relevance is fundamental to the information process and
   to the purpose, design, and use of information systems.  The
   relevance judgment is a focal point in system evaluation and
   research.  The method of magnitude estimation, an open-ended scaling
   technique, was developed in the field of psychophysics for the
   direct measurement of human response to various sensory stimuli.
   Magnitude estimation has been successfully applied to a wide range
   of situations requiring human judgments, often resulting in the
   development of new viewpoints and understandings.
       Questions were raised regarding (1) the use of scaling
   procedures, (2) the distribution of scaled responses, (3) biases in
   scaling, and (4) whether relevance could be viewed within a
   stimulus-response framework.  Four experiments were designed to test
   magnitude estimation under different conditions and in comparison to
   a standard 7-point category rating procedure.
       The major results indicate that magnitude judgments can be used
   for the measurement of relevance.  Furthermore, relevance judgments
   seem to behave as do other quantitative continua.  When category
   rating judgments are plotted against magnitude estimation judgments
   of relevance, a predictable, concave downward pattern is observed.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-02080.
AU RITTENHOUSE, ROBERT JOHN.
SO DAI v47(10), SecA, pp3598.
IN Case Western Reserve University Ph.D. 1986, 298 pages.
TI A composite measure for weighting databases in defense, engineering,
   and science.
DE Information Science.
AB     The primary problem of this dissertation is to propose a
   composite measure as a technique for measuring the relevancy of
   databases.  The databases are characterized as single units by the
   measure of closeness, C(,M), values.  The measure of closeness
   consists of two weighted factors: (1) a relevance factor, and (2) a
   descriptive factor.  The relevance factor is the sum of the recall
   and precision ratios.  The descriptive factor is the sum of the
   weighted properties of each file as follows: (1) subject coverage,
   (2) thesaurus strength, (3) technical level, (4) subject coding, and
   (5) length of years searched retrospectively.
       Two experiments were conducted to test if the measure of
   closeness may be utilized to select the relevant databases in
   DIALINDEX searches in the general areas of defense, engineering, and
   science.  Databases from Dialog Information Services, Inc., Defense
   Logistics Studies Information Exchange, Defense Technical
   Information Center, Mead Data Central Nexis, NASA/RECON, and
   DOE/RECON were also used.  Searches were conducted in seven sample
   topics: (1) composites, (2) missiles, (3) rockets, (4) sonar, (5)
   torpedoes, (6) underwater acoustics, and (7) underwater weapons.
       For each of the seven topics, online searches were performed on
   a group of databases.  These databases, ranked according to C(,M)
   values, were compared with their corresponding databases ranked by
   retrievals from DIALINDEX, a Dialog multidatabase file.  The first
   experiment compared six randomly selected Dialog files and Dialog
   files subjectively selected for their expected higher relevance to
   the topics.  While randomly selected files retrieved some relevant
   citations, these files generally did not contain many relevant
   citations.  The second experiment compared the DIALINDEX method and
   the measure of closeness, C(,M), technique.
       Mann-Whitney two rank and Spearman Rho rank correlation tests
   failed to indicate conclusively that the DIALINDEX method is
   different from use of the weighted measure of closeness alone.  The
   tests did indicate DIALINDEX term frequency retrievals appear to
   result in ranking relevant databases.  Possible artificial
   intelligence designs may further enhance the future modelling of
   weighting schemes for more effective multivendor and multidatabase
   online search techniques.
       Only unclassified terms, titles and/or abstracts were discussed
   in order to conform to U.S.  national security requirements.

[Note: rest will be in Issue 15 - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
15
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 87 19:11:08 EDT
-FROM-
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: dissertation abstracts for SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
[Note: This is rest of msg, first part of which was in Issue 14 - Ed]


AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG86-25849.
AU SCHWARTZ, CAROLYN SUSAN (CANDY).
SO DAI v47(08), SecA, pp2778.
IN Syracuse University Ph.D. 1986, 144 pages.
TI A study of the application of post-retrieval clustering in
   bibliographic databases.
DE Information Science.
AB     The items retrieved as the result of a search in a large
   bibliographic database are not typically organized such that
   relevant references are presented before non-relevant references.
   In this study, post-retrieval clustering is proposed as an effective
   method of presenting retrieved results.  A clustering algorithm was
   applied to 48 retrieved sets in two different databases, INSPEC and
   PSYCINFO.  Coefficients of ranking effectiveness (CRE's) were
   calculated for results presented in reverse accession number order
   (the default mode in commercially available search systems) and in
   an order derived from the clustering.  A two-alternative t-test was
   used to evaluate whether the difference between mean CRE's was
   significant.  In all cases, the difference was found to be
   statistically significant.  The conclusion is made that
   post-retrieval clustering offers an improved method of presentation
   of retrieved results.  Other advantages of clustered results are
   also discussed.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG86-19997.
AU SODERSTON, CANDACE.
SO DAI v47(06), SecA, pp1912.
IN Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Ph.D. 1986, 285 pages.
TI A study of spatial models and human navigation within complex
   computer interfaces.
DE Information Science.  Education, Technology.
AB     This study examines the process of building a conceptual model
   of the layout of information within a computer system.  The
   contentions are that this draws primarily upon spatial skills, that
   some underlying structural patterns are easier to perceive, and that
   some methods of introduction lead to more rapid learning.
       An experiment was performed in which eighty people (with five
   different types of background) had to search for sixteen pieces of
   information within each of two computer interfaces.  Four interface
   designs were tested, varying on underlying structure and access
   method.  Each contained the same content and covered two different
   knowledge domains.  Two of the designs linked information together
   in a hierarchical structure, which users could browse by making
   branching choices at each display screen.  The other two designs
   linked the same information together in a linear chain, which users
   could browse by simply scrolling forward or backward.  Furthermore,
   one of the hierarchical and one of the linear structures provided
   subjects with survey access to the structure of the interface.  That
   is, users began each session task at an on-line table of contents,
   depicting the entire spectrum of available choices.  The other
   hierarchical and linear structure provided only route access
   (traversing the "maze").
       Exploration, retrieval, and error recovery tasks were examined
   and data were collected on subjects' performance, preference, and
   cognitive model.  In brief, hierarchical structures were identified
   correctly by all subjects and were performed by route subjects.
   Subjects were not able to identify the linear structures correctly
   and were not able to build accurate cognitive maps of the location
   of parts within the whole.  Survey subjects preferred the second
   system they used, regardless of its underlying structure.  They were
   also faster at the tasks, but route subjects built more accurate
   cognitive maps of the structural layout.
       It is concluded that systems should provide survey access to all
   function, however, learning aids should include an emphasis upon
   building up route knowledge of the system.  Furthermore, on-line
   information should be structured hierarchically.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG86-27852.
AU VIDAL-ARBONA, CARLOS.
SO DAI v47(08), SecA, pp2778.
IN Case Western Reserve University Ph.D. 1986, 167 pages.
TI Comparing the retrieval effectiveness of free-text and citation
   search strategies in the subject of technology planning.
DE Information Science.
AB     This comparative study addresses the retrieval effectiveness of
   two methods of online searching: subject term and citation searching.
   Both methods were used to search the subject of Technology Planning
   in a collection of articles published by 223 journals.
       The objective of the experiment was to determine: (1) how much
   overlap existed between the articles retrieved by each of the
   methods; (2) under what circumstances each method yielded more
   relevant articles; (3) if a method which consistently retrieves a
   high percentage of relevant articles can be developed.
       Searches were conducted for eight questions on the Dialog
   Information Service against two data bases: (1) ABI/INFORM--a
   management literature file containing bibliographic citations and
   article summaries; (2) Social SciSEARCH--a citation index to the
   literature of the Social Sciences.
       Each of the questions was searched twice: one via subject terms
   on ABI/INFORM, and the second time via citations on Social Scisearch.
   Practitioners in Technology Planning evaluated the search results
   for relevance.  Effectiveness scores were calculated based on
   relevance judgements performed by experts on how similar the
   retrieved results were to two known relevant "seed" articles they
   submitted for the experiment.
       The study results demonstrated that subject term searches
   satisfied the information requirement of higher recall with
   reasonable precision preferred by the experts who participated in
   the investigation.  Citation was found to be an effective method
   when "seed" documents cited significant prior work.  Additionally,
   it was shown that the number of common documents retrieved by both
   methods is very small.  And that both methods are complementary.
   This finding is consistent with prior research and implies that
   subject bibliographies assembled by employing one method alone miss
   a large proportion of relevant articles.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-02068.
AU HERRON, NANCY LEE.
SO DAI v47(10), SecA, pp3599.
IN University of Pittsburgh Ph.D. 1986, 172 pages.
TI Information-seeking behavior and the perceptions of information
   channels by journalists of two daily metropolitan newspapers.
DE Library Science.
AB     In the last decade the large metropolitan newspaper has
   undergone an extensive transformation from a largely manual
   operation to a fully automated system where display terminals link
   departments and personnel.  Although most publishing processes have
   been transformed via computer applications, often the newspaper
   library has been the last department to experience change.  In order
   to develop in-house information systems to be used by newspaper
   journalists for information retrieval in the course of their
   day-to-day work, planners require data about the information-seeking
   behavior of different types of journalists and how they search for,
   use, and verify information available to them from inside and
   outside the newspaper organization.
       This study was undertaken to provide descriptive data about how
   newspaper journalists perceive information channels and the source
   types within them in the course of producing copy for the daily
   newspaper.
       Data was collected from the staffs of the two daily metropolitan
   Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, newspapers by survey questionnaire, and
   data analysis centered around four major variables.  Frequency of
   use, the pivotal variable established information use patterns for
   the six area of journalistic specialty, and the three source
   performance variables, (a) ease of use, (b) degree of reliability,
   and (c) degree of accessibility were examined from the perspective
   of channel use and use of the source types within formal and
   informal information channels.
       The findings revealed that the newspaper journalists surveyed
   preferred informal channel use over formal channel use two to one,
   and that personal communication especially with colleagues was the
   most important factor across all six areas of journalistic specialty.
   While journalists were relatively consistent in their use of the
   various source types, there was diversity in the way different types
   of journalists look for and use information sources.
       Although reliability of channel and source types use was
   perceived to be important to journalists, ease of use and
   accessibility tend most to affect frequency of use.
       Future developments involving the library as intermediary
   between electronic networks and the newspaper organization offer
   promise for in-house system designers as a solution to problems of
   accessiblity and ease of use.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG86-16899.
AU PAULK, BETTY DOUGLAS.
SO DAI v47(05), SecA, pp1520.
IN The Florida State University Ph.D. 1986, 282 pages.
TI The facilitation of direct searching of online services by the end
   user in academic libraries.
DE Library Science.
AB     Four hundred eighty-seven online search librarians in
   comprehensive and doctoral institution libraries in the United
   States were surveyed about end user online searching.  Of the 431
   respondents (89 percent), only 10.4 percent or forty-five of the
   responding libraries allow end users direct access to conduct their
   own online searches.  The majority of librarians indicated that they
   are offering instructional programs in online searching.  Upon
   closer examination of the purpose of this instruction, it was
   determined that only a small percentage of the instructional
   programs are actually teaching the user to conduct their own
   searches.
       While the majority of the online search librarians believed that
   end user searching was inevitable, there was a feeling of ambiguity
   concerning this development.  The majority of the librarians
   believed that online search librarians would assume a more
   challenging role as a result of end user searching.  And yet, the
   librarians did question whether or not end users were going to want
   to conduct their own searches and the role the librarian should
   assume in encouraging end users to conduct their own searches and in
   training end users to perform these online searches.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-02911.
AU SULLIVAN, PATRICIA ANN.
SO DAI v47(10), SecA, pp3601.
IN Carnegie-Mellon University Ph.D. 1986, 276 pages.
TI Rhetoric and the search for externally stored knowledge: toward a
   computer age art of research.
DE Library Science.  Education, Technology.
AB     The search for external sources of argument has traditionally
   been placed outside the "art" of rhetoric.  But college composition
   classes teach library research through the research paper.  Because
   the advent of the Electronic Library makes traditional library
   research training obsolete, consideration of building a computer-age
   art of research is appropriate.  This exploratory study examines one
   facet of the artfulness of searching by studying how expert (6) and
   novice (6) searchers plan to search LS/2000 (OCLC's online public
   access catalog) general references.
       The study finds that experts outperform the novices: experts'
   plans would find a significantly higher proportion of the relevant
   sources and are more complex, but experts do not achieve success
   through economy or more plans.  The study also proposes a model of
   search planning that shows distinctions between expert and novice
   planning: experts evidence more detail in how they understand the
   searching task (focusing on searchable terms, setting subgoals, and
   transforming the question where appropriate), how they simulate the
   searches they plan (offering more alternative routes, giving
   specific alternatives), and how they evaluate the plans' success
   (offering substantive evaluations and planning for failure).  The
   novices do not show an ability to plan without feedback from the
   system.
       Patterns, moves, and representational explanations for expert
   decision-making are examined, with the representational being
   preferred.  Experts represent searching problems and then use
   strategies (like subgoals and decision rules) to help them build
   flexible plans that represent their views.  The study concludes that
   the experts in this study can plan LS/2000 searches while the
   novices cannot.  The novices' apparent need for system feedback in
   order to plan and the experts' systematic approach to searching for
   questions of general interest suggest that an "art" of online
   searching may be both needed and possible.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
16
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 87 10:51 EDT
-FROM-
From: Roland Zito-Wolf <RJZ@JASPER.PALLADIAN.COM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: references re (approximate) structure matching
-BODY-
    [Message also sent to NL-KR and AI lists; please excuse duplications.]
    I am looking for references regarding the matching of complex structures
    (matching on semantic networks or portions of networks) such as arise in
    doing retrieval operations on knowledge-bases so represented.
    Since the general matching problem is most likely intractable, I'm
    looking for approximate or incomplete techniques, such as partial match,
    resource-bounded match, matches using preference rules, etc.
    References which explore algorithms in detail, and implemented systems,
    would be especially useful. For example, does anyone know of a detailed
    description of the KRL matcher?
    Information on the more general problem of query/data-retrieval from
    semantic networks would also be useful.
    Thanks in advance.
    Roland J. Zito-wolf
    Palladian Software
    4 Cambridge Center
    Cambridge, Mass 02142
    617-661-7171
    RJZ%JASPER@LIVE-OAK.LCS.MIT.EDU
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 87 03:31:13 pdt
-FROM-
From: cssamia%opal.Berkeley.EDU@BERKELEY.EDU (Samia Benidir)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: microcomputer software for information retrieval
-BODY-
[Note: message begins with copy of Welcome message, and comment about
people on USENET now getting IRList - Ed]
 ...
Great! I am glad that information scientists can discuss info. retrieval
issues on the USENET!
Thanks for the initiative.
I know that the following question is not quite the direction you
want to give to this group, but I need to find out if there is any
microcomputer software for information retrieval, i.e., not just any
database, but a sophisticated package, using Booleans and other
algorithms. The only one I am aware of is SIRE; is there something
more polished either in the public domain, shareware or commercial
packages?
I will inform the scholars from the School of Library & Information
Studies of Berkeley of the existence of this new group.
Samia

[Note: I am glad that IRList can be received under USENET; if anyone
wants to inform me of messages from USENET that the rest of us should
see, please do so.  Regarding packages, I would be happy to publish a
summary of free or commercially available or research systems for
information retrieval, giving features and key characteristics, if
someone would like to prepare such. I have seen TOPIC by ADS, and
CD450 by OCLC; SIRE has evolved into the Personal Librarian - Ed]
 --
amia Benidir
cssamia@ucbopal.Berkeley.EDU

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 87 12:06:08 edt
-FROM-
From: "Susan E. Gauch" <gauchs%cs.unc.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Thesauri
-BODY-
I am doing my Ph.D. thesis in Intelligent Information Retrieval, and could
use some help/advice/software.  My database is a full-text textbook about
computer architecture.  I need a thesaurus for this area.  I can either
    - build one by hand from the words in the text
    - write some software to build one automatically
    - or import a thesaurus for this general area if such a thing exists.
Does any one have any advice/experience with any of the above options?
Are there any online thesauri/thesaurus building software around that
may be useful?
Susan Gauch
gauchs@unc    decvax!mcnc!unc!gauchs

[Note: Good questions! Since at the 1986 ASIS Annual Meeting he
indicated he knew how to build thesauri, you might send query to
Dagobert Soergel at U. Md. (author of Academic Press book "Organizing
Information").  Bob Amsler at Bellcore has been building knowledge
bases from machine readable books and may have advice too.  We have
done a bit here in connection with the CODER project, using the
machine readalbe text of the "Handbook of Artificial Intelligence" to
help with an intelligent information retrieval system for AIList Digest.
There are various published articles and books with information on
building term association matrices etc. that are also relevant.
Please send back a report on what else you find. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 87 17:28:51 edt
-FROM-
From: A385@EMDUCM11.Bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject: machine readable novels
-BODY-
Greetings from Spain! Does anyone knows where I can find contemporary
novels on PC-diskettes?.It doesn't matter public domain or commercial. I
also could dumping files frommainframes to PC's.  Are there any Arpanet
list or another forum about literature  and   word processing?
Please people interested in these subjects contact to me as i'm not subs-
cribed to this list.
  Many thanks in advance.
                  Yours
                      Javier Lopez.
         Universidad Complutense de Madrid
             <A385@EMDUCM11.Bitnet>
[Note: Have you looked into the Oxford Text Archive? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 87 09:21:40 EDT
-FROM-
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  dissertation abstracts for SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
Ed, in the intro I sent you with the citations including abstracts,
please replace last paragraph with:

  [Note: this refers to IRList V3 #14 - Ed]

The dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published
with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers
of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright by University
Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced without their
prior permission.

>-Susanne

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 87 18:40:34 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: 1987 SIGIR Elections
-BODY-
According to a letter from Pat Ryan of ACM:

The following individuals were elected to serve as SIGIR officers for the term
July 1, 1987 - June 30, 1989:

CHAIR:		Bruce Croft, Dept. of Computer Sci., Univ. of Massachusetts
		Amherst, MA 01003, 413-545-0463

VICE-CHAIR:	Edward A. Fox, Dept. of Computer Sci., Virginia Tech
		Blacksburg, VA 24061, 703-961-5113

SECRETARY:	Nicholas J. Belkin, Rutgers Univ./SCILS
		New Brunswick, NJ 08903

TREASURER:	Donna Harman, Nat'l Library of Med., Lister Hill Center
		8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD 20815, 301-496-1939

[Note: Nick Belkin is in UK for the summer.  EMAIL addresses for the
others are --
	croft@umass-cs.csnet
	fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
	donna@nlm-vax.arpa
in case contacting is easier that way. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 24 May 87 08:48 EDT
-FROM-
From: science@nems.ARPA (Mark Zimmermann)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Browser v.244+ now available
-BODY-
  Version 0.244+ of the Browser for the Mac is now available ... if
anybody wants a copy, send a self-addressed stamped envelope along
with a formatted Mac disk to me, Mark Zimmermann, 9511 Gwyndale Dr.,
Silver Spring, MD  20910.
  Browser lets you create a complete inverted index to every word in
a text file that can be many megabytes long ... it also lets you
browse that index in Macintosh-fashion, point and click to see a
KWIC display of occurrences of any term, and click on one line of
that key-word-in-context display to call up the full text around
that item ... use the mouse to copy/paste from the retrieved information
into notes, etc. with the integrated multi-window text editor.  Fast
and simple.
  V.244+ adds a proximity-search or subindex capability ... can restrict
the retrieved words to those in some chosen proximity to other words,
also with point-and-click techniques.  V.244+ also has greatly improved
scrolling of windows and other enhancements.
  Requires 512KB mac or greater ... works on Mac SE, Mac II, as far as
I can tell in short tests.  Best with a fast hard disk.  I'm working
on developing a C version that will lack the beautiful user interfaces
but will be more transportable to other machines ... but that project
is likely to take several months to complete.
       science@nems.arpa     301-565-2166

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 87 17:17:43 edt
-FROM-
From: "Robert B. Allen" <rba@flash.bellcore.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IFIP WG8.4 Workshop Program on Office Knowledge
-BODY-
            Office Knowledge: Representation, Management and Utilization
                                University of Toronto
                             IFIP WG8.4 Workshop Program

                For information contact: Fred Lochovsky, fred@csri.toronto.edu

                              Monday, August 17th, 1987
          8:00-9:00 Registration
          9:00-9:15 Workshop Opening Remarks
          9:15-10:45 Session: Invited Talk
             Objects and Things.   D. Tsichritzis,  Universite  de  Geneve,
               Switzerland
          11:15-12:45 Session: Supporting Organizational Activities
             Ubik: A System for Conceptual and Organizational  Development.
               P. de Jong, MIT, U.S.A.
             KNOOM - KNowledge  Oriented  Office  Model  Representation  of
               Knowledge  in  the  Office.   M. Hofmann, Universitaet Wien,
               Austria
             OTM: A Language  for  Representing  Concurrent  Office  Tasks.
               J. Hogg, University of Toronto, Canada
          2:00-3:30 Session: Invited Talk
             Representing  Office  Work   with   Goals   and   Constraints.
               W.B. Croft, University of Massachusetts, U.S.A.
          4:00-5:30   Session: Representing,   Querying   and    Generating
                              Office Objects
             Time  Management  in  the  Office-net  System.    R. Maiocchi,
               R. Zicari,   Politecnico   di   Milano,   Italy,  M. Fugini,
               Universita di Brescia, Italy
             Towards  a  Graphic  Query  Interface  for  Complex   Objects.
               G. Lausen, Universitaet Mannheim, West Germany, A. Oberweis,
               Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, West Germany
             Knowledge Representation and Utilization in  Automatic  Office
               Form  Generation.   K. Watabe, K. Tsuruoka, NEC Corporation,
               Japan
          5:30-6:30 Reception
          6:30-7:30 Demonstration
             Meta-Data for Automating the Management of Office Information.
               R.E.A. Mason, A. Benjamin, J.R. Tessier, Online People Inc.,
               Canada
          _________________________________________________________________
                             Tuesday, August 18th, 1987
          9:00-10:30 Session: Invited Talk
             Organizational Semantics.  C. Hewitt, MIT, U.S.A.
          11:00-12:30 Session: Problem Solving
             An   Office   Environment   to   Support   Problem    Solving.
               P.W.G. Bots,   H.G. Sol,  Delft  University  of  Technology,
               Netherlands
             Generic   Knowledge   in   Office   Activities.    A.A. Araya,
               M.J. Stefik, Xerox PARC, U.S.A.
             EXPERTNET: An Approach to Resource Sharing  on  a  Network  of
               Workstations.    A. Allam,  Northern  Telecom  Canada  Ltd.,
               Canada, G.M. White, University of Ottawa, Canada
          2:00-3:30 Session: Text and Pictures
             Semantics and Conceptual Modelling of  Documents.   F. Barbic,
               S. Daneluzzi,    F. Garzotto,    S. Mainetti,    P. Paolini,
               Politecnico di Milano, Italy
             Knowledge-Based Text Processing in  Office  Environments:  The
               Text   Condensation  System  TOPIC.   U. Hahn,  Universitaet
               Passau, West Germany, U. Reimer, Universitaet Konstanz, West
               Germany
             Knowledge  Base  for  Storage  and  Retrieval   of   Pictures.
               B. Beetz, SEL Research Center, West Germany
          4:00-5:30 Session: Poster Session
             Artificial Intelligence and Organizational  Design:  Prospects
               of  Integrating  Two  Perspectives.   U. Frank, Universitaet
               Mannheim, West Germany
             Intermediate  Knowledge  Representation  for  Extended  Office
               Systems.  E.S. Cordingley, University of Surrey, England
             Intelligent  Interfaces  for   Office   Information   Systems.
               B.C. Desai,   Concordia   University,   Canada,  C. Frasson,
               J. Vaucher, Universite de Montreal, Canada
             Managing  Office  Knowledge  through  Conceptual   Structures.
               G. Berg-Cross, Advanced Decision Systems, U.S.A.
             Picture Management on Optical Disks: A Practical  Approach  on
               Micro-computers.   S. Miranda,  N. Le  Thanh,  A.C. Salgado,
               E. Borelli-Vittori, Universite de Nice, France
             Managing    Replicas    in    Distributed    Telephone/Address
               Directories.   H.M. Gladney,  IBM  Almaden  Research Center,
               U.S.A.
          7:30 Banquet
          _________________________________________________________________
                            Wednesday, August 19th, 1987
          9:00-10:30 Session: Invited Talk
             NICK:  Intelligent  Computer   Supported   Cooperative   Work.
               C. Ellis, MCC, U.S.A.
          11:00-12:30 Session: Office Communication
             Solving the Connection  Problem.   M.S. Mazer,  University  of
               Toronto, Canada
             Viewing  Communication  as  a  Problem  Solving  Activity:  An
               Enrichment   Towards  Supporting  Cooperative  Office  Work.
               C.C. Woo, F.H. Lochovsky, University of Toronto, Canada
             CHAOS: A Knowledge-Based System for Conversing Inside Offices.
               F. De    Cindio,    C. Simone,   R. Vassallo,   A. Zanaboni,
               Universita di Milano, Italy
          2:00-3:30 IFIP WG8.4 Business Meeting

>-----------------------------
-END-
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END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
17
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 25 May 87 12:51 EDT
-FROM-
From: Walter Bunch <mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!aimmi!walt@seismo.css.gov>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conceptual Information Research
-BODY-
[From NL-KR Digest   (5/28/87 17:33:56)     Volume 2 Number 44 - Ed]

I'm interested in researching knowledge representation as part of a PhD
program.

What universities are supporting research in the use and properties of
conceptual information, e.g. in light of Sowa's "Conceptual Structures"
(1984)?

I've read about some work going on at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Inst Tech).
I suppose that anyone grappling with frames/schemas/etc. could say they
are exploring the use of conceptual information, in a broad sense.

My interest is less in the application of schema-like data structures to
specific problems than in the manipulation of the structures themselves,
e.g. in generic conceptual recognition and generalization.

As an aside: Is there anyone working with conceptual structures on
connectionist machines?

Thanks in advance,
Walt
>-
Walter Bunch, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
UUCP:   walt@uk.ac.hw.aimmi
ARPA:   walt%aimmi.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
JANET:  walt@uk.ac.hw.aimmi                         "Is that you, Dave?"

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 87 14:00 EDT
From: William J. Rapaport <rapaport@sunybcs.UUCP>
Subject: Re: Conceptual Information Research

[ From NL-KR Digest  (6/16/87 19:14:20)    Volume 2 Number 55 - Ed]

In article <33@aimmi.UUCP> walt@hci.hw.ac.uk (Walter Bunch) writes:
  >
  >I'm interested in researching knowledge representation as part of a PhD
  >program.
  >
  >What universities are supporting research in the use and properties of
  >conceptual information, e.g. in light of Sowa's "Conceptual Structures"
  >(1984)?
  >Walter Bunch, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN
  >UUCP:   walt@uk.ac.hw.aimmi
  >ARPA:   walt%aimmi.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk
  >JANET:  walt@uk.ac.hw.aimmi                         "Is that you, Dave?"

There is an active research group looking at knowledge representation
issues in the Dept. of Computer Science at SUNY Buffalo.  The group is
the SNePS Research Group, directed by Stuart C. Shapiro (I'm its associate
director).  You can get more complete information on our graduate
program by writing to:

Mrs. Eloise Benzel
Department of Computer Science
SUNY Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260
USA

or contacting me electronically for specific questions:

				William J. Rapaport
				Assistant Professor

Dept. of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260

(716) 636-3193, 3180

uucp:	..!{allegra,decvax,watmath,rocksanne}!sunybcs!rapaport
csnet:	rapaport@buffalo.csnet
bitnet:	rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 87 10:27:42 edt
From: "Robert B. Allen" <rba@flash.bellcore.com>
Subject: technical report on electronic newspapers and user models

    Technical report available:

             Selecting Articles from an Electronic Newspaper:
                     Some Limitations of User Models

    Robert B. Allen
    2A-367
    Bell Communications Research
    Morristown, NJ  07960
    rba@bellcore.com

    While the technology of new information services is rapidly
    advancing, it is not entirely clear how this technology can be
    best adapted to people's needs and interests.  One often-mentioned
    proposal is that user models may be developed to select and filter
    information sources.  This paper examines the possibilities and
    implications for automatic filtering of information, and focuses
    on predicting preferences for news articles presented
    electronically.  In the studies reported here, prediction of
    preferences appears straightforward when general categories are
    used; however, it is relatively difficult for specific news
    reports.  Beyond the specific results, fundamental issues about
    user models are raised such as appropriate standards and
    techniques for applying them, what are their essential components,
    and what are the limits of using them to predict user behavior.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     Tue, 16 Jun 87 16:20 N
From:     <COR_HVH@HNYKUN52>
Subject:  database for syntax analysis (or other) trees
Below you find a copy of an information folder about a database system
for tree structures. The pictures have lost some of their
attractiveness in the translation from graphics to characters, but I
hope they still give a reasonable impression of the system at work.
Hans van Halteren (COR_HVH@HNYKUN52.BITNET)
______________________________________________________________________
The LDB (Linguistic DataBase) project is concerned with the
construction and maintenance of a computer system for the
exploitation of analyzed corpus material.
To make possible a widespread use by linguists, the system is
designed without the need for specialized hardware and without
the need for computer expertise on the part of the user. The
first complete version features a menu system for overall
control, a sub-system for the examination of analysis trees on
standard terminal screens and a query language in which the
linguist can specify database actions in his own terminology.
The database has already been in use at 20 universities
throughout the world in its mainframe (VM/CMS) and supermini (VAX
with VMS or UNIX) versions. Now the availability of the database
has been improved even further with the completion of a version
for PC/AT (with the same possibilities and user-interface as the
other versions).
Packaged with the database system comes a 130,000 word corpus of
modern English with a full syntactical analysis of each
utterance (the Nijmegen corpus, analyzed in the CCPP project). In
the future more corpora will become available. Furthermore, as
the database system is formalism and language independent, it is
possible to use it for your own analyzed corpus material.
For scientific research, the system is available at a nominal fee.
For information about obtaining it, write to:
     TOSCA Work Group
     Dept. of English
     University of Nijmegen
     P.O. Box 9103
     6500 HD Nijmegen
     The Netherlands
or E-mail to COR_HVH @ HNYKUN52.BITNET
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Figure I: The tree map view in the Tree Viewer
______________________________________________________________________
MANY A DOCTOR <# WHO APPEARS HESITANT AND RESERVED IN SOCIETY #> DONS
            .-1- .  .  .  .  .  MANY
            |-2- .  .  .  .  .  A
            |-3- .  .  .  .  .  DOCTOR
      .-1---|     .-1- .  .  . #WHO
      |     |     |-2- .  .  . #APPEARS
      |     '(4)--|     .-1- . #HESITANT
      |           |-3---+-2- . #AND
      |           |     '-3- . #RESERVED
 -*---|           '-4-----1- . #IN
      |                 '-2- . #SOCIETY
      |-2- .  .  .  .  .  .  .  DONS
      |-3-----1- .  .  .  .  .  COMPLETE
      |     '-2- .  .  .  .  .  CONFIDENCE
      |     .-1- .  .  .  .  .  WITH
      '-4---|     .-1- .  .  .  HIS
            '-2---+-2- .  .  .  WHITE
                  |-3- .  .  .  PROFESSIONAL
                  '-4- .  .  .  COAT.
POSTMODIFIER:FINITE SENTENCE()
command:
scroll:YUDLR<>() focus:FS1-90PNMJ amb:CA view:V help:? exit:X
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Figure II: A search pattern for sentences with noun phrases showing
           a non-initial determiner and a postmodifying finite
           sentence with subject WHO or THAT and a subject complement
           of more than one word (for an example, see figure I)
______________________________________________________________________
                          .--------------------.
                       1--|FUN = 'DET'         |
                       |  |SNO > 1             |
                       |  |                    |
                       |  `--------------------'
.--------------------. |  .--------------------.
|CAT = 'NP'          |-2--|FUN = 'HD'          |
|                    | |  |                    |
|                    | |  |                    |
`--------------------' |  `--------------------'
                       |  .--------------------.    ######################
                       3--|FUN = 'POM'         |-1--#FUN = 'SU'          #
                          |CAT = 'SF'          | |  #WOR = 'WHO' OR WOR =>
                          |                    | |  #                    #
                          `--------------------' |  ######################
                                                 |  .--------------------.
                                                 2--|FUN = 'CS'          |
                                                    |WCT > 1             |
                                                    |                    |
                                                    `--------------------'
FUN = 'SU' ; WOR = 'WHO' OR WOR = 'THAT'
command:
scroll:YUDLR()<> focus:FS1-90PN edit:IETCOW view:V help:? exit:X
______________________________________________________________________

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 87 12:42 EDT
From: Sherman Tyler <wiley!sherman@lll-lcc.ARPA>
Subject: Conference - Architectures for Intelligent Interfaces

[Excerpted from NL-KR which in turn excerpted from AIList - Ed]

                        Call for Participation

                             Workshop on

              Architectures for Intelligent Interfaces:

                       Elements and Prototypes


            March 29 - April 1, 1988, Monterey, California
                          Sponsored by AAAI


Objective:  The term ``Intelligent Interface'' characterizes  the  set
of   computer-human   interfaces   which  employ  AI  to  enhance  the
transactional nature of the interface.  The goal of the workshop is to
explore  ways  in which AI techniques (e.g., knowledge representation,
inference mechanisms, and heuristic search) can be used to provide the
adaptability   and   reasoning   capabilities   required  for  a  more
intelligent human-machine interaction.

Some possible areas for focused discussions might include:


      *  Models (user, system, task) - adapting the  dialogue  to  the
         current   context   of   the   interaction,  considering  the
         particular user, the target system, and the  high-level  task
         under execution;

      *  Channels of Communication -  allowing  users  to  communicate
         intentions  with  a  minimum  of  learning  and effort, using
         Natural Language, Graphics,  and  the  integration  of  mixed
         modalities of input;

      *  Planning - for  recognizing  user  plans  and  their  implied
         goals, generating plans to meet those goals, and planning how
         to best display the resulting information to communicate  the
         result of the executed action;

      *  Interface-Building  Tools  -  using  artificial  intelligence
         techniques   to   support   developers   in   designing   and
         constructing interfaces.


Attendance:   In  order  to  provide  an  intellectually   stimulating
environment  conducive  to  interaction  and  exchange  of  ideas, the
attendance will be limited  to  approximately  35  participants.   The
ideal   participant  is  an  individual  who  is  actively  addressing
theoretical,  research,  and/or  implementation  issues  relevant   to
Intelligent  Interfaces  (with a bias toward those who have dealt with
implementation issues at some level).   Limited  financial  assistance
will   be   available   for  graduate  students  who  are  invited  to
participate.

Review Process:  The submitted abstracts and autobiographies  will  be
reviewed  by  the  program  committee.   Invitation will be based upon
relevance of the work to the goals of the workshop, and on  the  basis
of significance, originality, and scientific quality.

Workshop Organization:   The  workshop  organizers  are  J.   Sullivan
(Lockheed  AI Center) and S.  Tyler (Lockheed AI Center).  The program
committee consists of J.  Mackinlay (Xerox PARC), R.  Neches
(USC Information Sciences Institute), E. Rissland (University of
Massachusetts), and N. Sondheimer (USC Information Sciences Institute).

Submission:   A  detailed  eight  page  abstract  and   a   one   page
biographical  sketch  (six  copies  of  each)  should  be submitted by
September 1, 1987.  Invitations for participation will be extended  by
October  16,  1987,  with  complete  papers  due by December 18, 1987.
Publication of the proceedings is planned, therefore  the  quality  of
the papers is important.

Submit abstracts to:   Joseph  W.   Sullivan  or  Sherman  W.   Tyler,
O/90-06  B/259, Lockheed AI Center, 2710 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park, CA
94025,      (415)      354-5200,       wiley!joe@lll-lcc.arpa       or
wiley!sherman@lll-lcc.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
18
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 87 14:54:01 EDT
-FROM-
From: Michael Hawley <mike@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IR query
-BODY-
I'm looking for reasonable stemming algorithms -- one good one,
for English, to reduce a given word form to a canonical base form,
would be great.  An inflection generator would also be wonderful
(something to cast a word in some other functional form,
e.g., plural, past tense, whatever).
Any leads appreciated -
Michael Hawley
mike@media-lab.mit.edu

[Note: I expect donna@nlm-vax.arpa is a good place to start. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 87 14:14:09 EDT
From: Bruce Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com>
Subject: online HAI
Is the machine-readable text of the _Handbook of Artificial Intelligence_
available on line by ftp?  I saw your mention of it in IRList 3.16
(last Friday's digest).
[Note: I have it online but had to obtain tapes after getting
permission  of publisher and authors.  Also, I am not yet on
ARPAnet (but am supposed to be in about a month!). - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 87 11:51:16 edt
From: amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler)
Subject: representation of dictionary information
 . . .
I am concerned now with the representation of dictionary information
by whomever wants to use dictionaries and in making sure that
whatever format is developed meets all users needs.
Personally, I am involved in correcting a lot of errors in the Seventh
Collegiate and improving its format for easier extraction of linguistic
data as well as extending the format to other dictionaries.
Generally, all formats tend to have more in common with each other than
with the original book--as long as they didn't discard information.
Thus, while two formats may look radically different, they tend to
be algorithmically derivable whereas the original work may lack
information and require extensive manual labor to get formatted.
So, I'd welcome news of your format.

[Note: We have put the Collins dictionary into a set of Prolog
relations. Alas, we have spent an enormous amount of time making
manual corrections, but the end is in sight!  We (Martha Evens of IIT,
along with J. Terry Nutter and I at Virginia Tech) are starting a new
project soon to build an enormous semantic network from several
dictionaries merged together, with hopes that it will be of service to
many others, and would welcome comments from you and others regarding
how to "meet all users needs". - Ed]
Bob Amsler

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat, 13 Jun 87 16:35 EDT
From: Gabriel Robins <gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu>
Subject: The ISI Grapher

[Excerpted from NL-KR which in turn excerpted from AIList - Ed]

Greetings,

   Due to the considerable interest drawn by the ISI Grapher so far, I am
posting this abstract summarizing its function and current status.  Interested
parties may obtain further information by directly sending EMail to
"gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu" or by writing to:

             Gabriel Robins
             Intelligent Systems Division
             Information Sciences Institute
             4676 Admiralty Way
             Marina Del Rey, Ca 90292-6695

If you want documentation in hardcopy, please include your U.S. Mail address.

Gabe

                             The ISI Grapher

                                June, 1987

                              Gabriel Robins
                       Intelligent Systems Division
                      Information Sciences Institute


   The ISI Grapher is a set of functions that convert an arbitrary graph
structure (or relation) into an equivalent pictorial representation and
displays the resulting diagram.  Nodes and edges in the graph become boxes and
lines on the workstation screen, and the user may then interact with the
Grapher in various ways via the mouse and the keyboard.

   The fundamental motivation which gave birth to the ISI Grapher is the
observation that graphs are very basic and common structures, and the belief
that the ability to quickly display, manipulate, and browse through graphs  may
greatly enhance the productivity of a researcher, both quantitatively and
qualitatively.  This seems especially true in knowledge representation and
natural language research.

   The ISI Grapher is both powerful and versatile, allowing an
application-builder to easily build other tools on top of it.  The ISI NIKL
Browser is an example of one such tool.  The salient features of the ISI
Grapher are its portability, speed, versatility, and extensibility.  Several
additional applications were already built on top of the ISI Grapher,
providing the ability to graph lists, flavors, packages, divisors, functions,
and Common-Loops classes.

  Several basic Grapher operations may be user-controlled via the specification
of alternate functions for performing these tasks.  These operations include
the drawing of nodes and edges, the selection of fonts, the determination of
print-names, pretty-printing, and highlighting operations.  Standard
definitions are already provided for these operations and are used by default
if the application-builder does not override them by specifying his own
custom-tailored functions for performing the same tasks.

   The ISI Grapher now spans about 100 pages of CommonLisp code. The 120-page
ISI Grapher manual is available; this manual describes the general ideas, the
interface, the application-builder's  back-end, the algorithms, the
implementation, and the data structures.  The ISI Grapher presently runs on
both Symbolics (6 & 7) and TI Explorer workstations.

   If you are interested in more information, the sources themselves, or just
the documentation/manual, please feel free to forward your U.S. Mail address to
"gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu" or write to "Gabriel Robins, c/o Information Sciences
Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, Ca 90292-6695."

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue 23 Jun 87 16:45:40
From: Roland Hjerppe <seismo!enea!liuida.UUCP!rhj>
Subject: Prel. Program Visual Languages 1987


                 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

            1987 WORKSHOP ON VISUAL LANGUAGES
                 August 19-21, 1987
                 Linkoping, Sweden

Program Declaration:
The workshop is concentrated on theory, methodology and applications
of visual languages, including languagaes that have a heavy visual
component as well as languages designed for operating on visual
objects.
Areas related to visual languages, such as: Man-Machine Interface,
Office Automation, Computer Hardware, Knowledge Based Systems are also
of interest if the visual language is in focus.


                  PRELIMINARY PROGRAM

Wednesday August 19, 1987

	09.00 Welcome address
		  Sven Erlander
		  Rector of the University of Linkoping

	09.20 Key-note-address
	      Werner Schneider, University of Uppsala

	10.10 Coffee break

	10.40 Session 1. Icon Formalization
 		Co-chairmen: S. K. Chang and Nan Shu

		Icon Purity - Toward a Formal Theory of Icons
		Shi-Kuo Chang, G. Tortora*, Bing Yu and A. Guercio*
		University of Pittsburgh, *University of Salerno

		Visual Representaion in the Game of Adumbration
		Steven L. Tanimoto
		University of Washington

		Approach to Standardize Icons
		K. Furuya, S. Tayama, E. Kutsuwada and K. Matsumura
		Toshiba Corporation

	12.10 Lunch

	13.30 Session 2: Visual Programming

		Co-chairmen: Clarence Ellis and Ch. Krysander

		Animation of Algorithms without Programming
		A. Hyrskykari and K.-J. Raiha
		University of Tampere

		Visual Programming of Program Visualizations
		A Gestural Interface for Animating Algorithms
		Robert Duisberg
		Tektronix, Inc

		Software Design Capture
		Don Petersen
		MCC

		Generalized Halstead Metrics for Iconic Programming?
		Ephraim P. Glinert and Craig D. Smith*
		Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, *AT & T Bell Labs

	15.00 Coffee break

	15.30 Session 3: Sheet Languages
	Co-chairmen: E. Glinert and W. Schneider

		A Spreadsheet-Based Visual Language for Freehand
		Sketching of Complex Motions
		J. Michael Moshell, Charles E. Huges, Lee Lacy, Rick Lewis
		University of Central Florida and
		David N. Blower
		Naval Training Systems Center

		Forms: Expanding the Visualness of Sheet Languages
		Allen L. Ambler
		University of Kansas

		Description Based Icon Design
		P. Mussio, M. Padula* and M. Protti
		University of Milan, *C.N.R. S.I.A.M.

	18.30 Cocktail Party at the CS Dept. of  University of Linkoping




Thursday August 20 1987

	09.00 Session 4: Applications
		Co-chairmen: S. Levialdi and G. Borgefors

		Animation Using Behaviour Functions
		Timothy C. Lethbridge and Colin Ware
		University of New Brunswick

		An Extended Visual Programming Synthesizer for
		Computer Aided Instruction Applications
		K. Y. Cheng, M. S. Hwu and C. C. Hsu
		National Taiwan University

		Visual Programming of Graphical User Interfaces
		Gurminder Singh and Mark Green
		University of Alberta

	10.15 Coffee break

	10.45 Session 5: Information Retrieval Applications
		Co-chairmen: Robert R. Korfhage and Roland Hjerppe

		A Pictorial Representation of Data in an
		Information Retrieval Environment
		Donald B. Crouch
		Tulane University

		A Graphical Tool for Structuring and Understanding
		Quantiative Decision Models
		Charles Wiecha and Max Henrion
		Carnegie-Mellon University

		QPF - A Versatile Query Language Based on ADTS
		Tao Chen and Jian-Kang Wu
		University of Science and Technology of China

		Methodologies and Applications of Visual languages for
		Information Services
		S. C. Chan, I. F. Chang, T. S. Chua, K. C. Chu,
	        A. B. H. Kang, K. C. Kwok, C. K. Law, J. L. Lim,
		K. T. Loh, H. B. Low, A. D. Narasimhalu,
		T. M. Ng, and W. H.  Wong,
		National University of Singapore

	12.15 Lunch

	13.30 Session 6: Panel: Visual Grammars: Consistency and Desirability
		Chairman and Moderator: Erland Jungert
		National Defence Research Institute, Sweden
	        Panelists:
		S. K. Chang, Univ. of Pittsburg
		S. L. Tanimoto, Univ. of Washington
		M. Tauber, Univ. of Paderborn

	14.45 Coffee break

	15.15 Session 7: Visual Data Structures
		Co-chairmen: Tadao Ichikawa and G. Tortora

		Specification of Visual Representations of Petri Nets
		A. T. Berztiss
		University of Pittsburgh

		A Rapid Prototyping of Real-Time Software Using Petri Nets
		Tadashi Ae and Reiji Aibara
		University of Hiroshima

		A Visual Programming Environment for Hierarchical
		Data Structures
		Sandra Loosemore
		University of Utah

	18.00 Buses from Ekoxen and Stora Hotellet depart
		  for the Conference dinnner.



Friday August 21

	09.00 Session 8: Panel on Visual Human-Machine Interfaces
		Chairman and Moderator Stefano Levialdi
		University of Rome

	10.30 Coffee break

	11.00 Session 9: Visual Languages and Systems
		Co-chairmen: Steven L. Tanimoto and T. Ae

        	From Modern Alchemy to a New Renaissance
	        Kim Fairchild and Eric Gullichsen
        	MCC

        	Simulacrum: A System Behavior Example Editor
        	David Bridgeland
        	MCC

         	Icon Driven Troubleshooting
        	L. Cinque, M. Crisplodi and S. Levialdi*
          	SELENIA s.p.a.  *University of Rome

         	Visual Specification of Security Constraints
        	J. D. Tygar and Jeannette M. Wing
        	Carnegie Mellon University

	12.30 Lunch

	14.00 Session 10: Visual Programming Languages
		Co-chairmen: P. Mussio and S. Hagglund

		An Environment for HI-VISUAL Iconic Programming
		M. Hirakawa, S. Iwata, I. Yosimoto, M. Tanaka and T. Ichikawa
		University of Hiroshima

		ALEX - An Alexical Programming Language
		D. Kozen, T. Teitelbaum, W. Chen,
		J. Field, W. Pugh and B. Vander Zanden
		Cornell University

		A Visual Environment for the Design of Distributed Systems
		Michael Graf
		MCC

	15.30 Closing session


                 CONFERENCE ORGANISATION

Sponsors:
Univ. of Linkoping, Dept. of Computer and Information Science
Univ. of Pittsburg, Dept. of Information Science

In cooperation with:
IEEE-CS

With support from:
FOA3, National Defense Research Institute, Linkoping
FFV Elektronik AB, Linkoping
SSI, Swedish Society for Information Processing,
     Local Chapter of Linkoping


Conference Chairman:
Prof. Robert Korfhage, Dept. of Information Science,
Univ. of Pittsburg, Pittsburg, PA 15260, U.S.A.

Program Chairman:
Erland Jungert, FOA3, Box 1165, S-581 11 Linkoping Sweden

Organizers:
Roland Hjerppe, Christian Krysander, Dept. of Computer and Information
Science, Univ. of Linkoping, S-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden
UUCP:RHJ@LIUIDA, ARPA:RHJ%LIUIDA.UUCP@SEISMO

Conference Secretary:
Ingrid Nyman, Telephone +46 13 281148 (not during July)


                 ADVANCE REGISTRATION FORM, VisLang87
                           Aug. 19-21, 1987
                          Linkoping, SWEDEN


Name:

Company/Organisation:

Address:

City/State/ZIP:

Country:

**************************************************************************

WORKSHOP FEE

Workshop fee including proceedings, refreshments and banquet.

Early registration before June 25, 1987  SEK 1700/person   ...............

Registration from June 25, 1987          SEK 2100/person   ...............

(IEEE-CS members will receive repayment of SEK 65.00 ($10.00) at
registration)

Please note that the number of delegates are limited.

HOTEL RESERVATION

Hotel reservations and payment should be received before June 25, 1987,
otherwise hotel room cannot be guaranteed.

Please reserve for me/us from August ..... to August .....

Hotel Ekoxen   single room   SEK 730/night  ......
               double room   SEK 880/night  ......

Stora Hotellet single room   SEK 625/night  ......
               double room   SEK 725/night  ......

Baltic Hotel   single room   SEK 550/night  ......
               double room   SEK 680/night  ......

Total Hotel cost                           .......

Grand Total (Fee + Hotel)                              SEK ...............

Please enclose a commercial check made payable to VisLang 87,
Linkoping University, SWEDEN.

Send to:

Workshop on Visual Language
Ingrid Nyman
Center of Technology Transfer
Linkoping University
S-581 83 Linkoping
SWEDEN

                    Welcome!

>-----------------------------
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-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
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-VOL-
3

-N-
19
-DATE-
Date: Tue 5 May 87 23:33:14
-FROM-
From: Roland Hjerppe <rhj@liuida.uucp>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: feedback
-BODY-
Dear Ed,
I enjoy receiving IRList but seem to be missing the following
issues: ...
[Note: hope these arrived - let me know if I can help others too. - Ed]
Sometimes when reading questions or requests for information I wonder
if others have already answered or whether I should venture an answer.
It would be nice to have some kind of indication (satisfied, still
open, no answers) in the next issue (a regular feature) of the fate of
previous requests.

[Note: I agree that more feedback is needed, but that may also be a
result of my research. - Ed]
Roland Hjerppe
LIBLAB, Linkoping University

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 87 15:28:39 edt
From: Yaacov Choueka <choueka@thunder.bellcore.com>
Subject: Conferences announcement

             ALLC--AIBI Joint Conferences
             June 1988 -- Jerusalem, Israel

           Preliminary Announcement

    The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC)
and the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique (AIBI) invite
you to attend their International Conferences to be held in
June 1988 in Jerusalem. The Fifteenth Annual Conference of ALLC
will take place on June 5-9, 1988, and it will be followed
immediately by the Second Conference of AIBI on June 9-13, 1988.

    The conferences are jointly organized by the
Organizing Committee in Israel (which will also serve as the Conference
Committee for the ALLC one), but the procedures for papers'
submission and selection and for registrations will be kept separate.
A significant discount will be given, however, for a joint registration,
to encourage attendees of each conference to attend the other one also,
thus enhancing fruitful exchanges and communications between
researchers of closely related interests.

    Special registration rates will also apply to speakers,
students, and members of sponsoring institutions.

    The conferences are sponsored and supported by a number of academic
and professional societies and organizations that will be listed in
future mailings.

    A ``Call for Papers'' for the ALLC conference is enclosed;
a ``Call for Papers'' for the AIBI one is being mailed separately.
The coordination between the two programs will be assured
by a special panel consisting of Y. Choueka and R.-F. Poswick.

    Both conferences will consist of invited lectures,
contributed papers, panels, product-review sessions, poster displays,
exhibits and demonstrations.  Standard hardware and communications
equipment for on-line demonstrations and large-screen displays will be
available on site. Every effort will be made to meet special
hardware needs if a detailed request is sent well in advance
to the Organizing Committee.

    Selected papers from the two conferences will be
published in two separate Proceedings volumes.

    The conferences will be accompanied by an exhibition
of hardware, software, books and other products and services
relevant, in general, to the computing-in-the-humanities domain.

    The timing of the conferences was specially chosen
so as to coincide (hopefully...) with some of the most glorious
sunny days that Jerusalem can offer, and to assure availability
(and lower fares...) of air tickets and hotel rooms, while
avoiding the rush summer season when tourists usually crowd
the city.

    A rich and interesting series of cultural, social and
tourist events for the registrants and their parties
will accompany the conferences. A few Mediterranean beaches,
beautiful in so many ways, are also about one hour of driving from
Jerusalem; far enough so as not to distract the conscientious
wisdom seeker, but close enough for an occasional refreshing jump
to the sun-and-sea worshipper...

    The fascinating appeal and haunting beauty of Jerusalem, with
its multi-cultural environments and institutions, its intriguing
history, and its unique human and  architectural landscapes,
coupled with the anticipated characteristic ambiance  usually
associated with scientific activities and  the gathering of scholars
and researchers from all over the world, will certainly turn these
meetings into an exciting professional and cultural event.

    So, mark these dates on your calendar, and plan
early to join us in June 1988 in Jerusalem. Don't miss
this excellent opportunity for an enriching scientific and
human experience.

    In order to receive future mailings about the conferences,
and to help us better plan them, please return the enclosed
Notification Form, duly filled out, as soon as possible.

For further information on the conferences and their programs,
and for suggestions for panels, tutorials, etc., please write
to the Organizing Committee at the address given in the enclosed
form.
================================================================

           ALLC--AIBI Joint Conferences
           5-13 June 1988, Jerusalem

    Organizing Committee:

   Yaacov Choueka, Chairman    Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan
                               (visiting
                               Bell Communications Research, Morristown)
   Hillel Weiss, Coordinator   Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan
   Daniel Boyarin              Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan
   Itamar Even-Zohar           Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv
   Ariel Frank                 Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan
   Reuven Mirkin               Academy of Hebrew Language, Jerusalem
   Uzzi Ornan                  The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
   Yehuda Radday               Technion, Haifa

        Address:
    Department of Mathematics and  Computer Science
    Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100

    electronic mail: R70016%BARILAN.BITNET
		     choueka@bimacs.bitnet

 =================================================================

           Notification Form

 Mail to:
 Organizing Committee
 ALLC--AIBI Joint Conferences
 Deprtment of Mathematics and Computer Science
 Bar-Ilan University
 Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100

 Title_______Name_________________________________________________
 Affiliation______________________________________________________
 Address__________________________________________________________

 Tel._______________
 e-mail address___________________

 __  Please send me more information when available
 __  Please send me the Call for Papers of the AIBI conference
 __  I plan to attend   __ ALLC  Conf. __ AIBI Conf.  __ Both Conf.

 __  I plan to submit a paper to  __ ALLC    __ AIBI
     Tentative Title:
     _______________________________________________________________

__   I propose the following panel to the __ALLC  __AIBI conference:
     _______________________________________________________________


===================================================================
=====================================================================
    Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing
              Fifteenth Annual Conference
               5-9 June 1988,  Jerusalem

            Literary and Linguistic Computing-1988

    The Fifteenth Annual Conference of ALLC will be held on
5-9 June 1988 in Jerusalem. As has been traditional with ALLC meetings,
the full spectrum of literary and linguistic computing in general
is expected to be covered at the conference. Specific topics
which are currently under vigorous research, such as large
textual databases and corpora and linguistic computing in
multi-lingual environments, are naturally expected to
receive special attention.

    Papers are invited on substantial unpublished research
on the main themes of the conference and similar related areas
such as:
    -computational morphology, syntax and semantics
    -computational lexicography and lexicology
    -mechanized dictionaries, lexicons and grammars
    -lemmatization and parsing
    -ambiguity and its mechanical resolution
    -stylistic analysis and authorship studies
    -statistical linguistics and metrics
    -research tools: corpora, concordances, indexes and thesauri
    -full-text systems
    -natural language understanding
    -text processing and retrieval

    Papers that present specific theoretical models coupled with new
experimental results are particularly welcome, but contributions
dealing with critical evaluations, general reviews and appraisal of
theoretical models, software packages and specialized hardware
will be also considered. General descriptions of on-going long-range
projects are acceptable only if they contain substantial new
and unpublished information.

    Authors should send 6 copies of a one-page abstract and
a cover sheet in the format, and to the address, given below.
Abstracts should clearly point to the originality and importance
of the contribution and its relevance to the conference, and should
clarify the operational status of described projects;
vague or unsubstantiated claims and plans for the future will
be given little weight.

    Priority in evaluation and consideration
will be given to abstracts that are accompanied by an Extended
Abstract of 4-6 pages (6 copies). Although not formally required,
authors are urged to include these extended abstracts, so as to help
making the reviewing process more reliable and balanced.

    Papers must be received by December 15, 1987.
Authors will be notified for acceptance by February 29, 1988.
Based on the contribution's contents and on the feedback
from the conference, papers will be then selected for
inclusion in the Proceedings volume to be published by
Slatkine (Geneve). The happy selected authors will be notified
by the end of June 1988, and a camera-ready version of the full-length
papers must be received by August 15, 1988. Opportunity will be thus
given to the authors to include in the final version any refinements
or clarifications called for by the oral presentation and its feedback.

    More details on local arrangements and accomodations,
registration fees and forms, etc., will be given in the second
call for papers to be mailed during winter 1987. If you would
like to receive future mailings, and certainly if you plan to
submit a paper or just to attend the conference, please
mail the enclosed notification note immediately.


Format for submissions:

Cover Sheet:
____________
ABSTRACT SUBMITTED TO ALLC 1988
Title
Author
Affiliation
Complete address,including tel. and e-mail address
Subject identification (e.g. statistical linguistics, morphological
                disambiguation, etc.)


Abstract
________
Title
Author
ABSTRACT
the text of the abstract, one page of about 30 single-spaced lines
(in elite, pica or roman type, 10-12 points).

Extended Abstract:
__________________
Title
Author
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
text, 4-6 pages with the same format as the abstract.

Address: Send all material to:
Yaacov Choueka
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, 52100.

=======================================================================


      International Advisory Board

Paul Bratley        Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Quebec
Jacqueline Hamesse  Universite Catholique, Louvain-La-Neuve
R.-F. Poswick       Bible et Informatique, Maredsous
Klaus M. Schmidt    Bowling Green State University, Ohio
Don Walker          Bell Communications Research, Morristown, New Jersey

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

        Important deadlines

         December 15, 1987  paper submission
         February 29, 1988  author notification
         April 5,     1988  end of early registration
         August 15,   1988  camera-ready version of
                            full papers for the Proceedings

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1987  10:40 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@xx.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

  Date: Monday, 8 June 1987  11:08-EDT
  From: AHAAS at G.BBN.COM
  Re:   ai seminar
  - - - -
  Monday,  8  June  2:00pm   Room: second floor large conference room at
                                   10 Moulton Street.

                      BBN Seminar

            Default Reasoning and Stereotypes in User Modelling

                      Tim Finin
               Computer and Information Science
                   University of Pennsylvania
                      Philadelphia, PA

This talk discusses the application of various kinds of default reasoning in
systems which must maintain a model of its users.  In particular, we
describe a general architecture of a domain independent system for building
and maintaining long term models of individual users. The user modelling
system is intended to provide a well defined set of services for an
application system which is interacting with various users and has a need to
build and maintain models of them.  As the application system interacts with
a user, it can acquire knowledge of him and pass that knowledge on to the
user model maintenance system for incorporation.  We describe a prototype
general user modelling system (hereafter called GUMS1 which we have
implemented in Prolog.  This system satisfies some of the desirable
characteristics we discuss.

[Note: Christine Borgman also sent in announcement from AIList of this
talk being presented on Thursday, June 18, 1987 in Doherty Hall 3313
(which I think was at CMU) - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
20
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 87 12:29:46 GMT
-FROM-
From: Christian Fluhr <uspi020@frors31.bitnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: RIAO 88
-BODY-
 . . .

                      CALL FOR PAPERS
                           RIAO 88
                 USER-ORIENTED CONTENT-BASED
                   TEXT AND IMAGE HANDLING
           Massachusetts Institute of Technology
                       Cambridge, MA
                     March 21-24, 1988
                         Conference
                        organized by:
     Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  Centre National de Recherche des Telecommunications (CNET)
        Institut National de Recherche en Informatique
                    et Automatique (INRIA)
        Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris
    Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique
                     Documentaires (CID)
              US participating organizations:
   American Federation of Information Processing Societies
                            (AFIPS)
       American Society for Information Science (ASIS)
            Information Industry Association (IIA)
    This conference is prepared under the direction of:
                Professor  Andre Lichnerowicz
            de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris
                            and
                  Professor  Jacques Arsac
     correspondant de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris
     RIAO: Recherche d'Informations Assistee par Ordinateur
 A GENERAL INTRODUCTION:
     RIAO 88 is being held to demonstrate the state of the art in
information  retrieval,  a  domain  that is  in  rapid  evolution
because  of developments in the technology for machine control of
full-text  and image databases.  This evolution is stimulated  by
the demands of end-users generated by the recent availability  of
CD-ROM   full  text  publishing  and  general  public  access  to
information data bases.
     A group of French organizations has taken the initiative  of
preparing  this conference.  Its wish in promoting this forum  is
not  only to stimulate and challenge researchers from all nations
but also to increase an awareness of European technology.
     This "call for papers" is beeing distributed world-wide.  We
want  to reach individuals in the research communities throughout
the university and industrial sectors.
     The conference will be held in Cambridge,  MA.  We hope that
it   will  encourage  the  exchange  of  European  and   American
viewpoints,  and  establish new links between research  teams  in
United-states and Europe.
                       CALL FOR PAPERS
       General theme
          Full-text  and  mixed media database  systems  are
characterized  by  the  fact  that  the  structure  of   the
information is not known a priori.
          This   prevents  advance  knowledge  of  the  types  of
questions  that  will be asked,  unlike the  situation  found  in
hierarchical and relational database management systems.
          You  are  invited  to submit a paper  showing  how  the
situation can be dealt with. Special attention will be given to:
              - techniques   designed to reduce  imprecision
                in full-text  database searching;
              - data entry and control;
              - "friendly" end-user interfaces.
              - new media
          A large number of specific subjects can be treated
within this general framework.  Some suggestions are made in
the following section.
       Specific themes
      A)  Linguistic  processing and interrogation  of  full
text databases:
          - automatic indexing,
          - machine generated summaries,
          - natural language queries,
          - computer-aided translation,
          - multilingual interfaces.
      B)  Automatic thesaurus construction,
      C) Expert system techniques for retrieving information
in  full-text  and multimedia databases:
          - expert  systems  reasoning on open-ended domains
          - expert   systems  simulating   librarians   accessing
            pertinent information.
       D)  Friendly user interfaces to classical information
retrieval systems.
       E) Specialized machines and system architectures designed
for  treating  full-text data,  including managing and  accessing
widely distributed databases.
      F)  Automatic  database construction  scanning  techniques,
optical character readers, output document preparation, etc...
      G)    New  applications   and  perspectives  suggested   by
emerging new technologies:
              - optical storage techniques  (videodisk,
                CD-ROM, CD-I, Digital Optical Disks);
              - integrated  text,  sound and image retrieval
                systems;
              - electronic mail and document delivery  based
                on content;
              - voice  processing technologies for  database
                construction;
              - production    of    intelligent     tutoring
                systems;
              - hypertext, hypermedia.
       Conditions for participation
          The  program  committee is looking  for  communications
geared toward practical applications.  Papers which have not been
validated by a working model, a prototype or a simulation, or for
which a realization of such a model seems currently unlikely, may
be refused.
         Authors  must  submit a paper of about 10 pages  doubled
spaced, and a 100 word abstract.
          Four  copies must be sent before October 30 to  one  of
these two addresses:
>  RIAO 88, Conference Service Office, MIT, Bldg 7, Room 111
            CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139
>  RIAO 88, CID, 36 bis rue Ballu, 75009 PARIS  FRANCE
          Each  presentation will last 20 minutes followed by  10
minutes of discussion and questions.
          Arrangement  have  been  made  with  the  international
journal  "Information  Processing and Management" for  publishing
expanded versions of some papers.
          High quality audiovisual techniques should be used
when presenting the paper.
          Separate  demonstration sessions can be  scheduled
if requested.
       Particular attention will be paid to :
              - the  use  of  readily  available  equipment   for
                demonstrations  (IBM PC,  APPLE,  network connec-
                tions...);
              - pre-recorded video or floppy disk displays.
       Hardcopy  printouts of results should be  avoided  if
possible.
          English is the working language of the conference.
For further information call:
in North America  : Karen Daifuku,
                    tel: (202) 944 62 52
in other countries: Secretariat General du CID in France,
                    tel: (1) 42 85 04 75
                          -------
                     PROGRAM COMMITTEE
    French co-chairman                US co-chairman
   Prof. Christian FLUHR            Dr. Donald WALKER
 Universite Paris XI/INSTN     BELL Communications Research
J.C. Bassano (F) Universite d'Orleans
A. Bookstein (USA) University of Chicago
J. Bing (N) Norwegian research Center for Comp. and law
E. Black (USA) T.J. Watson IBM Research Center
C. Boitet (F) Universite de Grenoble
J. Boucher (CAN) Universite de Montreal
C. Chen (USA) Simmons College
Y. Choueka (Israel) Bar-Ilan University
C. Ciampi (I) Instituto per la Doc. jiuridica
X. Dalloz (F) Centre National de la Cinematographie
T. Doszkocs (USA) National Library of Medecine
E. Fox (USA) Virginia Polytechnic Institute
E. Garcia Camarero (SP) Universitad Complutense de Madrid
C. Goldstein (USA) National Library of Medecine
G. Grefenstette (F) Universite de Tours
H. Hjerppe (S) University of Link~oping
D. Kayser (F) Universite Paris XIII
P. Kirstein (UK) University College of London
R. Marcus (USA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
P. Mordini (F) Ecole des Mines de Paris
C. D. Paice (UK) University of Lancaster
A. S. Pollitt (UK) The Polytechnic Queensgate Uddersfield
F. Rabitti (I) Instituto dei Elabor. della Informazione
J. Rohmer (F) Bull, Louveciennes
G. Sabah (F) LIMSI(CNRS) Orsay
T. Saracevic (USA) Rutgers University
W. Turner (F) CDST (CNRS) Paris
H. J. Schneider (FRG) Technische Universit~at Berlin
C. Schwartz (FRG) Siemens M~unchen
assisted by a Technical and an Organisation Committee.
                                             APPLICATION FORM
NAME:...........................................................................
...................
TITLE/POSITION:.................................................................
...................
ORGANIZATION:...................................................................
...................
ADDRESS:........................................................................
...................
CITY:................................STATE:............................ZIP:.....
...................
COUNTRY:........................................................................
...................
I plan to attend the conference, please send me the program:  YES  NO
I plan to present a paper:  YES  NO
Conference theme (circle one): A B C D E F G
Title of the communication:
Are you willing to present a demonstration of your prototype?
YES  NO
Equipment needed:
Please mail this form before Septembre 15, 1987 to:
RIAO 88
Conference Service Office
MIT
Bldg 7, Room 111
CAMBRIDGE, MA
02139 USA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 87 12:00:56 CDT
-FROM-
From: Frank Halasz <halasz@mcc.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  HYpertext '87 and ACM SIGIR
-BODY-
 . . .
            Call for Participation
                          HYPERTEXT 87
            WORKSHOP ON SYSTEMS, APPLICATIONS, AND ISSUES
                       November 13-15, 1987
                   Chapel Hill, North Carolina
     Sponsored by ACM, IEEE, U. of North Carolina, ONR, MCC, NSF
Hypertext is an approach to information management in which data is
stored in a network of nodes connected by links.  Nodes can contain
text, source code, graphics, audio, video, or other forms of data, and
are meant to be viewed and manipulated interactively.  Hypertext
systems support collaboration and cooperation among users in a wide
varieties of activities, ranging from medical instruction to software
development.
Hypertext has come of age.  An increasing number of hypertext systems
and applications have been built and used within the last few years.
This Workshop will be the first opportunity for implementors,
application builders, and users of hypertext systems to come together
to share information and ideas.
Suggested Topics
The workshop will focus equally on implementations of hypertext
systems, applications of hypertext, and issues surrounding the use of
hypertext.  Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited
to, the following:
Implementations and technical issues
    - abstract machines and base engines
    - complete systems
    - user interfaces
    - multi-media support
        - distributed systems
        - query and search
    - storage management
Applications and experiences
    - Computer-aided engineering (CASE, CAEE, ...)
    - Authoring and technical documentation
    - Medical and legal information management
    - Electronic encyclopedias
    - Interactive tools for education and museums
    - Information analysis and knowledge acquisition
    - Scholar's workbenches for the humanties and social sciences
Issues surrounding use of hypertext
    - Cognitive aspects of using and designing hypertext systems
    - Strategies for effective use of hypertext
    - Supporting collaborative work
    - Managing complexity in large information networks
    - Legal issues (copyrights, royalties, ...)
    - Social implications
Information for participants:
Papers are invited for presentation at the Workshop and subsequent
publication in proceedings.  Papers should be limited to 20 pages, and
5 copies should be submitted to the following address:
        Hypertext 87
        Department of Computer Science
        University of North Carolina
        Chapel Hill, NC  27514
Attendance at the workshop will be limited.  Prospective participants
not submitting a paper should submit a brief (1-2 page) position paper
describing their activities or interests in hypertext.
Important dates:
 8/1/87   Submission of papers (Both position papers and presentations)
 9/15/87  Notice of acceptance for full papers
 9/15/87   Notice of admission to the Workshop
 10/5/87  Camera-ready copy of papers for preprints
Planing Committee:
  Frank Halasz, MCC, (Workshop Co-chair)
  Mayer Schwartz, Tektronix, (Program Co-chair)
  John B. Smith, UNC, (Workshop Co-chair)
  Nicole Yankelovich, Brown Univ. (Publications Chair)
Local Arrangements Committee:
  David V. Beard, UNC, (Arrangements Chair)
  James M. Coggins, UNC, (Workshop Manager)
  Leigh Pittman, (Workshop Coordinator),
Program Committee:
  Mayer Schwartz, Tektronix, Program Co-chair
  Stephen F. Weiss, UNC, Program Co-chair
  Greg Crane, Harvard University
  Norman Delisle, Tektronix
  Mark Frisse, Washington Univ. Med. School
  Frank Halasz, MCC
  David Lowe, NYU
  Norm Meyrowitz, Brown Univ.
  Theodore Nelson, Project Xanadu
  Walter Scacchi, USC
  John B. Smith, UNC
  Lucy Suchman, Xerox Parc
  Randy Trigg, Xerox PARC
  Andries van Dam, Brown Univ.
  Stephen A. Weyer, Apple Computer
  Nicole Yankelovich, Brown Univ.
For more information contact:
John B. Smith, 919-962-5021, jbs@cs.unc.edu
Frank Halasz, 512-338-3648, halasz@mcc,   seismo!ut-sally!im4u!milano!halasz

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
21
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 15:50:33 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: electronic mail problems and plans relating to IRList
-BODY-
1. Recent problems
  Two weeks ago we had lightning hits that caused around $40K of
damage to our departmental computers.  The machine that IRlist is
usually composed on was down for that period, so it has been difficult
to get news out. I will attempt to catch up on this in the next week.
If you sent in news and it does not appear soon, please send your
communication in again, since some messages were lost.  I apologize
for any inconvenience.

2. Disappearance of seismo as UUCP connection
By 1 September, the machine called "seismo" that is at the Center for
Seismic Studies will stop serving as a polling center for UUCP mail.
Please stop using seismo!vtisr1!fox as a UUCP address to reach me.
We will have our machine "vtopus" connected to several other UUCP
machines, so fox@vtopus.uucp or an address with the appropriate route
should work as a replacement.  I do not encourage UUCP traffic, but if
it is necessary, use vtopus!fox rather than vtisr1!fox since vtisr1 is
becoming more isolated than before.

3. Connection to the ARPANET
By early September there will be some changes, hopefully improvements, with
IRList mail handling.  The main point is that our machine "vtopus"
will eventually become the central point for all IRList business.  Virginia
Tech
is now part of SURANET, which is part of NSFNET, and so we are on the DARPA
Internet.  When we get all the addressing and other software issues corrected,
vtopus will be accessible for FTP and other services.   I will post information
when it is available and when we have finished testing.  At that time,
people who want access to back issues in quantity will be able to get
direct access; up till then I will honor requests for small numbers of
back issues.  Later, vtopus will also be on BITNET, so UUCP, ARPANET,
and BITNET mail will be from one place.

4. Interim situation
Meanwhile, please try to send mail to my BITNET address,
foxea@vtvax3.bitnet, which will always remain as an option for
reaching me.  ARPANET and CSNET members can reach that with address
foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu and BITNET members can reach it
directly.  The address for vtopus is now and will continue to be
fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu but I prefer it not be used a great deal till our
ARPANET connection is perfected.

4. Help with address changes
Please notify me in advance if you change address or wish to drop
your subscription, unless you are handling these matters with someone
who maintains a local redistribution.  Please try to give complete
addresses, and if it is not obvious, indicate if your address is
relative to BITNET or ARPANET or UUCPNET since it is sometime hard to
reach people.  If you stop receiving IRList, be sure to let me know
and we can try to see what happened - I drop people when mailers tell
me messages are not getting through.

Thanks for your patience! - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 15:58:43 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Announcement from Dr. Matthew B. Koll
-BODY-
Dr. Matthew B. Koll has asked me to announce his new address:
  Personal Library Software
  15215 Shady Grove Road
  Rockville MD 20850
  (301) 926-1402
He is no longer with George Mason University, and has shifted efforts
from his former company, KNM Inc., which marketed SIRE, to devote full
time to Personal Library Software.  They have a package which is an
enhanced version of SIRE.

Dr. Koll does not now have an ARPANET address, so should be contacted
directly at the address above.  He may have openings for experienced C
programmers who are knowledgeable about information retrieval, and
have some background in UNIX.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 87 16:28:09 PDT
-FROM-
From: George Cross <cross@cs1.wsu.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: SMART
-BODY-
Hi,
Do you have a contact for getting a copy of SMART from Cornell?  I remember
seeing a license agreement posted some time ago and Don Kraft ordered one
for LSU.  Thanks.

 ---- George

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 George R. Cross                cross@cs1.wsu.edu
 Computer Science Department    ...!ucbvax!ucdavis!egg-id!ui3!wsucshp!cs1!cross
 Washington State University    faccross@wsuvm1.BITNET
 Pullman, WA      99164-1210    Phone: 509-335-6319 or 509-335-6636

[Note: contact chrisb@cornell.arpa by electronic mail, or write to
Professor Gerard Salton at Cornell. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 87 17:06:49 EDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!mnetor!lsuc!dave
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Indexing of a complex statute for on-line retrieval
-BODY-
We at the Law Society of Upper Canada are responsible for
post-law school legal education in Ontario, both for call to
the Bar (the Law Society governs the legal profession in the
province and admits new members through the Bar Admission Course)
and for continuing legal education.
We've been using CAI for several years, particularly to teach
Canadian income tax law.  Our tax courses are taken by over 1,000
students a year plus a number of lawyers and others, and we're
developing more advanced courses for lawyers' use.
We have the opportunity to acquire an on-line version of the
(Canadian) Income Tax Act, a rather massive statute.  In its
published version, along with history of changes, regulations
and various minor annotations, it's over 1400 pages.  I'm told
the raw on-line data is something like 5-10Mb.  The publisher is
interested in us putting the Act up on our system so they can
gain experience in the "electronic publishing" field, and learn
how it might be used and how it can best be organized for retrieval.
They are therefore willing to let us have it for free.
My interest is in making this tremendously useful information
available to people who are on our system anyway for studying
tax through CAI.  If the experiment is successful, we might look
to putting other primary and secondary tax sources on-line in the
future.
Ours is a UNIX system, a Perkin-Elmer 3220 (roughly the power of
a VAX-11/750) running UNIX version 7.  We're educational source-licensed
for UNIX and can upgrade the license to System V if necessary.
My question is: how should I go about putting the data up on-line?
(We'll be getting the data in raw ASCII form from a different system.)
We don't have a lot of time to devote to this, as we're very busy
with other projects.  Are there existing tools I can make use of?
At the most primitive level, I imagine I would just stick the
data into a UNIX file and give people existing tools like "grep"
and "more" for searching and browsing through it.  I can imagine
indexing the section and subsection numbers too, perhaps by
location in the file so the user could seek to the right provision
quickly.  I'm a real novice in the field of information retrieval,
however.
I'd appreciate any suggestions as to (1) quick solutions or existing
tools which will make the data more usable; (2) references to literature
on storage/retrieval of complex statutes; and (3) specific ideas of
more complex indexing or retrieval mechanisms that we might implement
down the road.  Many thanks.
David Sherman
Computer Education Facility
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Osgoode Hall
Toronto, Canada  M5H 2N6
dave@lsuc.uucp        +1 416 947 3466
{ seismo!mnetor  pyramid!utai  decvax!utcsri  ihnp4!utzoo } !lsuc!dave

[Note: There are various retrieval packages that might work. The SMART
system is available from Cornell for a nominal charge, but may not run
on your hardware/software.  The Personal Librarian would probably work
and Matt Koll could tell you. See other msgs in this digest for
contact information about these two systems.  There are many others
around, and many people working on legal information retrieval - I
hope some will contact you with details and you will let us know what
you decide. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:49:24 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Demonstration of RESPONSA System
-BODY-
 YOU  ARE  INVITED  TO  AN  ONLINE DEMONSTRATION  OF  THE  RESPONSA   SYSTEM
                    An advanced full-text retrieval system
                      (with morphological processing) for
                      2000 years of Rabbinical Literature

                                       by
                                 Yaacov Choueka
                          Bell Communications Research
                             Morristown, New Jersey
                          (on sabbatical leave from the
                 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
                     Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, ISRAEL)

WHEN:	Wedn. August 12 from 1:30 - 3pm, and 7:30 - 9pm
WHERE:	Newman Library, 6th floor board room
WHAT:	Come and stop by if you would like to see
    * An interesting full-text retrieval system with a
      remarkably fast response time (despite some "hostile"
      parameters such as the size of the database, the
      complexity of the search, the long and not-so-reliable
      telephone communications lines to Israel, and the
      1200-baud transmission rate).
    * An automatically lemmatized (in a context-free sense)
      50-million words corpus (probably the only
      lemmatized one of this size in any language).
    *A complete morphological component embedded in an
      operational     retrieval system.
    * An online module for accurate and complete
      morphological analysis of any word in the language.
    * Some beginnings of applications of a short-context
      approach (how many different "following neighbors"
      are there for a given  ambiguous word with 200,000
      occurrences?   How many of these neighbors occur
      more than 1000 times, and which are they?    Do they
      disambiguate the given word?   How can this
      information be used in on-line retrieval or dictionary
      building contexts?).

WHO:	
    Dr. Choueka has almost twenty years of experience in
    teaching and research in computer science, some of it (in
    the early years) in finite automata and formal languages
    theory, but most of it in information retrieval,
    computational     linguistics and text processing. He was
    part of the team that initiated the RESPONSA  in 1966,
    and has served as its Director and Principal Investigator since 1975.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:50:05 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seminar on Disambiguation
-BODY-
                          COMPUTER  SCIENCE  SEMINAR
                             McBryde Hall Room 201
                       Wedn. August 12,  10:15 - 11:30AM

                             Short Is Beautiful:
             Short-context disambiguation in large textual databases

                                       by
                                 Yaacov Choueka
                          Bell Communications Research
                             Morristown, New Jersey
                          (on sabbatical leave from the
                 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
                     Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, ISRAEL)


ABSTRACT:
   Morphological disambiguation (i.e., finding the
intended "correct" meaning of an ambiguous word in a
specific context) is an intellectually challenging and
practically important issue in automatic text processing. One
of the suggested pragmatic approaches, specially viable for
large textual databases, the short-context method, proposes
to use the (very) short context of an ambiguous word as an
adequate vehicle for its disambiguation. An experiment
carefully designed to test this idea and its validity was
developed and applied to a small French corpus some time
ago, and the results were recently reported elsewhere.
Based on the clearly positive outcome of this test, an online
short-context disambiguation program was incorporated as
an operational component in the Responsa full-text retrieval
system (Hebrew, 50 million words), and is being now tested
on a large scale.
   Using this program, the user can submit a word W to
the system, which will respond by instantly displaying a list
of all the different right (left) neighbors of W in the
database, together with the neighbor's "local" frequency (its
frequency as a neighbor of W), ranked by the local
frequencies.   Preliminary findings show that more often
than not such a short context of the word is enough to
correctly disambiguate its appropriate occurrences. If
needed, however, a further expansion of the right neighbor
into the corresponding set of its right ones can again be
displayed, giving the set of all the different two-word right
contexts of the word under examination.
   It was found that, in general, no more than a few
minutes are required for a casual user to decide on the
intended meaning of an ambiguous W in its most frequent
contexts, thus resulting in the immediate disambiguation of
thousands of occurrences of W in the text. When
automatically recorded, the user's decisions can greatly help
in achieving a "context-sensitive" lemmatization of the
corpus, once its "context-free" one has been completed.   The
method is also very useful in information retrieval contexts,
where it gives the user an efficient tool for specifying, in a
query with an ambiguous word, which of the word's
contexts should  be retrieved, thus greatly enhancing the
precision of the retrieval.    Finally, it is expected that by
gradually accumulating these disambiguation decisions in the
appropriate word-entry of the available automatic
dictionary of the language, "local expert systems" for many
ambiguous words will develop, that can greatly facilitate
ambiguity resolution in practical situations.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
22
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:46:20 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Request for references, reprints etc. on CD ROM, optical discs
-BODY-
There will be a chapter in ARIST V.23, which should appear late in 1988,
on CD ROM and Optical Disc Publishing and Access.  If you have done work
in this area and have papers or manuscripts, or know of publications by
others, please send references or reprints to
	Dr. Edward A. Fox
	Dept. of Computer Science
	Virginia Tech
	Blacksburg
	VA 24061
or call (703) 961-5113 (direct), -6931 (office to leave messages).

Thanks in advance for your assistance! - Ed

PS We are setting up a lab here for work on CD ROM, and will have
a graduate special topics course this fall, so welcome demonstration
discs or other information as well.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 87 14:28:48 PDT
-FROM-
From: "Fred Gey [csr]" <gey@lbl-csam.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: past volumes of IRList
-BODY-
Dear Ed Fox,
   Please put me on the distribution list for IRList
Digest.  Under what circumstances could I get a machine
readable copy of all past volumes of the digest (we have
suns, vax-vms, vax-4.2bsd, and ibm-pcs at this site).
		Thanks, Fred Gey
			Computer Science research Dept
			Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
			1 Cyclotron Rd.
			Berkeley, CA 94720
			(415) 486-6208
			arpa: gey@lbl-csam.arpa
[Note: I have sent you the standard welcome msg and added you. The
welcome message explains about rights to the files, etc.  Regarding
getting the archive, you can send me a tape and pay for handling etc.
or you can wait, probably about a month, till our ARPANET connection
is to the point that FTP is possible. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 87 15:59:02 EDT
-FROM-
From: Hugo_Cisternas@57scl1.ceo.dg.com
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList: BRS, STATUS, IR Software for Data General?
-BODY-
I am interested in Library Automation (Cataloging, Circulation, Acquisition,
Info Retrieval). May be there are some information about this themes in back
issues of IRList, specificaly works on Data General Computers and/or using
the C or Pascal Language or the UNIX operating system, and perhaps the MUMP
Language . . .

I would like to know if you have any articles refering to BRS,
STATUS, STAIRS or other IR software.  I am searching also for IR,
Library Automation or Circulation Control packages for UNIX and/or
for Data General machines (AOS/VS).

I would be very thankful to you if you may send me something.
Many thanks
Hugo E. Cisternas

[Note: We have not had much in IRList on this topic, and what there
has been is rather old.  There were articles in the Communications of
the ACM in 1985 by Maron and Blair, and a related paper by Salton in
1986 that touched on use of STAIRS, but I have not seen much in
general in the research literature that relates to your interest. I
am sure that readers can send you much more data, and hope you can
summarize anything interesting you receive. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 87 10:07:56 EDT
-FROM-
From: Bruce Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Nat Lg Inc
-BODY-
A colleague asks me by Email about an outfit called Natural Language Inc.
He hears they claim to process `virtually unrestricted English text'
to create a relational database for query systems.  He says they are
located in Berkeley.  Anybody know more?

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 10 Jul 87 11:07:40 DNT
-FROM-
From:         Jakob Nielsen  Tech Univ of Denmark <DATJN@NEUVM1>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Hypertext report available
-BODY-
My trip report from the NordDATA'87 Joint Scandinavian Computer Conference
is now available as ID-TR-1987-24. If you write our department for the
report, you will only get a single sheet of paper however, announcing that
the report is a hypertext, multi-media document which is only available
in computer-readable form.
To get a copy of this report, please send an initialized Macintosh
diskette to the following address (it would be nice if you include some
good shareware on the diskette, but this is not a requirement):
  Jakob Nielsen
  Department of Computer Science
  Technical University of Denmark, Building 344
  DK-2800 Lyngby Copenhagen
  DENMARK
The report focuses on human factors and user interface design practice
in Scandinavia and also includes a hypertext version of my own paper
at the conference "Using Scenarios to Develop User Friendly Videotex
Systems" (in English).

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 87 08:24:04 CDT
-FROM-
From: Don <kraft%lsu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: travel grant for 1988 Intl Conf on R&D in IR, Grenoble, France
-BODY-
I have just received a travel grant for twenty or so stipends covering airfare
from the National Science Foundation so that U.S. residents can attend the
ACM/SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information
Retrieval, to be held in Grenoble, France on June 13-15, 1988.
The conference will include the topics of retrieval system modeling, artificial
intelligence and information retrieval, evaluation techniques, hardware
developments for retrieval systems, natural language processing, database
management and information retrieval, user interfaces, and advanced
applications.
Anyone interested in receiving a travel stipend should contact me.  The
deadline
for applying for a travel stipend is March 1, 1988.
Submission of papers (four copies of either a full paper of not more than 20-25
pages, or an extended abstract of about ten pages) with a complete author
identification and an abstract of about one hundred words must be submitted
by January 15, 1988 to:
     Professor Gerard Salton
     Department of Computer Science
     4130 Upson Hall
     Cornell University
     Ithaca, NY  14853-7501
     USA
Final copy is due May 16, 1988, with acceptance notification coming by March
21,
1988.
Don Kraft
kraft@lsu.edu
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 87 17:15 EDT
-FROM-
From: Equipe Chiaramella <siri@imag.UUCP>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CFP: SIGIR - Research and Development in Information Retrieval
-BODY-
                      CALL FOR PAPERS
                          SIGIR 88

                in cooperation with the ACM

               11th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
                            ON
        RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

                         ACM-SIGIR
                      JUNE 13-15 1988
                     GRENOBLE (FRANCE)


Conference Chairman : Yves CHIARAMELLA (USTMG - Grenoble, France)
>------------------
-END-
Program Comittee :
>---------------
	M.ADIBA (F)			G.KNORZ (Germany)
	R.BOUCHE (F)			S.MIRANDA (F)
	A.BOOKSTEIN (USA)		C.D.PAICE (UK)
	M.F.BRUANDET (F)		F.RABITTI (I)
	E.CHOURAQUI (F)			V.V.RAGHAVAN (USA)
	W.B.CROFT (USA)			K.VAN RIJSBERGEN (UK)
	T.E.DOSZKOCS (USA)		G.SALTON (USA)
	A.S. FRAENKEL (Israel)		P.WILLETT (UK)
	N.FUHR (Germany)		S.K.M. WONG (Canada)
-BODY-
Papers are invited on theory, methodology, implementation and applications of
information retrieval.

Communications from areas of prime interest for information retrieval, such
as artificial intelligence, database systems, office automation, hardware
technology, natural language processing, are welcome.

The main topics thus include,  but are not limited to:
	- retrieval system modelling :
		linguistic models
		mathematical models
		cognitive and semantic models
	- information retrieval and artificial intelligence:
		knowledge representation
		expert systems
		thesaurus management
	- evaluation techniques:
		retrieval and system performances
		system development and evaluation
	- natural language processing:
		parsers
		deep understanding
		multilingual systems
	- information retrieval and database management:
		storage and research techniques
		multimedia databases
		fifth generation databases
		deductive databases
		document databases for ofice automation
		database machines
	- user interfaces:
		natural language interfaces
		graphic interfaces
	- advanced applications

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS :
>----------------------
-END-
Full length papers should not exceed 20 or 25 pages. Extented abstracts of
about 10 pages are also accepted. Both must contain a complete author
identification and an abstract of about a hundred words. Four copies of each
paper should be submitted to the Program Committee. Papers from North America
should be sent to G.SALTON; submissions from outside North America should be
sent to E.CHOURAQUI:
-BODY-
	Gerard SALTON				Eugene CHOURAQUI
	CORNELL UNIVERSITY			GRTC-CNRS
	Dept. of Computer Science		31 chemin J.AIGUIER
	4130 UPSON HALL				13402 MARSEILLE
	ITHACA					Cedex 9
	N.Y. 14853 - 7501 USA			FRANCE

Important dates :
>--------------
-END-
	submission deadline :		january 15, 1988
	acceptance notification :	march 21, 1988
	final copy due :		may 16, 1988
-BODY-
Communication ways :
>-----------------
-END-
	electronic address :		siri@imag.UUCP
	telex address :			98 01 34
	telecopy address :		76 51 48 48
-BODY-
==============================================================================
=	SIGIR 88  - REPLY MESSAGE :                                          =
=	-------------------------                                            =
=	                                                                     =
=	Please return to Y.CHIARAMELLA	                                     =
=		- electronic address : siri @ imag .UUCP                     =
=		- mail address : Laboratoire IMAG - Genie Informatique       =
=				 BP 38 - 38402 Saint Martin d'Heres Cedex    =
=				 FRANCE                                      =
=	                                                                     =
=	Last Name, First Name : -------------------------------------        =
=	Address : ---------------------------------------------------        =
=	          ---------------------------------------------------        =
=	          ---------------------------------------------------        =
=	Electronic address : ----------------------------------------        =
=		- I intend to participate the Conference                     =
=		and want to receive the final program                        =
=	                                                                     =
=		- I intend to submit a paper :	- selected topic :           =
=						- previsional title :        =
=                                                                            =
=                                                                            =
==============================================================================

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 87 11:36:19 PDT
-FROM-
From: Jeff Ullman <ullman@navajo.stanford.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: PODS call
-BODY-
[Forwarded from PROLOG Digest  Thursday, 16 Jul 1987   Volume 5 : Issue 45]

                           CALL FOR PAPERS
            Seventh ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on
                    PRINCIPLES OF DATABASE SYSTEMS
                   Austin, Texas, March 21-23, 1988
The conference will cover new developments in both the theoretical and
practical aspects of database and knowledge-base systems. Papers are
solicited which describe original and novel research about the theory,
design, specification, or implementation of database and
knowledge-base systems.
Some suggested, although not exclusive, topics of interest are:
architecture, concurrency control, database and expert systems,
database machines, data models, data structures for physical
implementation, deductive databases, dependency theory, distributed
systems, incomplete information, user interfaces, performance
evaluation, physical and logical design, query languages, query
processing, recursive rules, spatial and temporal data, statistical
databases, and transaction management.
You are invited to submit ten copies of a detailed abstract (not a complete
paper) to the program chairman:
Mihalis Yannakakis
Room 2C-319
AT&T Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of significance,
originality, and overall quality. Each abstract should 1) contain
enough information to enable the program committee to identify the
main contributions of the work; 2) explain the importance of the work
> its novelty and its practical or theoretical relevance to database
and knowledge-base systems; and 3) include comparisons with and
references to relevant literature. Abstracts should be no longer than
ten double-spaced pages. Deviations from these guidelines may affect
the program committee's evaluation of the paper.
                          Program Committee
              Serge Abiteboul      Alberto Mendelzon
              Krzysztof Apt        Dale Skeen
              Philip Bernstein     Victor Vianu
              Paris Kanellakis     Mihalis Yannakakis
              David Maier
The deadline for submission of abstracts is October 9, 1987.  Authors
will be notified of acceptance or rejection by December 8, 1987.  The
accepted papers, typed on special forms, will be due at the above
address by January 8, 1988. All authors of accepted papers will be
expected to sign copyright release forms. Proceedings will be
distributed at the conference, and will be subsequently available for
purchase through ACM.
     General Chairman:            Local Arrangements:
     Avi Silberschatz             Chris Edmondson-Yurkanan
     Dept. of Computer Sciences   Dept. of Computer Sciences
     Univ. of Texas at Austin     Univ. of Texas at Austin
     Austin, Texas 78712          Austin, Texas 78712
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
23
-DATE-
Date:     Sun, 2 Aug 87 11:09 EST
-FROM-
From:     <KERSCH@GMUVAX>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Call for Papers:  Expert Database Systems Conference
-BODY-
(Please Distribute this Call for Papers to associates)
=====================================================
             Call for Papers and Participation
 Second International Conference on Expert Database Systems
                     April 25-27, 1988
                The Sheraton Premiere Hotel,
                  Tysons Corner, Virginia
        Sponsored by:
George Mason University
        In Cooperation With:
American Association for Artificial Intelligence
Association for Computing Machinery -- SIGART and SIGMOD
IEEE Computer Society -- T. C. on Data Base Engineering

                   Conference Objectives
The International Conference on Expert Database Systems  has
established itself as a leading edge forum that explores the
theoretical and practical issues in making database  systems
more  intelligent  and supportive of Artificial Intelligence
(AI) applications.  Expert Database  Systems  represent  the
confluence  of  R&D  activities  in Artificial Intelligence,
Database Management, Logic, Information Retrieval, and Fuzzy
Systems  Theory.   It is precisely this synergism among dis-
ciplines which makes the  Conference  both  stimulating  and
unique.
Expert Database Systems will play an ever-increasing role in
scientific, governmental and business applications.  The key
is to provide expertise to all facets of  database  systems,
including:
% providing knowledge-based access to large shared databases
through  intelligent  user-interfaces  and  natural-language
question-answering facilities,
% endowing database systems with  reasoning,  planning,  and
justification capabilities,
% defining new classes of knowledge/data  models  supporting
diverse  viewpoints and capable of both temporal and spatial
reasoning,
% creating architectures to support both loose-  and  tight-
coupling of knowledge base and database systems,
% creating tools and techniques to  support  the  specifica-
tion,  manipulation,  indexing, adaptation, and evolution of
large knowledge/data bases, and
% integrating AI and DB  functional  requirements  into  new
software  and  hardware  environments for the specification,
prototyping, testing and debugging of  knowledge/data  based
applications.
In order to foster  the  interchange  of  ideas  from  these
diverse  fields, the conference will be composed of tutorial
sessions, paper sessions, and  panel  discussions.   Several
invited keynote lectures are planned.
                     Topics of Interest
The  Program  Committee  invites  original  theoretical  and
application  papers (of approximately 5000 words) addressing
(but not limited to) the following areas:
Theory of Knowledge Bases (including  knowledge  representa-
>----- -- --------- -----
tion,  knowledge  models, knowledge indexing and transforma-
tion,   knowledge   servers,   and   formal   semantics   of
knowledge/data bases).
Object-Oriented  Systems  (including  object-oriented   data
>----- --------  -------
models,  query  languages,  transaction  management, version
control, and modeling applications for enterprises, CAD/CAM,
VLSI, Materials Properties knowledge/data bases, etc.).
Reasoning on Knowledge/Data Bases (including reasoning under
>-------- -- --------- ---- -----
uncertainty, sensor fusion, non-monotonic reasoning, analog-
ical  reasoning,  deductive  databases,  logic-based   query
languages,   semantic  query  optimization  and  constraint-
directed reasoning).
Knowledge Management (including methodologies for  knowledge
>-------- ----------
acquisition,  the  knowledge engineering process, constraint
and rule management, knowledge-based requirements  gathering
and specification, and knowledge administration).
Distributed Knowledge/Data  Bases  (including  loosely-  and
>---------- --------- ----  -----
tightly-coupled  architectures, intelligent query decomposi-
tion and processing,  federated  architectures,  distributed
problem-solving,  and  blackboard techniques for distributed
control and problem solving).
Intelligent Database Interfaces (including expert system  --
>---------- -------- ----------
database  communication,  knowledge  gateways, knowledgeable
user agents and browsers).
Natural Language Interaction (including  question-answering,
>------ -------- -----------
extended  responses,  cooperative  behavior, explanation and
justification).
Conference proceedings will be available at the conference.
Please send five copies of papers by October 14, 1987 to
        Professor Larry Kerschberg
        Dept. of Information Systems and Systems Eng.
        George Mason University
        4400 University Drive
        Fairfax, Virginia 22030
        USA
                      Important Dates
        Submission Deadline             October 14, 1987
        Acceptance Notification:        December 15, 1987
        Camera-Ready Version:           February 1, 1988
        Conference Dates:               April 25-27, 1988
===========================================================
                EDS'88 Organizing Committee
                Conference General Chairman
                     Edgar H. Sibley,
                  George Mason University
                      Program Chairman
                     Larry Kerschberg,
                  George Mason University
                     Program Committee
Robert Abarbanel, USA           Matthew Morgenstern, USA
Hideo Aiso, Japan               John Mylopoulos, Canada
Antonio Albano, Italy           Sham Navathe, USA
Stephen J. Andriole, USA        Erich Neuhold, FRG
Robert Balzer, USA              Setsuo Ohsuga, Japan
Francois Bancilhon, France      D. Stott Parker, Jr., USA
Don Batory, USA                 Alain Pirotte, Belgium
Alex Borgida, USA               W. Don Potter, USA
Michael L. Brodie, USA          Larry Reeker, USA
Janis Bubenko, Sweden           Nick Roussopoulos, USA
Peter Buneman, USA              Erik Sandewall, Sweden
Stefano Ceri, Italy             Timos Sellis, USA
Umesh Dayal, USA                John Miles Smith, USA
Mark Fox, USA                   Reid Smith, USA
Antonio L. Furtado, Brasil      Arne Solvberg, Norway
Herve Gallaire,  FRG            John Sowa, USA
Barbara Hayes-Roth, USA         Jacob Stein, USA
Yannis Ioannidis, USA           Michael Stonebraker, USA
Sushil Jajodia, USA             Adrian Walker, USA
Matthias Jarke, FRG             Andrew B. Whinston, USA
Jonathan King, USA              Gio Wiederhold, USA
Roger King, USA                 Eugene Wong, USA
Robert Meersman, Netherlands    Carlo Zaniolo, USA
Tim H. Merrett, Canada
               Tutorial and Panel Coordinator
                    Lucian Russell, USA
                   Conference Coordinator
                    Nancy D. Joyner, USA
                    Exhibits Coordinator
                     Diane Entner, USA
                     Publicity Chairman
                  Jorge Diaz-Herrera, USA
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 87 12:25:28 EST
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Fall Schedule for Potomac Chapter, Software Psychology Soc.
-BODY-
below is the troff file for the next Software Psychology Society
announcement...Please carve it up into your format and circulate on
IRLIST.
 . . .

I leave tomorrow AM for SF and then the conference in Hawaii...returning
Aug 30.   Have fun...Ben
__________________________________________________________
                         SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY
                                POTOMAC CHAPTER

              VOLUME 12 NUMBER 1                       FALL 1987


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 Sci-
ences.

Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology  Society,  c/o
Skip  Williamson,  Knowledge  Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD
20851.


         September 11                                    Room 413-414
                   TWO PSYCHOLOGICALLY MOTIVATED INVENTIONS
                          FOR INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

                Tom K. Landauer, Bell Communications Research
                    435 South Street, Morristown, NJ 07960

Our goal has been to identify human performance obstacles in  cognitive  tasks
and  then  to invent computer-based tools to help overcome them.  Two examples
of current projects will be described.

INFOSCALE: Traditional information retrieval methods rely on  matches  between
individual  words  in  queries and documents or indexes.  But individual words
are unreliable indicants of conceptual content.  As  a  result,  most  desired
documents  are  not  found, and most documents that are found are not desired.
We have been exploring a powerful statistical method, singular value  decompo-
sition,  as  a  way to characterize the semantic content of whole documents or
queries.  Results are promising.

SUPERBOOK: The effective use of reference and instructional text  is  hampered
by  the difficulty of searching for and displaying all and only those segments
of interest.  We have been building  a  multi-windowed  system  that  exploits
several methods for improved computer-aided search and display in an effort to
augment the utility of text.



             October 9                               Room 413-414
                       PERCEPTUAL AND COGNITIVE ASPECTS
                             OF IMAGE PROCESSING

               James Howard, Jr., Human Performance Laboratory
           The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC 20064

The use of high-resolution imagery has  become  widespread  in  a  variety  of
applications.    Many   interactive  image  processing  algorithms  have  been
developed for enhancing and/or reconstructing  imagery  data,  but  relatively
little  research has addressed the ability of human users to apply them effec-
tively.  A program of research which addresses this need will be described.

Two complementary aspects of the interactive imaging problem will be examined.
First, the perceptual implications of frequency-domain image operators will be
considered for detection, classification, and search.  These results relate to
previous  findings which suggest an important role of spatial-frequency sensi-
tive channels on attention in human vision.  Second, the  user's  strategy  in
applying  a  set  of operators will also be examined.  Users appear to develop
stable strategies which can be described in terms  of  simple  productions  or
rule  systems.  The theoretical and practical implications of the results will
be reviewed.



             November 13                            Room 413-414
                   STRATEGIES FOR ESTABLISHING A USABILITY
                TESTING LABORATORY IN A CORPORATE ENVIRONMENT

             Patricia Shearer and Roxanne Smith, EDS Corporation
Usability Testing Laboratory, 225 Grandview Avenue (6-10), Camp Hill, PA 17011

The scope of a usability testing laboratory goes beyond the test room  itself.
Establishing  and  operating  a  usability  lab  within a business environment
involves some interesting challenges.  There are business politics to overcome
which  make operations difficult.  And acceptance of human factors and usabil-
ity testing doesn't always come easy.

There are many challenges in incorporating a usability testing laboratory into
a  corporate  environment.   Strategies  influencing EDS product developers to
include human factors concerns in the development process will  be  presented.
Application domains include forms design, data entry, pop-up menus, documenta-
tion, and error messages.

Finally, successful procedures for usability testing and findings as a  result
of testing -- both product-related and organizational -- will be discussed.




             December 11                            Room 413-414
                           TOUCH SCREEN INTERFACES:
                         CONSIDERATIONS AND CONCERNS

                   Russ Benel, IBM Federal Systems Division
                9201 Corporate Boulevard, Rockville, MD 20850


Touch sensitive displays have been implemented commonly as the  simple  inter-
face  to menu systems in information kiosks, but have the potential for use as
the main interface to complex systems.  The human factors necessary to  design
an optimal touch sensitive human computer interface have not been derived from
an extensive base of empirical research.  The available  standards  appear  to
have  been developed originally for mechanical pushbutton switches.  Decisions
of when and how to employ touch screens frequently have not been made  on  the
basis of user requirements.  The interaction between touch technology type and
intended use is often ignored.  This discussion will examine these issues  and
suggest  approaches.   Reference  will  be made to empirical studies that have
been conducted.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
24
-DATE-
Date: 4 Aug 87 13:48 +0500
-FROM-
From: Gilles Imbeau <imbeau%iro.udem.cdn%ubc.csnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: list of name
-BODY-
[Forwarded from AI-ED Digest  Thursday, 6 Aug 1987  Volume 2 : Issue 27 - Ed]

I know from Ms. M. Jones that you may have lists of names
interested to different topics.

We organize for June 88 an international conference on
"Intelligent Tutoring System" the state of the art.

Please, i would appreciate if you can send me a list
of person interested in AI, education, ITS, or ather
connex domain.

thank you.

gilles Imbeau

[Note: I thought that there may be some IRList readers interested in
this conference, and so am forwarding this message so you can
individually reply if you want to be added to the lists they are
compiling. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 8 Aug 87 14:38:12 CDT
-FROM-
From: Vijay Raghavan <raghavan@usl.csnet>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Next issue of ACM SIGIR Forum - Table of Contents
-BODY-
Spring/Summer '87               CONTENTS               Volume 21  Numbers 3-4

SIGIR NEWS

  Officers' Objectives                                 1

  Publication Policy                                   2

  Articles
    Expert Systems and Information Retrieval,
    G. Salton                                          3

    Informativeness as an Ordinal Utility Function
    for Information Retrieval, J. Tague                10

  Workshop Report
    Distributed Expert-Based Information
    Systems:  A Perspective                            18

  Book Review
    Database System Concepts by H. F. Korth
    and A. Silberschatz                                21

  Abstracts of Articles
    Selected from Recent Issues of Journals            22

    Selected from Dissertation Abstracts
    International                                      38

  Conference Overview
    1987 ACM-SIGIR Conference                          46

    1986 ACM-SIGIR Conference                          50

  Call for Papers
    1988 ACM-SIGIR Conference                          54

    R.I.A.O. 1988 - Conference on User-oriented Content-
    based Text and Image Handling                      56

    Int'l Conference - Extending Database Technology   58

    Hypertext '87                                      60

    Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge   62

    Int'l Conference - Electronic Publishing,
    Document Manipulation and Typography               63

    Information Sciences - An International Journal    65

    1988 ACM-SIGMETRICS Conference                     66

    1988 Conference on Office Information Systems      67

    Fourth Int'l Conference on Data Engineering        68


  Program Highlights
    First Int'l Conference on Bibliometrics and
    Theoretical Aspects of IR                          69

    1987 Annual Meeting of ASIS                        73

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 87 12:25:28 EST
-FROM-
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hyperties system
-BODY-
 . . .
At the end is a brief writeup on our Hyperties (formerly TIES) system that
may also be of interest to your reader...please circulate if you feel it
is appropriate...
__________________________________________________________
                                  Hyperties:
            Hypertext based on The Interactive Encyclopedia System

                               Ben Shneiderman
           Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland,
                            College Park, MD 20742


                                 Introduction
Hyperties (Hypertext based on The  Interactive  Encyclopedia  System)  enables
users  to easily traverse a database of articles and pictures by merely point-
ing at highlighted words in context.  This embedded  menus  approach  and  the
simple  user interface enables users to tap the substantial power of hypertext
systems for browsing and information search tasks.

                                 Applications
Hyperties can be used to scan organizational policy manuals, a tool for  diag-
nostic problem solving, an environment for novels or mysteries, an online help
strategy, a browser for computer program text and documentation,  an  addition
to a museum exhibit, cookbooks or self-help manuals, or a way to explore cross
referenced materials such as legal documents or an annotated Bible.

Hyperties allows users to explore information resources in an easy and appeal-
ing  manner.   They  merely touch (or use arrow keys to move a light bar onto)
topics that interest them and a brief definition appears at the bottom of  the
screen.   The users may continue reading or ask for details about the selected
topic.  An article about a topic may be one or more screens long  and  contain
several  pictures.   As  users traverse articles, Hyperties keeps the path and
allows easy reversal, building confidence and a sense of control.   Users  can
also select articles and pictures from an index.

                                Authoring tool
Hyperties authoring software guides the  author  in  writing  a  title,  brief
definition  (5-35  words),  text  (50-1000 words, typically), and synonyms for
each article title.  Authors mark references in the text by  surrounding  them
with  a  pair  of tildes.  Hyperties collects all references, prompts the user
for synonym relationships, maintains  lists  of  articles  and  pictures,  and
allows  editing, addition, and deletion of articles and pictures.   The author
tool displays TO/FROM citations for each article and allows  authors  to  keep
notes  on  each article.  A simple word processor is embedded in the authoring
software, but users can create articles on their own word processor,  if  they
wish.   Command  menus reduce memorization, eliminate typing errors, and speed
work.  Authors create pictures with editors such as  PC  Paint  and  then  can
specify links from the articles to the pictures.

                            Hardware requirements
Hyperties runs on a standard PC (256K, monochrome or color, color required  if
pictures are used) and on PCs, XTs, or ATs.

                                   History
Hyperties has been under development since 1983 in the Human-Computer Interac-
tion  Laboratory.  It was first written in APL and has been rewritten in the C
programming language twice.   Dan Ostroff, a graduate student in computer sci-
ence, did the implementation and a major portion of the user interface design.
Dr. Janis Morariu of the Center for Instructional Development  and  Evaluation
contributed substantially to the user interface design.  Jacob Lifshitz, Susan
Flynn, Yuri Gawdiak, Richard Potter, and  Bill  Weiland  have  maintained  and
improved the system.

                                    Manual
A 120 page users manual is available to describe the  authoring  process.   It
shows extensive browser and author sessions.

                                 Availability
The University of Maryland has made a contract for commercial distribution and
development  with  Cognetics  Corporation  (Charles Kreitzberg, President), 55
Princeton-Hightstown Road, Princeton Junction, NJ 08550, Phone (609) 799-5005.

                            Continuing development
Current development efforts focus on improved touchscreens,  touchable  graph-
ics,  inclusion  of  videodisk  access, and alternate indexing strategies.  An
exploratory advanced browser with multiple windows and touchable  graphics  is
being implemented on the SUN 3 Workstation.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:45:32 EDT
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
Subject: new edition of abstracts for IRList and SIGIR Forum (part 1 of 4)

Appended is next edition of dissertation abstracts for IRList/SIGIR Forum.
 ...

Note there are some without an abstract.  These turn up in issue #12 each
year [v47(12) in the appended list].  For some reason, the university
departments do not want to let UMI include the abstracts for them.

 ...

Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts

Compiled by:

Susanne M. Humphrey, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 20894


The following are citations selected by title and abstract as being
related to Information Retrieval (IR), resulting from a computer
search, using the BRS Information Technologies retrieval service, of
the Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) database produced
by University Microfilms International.

Included are the UM order number and year-month of entry into the
database; author; university, degree, and, if available, number of
pages; title; DAI subject category chosen by the author of the
dissertation; and abstract.  References are sorted first by DAI
subject category and second by author.  Citations denoted by an
MAI reference do not yet have abstracts in the database and refer
to abstracts in the published Masters Abstracts International.

Unless otherwise specified, paper or microform copies of
dissertations may be ordered from University Microfilms
International, Dissertation Copies, Post Office Box 1764, Ann Arbor,
MI 48106; telephone for U.S. (except Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska):
1-800-521-3042, for Canada: 1-800-268-6090.  Price lists and other
ordering and shipping information are in the introduction to the
published DAI.  An alternate source for copies is sometimes
provided at the end of the abstract.

The dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published
with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers
of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright by University
Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced without their
prior permission.


AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-11462.
AU COOK, GARY JOE.
IN Arizona State University Ph.D. 1987, 142 pages.
TI An analysis of information search strategies for decision-making.
SO DAI v48(02), SecA, pp430.
DE Business Administration, General.  Information Science.
AB     Understanding how people search through available information
   prior to making a decision is an important concern in the study of
   decision making.  People tend to employ information search
   strategies consistent with the decision process employed.  Thus
   analysis of information search strategies provides insight which may
   be useful in the design of computer-based aids for decision making.
       The basic research question is: Do information search strategies
   shift from compensatory to noncompensatory as information load
   increases?  Based on models of decision processes and previous
   research, four hypotheses were formulated: Increased information
   load results in (1) a decrease in the proportion of information
   searched, (2) increased variability in the proportion of information
   searched across alternatives, (3) increased variability in the
   proportion of information searched across dimensions, and (4) a
   direction of search that changes from alternativewise to
   dimensionwise.
       An experimental tool was developed and a laboratory experiment
   was conducted to examine how information search strategies are
   affected by changes in information load.  The experimental tool is
   computer software that participants query for information to perform
   an experimental task.  This software, called ISLab, records the
   information queries, the elapsed time between queries, and the
   alternative chosen for each decision situation.  The experimental
   task involves selecting one from a set of companies to receive a
   bank loan, based on financial and related information, in each of a
   series of decision situations.  Information load is manipulated by
   varying the number of companies and the amount of information
   available on each company.  Search patterns are analyzed using an
   ANOVA repeated measures factorial design.
       The results support the conceptual hypothesis that there is
   increased use of noncompensatory information search strategies as
   information load increases.  All four of the dependent variables
   changed significantly in directions consistent with this hypothesis
   (significance level = .05).  There is evidence of information load
   effects for both cue selection (differences in information examined)
   and cue combination (differences in decisions).

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-07795.
AU JOSHI, KAILASH.
IN Indiana University Ph.D. 1986, 213 pages.
TI An investigation of equity and role variables as determinants of
   user information satisfaction.
SO DAI v47(12), SecA, pp4433.
DE Business Administration, General.  Information Science.
AB     In the MIS literature three major factors have been identified
   which can influence a user's satisfaction with her/his information
   systems.  These factors are: the quality of information products
   (reports and screens), attitudes towards MIS staff and services, and
   knowledge and involvement level of user.  This study investigates
   two additional factors as possible determinants of user information
   satisfaction.  These additional factors, which represent the social
   subsystem of the work environment, were identified based on the
   Socio-Technical Systems framework.
       The first additional factor is the perceived fairness in the
   allocation of information systems and related resources to different
   user groups.  Procedural fairness and distributive fairness have
   been identified as important for an individual's satisfaction in
   various non-MIS contexts.
       The second factor relates to the impact of information systems
   design on the work environment of users.  Role conflict and role
   ambiguity in the work environment are explored as possible factors
   influencing user information satisfaction.
       A cross-sectional survey of over 200 non-clerical users of
   information systems provided the data for testing the propositions
   of this study.  A new instrument was developed for measuring equity
   in the MIS context.  Equity, role conflict, and role ambiguity were
   found to be significantly correlated with overall user information
   satisfaction.  The addition of these new variables resulted in
   improvement in the proportion of variance explained in overall user
   information satisfaction from 47.9 percent (based on the three
   existing factors) to 57.1 percent.  A causal path model was proposed
   and tested using path analysis techniques.  Among all the existing
   and new variables included in this study, equity was found to be the
   most important variable influencing overall user information
   satisfaction, both in terms of correlation and total causal
   influence.

[Note: rest will be spread over next 3 issues - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
25
-DATE-
Date:    Mon, 10 Aug 87 10:12 PDT
-FROM-
From:    IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS
-SUBJECT-
Subject: re:  request for information on library automation
-BODY-
   While IRlist may not have covered much material on
library automation, a  lot exists.  Start with the indexes
LIBRARY LITERATURE and LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
ABSTRACTS (LISA).  Also several recent texts, includinhg
ones by Rice and by Corbin that aren't bad.
   I teach a one-quarter grad course on library automation here at
UCLA and my syllabus includes a fairly extensive bibliography
(10-15 pages).  I can mail a copy to anyone who is interested in
it, either electronically or by USMAIL.  I can be reached at
   Dr. Christine Borgman
   Grad School of Lib & Information Science
   UCLA
   Los Angeles, CA 90034
   213/825-1379
   IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS.BITNET
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:45:32 EDT
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
Subject: new edition of abstracts for IRList and SIGIR Forum

Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts (continued - part 2 of 4)

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-08218.
AU BASU, AMIT.
IN The University of Rochester Ph.D. 1986, 180 pages.
TI Imprecise reasoning in intelligent decision support systems.
SO DAI v47(12), SecA, pp4439.
DE Business Administration, Management.
AB     In this thesis, a formal methodology to support reasoning with
   imprecise knowledge in computer based decision support systems is
   developed.  Many important decision problems are highly
   unstructured, and cannot be solved adequately using preset
   algorithms.  Much of the complexity of such problems lies in the
   reasoning needed to determine how to solve individual problem
   instances.  Existing decision support systems do not provide much
   reasoning support, largely due to the difficulty of representing and
   manipulating the fragmented and imprecise knowledge that is
   generally available.  The methodology developed in this dissertation
   provides a basis for the design of Intelligent Decision Support
   Systems (IDSS) in which heuristic problem solving methods can be
   used to support reasoning as well as data retrieval and numerical
   computation.
       The dissertation consists of three parts.  First, a logic based
   framework for reasoning is developed.  The basic constructs of First
   Order Logic (FOL) are supplemented with constructs and mechanisms
   for automatic model manipulation, resulting in a powerful framework
   for IDSS development.  Next, the need to distinguish between two
   different sources of imprecision, namely fuzziness and uncertainty
   is established, and methods for formally representing and
   mechanically manipulating fuzzy and/or uncertain knowledge within
   the logic framework are developed.  Finally, the strengths of the
   imprecise reasoning methodology are demonstrated by implementing a
   prototype IDSS to support imprecise reasoning and examining the
   prototype's performance on sample problems.
       This research shows how IDSS can be developed for unstructured
   problems even when the available knowledge is imprecise, and also
   demonstrates the versatility of such a system.  For instance, the
   imprecision measures provide useful bases for comparing alternative
   solutions, even solutions that are "close misses"; evaluation of
   solutions is also possible for each subproblem.  Information about
   imprecision can be used not only to interpret solutions, but also to
   control the problem solving process itself.  Furthermore, the
   generation of useful results is often possible even if some of the
   available information is highly imprecise, sometimes even if some
   information is missing.  Such features can be very useful in
   supporting unstructured decision making, yet cannot readily be
   supported by a system limited to precise reasoning.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-10552.
AU CATER, STEVEN C.
IN The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col.
   Ph.D. 1986, 93 pages.
TI The topological information retrieval system and the topological
   paradigm: a unification of the major models of information retrieval.
SO DAI v48(02), SecB, pp493.
DE Computer Science.
AB     There are three topics discussed in this work.  The first topic
   is an investigation of the topological properties of the p-norm
   model of Salton, Fox, and Wu.  It is shown that certain properties
   of the p-norm model that one would expect to hold, given the
   topological origin of the model, do not in fact hold.  These
   properties include the ability to change the query by changing p,
   and the ability to adequately separate documents.  Since these
   properties do hold in the model as actually constructed, it must be
   that the properties do not follow from the topological origin of the
   model.
       The second topic is a search for a usable model with an adequate
   theoretical basis.  In order to construct such a model, the
   topological paradigm is defined.  This paradigm establishes a
   minimal set of requirements that any system with a topological
   foundation should have.  A particular example of the paradigm, the
   Topological Information Retrieval System (TIRS), is constructed.  It
   is shown that all of the desired properties of the p-norm model hold
   for the TIRS model.  A discussion of the various query systems that
   may be used with TIRS is given.  These query systems include a
   natural language interface and a weighted boolean query system, as
   well as two specialized interfaces.  The weighted boolean query
   system has the property that <attribute, weight> pairs, when treated
   as units, have all of the properties of the non-weighted boolean
   lattice.  The run time of the system is estimated, once for an
   inverted file implementation, and once for an implementation using
   kd-trees.  These run times are much better than for traditional
   systems.
       The third topic is a reexamination of the standard models of
   information retrieval, considered as cases of the topological
   paradigm.  The paradigm is shown to be a unifying model, in that all
   of the standard models, i.e., the boolean, vector space, fuzzy set
   theoretic, and probabilistic models, as well as a hierarchical
   model, are shown to be instances of the paradigm.
       An appendix contains a review of relevant topics from topology
   and abstract algebra.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-11310.
AU CHRISTENSEN, MARGARET H.
IN Temple University Ph.D. 1987, 276 pages.
TI Explanation generation from algebraic specification through
   hyperresolution and demodulation: automated heuristic assistance.
   (Volumes I and II).
SO DAI v48(02), SecB, pp493.
DE Computer Science.
AB     AHA delivers semantic help to users of interactive systems.  It
   possesses the following six capabilities: (1) It can report the
   user's current state.  (2) It can list all of the commands which are
   legal in the user's current state.  (3) It can explain the meaning
   of a given command.  (4) It can explain how the user got to the
   current state.  (5) It can explain the consequences of the issuance
   of hypothetical commands from the current state.  (6) It can tell
   the user how to get to a goal state, and if requested, explain why
   this will do the job.  Knowledge about the software is represented
   through algebraic specification and question answering is handled by
   a resolution-based theorem prover with demodulation for the
   treatment of equality.  A demonstration version is implemented for a
   subset of DEC command language.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-11440.
AU FRAME, MICHAEL CHARLES.
IN The George Washington University D.Sc. 1987, 183 pages.
TI Automatic translation of query language in heterogeneous database
   management systems.
SO DAI v48(02), SecB, pp494.
DE Computer Science.
AB     A heterogeneous database management system (HDBMS) is a set of
   dissimilar, but cooperating, "local" database management systems
   (LDBMSs).  The LDBMSs may reside on separate computer systems.  The
   HDBMS provides uniform access to the data in all of these databases
   available to users of all of the computer systems.  Users have the
   impression of interfacing with a single database.
       One of the problems that exists in providing such a capability
   is interacting with the various query languages that the LDBMSs
   provide.  A user should be able to access all data with a single
   query language.  In addition, it should be possible to add a new
   LDBMS to the HDBMS without the necessity of writing a translator to
   that LDMSs query language.  Both of these problems are solved here.
       The design of an HDBMS is presented that includes a table driven
   translator based upon attribute grammars.  Attribute grammars define
   the syntax (form) and the semantics (meaning) of a language.  A new
   LDBMS may be added simply by defining an attribute grammar for its
   query language.  The HDBMS includes algorithms for: translating the
   common query language to an internal form; decomposing the internal
   form based upon the participating LDBMSs; and translating the
   decomposed parts each to the appropriate query language.
       In addition, the HDBMS contains a database "machine" based upon
   relational algebra. This machine provides the capability of a high
   degree of parallelism by using a dataflow technique to evaluate
   relational algebra expressions.
      Relational algebra is the internal form used in the attribute
   grammar of the common query language.  In addition to its
   operational use, it also provides a formalism for defining the
   precise meaning of query languages. This is an improvement over the
   informal techniques that are now in use.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-08227.
AU FRISCH, ALAN MARK.
IN The University of Rochester Ph.D. 1986, 127 pages.
TI Knowledge retrieval as specialized inference.
SO DAI v47(12), SecB, pp4957.
DE Computer Science.
AB     Artificial Intelligence reasoning systems commonly contain a
   large corpus of declarative knowledge, called a knowledge base (KB),
   and provide facilities with which the system's components can
   retrieve this knowledge.  This thesis sets out to study the very
   nature of retrieval.  Formal specifications that capture certain
   informal intuitions about retrieval are developed, studied, and
   implemented by retrieval algorithms.
       Consistent with the necessity for fast retrieval is the guiding
   intuition that a retriever is, at least in simple cases, a pattern
   matcher, though in more complex cases it may perform selected
   inferences such as property inheritance.
       Seemingly at odds with this intuition, this thesis views the
   entire process of retrieval as a form of inference and hence the KB
   as a representation, not merely a data structure.  A retriever makes
   a limited attempt to prove that a queried sentence is a logical
   consequence of the KB.  When constrained by the no-chaining
   restriction, inference becomes indistinguishable from
   pattern-matching.  Imagining the KB divided into quanta, a retriever
   that respects this restriction cannot combine two quanta in order to
   derive a third.
       The techniques of model theory are adapted to build
   non-procedural specifications of retrievability relations, which
   determine what sentences are retrievable from the KB's.
   Model-theoretic specifications are presented for four retrievers,
   each extending the capabilities of the previous one.  Each is
   accompanied by a rigorous investigation into its properties, and a
   presentation of an efficient, terminating algorithm that probably
   meets the specification.
       The first retriever, which operates on a propositional language,
   handles only yes/no queries, the second also handles wh-queries, and
   the third allows quantifiers in the KB and the query.  Each is shown
   to be, in some sense, the strongest retriever that meets the
   no-chaining restriction.
       The third retriever forms an excellent basis for integrating a
   specialized set of inferences that chain in a controllable manner.
   This is achieved by incorporating taxonomic inference, such as
   inheritance, to form the fourth retriever, an idealized version of
   the retriever incorporated in the ARGOT natural language dialogue
   system.  It is characterized by its ability to infer all
   consequences of its taxonomic knowledge without otherwise chaining.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-08663.
AU KAZEMIAN, FEREYDOUN.
IN Kansas State University Ph.D. 1987, 95 pages.
TI A formal specification for a user interface for office automation.
SO DAI v47(12), SecB, pp4959.
DE Computer Science.
AB     This work describes a formal method for specifying the user
   interface of an Office Automation (OA) system.  Since there are no
   standard office environments to base the formal specifications on,
   some components of an OA system which model the workings of many
   offices are considered.  A model for the interface to the OA system
   is developed.  Based upon this model the requirements of a
   hypothetical user is described.  From these requirements components
   of an OA system satisfying them are identified.  Formal
   specification techniques are described.  The algebraic specification
   technique is used for specifying the user interface.  Completeness
   and consistency of the algebraic specification are discussed and the
   notion of sufficient completeness is presented.  An algorithm for
   testing the sufficient completeness of an algebraic specification of
   an abstract data type under certain constraints is discussed.
   Calculus of Communicating Systems is used as a formal specification
   technique for describing user interaction and communication aspects
   of the OA system.  Finally a framework for the design of a user
   interface is considered.

[Note: rest will be spread over next 2 issues - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
26
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:45:32 EDT
-FROM-
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: new edition of abstracts for IRList and SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts (continued - part 3 of 4)

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-11620.
AU SACHAR, HARVINDER JIT SINGH.
IN The University of Texas at Arlington Ph.D. 1986, 125 pages.
TI Theoretical aspects of design of and retrieval from similarity-based
   relational database systems.
SO DAI v48(02), SecB, pp498.
DE Computer Science.
AB     The similarity-based relational data model originated by
   Buckles/Petry permits the representation of inexact information in
   the form of a relational database.  In this dissertation, a
   theoretically sound definition of fuzzy functional dependency was
   developed.  Inference rules for fuzzy functional dependencies were
   presented and proved to be sound and complete. The concept of a
   fuzzy key for similarity-based data model was developed and normal
   forms were defined for this data model.  These developments provide
   the capability to incorporate the fuzzy information about the real
   world in the design process.
       To provide a higher-level query language for this data model, a
   complete fuzzy domain relational calculus was designed which is an
   extension of domain calculus for ordinary relational databases.  It
   was proven also that for any fuzzy relational algebra expression,
   there is an equivalent safe formula in fuzzy domain calculus.  As a
   first step towards more advanced query methods for the
   similarity-based data model, the concept of dual measure of
   possibility/necessity as applied to simple non-fuzzy queries for
   this data model was developed.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-08507.
AU TYLER, SHERMAN WILLIAM.
IN University of Pittsburgh Ph.D. 1986, 189 pages.
TI SAUCI: self-adaptive user-computer interface.
SO DAI v47(12), SecB, pp4964.
DE Computer Science.
AB     Different approaches to the design of the human-computer
   interface have been taken in the past.  These can be organized into
   four broad categories: tack-on; intuitive/empirical; formal; and
   conversational.  There are several important interface design
   criteria that have never been adequately attained in any of these
   approaches.  One is modularity, that is, maintaining a clear
   separation between the interface and its target system.  A second
   criterion is self-adaptation, or the ability of the interface to
   modify its own behavior to suit a given individual user.  Two
   further criteria relate to the interface's potential to guide users
   in performing typical high-level tasks on the target system and to
   provide intelligent advice on the use of that system.
       This research was focused on developing an integrated technique
   for achieving these four design criteria.  To that end, an abstract
   architecture called SAUCI, or the Self-Adaptive User-Computer
   Interface, was proposed, embodying a knowledge-based,
   object-oriented approach to interface design.  The foundation of
   this approach rests upon information encoded within sets of objects.
   This information includes separate knowledge bases describing the
   individual users, the commands of the target system, and the
   high-level tasks appropriate for that system.  The behavior of the
   interface is controlled by various methods which call upon the
   knowledge bases in a rule-governed manner to decide what interface
   features should be present at each phase of the user's dialogue with
   the target system.
       To test the feasibility of the proposed architecture, a working
   interface was implemented on a Xerox 1108 computer in the LOOPS
   language, with a UNIX operating system running on a separate
   minicomputer as the target system.  An empirical evaluation of this
   prototype revealed clear advantages over the standard interface.
   Closer examination pointed to each of the factors of modularity,
   task guidance, and user-tailored assistance as playing a significant
   role in these effects.
       A discussion of additional applications of this architecture and
   of areas for future development is offered as further evidence of
   the value of this approach as a general framework for human-computer
   interface design.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-08805.
AU MORRIS, JOHN HENRY.
IN Iowa State University Ph.D. 1986, 127 pages.
TI An experimental interface of a microcomputer with a Vega universal
   testing machine to retrieve data on test specimens.
SO DAI v48(01), SecA, pp111.
DE Education, Technology.
AB     The purpose of this study was to develop an inexpensive
   interface between the Vega universal testing machine and a
   Commodore-64 microcomputer. Also, to develop a computer program that
   will store and retrieve pertinent information about the
   metallurgical properties of tensile specimens (i.e., modulus of
   elasticity, Brinell Hardness number, yield point, reduction of area,
   tempering temperature, etc.).  Also, compare the interfacing with
   the conventional method.
       It is theorized that by interfacing the Vega universal testing
   machine with the Commodore-64 microcomputer, the metallurgical data
   calculated by the computer will be equal to the metallurgical data
   calculated by the conventional method.
       Out of eleven hypotheses, there were nine hypotheses with
   significant difference at the ninety-five percent confidence level.
   Two hypotheses had no differences.  These were the percent
   elongation and unit deformation.  The percent elongation is a
   multiple of the unit deformation by 100 times.
       The computer was faster overall than the conventional method.
   However, the regression predictive equation used in the computer
   program to calculate the metallurgical data produced on the average
   higher values than the conventional method.  The predictive equation
   can be adjusted to calculate values that are equivalent to the
   correct values for any given specimen.

AN This item is not available from University Microfilms International
   ADG03-74461.
AU BOETTCHER, KEVIN LLOYD.
IN Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D. 1986.
TI A methodology for the analysis and design of human
   information-processing organizations.
SO ADD X1986.
DE Engineering, Electronics and Electrical.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-12104.
AU DURANCE, PAUL WILLIAM.
IN The University of Michigan Ph.D. 1987, 373 pages.
TI Application to logical design to incomplete medical record
   processing.
SO DAI v48(02), SecB, PP532.
DE Engineering, Industrial.  Health Sciences, Hospital Management.
AB     Current hospital-based information systems are not adequate to
   meet the rapidly expanding information needs generated by additional
   economic competition and payment system changes.  Hospitals face
   both increasingly aggressive competition from other institutions and
   substitution of treatment modalities which reduces demand for
   inpatient services.  Simultaneously, cost minimization incentives
   have been established by the change from cost-based reimbursement to
   prospective fixed price and capitation payment systems.  Hospital
   managements need cost effective information processing as well as
   more information to manage their institution effectively.
      Since Medical Record Departments (MRDs) currently provide most
   medical information within hospitals, interest is strong in
   expanding information processing capabilities, while also increasing
   processing efficiency.  In particular, completing the inpatient
   medical record is a slow and costly process that does not
   satisfactorily meet post-discharge information demands.  An
   automated information processing system (IPS) that uses the latest
   in document image storage and retrieval technology is proposed.
   This IPS for aiding in inpatient medical record processing is
   referred to as the Record Completion System (RCS).
       Software Engineering principles are applied to the determination
   and specification of some RCS requirements.  In particular, a
   Logical Design methodology (LDM) is developed for the creation,
   capture, and analysis of logical functional requirements.  The LDM
   combines Structured Systems Analysis and Petri Net theory.  The
   Entity Relationship Attribute (ERA) model that defines a logical
   design language within the LDM is automated at the Program for
   Research in Information Systems Engineering (PRISE) and applied in
   the hospital-based requirements specification project.  A database
   that represents the Logical Design Specification (LDS) for the RCS
   application is populated and reviewed.
       The discussion of the proposed RCS reveals that a number of
   current problems, which result in slow and inadequate incomplete
   medical record processing, can be alleviated or eliminated.  It is
   concluded that: (1) an IPS based on document image storage and
   retrieval should improve both medical information availability and
   completion processing; (2) further work on the development of such
   an RCS is warranted; and (3) continued development and application
   of the LDM should be pursued.

AN This item is not available from University Microfilms International
   ADG03-75232.
AU LOSEE, ROBERT MACLEAN, JR.
IN The University of Chicago Ph.D. 1985.
TI The performance of probabilistic models of document retrieval
   systems.
SO ADD X1986.
DE Information Science.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-11733.
AU MONTGOMERY, JACQUELINE DELORES.
IN The Florida State University Ph.D. 1987, 256 pages.
TI End user searchers of online bibliographic databases in an
   industrial setting: training, use and perceived benefits.
SO DAI v48(02), SecA, pp238.
DE Information Science.
AB     A study of potential end users of online bibliographic searches
   was conducted in three parts at a product development location of a
   consumer products company.  Part one was a survey of the population.
   Part two included collection and analysis of search data from a
   sample trained to conduct online bibliographic searches in either a
   one-day course or a two-hour seminar.  Part three consisted of
   interviews with the sample at the close of the data collection phase.
   The survey data showed that interest in learning to search was
   associated with highest degree earned and type of previous exposure
   to online searching principles.  The search data could not be
   analyzed for statistical significance of differences between the two
   types of training due to uneven search activity by subjects.
   Approximately half of the subjects trained did not conduct searches
   during the nine-month study, and of the searches obtained, more than
   half were conducted by only two subjects.  Interview data revealed
   that availability of intermediaries and alternative resources, the
   perception that needed materials would not be available online, and
   difficulties in using computers and telecommunications software
   contributed to information users' decision not to conduct online
   bibliographic searches.  Searchers considered convenience, time
   saved, and convincing others to support a decision as positive
   attributes of online searches.  Concerns about frustration in use
   and missed information were viewed as negative attributes.
   Nonsearchers considered online searches conducted for them to have
   the positive attribute of convenience, and the negative attributes
   of time used and cost.  Searchers and nonsearchers considered
   non-online sources to have positive attributes of convenience, time
   saved, relevance, and expertise, and negative attributes of
   information overload, time used, concerns about correctness and
   frustration in use.  This research may be used in management
   decision-making regarding feasible approaches to training end users
   to conduct their own searches, or to communicate with intermediary
   searchers.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-06331.
AU QUARLES, PATRICIA O'HARA.
IN New York University Ph.D. 1986, 211 pages.
TI Videotex and conceptions of knowledge: an historically-based model
   for identifying epistemological consequences of videotex.
SO DAI v47(12), SecA, pp4217.
DE Information Science.
AB     The purpose of this study was to develop a model for evaluating
   the potential epistemological consequences of the videotex medium.
   It was theorized that an analysis of critical attributes of the
   medium would yield a series of possible consequences.  In order to
   develop the list of critical attributes and potential consequences,
   the work of five prominent media historians and theorists was
   examined.  Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, William
   Ivins and Harold Innis were the core group from whose work the model
   was constructed.
       Four primary attributes of communications media that have
   epistemological consequences were abstracted from these works:
   efficiency, fixity, accessibility and transparency.  The degree to
   which a medium exhibited high or low levels of these attributes
   suggested certain consequences for methods, contents, sources and
   validity of knowledge.
       This model was then applied to videotex, broadly defined as the
   electronic transmission of text and graphics between computer
   databases and remote terminals.  Taken as a whole, the model
   indicated that videotex will tend to favor new, integrated and
   interdisciplinary contents, relational and heuristic methods,
   homeostatic storage, greater graphic notation, and a tendency to
   focus on contemporary, comparative data.  The results of the
   analysis indicated that often two contrasting epistemological
   consequences may result from the same attribute of a medium--for
   example, high specialization and high interdisciplinarity of
   contents; high accessibility of information and high control of
   access.  The complex nature of media change and the unformed
   features of the medium hindered clear projection of videotex
   consequences in those areas.

[Note: rest will be in next issue - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
27
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 87 16:45:32 EDT
-FROM-
From: Susanne Humphrey <humphrey@mcs.nlm.nih.gov>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: new edition of abstracts for IRList and SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts (continued - part 4 of 4)

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-06113.
AU TAYLOR, RODERICK AUSTIN.
IN The University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. 1986, 191 pages.
TI Using multiple dialog modes in a user-system interface to accomodate
   different levels of user experience: an experimental study.
SO DAI v47(12), SecA, pp4218.
DE Information Science.  Computer Science.
AB     This dissertation investigated a normative theory that says
   computer users have different dialog needs depending on their level
   of experience in using a computer.  It was developed from the human
   factors and user-system interface research built upon differences in
   expert and novice problem solving strategies, memory, and learning.
   Experts want to control the interaction with a computer as with a
   command language whereas novices want to be led through their
   interaction as with menus and prompts.  Since most computer
   interfaces only provide one dialog mode, some portion of a
   population having a wide range of user experience is not having
   their user-system interface needs met.  This research hypothesizes
   that the answer to satisfy the needs of a mixed population is to
   have multiple dialog modes that the user is free to choose from and
   switch between as required.
      The hypotheses that experts and novices would perform better and
   be more satisfied with multiple dialog modes than with just one mode
   were tested empirically in a controlled laboratory setting.  Both
   novice and expert computer users used one of three types of
   user-system interfaces (menu, command language, or both modes) to
   perform the same data base task.  Results showed that those with
   both types of dialog modes were more satisfied and performed better
   than the command language group but were statistically equal to the
   menu group even though the performance scores and the satisfaction
   rating was slightly better for menu.  It was found that the
   subject's choice of dialog mode, when both modes were available, and
   their satisfaction with a dialog mode had more to do with past
   experience and preference than with the difference in expert and
   novice problem solving strategies.  Results also suggested that
   improvements in technology (e.g.  fast display times for presenting
   the menus) and the incorporation of basic underlying functions
   developed from human factor studies into the user-system interface
   have tended to overcome some of the previous dissatisfaction by
   experts for computer directed (menu) type of dialog modes.  In
   conclusion, it was found that even though multiple dialog modes did
   not improve performance and satisfaction over menus (although much
   superior to having just command language) almost 100% of the 98
   subjects expressed a preference for multiple dialog modes.  When the
   subjects were given a choice of dialog modes the subjects as a
   whole, regardless of experience, split 60/40, menu to command
   language.  Thus, strong consideration should be given to having
   multiple dialog modes in a user-system interface for application
   systems that are to be used by a population with a diverse
   experience background.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-10121.
AU TSAI, BOR-SHENG.
IN Case Western Reserve University Ph.D. 1987, 262 pages.
TI The behavioral and structural analysis of a special subject
   literature.
SO DAI v48(01), SecA, pp3.
DE Information Science.
AB     "Information Retrieval" has always been one of the major
   concerns in Information Science.  Because present searching methods
   for scientific literature basically use Boolean logic, probabilistic
   methods, etc., frustration in searching for quality documents is
   frequently experienced.
       To assist literature searching, a subject network approach to
   identify the significant authors related to a special subject
   literature can be very helpful.  By expanding Goffman's Epidemic
   Model, ten stages and five formation periods of a population growth
   model are developed to help analyze the behavior, the structure, and
   finally, to identify the significant authors of this special subject
   literature.  Using an original special subject database as a source,
   the citation data are thoroughly collected from Science Citation
   Index and plotted into author, journal, and document citation
   network maps as well as co-author network maps.  The growth
   dynamics, citation ratios, and entropies of the co-author network,
   and document/author/journal citation networks are thus measured.  An
   analysis about the frequency of occurrence of descriptors is also
   examined.  The behavior of each communication network is detected,
   identified, and explained in stages and periods.  Finally, based on
   the found formation periods, a stage-period table for the filtered
   and identified synthetic information elements (significant authors
   in this case) is constructed.  The usage of this synthetic table to
   its related functions is presented.  The strengths, the concerned
   issues, and further research areas related to this study are
   discussed.  The construction of an intelligent database and its
   connected projects are suggested.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-08276.
AU BLACK, EZRA WILLIAM.
IN City University of New York Ph.D. 1987, 181 pages.
TI Towards computational discrimination of English word senses.
SO DAI v47(12), SecA, pp4374.
DE Language, Linguistics.
AB     An experiment is conducted which compares three different
   methods of deciding which of three or four senses characterizes each
   occurrence of a word for which a Key Word In Context concordance has
   been constructed.  The three methods consist of a dictionary-based
   approach (DG) where categories intended to classify the words and
   expressions occurring in each concordance line are simply the
   subject codes of a major dictionary; an approach (DS1) in which
   categories are obtained via a frequency analysis of words occurring
   in the immediate neighborhood of the "node word"--the word in
   focus--of the concordance, and of "content" words occurring anywhere
   in a given line; and an approach (DS2) chiefly based on the
   content-analytic categories obtained by closely reading the
   concordances of a 100-type sampling of words occurring in the
   20-25-million-token English text source, consisting of the official
   proceedings of the Canadian House of Commons.  Results are that DG
   performs extremely poorly--in fact, near-randomly; DS1 and DS2 yield
   better and substantially similar performances.  The conclusion is
   that domain-general, syntax-based approaches to automatic word sense
   discrimination and domain-specific, content-analytic approaches need
   and complement each other.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG86-20874.
AU AL-DOSARY, FAHAD MISFER.
IN The University of Wisconsin - Madison Ph.D. 1986, 184 pages.
TI Characteristics of research literature used by political scientists:
   a study of the influence of differences in research approaches on
   citation behavior.
SO DAI v48(01), SecA, pp3.
DE Library Science.
AB     A method is proposed to clarify certain factors underlying
   citation behavior within a single discipline.  This approach, which
   is an extension and refinement of citation analysis as a method of
   research, was used to analyze the citation patterns of political
   scientists in relation to variations in their research approaches.
       A sample of 204 political science journal articles was examined
   to determine whether different research approaches used in a subject
   field are associated with differences in citation patterns.  The
   articles were operationally classified as to their analytic
   disposition into behavioral or traditional and as to their method of
   research into quantitative or non-quantitative.  Five citation
   variables were examined, in relation to both analytic disposition
   and to method of research, using a one-way analysis of variance.
   The variables were: (1) the number of subjects cited, (2) the
   percentage of non-political science subjects cited, (3) the
   percentage of non-English literature cited, (4) the journal citation
   rate, (5) the median age of cited literature.
       Results showed that differences in research approaches were a
   significant predictor for six of the ten relationships examined.
   Traditionalists and behavioralists were alike in subject and
   language dispersion; quantitative and non-quantitative were alike in
   the number of subjects cited.  Journal citation rate was higher for
   behavioralists than traditionalists, as hypothesized.  But contrary
   to expectations, behavioralists cited literature of greater median
   age than traditionalists, and the non-quantitative group cited a
   higher percentage of non-political science subjects, had a higher
   journal citation rate, cited literature of a lower median age and
   cited more non-English literature than did the quantitative group.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-11722.
AU HOLMES, GLORIA PRICE.
IN The Florida State University Ph.D. 1987, 203 pages.
TI An analysis of the information-seeking behavior of science teachers
   in selected secondary public schools in Florida.
SO DAI v48(02), SecA, pp240.
DE Library Science.
AB     The purpose of this study was to describe the
   information-seeking behavior of science teachers in selected
   secondary public schools in Duval County, Florida.  Information
   sources they used, the characteristics of these sources important to
   the teachers, and factors affecting their selection of resources
   were analyzed.  The goal of the study was to provide empirical data
   which can be used by school library/media specialists and other
   information providers to plan, design, and maintain more effective
   and efficient information systems.
       The questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument and
   was mailed to a total of eighty teachers who were identified as
   teaching at least one biology and/or chemistry course in the senior
   high schools in the Duval County Public School System.  A total of
   sixty-eight questionnaires were returned for an acceptable response
   rate of eighty-five percent.
       Cross tabulations for the variables in the hypotheses were
   calculated using chi square analysis.  The chi square statistical
   test at the .05 level of significance was used to report differences
   among the teachers.
       Three hypotheses were tested: (1) There are no significant
   differences in the information-seeking behavior of public school
   science teachers based on the subjects (biology and chemistry)
   taught.  (2) There are no significant differences in the
   information-seeking behavior of public school science teachers based
   on the level (standard versus advanced) of the courses taught.  (3)
   There are no significant differences in the information-seeking
   behavior of the teachers based on personal and professional
   characteristics such as: (a) Teaching experience. (b) Professional
   development activities.  (c) Level of education.  (d) Socio-economic
   status.
       The major findings of the study indicate that: (1) There is
   extensive reliance on the textbooks by the science teachers
   regardless of the subject taught; level of course taught; or
   personal and professional characteristics.  (2) The teachers tended
   to rate the academic library "excellent" but used their personal
   libraries more.  (3) A lack of time was the major problem in
   obtaining information.  (4) The characteristics of an ideal
   information system included convenience, accessibility, currency,
   relevancy, computer technologies, appropriate staff, and timeliness.

AN This item is not available from University Microfilms International
   ADG05-60261.
AU HART, PAUL JASON.
IN University of Southern California Ph.D. 1987.
TI The use and role of commercial online databases in four
   organizations.
SO DAI v48(02), SecA, pp242.
DE Mass Communications.
AB     The influence of commercial online data base use on the roles of
   technical gatekeepers and search analysts, interdepartmental
   dependence, organizational status, and the attributed importance and
   work benefits associated with online database use and their
   relationships to task characteristics were examined in an aerospace
   firm, medical center, law firm, and bank.  Data were collected by
   interviews (N = 48) and questionnaires (N = 91).  Technical
   gatekeepers at the aerospace firm, medical center, and bank
   retrieved information from the databases which increased the scope
   and improved the accuracy of information processed for problem
   definition and problem-solving activities.  Additional personnel
   were required to support online retrieval and some search analysts
   contributed to selecting and interpreting information retrieved.
   Evidence of increased organizational status and interdependence
   associated with online database use were also found.  Mean factor
   scores indicated that among organizational groups where information
   volatility was lower attributed values associated with coverage were
   more important, whereas in groups where information volatility was
   higher, particularly among bank traders, values associated with
   scanning were more important.  (Copies available exclusively from
   Micrographics Department, Doheny Library, USC, Los Angeles, CA
   90089-0182.).

AN This item is not available from University Microfilms International
   ADG03-75374.
AU ARENS, YIGAL.
IN University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. 1986.
TI CLUSTER: an approach to contextual language understanding.
SO ADD X1986.
DE Mathematics.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
28
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 87 20:55:54 EDT
-FROM-
From: dws@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Don W. Saklad)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: posting
-BODY-
To which address do you submit postings, they don't seem to get through.

[Note: I have changed the addresses at the top of each digest, to
what I hope is a very reliable list.  Our ARPANET connection is
working but changes to our software and mail handling routines still
have to be completed before they will be usable, so I have listed
an address that goes through csnet-relay.  Seismo and vtisr1 will
not be usable by us beginning in a few days, so I have removed mention of
them. I hope to begin sending IRList out using BITNET list handling
support, so there may be some problems in the next few weeks as I
change addresses etc.  Please let me know if you have any specific
difficulties or do not receive mail for a long period. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Mon, 10 Aug 87 15:49:34 EDT
-FROM-
From: seismo!UDEL.EDU!Brady
-SUBJECT-
Subject: query for IRList
-BODY-
What are good data compression packages that run on the
IBM PC family? I will summarize replies and send back to
the net.
//////
joe brady

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 11 Aug 87 05:57 EDT
-FROM-
From: science@nems.ARPA (Mark Zimmermann)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: RE: help re David Sherman's query
-BODY-
  I am working on developing software to let users index and then
browse completely free, unstructured text files of arbitrary size.
As mentioned on IRList some months ago, a version of this is now
available on the Macintosh, "Browser v.244+" (just send me s.a.s.e.
and Mac disk; foreigners need only send a note with their address).
  I now have preliminary versions of indexing/browsing programs
now in C, which seem to work on VAX and Sun systems as well as on
the Mac.  Indexing rate is > 2 MB/hour typically; temporary disk
space of 5-6 times the size of the input text is required, but when
the index is sorted and squeezed the final space requirement is
only about 80% of the text size.  The browser lets a user
scan through a complete inverted index to every word in the original
document, showing number of occurrences ... when a good word is found
in the index, a keystroke jumps into a key-word-in-context display
of the occurrences of that word, and from there a keystroke gets you
into the original text ... program currently includes facilities for
taking notes in a separate file, for spooling copies of retrieved text
into the notes file, etc.  I plan to add proximity searching soon.
The index structure is exceedingly simple and should make it possible
to add other tools for correlating, clustering, etc.
  If interested, let me know and I will send copies of source code
in C ... programs are heavily commented and occupy 20-30 kB each.
I am not very good at sending msgs across net boundaries, so if you
don't receive a reply from me, keep trying.
  ^z  (Mark Zimmermann, science@nems.arpa, 9511 Gwyndale Dr.,
Silver Spring, MD  20910; tel. 301-565-2166)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:    Tue, 11 Aug 87 12:41 PDT
-FROM-
From:    IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS
-SUBJECT-
Subject: wrong UCLA zip code
-BODY-
Ed, as Jeff suttor just pointed out to me, I gave the wrong
zip code for UCLA:  90034 when it should be 90024 ...
 Thanks for putting in a brief correction.

[Note: this refers to IRlist V3 #25 msg - Ed]

thanks!
Chris

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 10:19:48 edt
-FROM-
From: "Robert B. Allen" <rba@flash.bellcore.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Contents of ACM TOOIS
-BODY-
ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
Vol. 5#2

Malone, T.W., Grant, K.R. Lai, K-Y., Rao, R., and Rosenblitt, D.
Semistructured messages are surprisingly useful for computer-supported
coordination.

Delise, N. and Schwartz, M.
Contexts - A partioning concept for hypertext

Greif, I. and Sarin, S.
Data sharing in group work.

Stefik, M., Bobrow, D.G., Foster, G., Lanning, S., and Tatar, D.
WYSIWIS Revised: Early experiences with multiuser interfaces.

Cook, P., Ellis, C.E., Graf, M., Rein, G., and Smith, T.
Project Nick: Meetings augmentation and analysis.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 87 22:27 EDT
-FROM-
From: Gabriel Robins <gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: The ISI Grapher: an Update
-BODY-
[Extracted from NL-KR Digest (8/14/87 12:01:47)  Volume 3 Number 11 - Ed]

============================================================================

AI/Graphics tool announcement:

    "The ISI Grapher: a Portable Tool for Displaying Graphs Pictorially"

============================================================================

Greetings,

   Due to the considerable interest drawn by the ISI Grapher so far, I am
posting this abstract summarizing its function and current status, as well
as some new information regarding same.  This posting is also for the benefit
of those who missed the first announcement or who are new to the AIList.

   We are now able to satisfy European and other foreign requests, so
even if you are not a U.S.-based researcher or company, you may now have
the sources.

   I will be giving an invited talk on the ISI Grapher in Symboliikka '87,
Helsinki, Finland, August 17, 1987.  The paper describing this effort is
now available (for free) to all: it is entitled: "The ISI Grapher: a Portable
Tool for Displaying Graphs Pictorially."

   The CommonLisp sources are also available (for free to all entities who
receive DARPA funds, and for a small fee to all others).  It currently runs
on Symbolics versions 6, 7, and 7.1, and on TI Explorers versions 2 & 3.
Efforts are currently underway to port it to other machines.

   If you would like the paper and/or the sources, please forward your postal
address to "gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu" or to:

             Gabriel Robins
             Intelligent Systems Division
             Information Sciences Institute
             4676 Admiralty Way
             Marina Del Rey, Ca 90292-6695
             U.S.A.

============================================================================

                             The ISI Grapher

                               August, 1987

                              Gabriel Robins
                       Intelligent Systems Division
                      Information Sciences Institute


   The ISI Grapher is a set of functions that convert an arbitrary graph
structure (or relation) into an equivalent pictorial representation and
displays the resulting diagram.  Nodes and edges in the graph become boxes and
lines on the workstation screen, and the user may then interact with the
Grapher in various ways via the mouse and the keyboard.

   The fundamental motivation which gave birth to the ISI Grapher is the
observation that graphs are very basic and common structures, and the belief
that the ability to quickly display, manipulate, and browse through graphs  may
greatly enhance the productivity of a researcher, both quantitatively and
qualitatively.  This seems especially true in knowledge representation and
natural language research.

   The ISI Grapher is both powerful and versatile, allowing an
application-builder to easily build other tools on top of it.  The ISI NIKL
Browser is an example of one such tool.  The salient features of the ISI
Grapher are its portability, speed, versatility, and extensibility.  Several
additional applications were already built on top of the ISI Grapher,
providing the ability to graph lists, flavors, packages, divisors, functions,
and Common-Loops classes.

  Several basic Grapher operations may be user-controlled via the specification
of alternate functions for performing these tasks.  These operations include
the drawing of nodes and edges, the selection of fonts, the determination of
print-names, pretty-printing, and highlighting operations.  Standard
definitions are already provided for these operations and are used by default
if the application-builder does not override them by specifying his own
custom-tailored functions for performing the same tasks.

   The ISI Grapher now spans about 100 pages of CommonLisp code. The 120-page
ISI Grapher manual is available; this manual describes the general ideas, the
interface, the application-builder's  back-end, the algorithms, the
implementation, and the data structures.  A shorter paper is also available,
and includes hardcopy samples of the screen during execution. The ISI Grapher
presently runs on both Symbolics (versions 6, 7, & 7.1) and TI Explorer
workstations (versions 2 & 3); ports to other machines are underway.

   If you are interested in more information, the sources themselves, or just
the paper/manual, please feel free to forward your postal address to
"gabriel@vaxa.isi.edu" or write to "Gabriel Robins, Information Sciences
Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, Ca 90292-6695 U.S.A."

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 87 23:17:22 edt
-FROM-
From: Don Walker <walker@flash.bellcore.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACL 1988 Annual Conference CALL FOR PAPERS
-BODY-
			    CALL FOR PAPERS

			  26th Annual Meeting
				 of the
	       Association for Computational Linguistics

			     7-10 June 1988
		State University of New York at Buffalo
			   Buffalo, New York

TOPICS OF INTEREST:  Papers are invited on substantial, original, and
unpublished research on all aspects of computational linguistics,
including, but not limited to, pragmatics, discourse, semantics,
syntax, and the lexicon; phonetics, phonology, and morphology;
interpreting and generating spoken and written language; linguistic,
mathematical, and psychological models of language; machine translation
and translation aids; natural language interfaces; message
understanding systems; and theoretical and applications papers of every
kind.

REQUIREMENTS:  Papers should describe unique work that has not been
submitted elsewhere; they should emphasize completed work rather than
intended work; and they should indicate clearly the state of completion
of the reported results.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION:  Authors should submit twelve copies of an
extended abstract not to exceed eight double-spaced pages (exclusive of
references) in a font no smaller than 10 point (elite).  The title page
should include the title, the name(s) of the author(s), complete
addresses, a short (5 line) summary, and a specification of the topic
area.  Submissions that do not conform to this format will not be
reviewed.  Send to:

	Jerry R. Hobbs
	ACL88 Program Chair
	Artificial Intelligence Center
	SRI International
	333 Ravenswood Avenue
	Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
	415:859-2229; hobbs@warbucks.ai.sri.com

SCHEDULE:  Papers are due by 4 January 1988.  Authors will be notified
of acceptance by 8 February.  Camera-ready copies of final papers
prepared in a double-column format, either on model paper or in a
reduced font size using laserprinter output, must be received by 4
April along with a signed copyright release statement.

OTHER ACTIVITIES: The meeting will include a program of tutorials
organized by Ralph Grishman, Computer Science Department, New York
University, 251 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012, USA; 212:460-7492;
grishman@nyu.arpa.  Anyone wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a
demonstration should send a brief description together with a
specification of physical requirements (space, power, telephone
connections, tables, etc.) to Lynda Spahr, Department of Computer
Science, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA; 716:636-2464 or 3181;
spahr@gort.cs.buffalo.edu, spahr@buffalo.csnet, spahr@sunybcs.bitnet,
or {ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!spahr.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION:  Local arrangements are being handled by
William J. Rapaport (ACL), Department of Computer Science, SUNY Buffalo,
Buffalo, NY 14260, USA; 716:636-3193, 3180; rapaport@gort.cs.buffalo.edu,
rapaport@buffalo.csnet, rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet, or
{ames,boulder,decvax,rutgers}!sunybcs!spahr.  For other information on
the conference and on the ACL more generally, contact Don Walker (ACL),
Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown,
NJ 07960, USA; 201:829-4312; walker@flash.bellcore.com or
{ucbvax,decvax,allegra}!bellcore!walker.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:  Jared Bernstein, Roy Byrd, Sandra Carberry, Eugene
Charniak, Raymonde Guindon, Lynette Hirschman, Jerry Hobbs, Karen
Jensen, Lauri Karttunen, William Rounds, Ralph Weischedel, and Robert
Wilensky.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
29
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 15:17:43 CDT
-FROM-
From: nancy@usl-vb.usl.edu (Nancy )
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Abstracts from next ACM SIGIR Forum - sent by Raghavan
-BODY-
                           ABSTRACTS (part 1 of 4)

(Chosen by G. Salton from recent issues of journals in the retrieval area).

1.  FUZZY RELATIONAL DATABASES:  REPRESENTATIONAL ISSUES AND  REDUCTION  USING
    SIMILARITY MEASURES
    Henri Prade and Claudette Testemale
    Laboratoire Langages et Systemes Informatiques
    Universite Paul Sabatier
    118 Route de Narbonne
    31062 Taulouse Cedex, France
       Until Now, the idea of a fuzzy database  has  been  investigated  along
    different  lines:   Some authors have dealt with the imprecision of attri-
    bute values by modeling, using fuzzy similarity relations, the  extent  to
    which  these values could be regarded as interchangeable. Others have used
    possibility distributions for representing fuzzily known  or  incompletely
    known  attribute  values.   The  first  approach, which cannot accommodate
    incomplete information,  is  restated  in  the  framework  of  rough  sets
    extended to fuzzy relations.  Besides, in the second one, similarity meas-
    ures between attribute values can be introduced and computed; then a  com-
    parison  of the two approaches is provided.  The proposed similarity meas-
    ure, based on a fuzzy Hausdorff distance, estimates the  mismatch  between
    two  possibility  distributions.  From storage and query-evaluation points
    of view, it may be interesting to gather items  having  similar  attribute
    values.   Thus  the  similarity measures previously considered can be used
    for the reduction of the fuzzy database.  When several items  have  suffi-
    ciently  similar values for each attribute in a relation, the reduction is
    performed by taking for each attribute the union of these similar  values.
    The consequences of the reduction process on query evaluation are studied.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  2,
    pp. 118-126, 1987)

2.  KNOWLEDGE-ASSISTED DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL: II. THE RETRIEVAL PROCESS
    Gautam Biswas, James C. Bezdek, Viswanath Subramanian, and Marisol
    Marques.
    Department of Computer Science
    University of South Carolina
    Columbia, South Carolina 29208
       This article presents our conceptual model of the retrieval process  of
    a  document-retrieval system.  The retrieval mechanism input is an unambi-
    guous intermediate form of a user query generated by the language  proces-
    sor using the method described previously.  Our retrieval mechanism uses a
    two-step procedure.  In the first step a list of  documents  pertinent  to
    the  query  are obtained from the document database, and then an evidence-
    combination scheme is used to compute the degree of  support  between  the
    query  and individual documents.  The second step uses a ranking procedure
    to obtain a final degree of support for each document chosen, as  a  func-
    tion of individual degrees of support associated with one or more parts of
    the query.  The end result is as set of document  citations  presented  to
    the user in a ranked order in response to the information request.  Numer-
    ical examples are given to illustrate various facets of the  overall  sys-
    tem,  which  has  been proto-typically implemented in modular form to test
    system response to changes in model parameters.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  2,
    pp. 97-110, 1987)

3.  KNOWLEDGE-ASSISTED DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL:  I.  THE NATURAL-LANGUAGE INTERFACE
    Gautam Biswas, James C. Bezdek, Marisol Marques, and Viswanath
    Subramanian
    Department of Computer Science
    University of South Carolina
    Columbia, South Carolina 29208
       In this article we describe the  conceptual  model  and  processing  of
    (constrained)  natural-language  queries in information retrieval systems.
    A language interface based on fuzzy set techniques is proposed  to  handle
    the  uncertainty  inherent  in natural-language semantics.  The conceptual
    model is developed and exemplified in the context of  document  retrieval.
    Specifically,  the user query is considered to be a triple,
                q  =  ( q ,  q ,  q  )    where q
                         c    y    n             c
    indicates the part of the query that deals with concepts and operators
    that link these concepts, q   identifies the publication period the user
                               y
    is interested in, and q
                           n
    pertains  to  the  number of documents to be retrieved.  We describe query
    decomposition using an augmented transition network parser and the assign-
    ment  of  functions  and  relations needed by each portion of the query to
    represent uncertainties inherent in the natural language.  The  output  of
    the  natural-language  interface  is  then  passed  to  a  knowledge-based
    retrieval mechanism that will be described in a  companion  article  (Part
    II).
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  2,
    pp. 83-96, 1987)

4.  A NOTE ON WEIGHTED QUERIES IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS
    Ronald R. Yager
    Machine Intelligence Institute
    Iona College
    New Rochelle, New York 10801
       Several authors have suggested the introduction of fuzzy set methodolo-
    gies  as  a  means  for improving the performance of information-retrieval
    systems [1-8].  In a recent survey [9] of information-retrieval  technolo-
    gies,  Bartschi discusses the fuzzy set model among other models.  A prob-
    lem of considerable interest to designers of fuzzy set  retrieval  systems
    concerns  itself  with  the evaluation of the retrieval status function in
    the situation in which the query terms or the search criteria have weights
    indicating their importance to the requester.  A number of approaches have
    been suggested for this problem, but Bartschi [9] points out some  of  the
    difficulties  with each of these proposed methods.  We suggest an alterna-
    tive methodology for handling weighted queries in a fuzzy environment.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  1,
    pp. 23-24, 1987)

5.  A GRAPHICAL DATABASE INTERFACE FOR CASUAL, NAIVE USERS
    Clifford Burgess
    Computer Science Department
    University of Southern Mississippi
    Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39403
              and
    Kathleen Swigger
    Computer Science Department
    North Texas State University
    Denton, Texas 76203
       This paper is concerned with some aspects of  database  interfaces  for
    casual,  naive  users.   A ``casual user'' is defined as an individual who
    wishes to execute queries once or twice a month, and a ``naive  user''  is
    someone  who  has little or no expertise in operating computers. The study
    focuses on a specific group of casual, naive users, analyzes  their  needs
    and  proposes  a solution.  The proposed interface consists of a graphical
    display of a model of a database and a natural  language  query  language.
    One  of  the unique properties of the database interface is that it allows
    the user to see local item names within the context of a global structure.
    The  interface  was  then tested to determine whether it was acceptable to
    the user population and to discover the level of graphical model that  the
    users would find most comfortable.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 511-521, 1986)

6.  COMPRESSION OF INDEX TERM DICTIONARY IN AN  INVERTED-FILE  ORIENTED  DATA-
    BASE:  SOME EFFECTIVE ALGORITHMS
    Janusz L. Wisniewski
    Applied Informatics Department
    Nicholas Copernicus University
    Grudziadzke 5/7, Torun, Poland
       A new method of index term dictionary compression in an  inverted-file-
    oriented database is discussed.  A technique of word coding that generates
    short fixed-length codes obtained  from  the  index  terms  themselves  by
    analysis  of  monogram  and bigram statistical distributions is described.
    Transformation of  the  index  term  dictionary  into  a  code  dictionary
    preserves  a word-to-word discrimination with a rate of three synonyms per
    1300 terms, at compression ratio up to 90% and at low cost in terms of the
    CPU  time  expenditure.   When applied in computer network environment, it
    offers substantial savings in communication channel utilization at  negli-
    gible  response  time degradation. Experimental data for 26,113 index term
    dictionary of the New York Times Info Bank available via a  computer  net-
    work are presented.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 493-501, 1986)

7.  COMPUTER USE OF A MEDICAL DICTIONARY TO SELECT SEARCH WORDS
    John O'Connor
    Computer Science and Electrical Department
    Packard Lab #19
    Lehigh University
    Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015
       In a preceding experiment in text-searching retrieval for cancer  ques-
    tions,  search  words were humanly selected with the aid of a medical dic-
    tionary and cancer textbooks.  Recall results were (1) using only stems of
    question words (humanly stemmed): 20%; (2) adding dictionary search words:
    29%; (3) adding also textbook  search  words:  70%.   For  the  experiment
    reported  here,  computer  procedures  for using the medical dictionary to
    select search words were developed.  Recall results were (1) for  question
    stems  (computer  stemmed): 19%; (2) adding search words computer selected
    from the dictionary: 24%.  Thus the computer procedures compared to  human
    use  of  the  dictionary  were  50%  successful.  Human and computer false
    retrieval rates were almost equal. Some hypotheses about  computer  selec-
    tion of search words from textbooks are also described.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 477-486, 1986)

8.  IMPLEMENTING AGGLOMERATIVE HIERARCHIC CLUSTERING  ALGORITHMS  FOR  USE  IN
    DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL
    Ellen M. Voorhees
    Department of Computer Science
    Cornell University
    Ithaca, New York 14853
       Searching hierarchically clustered document collections can  be  effec-
    tive  [6],  but creating the cluster hierarchies is expensive, since there
    are both many documents and many terms.  However, the information  in  the
    document-term  matrix  is  sparse:  Documents are usually indexed by rela-
    tively few terms.  This  paper  describes  the  implementations  of  three
    agglomerative  hierarchic clustering algorithms that exploit this sparsity
    so that collections much larger than the algorithms'  worst  case  running
    times  would  suggest  can be clustered.  The implementations described in
    the paper have been used to cluster a collection of 12,000 documents.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 465-476, 1986)

9.  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION SUPPORT FOR COMPUTER AND  INFORMATION  SCIENCE
    AND ENGINEERING
    Harold E. Bamford and Charles N. Brownstein
    National Science Foundation
    Washington, D. C. 20550
       The National Science Foundation has supported research in the  informa-
    tion  sciences  for  25  years, initially through its Office of Scientific
    Information, later through the Office of Science Information  Service  and
    the  Division  of Science Information, and most recently through the Divi-
    sion of Information Science and Technology.  The Foundation has also  sup-
    ported research in computer science and engineering, most recently through
    the Division of Computer Research and the Division of Computer and  Infor-
    mation  Engineering.   On  May  1,  1986  all  these elements were brought
    together to form the Directorate for Computer and Information Science  and
    Engineering  (CISE),  one of the five research branches of the Foundation.
    A more persuasive demonstration of the  Foundation's  commitment  to  this
    dynamic new field of research would hardly have been possible.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp. 449-452, 1986)
[Note: continued in next 3 issues - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
30
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 15:17:43 CDT
-FROM-
From: nancy@usl-vb.usl.edu (Nancy )
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Abstracts from next ACM SIGIR Forum - sent by Raghavan
-BODY-
                           ABSTRACTS (part 2 of 4)

10. COGNITIVE MODELS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL - AN EVALUATIVE REVIEW
    P. J. Daniels
    Department of Information Science
    City University
    Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB
       Selected current and recent work in the area of cognitive modelling  is
    reviewed.  Particular attention is paid to user models (that is, the model
    held by a system of a user).  The relevance of this  work  to  information
    retrieval  is assessed and some attempts to include user models in IR sys-
    tems are discussed.  Implications are drawn for future work in IR.
    (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 272-304, 1986)

11. IMPROVED DESIGN OF GRAPHIC DISPLAYS IN THESAURI - THROUGH  TECHNOLOGY  AND
    ERGONOMICS
    Suzanne Bertrand-Gastaldy
    School of Library and Information Science
    University of Montreal
          and
    Colin H. Davidson
    School of Architecture
    University of Montreal
    Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3J7
       Within the framework of a research project  into  alternative  ways  of
    representing  documentation  languages  and  into  their  flexibility,  an
    attempt is made to draw up a list of performance criteria that an  `ideal'
    thesaurus  graphic  display  should respect.  However, a study of the main
    bibliographies listing thesauri, shows that less than 6 per cent  of  them
    contain  graphic  displays,  even  though  a  concurrent literature survey
    reveals that such displays offer many potential advantages.   Up  to  now,
    use  of  displays  was probably limited by technology and by the rarity of
    studies into the cognitive processes of the users  of  automated  systems.
    Current  research  in  several  disciplines  (computer graphics, ergonomic
    psychology and spatial representation) should contribute to the  emergence
    of  new  types of documentation retrieval tools, well adapted to a broader
    and more diversified clientele.
    (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 225-251, 1986)

12. DESKTOP PUBLISHING:  WHAT IT CAN AND CANNOT DO
    Ronald K. Jurgen
    Senior Editor
       Desktop publishing is an evolutionary  outgrowth  of  word  processing.
    This  low-cost alternative to typesetting services has decided limitations
    in many applications.
    (IEEE SPECTRUM, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 50-52, 1987)

13. COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE FOR A SURROGATE FILE TO A VERY LARGE  DATA/KNOWLEDGE
    BASE
    P. Bruce Berra, Soon Myoung Chung, and Nabil I. Hachem
    Syracuse University
       This  article  presents  techniques   for   managing   a   very   large
    data/knowledge  base  to  support  multiple inference-mechanisms for logic
    programming. Because evaluation of goals can require accessing  data  from
    the  extensional  database,  or  EDB, in very general ways, one must often
    resort to indexing on all fields of the extensional database facts.   This
    presents  a  formidable  management  problem in that the index data may be
    larger than the EDB itself.  This problem becomes even more serious in the
    case  of  very  large  data/knowledge bases (hundreds of gigabytes), since
    considerably more hardware will be required to process and store the index
    data.   In  order  to reduce the amount of index data considerably without
    losing generality, we form a surrogate file, which is a hashing  transfor-
    mation  of  the  facts.   Superimposed code words (SCW), concatenated code
    words (CCW), and transformed inverted lists (TIL) are possible  structures
    for the surrogate file.  Since these transformations are quite regular and
    compact, we consider possible computer architectures for the processing of
    the  surrogate file.  We discuss the use of associative memory methods, as
    well as a back-end system that we are developing, in order  to  illustrate
    how nonsequential computer architectures can be used to advantage in solv-
    ing this problem.  Finally, we consider how  one  might  perform  rational
    operations on the surrogate file rather than on the full data.
    (IEEE Computer, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 25-32, 1987)

14. INFORMATION SCIENCE AS INTERFACES OF THE COGNITIVE SPHERE AND SOCIETY
    Sinisa Maricic
    The Research Library of the National and University Library
    41000 Zagreb
    P. O. B. 550
    SR Croatia, Yugoslavia
       Ideas from the science of science literature have been put  within  the
    framework  of  information  science in a synthetic, critical assessment of
    information science philosophy.  The information field is found to be in a
    transition  state  and  the concept of its autocatalytic self-organization
    can be applied.  Information science is expected to  study  preponderantly
    the  ways  by  which  humankind's  cognitive  creativity, with perpetually
    changing content, becomes humankind's everyday living force.   Information
    science is likened to a membraneous system which takes active part in this
    transfer process both at the  internal  interfaces  within  the  cognitive
    sphere  itself and at the external interfaces between the cognitive sphere
    and the society at large.  Examples of various types of  information  sci-
    ence membranes are given as possible research projects.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 33-43, 1987)

15. HOW WELL DO WE ACKNOWLEDGE INTELLECTUAL DEBTS?
    Manfred Kochen
    Mental Health Research Institute
    University of Michigan
    Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
       Authors of scientific articles often read a paper that  fails  to  cite
    their  prior  work  when they feel it should have.  A survey of university
    faculty shows the extent to which such  opinions  abound.   If  justified,
    they  reflect non-use of bibliographic search methods, their inadequacy or
    non-scholarly use of the result.  Principles for the design of a new  kind
    of  automated  or semi-automated document retrieval system are formulated.
    They are analysed and shown likely to improve  the  scholarly  quality  of
    scientific  work  as  represented  by  the  bibliographies  in manuscripts
    reporting that work.
    (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 54-64, 1987)

16. A REFERENCE AND REFERRAL SYSTEM USING EXPERT SYSTEM TECHNIQUES
    Alina Vickery, Helen Brooks, Bruce Robinson
    Central Information Service
    University of London
    Senate House, Malet Street
    London WC1E 7HU
           and
    Brian Vickery
    University College
    Gower Street
    London WC1E 6BT
       The issues involved  in  the  construction  of  an  expert  system  for
    retrieval  are  described,  together with some of the techniques that have
    been used in artificial intelligence and  information  science  to  tackle
    them.   The  solutions  adopted  by the prototype expert system PLEXUS are
    described, with particular reference to the semantic processing that takes
    place. The paper concludes with a discussion of continuing issues on which
    work is currently proceeding.
    (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 1-23, 1987)

17. IMPLICATIONS FOR LIS EDUCATION OF RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EXPERT SYSTEMS
    Michael Brittain
    Department of Library and Information Studies
    Loughborough University
    Loughborough, Leicestershire
    LE11 3TU  Great Britain
       Although there is general agreement that library and  information  sci-
    ence (LIS) education must include a sizable component of information tech-
    nology (IT), there is less agreement about which aspects of IT  should  be
    included, in particular about the role of expert systems. There is a grow-
    ing body of educators and researchers enthusiastic about  expert  systems,
    although  there are still no examples of fully operating expert systems in
    LIS work, with the exception of activity in the related field of  intelli-
    gent front ends for data bases.
       Expert Systems are likely to impinge upon LIS work, to varying degrees,
    in one or more of the following six areas:
       1.  Library  management and library routines
       2.  Classification and indexing
       3.  Interactive information retrieval services
       4.  Knowledge acquisition and knowledge refinement stages of expert
                 system development.
       5.  The development of expert systems for client groups
       6.  The operation of expert systems for client groups
       This paper considers  the  implications  for  LIS  education  of  these
    different  levels  of involvement.  It touches upon recent developments in
    programming, expert system shells,  generation  of  rules  from  examples,
    heuristic  programming, and knowledge refining techniques. In a field that
    is rapidly changing, the dangers of a  too  rapid  crystalization  of  new
    courses  on  expert  systems  are  set against the lost opportunities of a
    fast-growing emerging market for new types  of  information  professionals
    who  almost  certainly  require  some  expertise  in expert system design,
    development, and operation.
       Finally, reference is made to the level at which expert systems  should
    be  taught  (e.g., postgraduate versus undergraduate, in-service training,
    etc.), the practical problems involved in the implementation  of  instruc-
    tion with existing library school resources, problems of practical experi-
    ence, and the implications for the recruitment of students to LIS courses.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 139-152, 1987)

18. CANSEARCH: AN EXPERT SYSTEMS APPROACH TO DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL
    Steven Pollitt
    Huddersfield Polytechnic
    Great Britain
       This paper concerns the provision of a computerized intermediary system
    to  facilitate  online  document  retrieval  from  large-scale  data bases
    directly by users of the  retrieved  information.   The  system  does  not
    require the user to be knowledgeable or undergo any training in the use of
    the underlying retrieval system.  The scope for a novel intermediary  sys-
    tem  relating to recent developments in expert systems has been identified
    and a system entitled CANSEARCH designed  to  enable  doctors  to  specify
    queries to retrieve cancer-therapy-related documents stored in the MEDLINE
    data base.  The design of the intermediary system uses  the  principle  of
    search  space  abstraction, employing menu selection from a touch terminal
    and encapsulating the necessary intermediary  expertise  using  rule-based
    techniques  programmed in PROLOG.  CANSEARCH performed well enough to jus-
    tify the approach taken, suggesting that further development of  CANSEARCH
    and  of intermediary systems for document retrieval in other subject areas
    should be undertaken.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 119-138, 1987)

19. PLEXUS-THE EXPERT SYSTEM FOR REFERRAL
    A. Vickery and H. M. Brooks
    Central Information Services
    University of London
    Senate House, Malet Street
    London, WC1 7HU, Great Britain
       PLEXUS is an expert system which is designed as a referral tool  to  be
    used  in  public  libraries.   It was developed by the Central Information
    Service (CIS) at the University of London under a  grant  awarded  by  the
    British  Library  Research  and  Development Department.  The first phase,
    which resulted in a working prototype, was  completed  in  20  months.   A
    second  phase,  also  funded  by the British Library, is now under way and
    will involve the testing, evaluation, and further development of the  pro-
    totype.   The system should be able to carry out the same kind of tasks as
    the human reference librarian does and should do it in  a  way  which,  if
    done  by  a human would be described as intelligent.  The system should be
    able to obtain a description of the user's problem and, if  necessary,  to
    supplement  the  user's  original  statement either by deriving additional
    concepts or by asking the user to  answer  some  questions.   The  problem
    description  should  then be transformed into a search strategy that could
    be applied to a data base or referral resources.  The results of a  search
    should  be  evaluated both by the system and the user.  Should the initial
    search strategy produce unsatisfactory results, the system should infer an
    appropriate  action.  The  search strategy would be gradually reformulated
    until a satisfactory outcome was  achieved.   The  result  of  the  search
    should  then be presented to the user.  The prototype system is restricted
    to gardening because it was assumed that it would be of general appeal  to
    the  users of a public library.  The paper describes the knowledge base of
    PLEXUS, its representation, the control mechanism, and the working  system
    as a whole.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 99-117, 1987)
[Note: continued in next 2 issues - Ed]

>-----------------------------
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3

-N-
31
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 15:17:43 CDT
-FROM-
From: nancy@usl-vb.usl.edu (Nancy )
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Abstracts from next ACM SIGIR Forum - sent by Raghavan
-BODY-
                           ABSTRACTS (part 3 of 4)

20. OUTLINES OF THE EMERGING PARADIGM IN CATALOGUING
    Roy Davies
    The University Library
    University of Exeter
    Stocker Road
    Exeter, EX4 4PT, Great Britain
       The basic principles of cataloguing were originally formulated  in  the
    19th  century  and still enjoy general acceptance in the form of the Paris
    Principles.  Initially, automation was simply a matter of  producing  con-
    ventional  catalogues  in  a new way.  However, the introduction of online
    systems makes possible searching modes for which the catalogues  were  not
    originally  designed.   Thus, technological progress accompanied by rising
    user expectations and economic pressures could lead to a breakdown of  the
    present  paradigm.  The use of concepts from artificial intelligence could
    help us to exploit knowledge of cataloguing to a greater  extent  than  is
    done at present.  The description of books and the like and the determina-
    tion of access points could be specified in terms of frames and production
    rules,  respectively.   Such  developments  would  not  make cataloguing a
    largely automatic process, as at present we do not properly understand the
    cognitive  processes  involved  in  the  interpretation  of  title  pages,
    although some possible heuristics are listed in the Appendix.  A knowledge
    engineering approach to cataloguing should assist in the development of an
    improved code.  If successful, such an approach would constitute a  change
    of paradigm.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 89-98, 1987)

21. GETTING STARTED IN LIBRARY EXPERT SYSTEMS RESEARCH
    Harold Broko
    Graduate School of Library and Information Science
    University of California at Los Angeles
    405 Hilgard Ave.
    Los Angeles, CA 90024
       In the 1960's, information science researchers pioneered in the  design
    of  computer-based  document storage and retrieval systems.  These efforts
    were crowned with success, and online systems are now  in  common  use  as
    reference tools.  Today the new information science frontier is to design,
    develop, and to test expert systems for use in libraries and other  infor-
    mation  centers.  At UCLA we are exploring the applicability of artificial
    intelligence and expert  systems  for  modeling  the  cognitive  processes
    involved  in  cataloging.  Specifically, Zorana Ercegovac, a doctoral stu-
    dent, is designing a prototype expert system in the limited domain of  map
    cataloging  that  will  seek  to employ the reasoning used by expert cata-
    logers in applying AACR2 rules.   It  is  anticipated  that  the  research
    results  will shed some light on the way catalogers reason and conceptual-
    ize the structure of a catalog entry.  The project is still in its initial
    stages,  and in this presentation one can only indicate the design choices
    that need to be made, the reason for the decisions made, and the  problems
    encountered.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 81-87, 1987)

22. A MODEL FOR THE STOPPING BEHAVIOR OF USERS OF ONLINE SYSTEMS
    Paul B. Kantor
    Tantalus, Inc.
    3257 Ormond Road
    Cleveland, Ohio  44118
       We examine a model in which the user of an  online  system  continually
    updates  his/her  estimated probability of success, and quits or continues
    according to the expected utility of each action.  The prior  distribution
    of the unknown probability is a beta distribution, with mean determined by
    the a priori expectation of success, and variance determined by the confi-
    dence  with  which the user has that prior expectation.  The stopping cri-
    terion depends upon the accumulated number of positive and negative  rein-
    forcements, and is a straight line in a suitable coordinate system.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  3,
    pp. 211-214, 1987)

23. ETHICS AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
    Manfred Kochen
    Mental Health Research Institute
    University of Michigan
    205 Washtenaw Place
    Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-0010
       The challenge  of  ethical  problem  solving  in  the  context  of  the
    information-science professions has fostered debate over whether a code of
    ethics might not provide a valuable guide to decision making in situations
    involving  ethical  conflicts.   Sample issues and questions are presented
    with an aim toward placing them in historical and philosophical frameworks
    for  considering the tension between knowledge and power.  While the arti-
    cle concludes that ethical choices are too dynamic and  unpredicatable  to
    make a fixed code useful, practical guidelines to help information profes-
    sionals act out of wisdom are offered.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  3,
    pp. 206-210, 1987)

24. KNOWLEDGE-BASED INDEXING OF THE MEDICAL LITERATURE:  THE INDEXING AID PRO-
    JECT
    Susanne M. Humphrey and Nancy E. Miller
    National Library of Medicine
    Bethesda, MD 20894
       This article describes the Indexing Aid Project for conducting research
    in  the  areas  of  knowledge  representation and indexing for information
    retrieval in order to  develop  interactive  knowledge-based  systems  for
    computer-assisted indexing of the periodical medical literature.  The sys-
    tem uses an experimental frame-based  knowledge  representation  language.
    FrameKit, implemented in Franz Lisp.  The initial prototype is designed to
    interact with trained MEDLINE indexers who will be prompted to enter  sub-
    ject  terms  as  slot  values  in  filling in document-specific frame data
    structures that are derived from the knowledge-base frames.  In  addition,
    the  automatic  application  of  rules  associated with the knowledge-base
    frames produces a set of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) keyword indices to
    the  document,  important  features  of  the  system are representation of
    explicit relationships through slots which  express  the  relations;  slot
    values,  restrictions,  and  rules  made  available by inheritance through
    ``is-a'' hierarchies; slot  values  denoted  by  functions  that  retrieve
    values  from other slots; and restrictions on slot values displayable dur-
    ing data entry.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  3,
    pp. 184-196, 1987)

25. COMPUTATION OF TERM/DOCUMENT DISCRIMINATION VALUES BY  USE  OF  THE  COVER
    COEFFICIENT CONCEPT
    Fazli Can
    Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
    Middle East Technical University
    Ankara, Turkey
              and
    Esen A. Ozkarahan
    Department of Computer Science
    Arizona State University
    Tempe, AZ 85287
       Indexing in information retrieval (IR) is used  to  obtain  a  suitable
    vocabulary  of  index terms and optimum assignment of these terms to docu-
    ments for increasing the effectiveness and efficiency  of  an  IR  system.
    The concept of term discrimination value (TDV) is one of the criteria used
    for index-term selection.  In this article a new concept called the  cover
    coefficient  (CC)  will be used in computing TDVs. After a brief introduc-
    tion to the theory of indexing and the CC concept,  an  efficient  way  of
    computing  TDVs by use of the CC concept, index-term selection, and weight
    modification are discussed.  It is also shown that the computational  cost
    of  the  CC approach in the calculation of TDVs is favorably comparable to
    the cost of  a  different  approach  that  uses  similarity  coefficients.
    Furthermore,  the  TDVs  obtained  by  the CC approach are consistent with
    those of the latter approach.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  3,
    pp. 171-183, 1987)

26. HISTORICAL NOTE:  PERSPECTIVES
    Cyril Cleverdon
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE,
    Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 152-155, 1987)

27. HISTORICAL NOTE:  PERSPECTIVES
    Allen Kent
    Distinguished Service Professor
    Interdisciplinary Department of Information Science
    University of Pittsburgh
    Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15228
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 38, No.  3,
    pp. 147-151, 1987)

28. AN INTELLIGENT SYSTEM FOR DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL IN DISTRIBUTED OFFICE
    Uttam Mukhopadhyay, Larry M. Stephens, Michael N. Huhns, and Ronald
    D. Bonnell
    Center for Machine Intelligence
    University of South Carolina
    Columbia, SC 29208
       MINDS (Multiple Intelligence Node Document Servers)  is  a  distributed
    system  of  knowledge-based  query engines for efficiently retrieving mul-
    timedia documents in an office environment  of  distributed  workstations.
    By  learning document distribution patterns, as well as user interests and
    preferences during system usage, it  customizes  document  retrievals  for
    each  user.   A  two-layer learning system has been implemented for MINDS.
    The knowledge base used by the query engine is learned at the lower  level
    with  the help of heuristics for assigning credit and recommending adjust-
    ments; these heuristics are incrementally refined at the upper level.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 37, No.  3,
    pp. 123-135, 1986)

29. BAROQUE:  A BROWSER FOR RELATIONAL DATABASES
    Amihai Motro
    University of Southern California
    Department of Computer Science
    Los Angeles, CA 90089
       The standard, most efficient method to retrieve information from  data-
    bases can be described as systematic retrieval:  The needs of the user are
    described in a formal query, and the database management system  retrieves
    the  data  promptly.  There are several situations, however, in which sys-
    tematic retrieval is difficult or  even  impossible.  In  such  situations
    exploratory  search  (browsing)  is  a  helpful  alternative.   This paper
    describes a new user interface, called BAROQUE, that  implements  explora-
    tory  searches in relational databases. BAROQUE requires few formal skills
    from its users.  It does not assume knowledge of  the  principles  of  the
    relational data model or familiarity with the organization of the particu-
    lar database being accessed.  It is especially helpful when retrieval tar-
    gets are vague or cannot be specified satisfactorily.  BAROQUE establishes
    a view of the relational database that resembles a semantic  network,  and
    provides   several  intutive  functions  for  scanning  it.   The  network
    integrates both schema and data, and supports access by value. BAROQUE can
    be  implemented  on top of any basic relational database management system
    but can be modified to  take  advantage  of  additional  capabilities  and
    enhancements often present in relational systems.
    (ACM TRANSACTIONS ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Vol. 4, No. 2,  pp.  164-
    181, 1986)
[Note: continued in next issue - Ed]

>-----------------------------
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-VOL-
3

-N-
32
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 87 15:17:43 CDT
-FROM-
From: nancy@usl-vb.usl.edu (Nancy )
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Abstracts from next ACM SIGIR Forum - sent by Raghavan
-BODY-
                           ABSTRACTS (part 4 of 4)

30. ENHANCEMENT OF TEXT REPRESENTATIONS USING RELATED DOCUMENT TITLES
    G. Salton
    Department of Computer Science
    Cornell University
    Ithaca, NY 14853
            and
    Y. Zhang
    Institute of Computer Technology
    China Academy of Railway Sciences
    Beijing, China
       Various attempts have been made over the years  to  construct  enhanced
    document representations by using thesauruses of related terms, term asso-
    ciation maps,  or  knowledge  frameworks  that  can  be  used  to  extract
    appropriate  terms  and  concepts.   None  of the proposed methods for the
    improvement of document representation has proved to be  generally  useful
    when applied to a variety of different retrieval environments. Some recent
    work by Kwok suggests that document indexing  may  be  enhanced  by  using
    title  words taken from bibliographically related items.  An evaluation of
    the process shows that many useful content words  can  be  extracted  from
    related  document  titles,  as  well  as  many  terms  of  doubtful value.
    Overall, the procedure is not sufficiently reliable to warrant  incorpora-
    tion automatic retrieval systems.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol, 22, No. 5, pp. 385-394, 1986)

31. A DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC JOURNAL SELECTION ALGORITHM
    Chunpei He
    Institute of Information of Agricultural Science and Technology
    Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
    Beijing, People's Republic of China
                and
    Miranda Lee Pao
    School of Library Science
    The University of Michigan
    Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
       An experiment was conducted to demonstrate the validity  of  a  journal
    selection  and ranking algorithm designed for any discipline.  The charac-
    teristics of the journal generation procedure incorporate both  cited  and
    citing journals so that basic scientific research journals contributing to
    the research foundation of the discipline, as well as journals in the dis-
    cipline,  might  be identified.  A Discipline Influence Score was proposed
    as a journal weight which could reflect the relative citation influence of
    each  journal  to the discipline under consideration.  Two evaluation stu-
    dies showed that this method produced many journals which  were  perceived
    as frequently used journals by a group of American and Chinese profession-
    als in veterinary medicine. Journals with high Discipline Influence Scores
    were  also  selected by experts in their compilations of basic recommended
    lists in this discipline.  In particular, the easy implementation of  this
    journal  selection  algorithm  appears to be of practical use to resource-
    poor libraries.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 5, pp. 405-416, 1986)

32. EMPIRICAL VALIDATION OF LOTKA'S LAW
    Paul Travis Nicholls
    School of Library and Information Science
    University of Western Ontario
    London, Canada N6G 1H1
       Two modifications to the Pao procedure for testing Lotka's law are pro-
    posed  and  applied  to  15 samples drawn from the humanities, social sci-
    ences, and sciences.
    (INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT, Vol. 22, No. 5, pp. 417-419, 1986)

33. ON RELEVANCE WEIGHT ESTIMATION AND QUERY EXPANSION
    S. E. Robertson
    Department of Information Science
    The City University
    London, EC1V 0HB
       A  Bayesian  argument  is  used  to  suggest   modifications   to   the
    Robertson/Sparck  Jones  relevance  weighting  formula, to accommodate the
    addition to the query of terms taken from the relevant  documents  identi-
    fied during the search.
    (JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 182-188, 1986)

34. SUBJECT ACCESS IN ONLINE CATALOGS:  A DESIGN MODEL
    Marcia J. Bates
    Graduate School of Library and Information Science
    University of California at Los Angeles
    Los Angeles, CA 90024
       A model based on strikingly different  philosophical  assumptions  from
    those currently popular is proposed for the design of online subject cata-
    log access.  Three design principles are presented and  discussed:  uncer-
    tainty  (subject indexing is indeterminate and probabilistic beyond a cer-
    tain point), variety (by Ashby's law  of  requisite  variety,  variety  of
    searcher  query  must  equal variety of document indexing), and complexity
    (the search process, particularly during the entry and orientation phases,
    is  subtler  and  more  complex,  on  several grounds, than current models
    assume).  Design features presented are an access phase,  including  entry
    and  orientation,  a  hunting  phase,  and  a selection phase. An end-user
    thesaurus and a front-end system mind are presented as examples of  online
    catalog  system  components  to  improve searcher success during entry and
    orientation.
       The proposed model is ``wrapped around'' existing Library  of  Congress
    subject-heading  indexing  in  such  a  way  as  to enhance access greatly
    without requiring reindexing.  It is argued that both for cost reasons and
    in principle this is a superior approach to other design philosophies.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 37, No.  6,
    pp. 357-376, 1986)

35. WHY ARE ONLINE CATALOGS HARD TO USE?  LESSONS  LEARNED  FROM  INFORMATION-
    RETRIEVAL STUDIES
    Christine L. Borgman
    Graduate School of Library and Information Science
    University of California
    Los Angeles, CA 90024
       Research in user behavior on online catalogs is in  its  early  stages,
    but  preliminary  findings  suggest  that users encounter many of the same
    problems identified in behavioral studies of other types of  bibliographic
    retrieval systems.  Much can be learned from comparing the results of user
    behavior studies on these two types of systems.  Research on user problems
    with  both the mechanical aspects and the conceptual aspects of system use
    is reviewed, with the conclusion that more similarity exists across  types
    of  systems in conceptual than in mechanical problems.  Also discussed are
    potential sources of the problems, due either to  individual  characteris-
    tics  or  to system variables.  A series of research questions is proposed
    and a number of potential interim solutions are suggested for  alleviating
    some of the problems encountered by users of information systems.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 37, No.  6,
    pp. 387-400, 1986)

36. PARALLEL FREE-TEXT SEARCH ON THE CONNECTION MACHINE SYSTEM
    Craig Stanfill and Brewster Kahle
    Thinking Machines Corporation
    245 First Street
    Cambridge, MA  02142.
       A new implementation of free-text search using a new parallel  computer
    -  the  Connection  Machine - makes possible the application of exhaustive
    methods not previously feasible for large databases.
    (COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, Vol. 29, No. 12, pp. 1229-1239, 1986)

37. A PROBLEM IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL WITH FUZZY SETS
    Duncan A. Buell
    Department of Computer Science
    Louisiana State University
    Baton Rouge, LA 70803
       In this note attempts to invent a system of weighted fuzzy queries,  in
    which the weights would correspond to the relative importance of each term
    to the query as a whole are evaluated.
    (JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE, Vol. 36, No.  6,
    pp. 398-401, 1985)

38. ANOTHER LOOK AT AUTOMATIC TEXT-RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS
    Gerard Salton
    Department of Computer Science
    Cornell University
    Ithaca, NY  14853
       An automatic text-retrieval system is designed  to  search  a  file  of
    natural-language  documents  and retrieve certain stored items in response
    to queries submitted by a user.
       Evidence from available studies comparing manual  and  automatic  text-
    retrieval  systems  does not support the conclusion that intellectual con-
    tent analysis produces better results than comparable automatic systems.
    (COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM, Vol. 29, No. 7, pp. 648-656, 1986).

39. SELF-ASSESSMENT PROCEDURE XV - FILE PROCESSING
    Martin K. Solomon and Riva Wenig Bickel
    Department of Computer and Information Systems
    Florida Atlantic University
    Boca Raton, FL 33431
       This is the fifteenth self-assessment procedure.  All the previous ones
    are  listed  on  the next page.  The first thirteen are available from the
    ACM* in a single loose-leaf binder to which later procedures may be
    added.
       This procedure deals with various aspects of file processing, including
    low  level  considerations  and the design, use, and performance of access
    methods and file structures.
       A subtheme of the procedure, chosen for its illustration of a number of
    important  points,  is the contrast between file processing in the ``large
    scale IBM-like environment'' and in the ``Unix-like environment.''
    *   Order Number 203804.
    (ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING MACHINERY, Vol. 29, No. 8, pp. 745-750, 1986)

40. MAN-MACHINE INTERFACES:  CAN THEY GUESS WHAT YOU WANT?
    Robert F. Simmons
    University of Texas at Austin
    Computer Science Department
    Austin, TX 78712
       Help systems and menus make operating systems more friendly and useful,
    but  can  natural  language  interfaces  guess what the user means but not
    specify?
    (IEEE EXPERT, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 86-94, 1986)

>-----------------------------
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-N-
33
-DATE-
Date: 25 Aug 87 09:40 EDT
-FROM-
From: Mark Zimmermann <science@nems.arpa>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: brwsr/ndxr announcement
-BODY-
[Note: this is a sequel to msg in V3. #28 - Ed]

If anybody is interested and can figure out how to get a msg back to me, I'll
be happy to send you copies of my latest indexing and browsing programs in C.
They seem to work fine on the Macintosh, the VAX, and the Sun that I've tried
them on.
  "ndxr.c" takes a single, arbitrarily-large, text file as input and produces
a complete inverted index to every word in that file.  It currently runs at
over 2 MB/hour on the Mac Plus, and 6-12 MB/hour on a Sun 3/140, depending on
what else is running at the same time.  Final index files are around 80%
the size of the input document, though one still needs 5-6 times the size of
the input document in free space on the disk while the index is being sorted.
(I'm working on reducing that intermediate storage requirement still.)
  "brwsr.c" is a command-line-oriented version of the Macintosh Browser
program.  It enables you to interact with an indexed document -- you can
search around the index itself, and when an interesting word turns up, drop
down into a key-word-in-context display of all the occurrences of that
word.  From an interesting line in the KWIC display, you can then jump into
the actual text of the document.  "brwsr.c" includes facilities for proximity
restrictions on searches (so the size of the search space can be cut down
for commoner terms -- e.g., instead of having to scroll through 10,000
occurrences of "Apple" you can only look at the 200 occurrences of "apple"
in the neighborhod of "Macintosh" or "Mac").  The browser also lets you
route output into a "notes" file as desired, so if you're not working in
a multiwindow cut/paste environment you can at least take some clippings
out of the text you have retrieved.
  There's a third file, a descriptive commentary and mini-manual for using
"brwsr.c", that I can also send you if interested.  "ndxr.c" is around 35 kB,
"brwsr.c" is around 55 kB, and the descriptive file is around 11 kB long.
Heavily commented C code, but designed to compile and run without any
editing or magic as far as I can tell (on VAX and Sun, anyway).
  No guarantees, of course!  ^z
  (science@nems.arpa)
  Mark Zimmermann, 9511 Gwyndale Dr., Silver Spring, MD  20910, USA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 87 19:13:03 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: more on RIAO '88
-BODY-
In V3 #20 the call for papers for RIAO '88 was published. I have heard that
there has been a disappointing response from US universities. Since some
of you may not have received #20, due to mail problems or summer trips,
I am sending out the call again.

Some may have noted that this conference is the same week as the
Office Information Systems Conference.  Special arrangements will be
made to schedule people who want to attend both to speak on the 21st
or 22nd if they want to then go on to the OIS conference.

While it is desirable that systems being discussed be demonstrable,
it is understood that university systems are typically prototypes, so
people should not be scared off by that factor.  - Ed


                      CALL FOR PAPERS
                           RIAO 88
                 USER-ORIENTED CONTENT-BASED
                   TEXT AND IMAGE HANDLING
           Massachusetts Institute of Technology
                       Cambridge, MA
                     March 21-24, 1988
                         Conference
                        organized by:
     Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
  Centre National de Recherche des Telecommunications (CNET)
        Institut National de Recherche en Informatique
                    et Automatique (INRIA)
        Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris
    Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d'Informatique
                     Documentaires (CID)
              US participating organizations:
   American Federation of Information Processing Societies
                            (AFIPS)
       American Society for Information Science (ASIS)
            Information Industry Association (IIA)
    This conference is prepared under the direction of:
                Professor  Andre Lichnerowicz
            de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris
                            and
                  Professor  Jacques Arsac
     correspondant de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris
     RIAO: Recherche d'Informations Assistee par Ordinateur
 A GENERAL INTRODUCTION:
     RIAO 88 is being held to demonstrate the state of the art in
information  retrieval,  a  domain  that is  in  rapid  evolution
because  of developments in the technology for machine control of
full-text  and image databases.  This evolution is stimulated  by
the demands of end-users generated by the recent availability  of
CD-ROM   full  text  publishing  and  general  public  access  to
information data bases.
     A group of French organizations has taken the initiative  of
preparing  this conference.  Its wish in promoting this forum  is
not  only to stimulate and challenge researchers from all nations
but also to increase an awareness of European technology.
     This "call for papers" is beeing distributed world-wide.  We
want  to reach individuals in the research communities throughout
the university and industrial sectors.
     The conference will be held in Cambridge,  MA.  We hope that
it   will  encourage  the  exchange  of  European  and   American
viewpoints,  and  establish new links between research  teams  in
United-states and Europe.
                       CALL FOR PAPERS
       General theme
          Full-text  and  mixed media database  systems  are
characterized  by  the  fact  that  the  structure  of   the
information is not known a priori.
          This   prevents  advance  knowledge  of  the  types  of
questions  that  will be asked,  unlike the  situation  found  in
hierarchical and relational database management systems.
          You  are  invited  to submit a paper  showing  how  the
situation can be dealt with. Special attention will be given to:
              - techniques   designed to reduce  imprecision
                in full-text  database searching;
              - data entry and control;
              - "friendly" end-user interfaces.
              - new media
          A large number of specific subjects can be treated
within this general framework.  Some suggestions are made in
the following section.
       Specific themes
      A)  Linguistic  processing and interrogation  of  full
text databases:
          - automatic indexing,
          - machine generated summaries,
          - natural language queries,
          - computer-aided translation,
          - multilingual interfaces.
      B)  Automatic thesaurus construction,
      C) Expert system techniques for retrieving information
in  full-text  and multimedia databases:
          - expert  systems  reasoning on open-ended domains
          - expert   systems  simulating   librarians   accessing
            pertinent information.
       D)  Friendly user interfaces to classical information
retrieval systems.
       E) Specialized machines and system architectures designed
for  treating  full-text data,  including managing and  accessing
widely distributed databases.
      F)  Automatic  database construction  scanning  techniques,
optical character readers, output document preparation, etc...
      G)    New  applications   and  perspectives  suggested   by
emerging new technologies:
              - optical storage techniques  (videodisk,
                CD-ROM, CD-I, Digital Optical Disks);
              - integrated  text,  sound and image retrieval
                systems;
              - electronic mail and document delivery  based
                on content;
              - voice  processing technologies for  database
                construction;
              - production    of    intelligent     tutoring
                systems;
              - hypertext, hypermedia.
       Conditions for participation
          The  program  committee is looking  for  communications
geared toward practical applications.  Papers which have not been
validated by a working model, a prototype or a simulation, or for
which a realization of such a model seems currently unlikely, may
be refused.
         Authors  must  submit a paper of about 10 pages  doubled
spaced, and a 100 word abstract.
          Four  copies must be sent before October 30 to  one  of
these two addresses:
>  RIAO 88, Conference Service Office, MIT, Bldg 7, Room 111
            CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139
>  RIAO 88, CID, 36 bis rue Ballu, 75009 PARIS  FRANCE
          Each  presentation will last 20 minutes followed by  10
minutes of discussion and questions.
          Arrangement  have  been  made  with  the  international
journal  "Information  Processing and Management" for  publishing
expanded versions of some papers.
          High quality audiovisual techniques should be used
when presenting the paper.
          Separate  demonstration sessions can be  scheduled
if requested.
       Particular attention will be paid to :
              - the  use  of  readily  available  equipment   for
                demonstrations  (IBM PC,  APPLE,  network connec-
                tions...);
              - pre-recorded video or floppy disk displays.
       Hardcopy  printouts of results should be  avoided  if
possible.
          English is the working language of the conference.
For further information call:
in North America  : Karen Daifuku,
                    tel: (202) 944 62 52
in other countries: Secretariat General du CID in France,
                    tel: (1) 42 85 04 75
                          -------
                     PROGRAM COMMITTEE
    French co-chairman                US co-chairman
   Prof. Christian FLUHR            Dr. Donald WALKER
 Universite Paris XI/INSTN     BELL Communications Research
J.C. Bassano (F) Universite d'Orleans
A. Bookstein (USA) University of Chicago
J. Bing (N) Norwegian research Center for Comp. and law
E. Black (USA) T.J. Watson IBM Research Center
C. Boitet (F) Universite de Grenoble
J. Boucher (CAN) Universite de Montreal
C. Chen (USA) Simmons College
Y. Choueka (Israel) Bar-Ilan University
C. Ciampi (I) Instituto per la Doc. jiuridica
X. Dalloz (F) Centre National de la Cinematographie
T. Doszkocs (USA) National Library of Medecine
E. Fox (USA) Virginia Polytechnic Institute
E. Garcia Camarero (SP) Universitad Complutense de Madrid
C. Goldstein (USA) National Library of Medecine
G. Grefenstette (F) Universite de Tours
H. Hjerppe (S) University of Link~oping
D. Kayser (F) Universite Paris XIII
P. Kirstein (UK) University College of London
R. Marcus (USA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
P. Mordini (F) Ecole des Mines de Paris
C. D. Paice (UK) University of Lancaster
A. S. Pollitt (UK) The Polytechnic Queensgate Uddersfield
F. Rabitti (I) Instituto dei Elabor. della Informazione
J. Rohmer (F) Bull, Louveciennes
G. Sabah (F) LIMSI(CNRS) Orsay
T. Saracevic (USA) Rutgers University
W. Turner (F) CDST (CNRS) Paris
H. J. Schneider (FRG) Technische Universit~at Berlin
C. Schwartz (FRG) Siemens M~unchen
assisted by a Technical and an Organisation Committee.
                              APPLICATION FORM
NAME:...........................................................................
TITLE/POSITION:.................................................................
ORGANIZATION:...................................................................
ADDRESS:........................................................................
CITY:................................STATE:.......................ZIP:.........
COUNTRY:........................................................................
I plan to attend the conference, please send me the program:  YES  NO
I plan to present a paper:  YES  NO
Conference theme (circle one): A B C D E F G
Title of the communication:
Are you willing to present a demonstration of your prototype?
YES  NO
Equipment needed:
Please mail this form before September 15, 1987 to:
RIAO 88
Conference Service Office
MIT
Bldg 7, Room 111
CAMBRIDGE, MA
02139 USA

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
34
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 87 21:53:30 EDT
-FROM-
From: ackerman@athena.mit.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Needed: dictionary
-BODY-
We're looking for dictionaries (English or otherwise) that have been
formatted.  I've got the Collins and Webster's 7th, but I'd like to find
a version that isn't raw.  We're also looking for French, Spanish, and
German dictionaries.  Any info would be appreciated.

[Note: We are really just about done here working on cleaning up
the Collins dictionary. If our computers stay up, we should be
able to get final sorting and checking done within a few weeks, and
will mail that version back to Oxford Text Archive.  How about
comments on other efforts? Will someone report on the Century
project and ASCIIDD? - Ed]

Among other parts to our visual courseware system, we're writing a
text display/browser that can pop up another display/browser on a word
hit.  A number of our projects are encyclopedic dictionaries, and I'd
like the default condition to search a "standard" dictionary.

[Note: please send in a more complete description if available
in machine readable form.  I believe there are many people at
universities who don't know about latest efforts at Athena, and
would especially like to know what is available for use besides X. - Ed]

		Mark Ackerman
		Visual Courseware Group
		MIT/Project Athena

		(ackerman@athena.mit.edu)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Tue, 25 Aug 87 20:48 EST
-FROM-
From:     <LFA@ORNLSTC>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Call for papers.  Please route to Computer Science faculty.
-BODY-
                           CALL FOR PAPERS
                 NARDAC Washington/ORNL/DSRD Conference
                                  on
             Expert Systems Technology in the ADP Environment
                            to be held in
                           Washington, D.C.
                          November 2-3, 1987
THE CONFERENCE
     The Naval Regional Data Automation Center in Washington, D.C., the Oak
Ridge National Laboratory, and the Data Systems Research and Development
Program, Martin Marietta Energy Systems are hosting a conference; its
primary focus is on the use of Artificial Intelligence in traditional computing
domains and its potential for further exploitation.  Both invited talks and
contributed papers will be given at the conference.
INVITED SPEAKERS
        Several individuals have tentatively accepted invitations to speak at
this conference on the various aspects of Artificial Intelligence as it
pertains to traditional computing problems.  Scheduled speakers and their
topic areas include:
        Prof. James Slagle (Minnesota)       -  Keynote speaker
        Prof. Brian Gaines (Calgary)         -  Intelligent Interfaces for
                                                Knowledge-Based Systems
        Prof. Larry Henschen (Northwestern)  -  Logic and Databases
        Dr. Sukhumay Kundu (Louisiana State) -  AI in Software Engineering
CONTRIBUTED PAPERS
        In addition to the invited talks, papers are being solicited from
researchers in academia, government and industry in the following areas:
        ADP Project and Systems Management,
        Knowledge-Based Simulation and Modeling,
        Intelligent Man-Machine Interfaces,
        Intelligent Databases,
        AI in Software Engineering,
        AI as a Tool for Decision-Making, and
        Innovative Applications in MIS or Scientific Computing.
SUBMISSION DETAILS
        Authors are asked to submit five (5) copies of their paper, which is to
be single-spaced and between five to seven pages in length.  Both finished and
ongoing research will be considered by the program committee and reviewers.
Send papers (in English), requests for additional information, and all other
correspondence to
        Lloyd F. Arrowood
        Program Chairman
        Oak Ridge National Laboratory
        Building 4500-North, Mail Stop 207
        Oak Ridge, TN 37831
                or
        BITNET:  lfa@ornlstc
        ARPA:    lfa@ornl-stc10.arpa

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From: seismo!unido!iaoobel!reim (Friedemann Reim)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: EURINFO'88
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 87 9:35:32 MET DST
-BODY-
                   E U R I N F O  '88
FIRST EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR ORGANISATIONAL SYSTEMS
                  ATHENS 16-20 MAY 1988
            CONCEPTS FOR INCREASED COMPETITIVENESS
organised by: COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
sponsored by: IFIP
The development of Information Systems cannot be separated from the develop-
ment of organisation style.
The aim of this conference is to explore trends and concepts in organisations
triggered by the widespread introduction of information technologies. These
technologies are making possible profound changes in the way which organi-
sations react to the market. Technological developments have a significant
impact on the competitive environment of companies of nearly all industries,
administrations and enterprises changing their shape, size, and mode of oper-
ation.
The conference will bring together decision makers, managers and researchers
from Europe and overseas, who are working on these issues. Key questions the
Conference aims to address are:
      - What are the strategic neeeds of organisations which are not yet being
    aided by information technology?
      - What are the problems and difficulties with present information tech-
    nology at both strategic and operational levels?
      - What are the most significant trends in information technology?
      - How does information technology change the competitive environment and
    the nature of organisations?
      - What are the requirements for further information technology develop-
    ments from the users point of view?
      - Which new concepts and tools for applied information system design are
    available?
      - What is the payoff for modern technology-based tools in the office? in
    the factory? for engineers?
TECHNICAL PROGRAMME:
Complex information systems offer suppliers and system designers a very wide
range of design options. Early feedback from potential users will be
beneficial for all sides. In order to assess the impact of advanced infor-
mation technology on future organisational systems, and to analyse user needs
and user solutions for their impact on technological development, the tech-
nical programme will be developed according to three main themes:
      I.   Information management for organisations
      II.  Advances in information technology
      III. Examples of advanced systems in a range of application domains
STRUCTURE OF THE PROGRAMME:
PAPERS:
   The Conference will be structured in a number of parallel sessions to give
   appropriate time to each contribution. Each session will be planned to
   allow more discussion time than usual.
INTERACTIVE POSTER SESSIONS:
   Some parallel sessions will be arranged in the interactive form which is
   becoming popular.
WORKSHOPS:
   Some sessions are planned with speakers co-ordinated to address one parti-
   cular themes. Suggestions for themes and offers to convene panels, are in-
   vited.
VIDEOTAPE DEMONSTRATIONS:
   New work will be presented in a continuous programme.
TUTORIAL AND MANAGEMENT SEMINARS:
   These will be presented in separate sessions in the 2 days before the
   conference.
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS:
Contributed papers must be sent before October 31st, 1987, to the Programme
Committee Secretariat.
The Secretariat of the PC will be with the European Commission, DG XIII, in
Brussels. Address as follows:
      The Programme Committee Chairman
      EURINFO '88
      Commission of the European Communities, A25 3/8
      200, Rue de la Loi
      B-1049 Brussels
      Tel.: 00-32-2-2351942
      Tlx.: 21877 comeu b
      Tfa.: 00-32-2-2356502
All papers will be refereed by the international Programme Committee. Presen-
tation at the Conference will be oral or by poster. All accepted papers will
be published in the Proceedings, in collaboration with a major international
publishing house. All participants will receive a copy. The Conference
language is English. Further instructions for the preparation of papers will
be sent to proposers after receipt of the notification of the intention to
submit a paper.
SCHEDULE:
TODAY: Send back the attached reply form and your intention to submit a paper.
OCT. 31 '87: Deadline for submission of papers.
NOV. 30 '87: Notification of acceptance of contributed papers.
JAN. 15 '88: Deadline for submission of the final camera-ready paper copy.
MAY 16-20 '88: Conference starts on Monday, May 16 in the afternoon and ends
           on Friday, May 20 in the evening.
Welcome and Registration desk will be open from Saturday, May 14 at the
Athaneum-Intercontinental.
ADVISORY BOARD, STEERING AND PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:
A high level Advisory Board will provide guidance on strategic issues. Member-
ship will be published in the Preliminary Programme.
The Steering Committee is responsible for the overall management of the Con-
ference and will assist the Programme Committee.
The Programme Committee is responsible for defining the detailed technical
programme and the selection of the papers. The Committee membership represents
all the domains concerned: Universities and Research Institutions, Industry
and User Organisations.
STEERING COMMITTEE:
E.N. Protonotarios, Chairman, National Technical University of Athens
V. Makios, Co-Chairman, University of Patras
S.E. Aliprantis, Treasurer, Mnemonica Ltd.
J. Coustas, Secretary, Danaos Shipping Company
J. Roukens, Comm. Eur. Communities, Brussels
T. Jones, CEC - Adm. Coordination, Comm. Eur. Communities, Luxemburg
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (PC) - (tentative list of members):
H.-J. Bullinger, Chairman, Fraunhofer Institute IAO, Stuttgart
Y. Vassiliou, Dep.Chairman, Cretan Research Center, Heraklion
H. Benke, Heimstatt Bausparkassen, Muenchen
N. Bjorn Andersen, Copenhagen Business School
H. Bouma, Philips-IPO, Eindhoven
G. Bracchi, Polytechnic of Milan
G. Cunningham, Lamsac, London
A. Danthine, University of Liege
N. Dini, Alitalia, Rome
C. Ellis, MCC, Austin, Texas
W. Guyer, Schweiz.Kreditanstalt, Zuerich
H. Hammer, Hammer&Co., Cambridge Mass.
C. Haynes, ICL, Bracknell
J.F. Kennedy, Captec, Dublin
G. Metakides, University of Patras
D. Monaco, Olivetti, Pisa
J. Mulet, Telefonica, Madrid
N. Naffah, Bull, Massy-Paris
E. Pelletier, CIGREF, Paris
M. Rathman, Danfoss, Nordborg
A. Roza, Shell-SIPC, London
B. Shackel, Loughborough University
T. Steinbrinck, Datenzentrale Schleswig Holstein, Kiel
J. Tarstrup, IT Consultant, Arhus
C. Thanos, National Research Council, Pisa
J.M. Tribolet, INESC, Lisboa
R. Uhlig, Northern Telecom, Texas
F. Vanden Bergen, Telindus, Leuven
K. Van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow
A. Verijn Stuart, Leiden University
I. Viale, Ministry of Finance, Paris
C. Vissers, Technical University Twente, Enschede
H. Wilmanowski, Volkswagen, Wolfsburg
A. Wilhelm, Alfred Kaercher GmbH, Winnenden
INFORMATION, REGISTRATION :
___________________________________________________________________________
|[ ] Please send registration form for     [ ] I intend to submit a paper.|
|    EURINFO'88 and all further infor-         Provisional title:         |
|    mation to my address as below                                        |
|                                                                         |
|                                                                         |
| Name:                                                                   |
| Address:                                                                |
| Phone:                       Telex:                                     |
|                                                                         |
| All correspondence and inquiries to be addressed to:                    |
|                                                                         |
|      Conference Office EURINFO '88                                      |
|      c/o GINIS Vacances Ltd.                                            |
|      23-25 Ermou Str., 105 63 Athens, Greece                            |
|      Tel.: (1) 32.29.808  & (1) 32.41.216.-19                           |
|      Tlx.: 219249                                                       |
|      Tfa.: (1) 32.37.703                                                |
___________________________________________________________________________
 --
riedemann Reim
Fraunhofer-Institut fuer Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation
Holzgartenstrasse 17
D-7000 Stuttgart 1
West Germany
Phone +49 (711) 6648-180
BITNET: iaoobel.uucp!reim@unido.bitnet
UUCP:   ...{seismo!unido, pyramid}!iaoobel!reim

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
35
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 87 17:27:29 edt
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Email changes relating to IRList
-BODY-
Finally, we have, I believe, straightened out the mess resulting from
	1) seismo stopping support of IRList
	2) software changes at Virginia Tech

The net effect is as follows:
	1) IRList distribution is now being handled using the Listserv
		facility supported in connection with BITNET. That means
		that mail will go out from IRLIST-L@VTVM2.BITNET after I
		mail it to there from fox@vtcs1.bitnet.
	2) I have redone all the addresses. If you don't get mail, or if
		there are problems that I can correct, please let me know.
		I have put in names for some people - remind me if you get
		a message with "no name" and want that changed.

Later, we will make use of ARPANET to simplify the situation.

Note that it is possible to have "peer" listserv lists which I could
administer if that is desired -- let me know if you wish to explore
the possibility.

Meanwhile, I hope things will get back to normal and that you will
forgive the various test messages and delay in getting issues out.
If I have lost any submissions in the process, please send them anew.

Many thanks for your cooperation, Ed Fox (IRList Editor)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From:       Prof Keith Van Rijsbergen <cjvr@CS.GLASGOW.AC.UK>
Date:       Fri, 4 Sep 87 11:41:04 BST
Subject:    connectionism
I would like to hear from anyone interested in the relation
between parallel distributed processing and information
retrieval. I would like to set up an informal group
exchanging ideas, software, seminar notices etc. We could
agree to do it through IRLIST but have personal contact
as well. Anyone out there interested?
Keith van Rijsbergen
Computing Science
Glasgow University
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Scotland

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 87 17:50:47 edt
From: D3ECJCB2@EB0UB011 (JOSEP M. CASAS)
Subject: flows and organizations of cities - comments requested

[Note: I received this message as a BITNET file with the right ends
of lines truncated - I hope it is clear. -Ed]

   I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON THE ITEM WHOSE ABSTRACT IS FOLLOWING THESE
LINES:

NOW I AM TRYING TO DESIGN A SORT OF THERMODYNAMIC NETWORK APPLIED TO THE
HUMAN ECOSYSTEM CONSIDERING: 1) THE FLOWS BETWEEN CITIES
                             2) THE SELF-ORGANIZATION OF EACH CITY
   THE PURPOSE IS SIMULATION, THOUGH STARTING AT A VERY PLAIN LEVEL. THE
PROBLEM IS HOW TO DESIGN SUCH A SYSTEM THAT, ONCE RUNNING, COMPUTES
ENERGY OR WHATEVER (FLOWS BETWEEN CITIES) AND INFORMATION (SELF-ORGANIZA
OF THE CITIES). FLOWS BETWEEN CITIES MAY BELONG TO ANY OF THE THREE
WORLDS QUOTED BY POPPER ET AL. 1977. WOULD IT HELP TO IMAGINE EACH
CITY AS A NODE OF A COMPUTER NETWORK ? OR AS A CELLULAR AUTOMATON?
OR AS A CHAIN OF A FORMAL SYSTEM ?
   TILL THE PRESENT I HAVE BEEN STUDYING ENERGY AND MIGRATORY FLOWS
ON HUMAN POPULATIONS. KEY IDEAS OBTAINED:
> EXPRESSION THAT QUANTIFIES THE BEHAVIOUR OF A WIDE POPULATED AREA
  CONCERNING THE WAY PEOPLE SPREAD ON IT.
> A TERM OF THIS EXPRESSION IS SHOWN TO BE CLOSELY RELATED WITH
  EXOSOMATIC(EXTERNAL) ENERGY.
> FOR A GIVEN MUNICIPALITY, THE DEPENDENCE OF THE GROWTH RATE ON
  THIS TERM AND ITS OWN POPULATION IS CHARACTERIZED.
> THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE WHOLE AREA IS FOLLOWED FROM A SPATIAL AND
  TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVE.
> CONDITIONING OF THE DYNAMIC OF SPACE OCCUPATION BY EXTERNAL
  ENERGY ALLOWANCE IS SHOWN.
> I HAVE GOT MAPS SHOWING THE DEVIATION OF THE MUNICIPALITIES FROM
  THE GENERAL LAW FOLLOWED BY THE WHOLE AREA. DEVIATIONS DON'T
  OCCUR AT RANDOM BUT SHOW SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL SELF-ORGANIZATION.

  ALL SUGGESTIONS WELLCOMED IN ADVANCE.
  BEST REGARDS.
  JOSEP M. CASAS      D3ECJCB2 AT EB0UB011

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 87 12:02:11 EDT
From: "Don W. Saklad" <dws@eddie.mit.edu>
Subject: internal censorship

  Subject: internal censorship
  Summary: intellectual freedom
  Keywords: preselection censorship intellectual freedom

Notwithstanding the good record libraries have opposed to censorship,
the Boston Public Library declines valid public access to city records
accumulated in the library, itself being one of the city departments.
There should be an improvement in our library's response to
inquiries about library books and recordings as well as public
documentation like minutes of our library board public proceedings
and internal manuals when they are public records validly.

Our Boston Public Library declines access to public records
of local government especially valid inquiries and requests
for public records about city library services growth,
development and long range planning.  A while ago it occurred
to me that an effective library user like myself might ask
as a library "consumer" for documentation about the library
system itself.  Efficient use of library services might be
better with an understanding of the capacity and limitations
of the library.  Intellectual freedom as a principle opposed
to censorship should be the ethical consideration for library
professionals.

Would anyone have information about what I can do about this
situation, which has continued a long time now.  Is there anyone
in this area who might help.  After talking with more than 18
people and making administrative appeals it occurs to me that
network readers might have some good ideas or perhaps
look into this wrongful hampering of library access by officials.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 87 11:53:40 EDT
From: "Don W. Saklad" <dws@eddie.mit.edu>
Subject: special interest group

 ###########################################################################
#									    #
#                                          ----------------		    #
#                                          |      O V     |		    #
#  Summary:  library users association     |     /\/      |		    #
#                                          |    /__       |		    #
#                                          |      /       |		    #
#                                          |     /        |		    #
#                                          ----------------		    #
#									    #
#  We're forming an information retrieval special interest group.           #
#									    #
#  The purpose of this activity is to organize a group and network	    #
#  for persons interested in library services and systems.  Library users   #
#  as well as those merely interested are encouraged to contact		    #
#									    #	
#									    #
#		Boston library users info-retrieval sig, tel. 661-9650	    #
#									    #
#									    #
 ###########################################################################

[Note: This sounds like great timing -- just before ASIS '87 in Boston! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 87 14:22:30 edt
From: fox (Ed Fox)
Subject: Collection for CD ROM

I will be producing Virginia Discs 1,2 in 1988 -- 2 CD ROM discs with a variety
of databases on each.  I believe it might be of use to put a number of
IR test collections on one of them.  We can, I believe, do so with collections
we have here at Virginia Tech, such as
	CACM abstracts thru 1979 (with title, author, etc.)
	ADI
	ISI collection of highly cited articles
	AIList Digest issues (collected here for CODER Project)
	IRList Digest issues (archived here)
	Med 1033
I don't believe INSPEC would allow their collection out. We could add others
that might be of interest if I can obtain them in time (e.g., Cranfield,
NPL) -- would anyone like to send them to me?

Would this be of value?  Should we have indexed as well as text forms?
I plan on having the documents, queries (in all forms available), and
relevance judgements as available.

The CD ROMs produced would have other full text and bibliographic
collections as well, with a Virginia flavor.  It may be accompanied
with several software packages to illustrate different types of
retrieval.  The first disc is scheduled to be available by 3/88. If
people want copies they will need to let us know by the end of this
year.  We plan on only releasing the discs to people who will use them
for research purposes.  I expect the cost will be under $50.

I welcome comments on this plan. Many thanks, Ed Fox

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 87 17:09:55 GMT
From: Alan Bundy <bundy%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: Site and Officers for IJCAI-91


	At its meeting during IJCAI-87, the 1987 IJCAI Executive
Committee took the following decisions about IJCAI-91.

Site: Sydney, Australia.

Conference Chair: Barbara Grosz, University of Harvard.

Program Chairs (joint): Ray Reiter & John Mylopoulos, University of
                        Toronto.

	The conference is provisionally scheduled for the 3rd week of
August 1991.


			Alan Bundy
			Executive Committee Chair

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1987  21:55 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@xx.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar
Start-Date: 9/14/87
Expiration-Date: 9/17/87


cog-sci-calendar digest [Extract - Ed]

 ...

   Date: Thursday, 10 September 1987  13:56-EDT
   From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
   Re:   BBN AI/Biotech seminar

                    BBN Science Development Program
                   AI/Biotech Seminar Series Lecture

                  "The Matrix of Biological Knowledge"

                             Kimberle Koile
                                BBN Labs
                           (KKOILE@G.BBN.COM)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                    10:30 am,  Wednesday Sept. 16th


Abstract: The body of experimental data in the biological sciences is
immense and growing rapidly.  Its volume is so extensive that computer
methods, possibly straining the limits of current technology will be
necessary to organize the data.  Moreover, it seems highly likely that
there are a significant number of as yet undiscovered ordering
relations, new laws, and predictive models embedded in the mass of
existing information.  To employ this body of information productively,
it will be useful to create an extensive data/knowledge base, "the
matrix of biological knowledge," structured to provide a conceptual
framework by the laws, models, empirical generalizations, and physical
foundations of the modern biological sciences.

This talk will describe preliminary efforts to define and prototype
parts of the Matrix.  (These efforts took place at a summer workshop
that was organized as a result of a National Academy of Sciences report,
"Models for Biomedical Research: A New Perspective.")

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
36
-DATE-
Date:    Mon, 28 Sep 87 19:06 PDT
-TO-
To:      Edward A. Fox <FOX@VTCS1>
-FROM-
From:    Donald Case                          <IIN8PXB@UCLAMVS>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: personal filing systems and work in cognitive psychology
-BODY-
 . . .

I am starting a project that will examine possible connections between
personal filing systems and work in cognitive psychology on categorization.
To begin with, I will be studying historians, as they are knowledge workers
who must deal with massive amounts of textual material, in a field that has
some accepted structures (but is otherwise as broad as any field could be)
and who are not yet as automated as scholars in some other fields.  I would
apprciate hearing from anybody who has similar interests or who knows of
kindred research.  I believe that such studies could help us to devise more
natural and adaptive filing systems for personal workstations, as well as
helping us to better understand the nature of scholarhsip itself.
>- Donald Case, UCLA  IIN8PXB@UCLAMVS

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 87 01:06 EST
-FROM-
From: STEIN@wharton.upenn.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: social and technical means of storing knowledge in organizations
-BODY-
  To: members of the IRlist.
  From:   Eric W. Stein
          Systems Research Fellow
          Department of Social Systems Sciences
          The Wharton School
          University of Pennsylvania
          3733 Spruce Street
          Philadelphia, PA  19104
          (215) 898-4472
          email: stein@wharton.upenn.edu or stein@wharton-10.arpa
  Re:     Request for citations and information regarding research being
          conducted on the social and technical means of storing knowledge
          in organizations.
The department to which I belong conducts research on social systems;
that is, on systems composed of people and technologies that are transformed
over time.  The graduate group in social systems science owes its roots to the
the works of Russell Ackoff, Hasan Ozbekhan, Eric Trist, Fred Emery,
and Tom Saaty who were among the principle founders.  Theoretical roots
lie in systems, cybernetics, planning, organizational design, decision
science, socio-technical design, and management theory.
I am developing a dissertation on the social and technical
means by which organizations (most likely in the private sector)
store core organizational knowledge including expertise,
values, procedures, and strategic knowledge about the environment.
I am looking at the technical means by which organizations accomplish
knowledge storage such as the implementation of expert systems as well
as the more subtle, social means such as through systems of
communication, myth-making, and participative planning to name a few.
I am interested in those who are working in this area; my review of the
literature has failed to produce many studies. Please
contact me if you know of important citations or models for dealing
with the general area mentioned; esp. the problems of mapping out
knowledge structures in organizational settings, the effects of
expert systems technologies on social systems, network
theories of organizations, and evaluation of
expert systems from the users point of view.
I hope I have provided you with enough information to capture
the attention of those who share the same interests.  If even
mildly interested, feel free to contact me at the address listed.
Yours,
Eric Stein
stein@wharton.upenn.edu
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Mon, 28 Sep 87 12:32:47 CST
-FROM-
From:         JEFF HUESTIS <C81350JH@WUVMD>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      ELSI/VTLS/SMART, ETC.
-TO-
To:           "EDWARD A. FOX" <FOX@VTCS1>
-BODY-
I would appreciate receiving a brief update on the status of the
ELSI-SMART-VTLS connection, as mentioned in your March, 1986 article
in Microcomputers for Information Management.  I'm particularly
interested in the application of IR techniques to the information
problems of undergraduates, for a number of personal, professional,
and political reasons.  More specifically, I'm looking at ways to
take an unfocused browsing search, or an erroneously precise search
(eg., using the wrong terminology), and guiding it onto the beaten
path of what has been published and what is available in the local
library collection (given the limited interlibrary support usually
available to undergraduates).

[Note: Tom McGuire finished ELSI in connection with his Masters work
here.  It ran on a 3B2 which AT&T had been kind enough to donate.
Since then we were able, thanks to the kindness of the Virginia Tech
library staff and personnel at VTLS, Inc., to obtain virtually all of
the catalog data as of 12/85.  We ran a preliminary experiment with a
version of the SMART system we extended to handle the data, using some
300,000 catalog entries -- an article discussing some of the findings
should appear soon in "Information Services and Use."  We hope to
extend that study, using some 600,000 catalog entries, later this AY.  - Ed]
One approach I'm taking is a kind of crude co-citation-based clustering
of 14-years worth of circulation archival data from one of the central
library's old batch systems, consisting of about 1.5 million charge
records.  Each record includes the LC call number, very brief author
title information, and the borrower number, among other fields.
Working from the assumption that most borrowers check out books on
loosely related topics within a delimited period of time, I've clustered
these transactions into borrower/time-period records which are indexed
by the call numbers of the transactions in each record.  At present,
the time-period represented by each record is one academic year, though
I'm planning to reorganize the file into quarterly records, at least
for the heaviest borrowers.
The primary value of this file, beyond the
title/user/title linkage pathways established (analogous to the
combined use of bibliographies and citation indexes), might be to
extend the browsing support provided by the LC classification, by
providing possible cross-references between arbitrarily small subtrees.
But this really depends on cleaning up what is now a very dirty file,
eg., by the use of statistical techniques to separate the records of
focused researchers from those of renaissance men.
 ...

[Note: This reminds me of the study by Paul Metz of Virginia Tech, in
the ALA book that is ACRL Publications in Librarianship no. 43, "The
Landscape of Literatures: Use of Subject Collections in a University
Library." - Ed]

[Note: Following are more comments from Jeff after he read my note:
  "I read Metz's book cover-to-cover, which is unusual for me.  Its
primary orientation was toward collection development, a sort of
macro-view.  But I found a lot that was relevant to the problem of
retrieval, the micro-view (borrowing from the macro/micro distinction
from economics)."]
>-Jeff Huestis
c81350jh@wuvmd.bitnet
Washington University Libraries, St. Louis

[Note: I encourage other comments and discussion on this topic - many
of the IRList readers are involved in library science or library work
of one type or another and do not often send in news or comments - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Wed, 12 Aug 87 15:55 N
-FROM-
From:     <COR_HVH@HNYKUN52>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  coder dictionary
-BODY-
Is the CODER lexicon available to the outside world, i.e. can one get a
copy of it (and how)?
I am interested for two reasons in your results.
1) The PROLOG version of Collins could be of use to our analysis efforts.
2) If you have by now actually parsed the adverb definitions, you have
   a bunch of tree structures I could put in my database (the Linguistic
   Database I am always talking about) as yet another demo application.
Hans van Halteren (Nijmegen University, Netherlands)

[Note:  I am assured by my graduate students and secretary that a tape
will go out to Oxford Text Archive tomorrow with the CODER version of
the Collins Dictionary of the English Language.  The contents of the
tape could be directly loaded into a (large) Prolog fact base, or with
some minor changes, could probably be put into a relational database.
It should be possible for you and others to obtain a copy of the tape
by going through the normal channels of requesting the dictionary from
OTA, for use in research.
    Regarding the parsing question, we are not parsing definitions
here now.  The NSF has funded a joint project at Illinois Institute of
Technology and Virginia Tech, part of which will deal with parsing
Collins definitions, but we are won't have those results for quite
some time. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 87 13:45:24 edt
-FROM-
From: ltw (Layne Watson)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  IRList Digest V3 #35
-BODY-
To: Keith van Rijsbergen		cjvr@cs.glasgow.ac.uk

Several of us here at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
have interests in both parallel computation and IR.  My background is
primarily in scientific and parallel computing, but I have recently
become interested in IR as it relates to supercomputing and parallel
computing.  We are trying to acquire parallel hardware, and have lots of
ideas we want to try out.

Layne Watson
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061   USA
watson@vtcs1.bitnet   or   watson@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Mon, 28 Sep 1987 12:08:39 LCL
-FROM-
From:     RNODDY@SUVM
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  Job Opening at Syracuse University
-BODY-
 . . .
         SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY - SCHOOL OF INFORMATION STUDIES
            ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR - TENURE TRACK
The School is seeking an individual for a new full-time, tenure-track
faculty position, beginning September 1988.  The primary responsibilities
for this position are to teach and conduct research in the areas of:
      *  Information Retrieval
      *  Natural Language Processing
      *  Knowledge Representation
      *  Artificial Intelligence
      *  Application of Parallel Architectures to Information Science
Applicants should be committed to excellence in teaching and research, and
be interested in working with an interdisciplinary faculty to apply
their expertise to the current theoretical and applied problems of our
field.  PhD is required, though candidates near completion are encouraged
to apply.
In December 1988, the School will be housed in a new Science and
Technology Center for the express purpose of engaging in interdisciplinary
research with the Schools of Engineering and Computer Science, as well as
the Northeast Parallel Architecture Center (NPAC), and the Computer
Applications and Software Engineering Center (CASE).
The closing date for applications is December 15, 1987.  Applications
(including letter, resume and names of three references) should be
addressed to:
               Dr Jeffrey Katzer, Chair, Search Committee
               School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
               200-K Huntington Hall
               Syracuse, New York 13244-2340
Syracuse University wholeheartedly supports the Affirmative Action Program.
(Preliminary contacts by potential applicants will be welcomed by
Jeffrey Katzer or Robert Oddy at (315)423-4525, or
Robert Oddy at rnoddy@suvm on BITNET.)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1987  10:34 EDT
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Thursday, 24 September 1987  17:06-EDT
  From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   BBN AI Seminar -- Alexander Makarovitsch

                    BBN Science Development Program
                      AI/Education Seminar Series

                    SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE EXPERTISE

                         Alexander Makarovitsch
         Computer Science Department, West Catholic University
                           (Angiers, France)

                         BBN Laboratories Inc.
                           10 Moulton Street
                    Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor

                10:30 a.m., Tuesday, September 29, 1987


Abstract:  By a system with multiple expertise, we mean one containing
two or more expert systems, all working on a common information domain.
Three such systems under current development will be briefly reviewed.
(1) Syclope, a system being developed for the French Board of
    Electricity for aiding agents working under risky conditions to
    improve their task behavior;
(2) Sonar, a system being developed for the Bull Computer Group for
    aiding in the design, operation, and maintenance of computer
    networks;
(3) Link, a system being developed for the Bull Group for aiding
    decision makers in the networked computer area in the processes of
    product planning.

The review will focus on the difficulties encountered in key aspects of
the development process:  the acquisition of expertise, knowledge
representation, man/machine interface, and interactions amopng the
system and multiple users and experts.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1987  12:05 EDT
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
 Date: Tuesday, 29 September 1987  12:08-EDT
 From: Fran Lewitter <lewitter at PROPHET.BBN.COM>
 Re:   Biotech Sem - 10/1/87
 		      Biotechnology Seminar Series
 			   BBN Laboratories
 		       Science Development Program
 Topic:        Protein Structure and Pattern Matching
 Speaker:      Dr. Robert M. Abarbanel
 	      Technical Manager KEEconnection and IntelliScope
 	      Intellicorp
 Location:     Room 3/130 (Weiner Room)
               50 Moulton Street
 Time & Date:  Thursday October 1, 1987,  11:00 a.m.
 Abstract:     Pattern matching has been applied to the problem of assigning
 	      protein secondary structure with some success.  This talk will
 	      discuss the ideas implemented using a pattern matching language
 	      called PLANS, for finding secondary structures and turns in
 	      globular proteins.  These assignments are then extended to
 	      determine reasonable tertiary models for several proteins.  In
 	      particular, work with Interleukin-2 and Human Growth Hormone will
 	      be discussed.  The Macro-Molecular Workbench project at UCSF will
 	      also be mentioned.
 Note:	      For more information about this seminar series, please contact
 	      Fran Lewitter, Life Sciences/Research Systems - x2751.  Please
 	      note that following the seminar we will meet for lunch and
 	      further discussion in the 7th floor cafeteria, 10 Moulton Street.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1987  12:19 EDT
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Thursday, 1 October 1987  16:40-EDT
  From: mvilain at G.BBN.COM
  Re:   BBN AI Seminar --John White

                            A METHODOLOGY FOR
                 DERIVING MULTILINGUAL SEMANTIC STRUCTURES
                    FROM MACHINE-READABLE DICTIONARIES


                             John S. White
                          Martin Marietta Corp.

                          BBN Laboratories Inc.
                           10 Moulton Street
                   Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor

                4:00 p.m., Thursday, October 8, 1987



This paper describes a methodology for generating multilingual
taxonomic hierarchies for specific and general terminological systems,
using the lexical relations derivable from machine-readable
dictionaries (MRDs).  Taxonomic structures can be optimized to form
the data foundation of a knowledge base facilitating the automatic
disambiguation of text in one language into lexical senses of terms in
the same or another language.  Such a capability, in turn, contributes
a multi-directional translation dimension to automatic paraphrase and
content analysis.  As part of a full natural language processing
machine translation system, the knowledge added by the MRD structures
can assist in sense selection, grammar rule-base composition, and
generation.

  The methodology for the development of these structures is described
here, consisting of a manual pre-disambiguation task, and
computational creation of parallel taxonomic structures in each
language.  The rationale behind deriving lexical semantic structures
in this way is discussed.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
37
-DATE-
Date: Mon 5 Oct 87 10:05:39-PDT
-FROM-
From: Ken Laws <LAWS@IU.AI.SRI.COM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Research on Filing Systems [See V3 #36 - Ed]
-CC-
Cc: IIN8PXB%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU, STEIN@WHARTON.UPENN.EDU
-BODY-
A very interesting IRList issue.  While I have no expertise in the
theory of personal filing systems, I have always been fascinated by
taxonomies and other means of organizing knowledge.  I would be happy
to help out if someone wants to study the evolution (or current
structure) of the machine vision field.  (This includes digital image
processing, analysis, and understanding, with interfaces to perceptual
psychology, neurophysiology, computational geometry, remote sensing,
geology, geodessy, computer graphics, computer science, mathematics,
and many other areas.  I can't claim to understand it all -- indeed,
computer vision is itself not well understood -- but I am familiar
with much of the literature.)

                    -- Ken Laws

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 4 Oct 1987 18:52 CST
-FROM-
From:         Robin C. Cover <ZRCC1001@SMUVM1>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      texts of ancient languages
-BODY-
Professor Fox: I am a professor of semitics and am interested in full-text
retrieval software which can be used to concord/index/search machine-readable
texts of ancient languages. I am also interested in various aspects of mechano-
linguistics: statistical thematics, content analysis, disambiguation, etc.
I would appreciate being added to the mail list for (BITNET) IRList -- in hopes
 of making contact with other scholars interested in study of ancient texts.
Many thanks!  Professor Robin C. Cover; 3909 Swiss Avenue; Dallas, TX 75204
214/824-3094.
Acknowledge-To: Robin C. Cover <ZRCC1001@SMUVM1.bitnet>

PS. I would like to be added to your IRList.  The topics given in the
ARPANET SIGLIST sound like it's the SIG most centrally focused on my
area of interest.  I am helping supervise a hypertext project, and we
need advice at critical junctures from people in AI, linguistics and
similar sub-disciplines.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 87 10:58:10 PDT
-FROM-
From: Mark Richer <RICHER@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Relational DB toolkits
-BODY-
I'm interested in finding RDB toolkits with full source provided for
programmers. Multi-user capabilities would be very nice. I should say
I'd like source in C. I want to use this on a Macintosh so it has to be
possible to port.
I know of one toolkit for the Mac called inside out which comes as a
linkable object library, but they won't sell source and I don't know
anything about the product (do you?). I'm not even sure they have anything
execpt the MPW Pascal version shipping, but they claim they will support a
host of C and Pascal compilers on the Mac.
Thanks in advance for any comments.
Mark

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 87 19:40 EST
-FROM-
From: STEIN@wharton.upenn.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: network for those interested in social systems sciences
-BODY-
 . . .
Finally, I wonder if I can create a network for that subset of the
irlist (or other lists) who are interested in research in
social systems sciences coming from the same tradition as my
graduate group (exlained in previous memo)--please advise.
. . .
Sincerely Yours,
Eric W. Stein
Social Systems Sciences
The Wharton School
U. Penn
Stein@Wharton.upenn.edu

[Note: I certainly have no objects to others setting up discussion
groups, but am happy to include any subscribers and news in this area
if it comes my way.  Eric is referring to his msg in V3 #36 in case
you have forgotten - sorry for not getting this follow up msg out
sooner. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 87 21:26 EST
-FROM-
From: STEIN@wharton.upenn.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: knowledge classification
-BODY-
 . . .
I'm interested in how types of knowledge are classified; e.g. declarative,
procedural, implicit, tacit, etc.  Does anyone know the seminal works
in this area?  Most current research, especially in AI and in the
expert database systems literature?  I'm interested in the types of
knowledge structures that exist in organizations.
yours,
Eric Stein
U. Penn

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 87 12:12:46 PST
-FROM-
From: richardp@violet.Berkeley.EDU
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Neural networks and IR
-BODY-
                                  Richard Petersen
                                  School of Library and Information Studies
                                  2150 Kittredge St.
                                  Berkeley, CA. 94720
                                  (415) 642-1464
                                  1210 Paru St. #E
                                  Alameda, CA. 94501
                                  (415) 523-9571
                                  richardp@violet.bitnet
Dear Professor Fox,
     I am currently a doctoral  student  at  the  School  of
Library  and Information Studies at U.C. Berkeley.  My field
of research is the application of Neural Networks (also know
as  Parallel Distributed Processing or Connectionism) to the
problem of Information retrieval. I would be  interested  in
contacting  and  corresponding  with anyone who is currently
working on similar kinds of applications.
     I have also heard that you are  currently  compiling  a
collection of test data bases used for information retrieval
studies.  I would be extremely interested in the possibility
of acquiring such test retrieval systems for my research. Of
particular interest are those retrieval data bases  used  by
Salton and Spark-Jones; Cranfield 400, Smart, and Inspec.

[Note: I plan on having a number on a CDROM. I encourage IR researchers,
especially those in Europe who have collections that I do not have, to
contact me so NPL, Cranfield, etc. can be included. - Ed]
     Such a retrieval data bases may serve as a  comparative
benchmark  of  a  neural  networks effectiveness in terms of
other information retrieval systems.   Neural  Networks  are
characterized  by  binary  vector and matrix representations
similar to that used in document-term  matrices.   The  term
based  binary  representation of documents may be formulated
as a distributed representation (parallel  distributed  pro-
cessing)  used  in  neural. networks.  Such a representation
could be  used  in  classification  and  feedback  processes
employed in neural networks.  My particular area of study is
in the application of relevance feedback mechanisms to ther-
modynamic  PDP  models such as the Boltzman machine and Har-
mony theory.
     I would appreciate any help you could  give  me,  espe-
cially  in regard to the acquisition test retrieval systems.
I would also greatly appreciate your evaluation on  the  use
of  such  retrieval  data bases in the application of Neural
Networks to the Information Retrieval problem.

                          Sincerely,
                                           Richard Petersen
                                           richardp@violet.bitnet

[Note: I will make an announcement regarding the CDROM with IR
collections when dates and prices are known.  I suggest you contact
Bruce Croft at croft%cs.umass.edu@relay.cs.net regarding your work
since there may be a conference in part relating to this. - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon Aug 31 16:35:16 1987
-FROM-
From: omepd!littlei!foobar!sdp!sdp@seismo.CSS.GOV
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hypertext
-BODY-
Hello,

 . . .

I'm looking for a program called HYPE.  It's a small hypertext editor written
in Turbo Pascal.

Anyone know of any other interesting PD hypertext code?

Is there a hypertext mailing list or discussion group anywhere on the net?
Is there demand for one?

Thanks,
Scott Peterson
OMO Software
Intel,  Hillsboro OR
sdp.hf.intel.com!sdp
omepd.intel.com!littlei!foobar!sdp!sdp

[Note: I found this msg in AIList Digest and wonder if there were any
replies about the discussion group.  Hypertext certainly seems to me
to be a topic that should be covered by IRList -- I welcome any news
and discussion.  See the following message, for example.  I certainly
hope that we get a number of reports from people going to Hypertext '87,
which will occur very shortly. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Tue, 27 Oct 87 13:11:23 CST
-FROM-
From:         JEFF HUESTIS <C81350JH@WUVMD>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      QUICK BIB ON BROWSING
-BODY-
I've tapped into an interesting part of the database literature lately,
starting from citation number 29 in Salton's selected abstracts in
SIGIR Forum 21(3-4).  The concept of browsing is critical for anyone
trying to model user behavior, and the small body of database browsing
literature seems to offer some useful terminology and ways of looking
at things that are applicable to IR.  There doesn't seem to be a whole
lot out there, so it may be useful to someone if I list a couple of
representative citations, aside from the above.  If this is old hat
to anyone, I'd appreciate contributions.
Larson, James A.  "A visual approach to browsing in a database
   environment," Computer, 19(6):62-71; June 1986.
                 ^^^^^^^^
Motro, Amihai.  "Browsing in a loosely structured database,"
   SIGMOD Record, 14(2):197-207; 1984 (Proceedings of the SIGMOD
   ^^^^^^ ^^^^^^
   Annual Meeting, Boston, June 18-21, 1984, edited by B. Yormark).
A common thread through all this stuff seems to be the acknowledgement
that not every user knows what he wants, but he knows what he likes
when he sees it.  Adaptive search strategies, relevance feedback,
query refinement, etc.
The ideal IR system should work from the initial query: "Uh..."

[Note: In some ways, the concept of hypertext is simply that of
intelligent, personal or aided, browsing.  I feel that there should
not be a split into camps of people working on hypertext and others
working on IR -- we will all benefit if hypertext capabilities are
included in those IR systems where such is possible.  After all, V.
Bush's memex inspired both kinds of effort. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 87 10:00:58 EDT
-FROM-
From: Maureen Searle <msearle@watsol.waterloo.netnorth>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Conference reminder
-BODY-
Would it be possible to include this announcement in the IRList DIGEST?
Thank you.
Maureen Searle
Centre for the New OED
University of Waterloo
msearle%watsol@waterloo.csnet

______________________________________________________________________

            University of Waterloo, Centre for the New OED
                           Waterloo, Ontario

            Conference on the Uses of Large Text Databases
                      November 9th and 19th, 1987

Deadline for registration is October 15.  Because of a rotating Canadian
postal strike, registrations can be made by phone (519) 885-1211 ext 6183
or by electronic mail to mjfehlner%watsol@waterloo.csnet.

Conference fees are:-
     Registration          $90.00 (CDN)      $68.00 (U.S.)
     Proceedings           $20.00 (CDN)      $15.00 (U.S.)
     Mon. evening Dinner   $30.00 (CDN)      $23.00 (U.S.)

Recommended hotel is the Walper Terrace Hotel, 1 King Street West,
Kitchener, Ontario, N2G 2Z9.
Rates are $54.00 (CDN)/night (single) and $60.00 (CDN)/night (double).
Reservations should be made directly with the hotel by calling (519) 745-4321,
specifying that you are attending the conference.
Transportation from Toronto Airport to Kitchener is available from
Airways Transit at a special conference rate of $17.00 (one way).
Reservations can be made by calling (519) 578-0110, again specifying
that you are attending the conference.

If you have further questions please contact the Centre at the above
number or via electronic mail.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 21 Oct 87 20:04 -0300
-FROM-
From: Michael Shepherd <shepherd@cs.dal.cdn>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS  -- Connexions:  linking mind and machine
-BODY-
 . . .
                                 CALL FOR PAPERS
                      Connexions:  linking mind and machine
                  CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE
        The 16th annual conference of the Canadian Association for
        Information Science will convene at the University of Ottawa,
        in Ottawa, Canada, May 12 - 14, 1988.
        This conference will interest information professionals,
        data processing and computer specialists, engineers and others
        involved in documentation, communications and computer science.
        Previously unpublished papers are solicited.  Authors are invited
        to submit papers for presentation in either English or French.
        Topics may include, but will not be limited to,the following:
                - the transfer of information through the information chain
                        from source to supplier to consumer
                - new hardware technologies and software systems and how
                        they connect to existing systems and services
                - new ways of organizing knowledge to expedite its transfer,
                        such as artificial intelligence and expert systems
                - ergonomics and the studies of the interactions between
                        information systems and users
                - the study of information science and its links to other
                        disciplines as diverse as psychology, linguistics,
                        communications, computer science and engineering
        Three copies of a 500 to 1000 word abstract with the author's full
        name, affiliation, address and telephone should be submitted to:
                        Prof. Charles Meadow
                        c/o CAIS 88
                        P.O. Box 38, Station B
                        Ottawa, Ontario
                        Canada
                        K1P 6C3
        Selected papers will be published in the Canadian Journal of
        Information Science.
        IMPORTANT DATES:        15 Nov - Abstract Due
                                30 Dec - Papers Due
        For further information regarding the conference, please contact:
        David Holmes at the address above, or by telephone:  (613)-564-4074
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
38
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 87 10:21:08 EDT
-FROM-
From: "Susanne M. HUMPHREY" <humphrey@MCS.NLM.NIH.GOV>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re:  new edition of abstracts for IRList and SIGIR Forum
-BODY-
 . . .

Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts

Compiled by:

Susanne M. Humphrey, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 20894


The following are citations selected by title and abstract as being
related to Information Retrieval (IR), resulting from a computer
search, using the BRS Information Technologies retrieval service, of
the Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) database produced
by University Microfilms International.

Included are the UM order number and year-month of entry into the
database; author; university, degree, and, if available, number of
pages; title; DAI subject category chosen by the author of the
dissertation; and abstract.  References are sorted first by DAI
subject category and second by author.  Citations denoted by an
MAI reference do not yet have abstracts in the database and refer
to abstracts in the published Masters Abstracts International.

Unless otherwise specified, paper or microform copies of
dissertations may be ordered from University Microfilms
International, Dissertation Copies, Post Office Box 1764, Ann Arbor,
MI 48106; telephone for U.S. (except Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska):
1-800-521-3042, for Canada: 1-800-268-6090.  Price lists and other
ordering and shipping information are in the introduction to the
published DAI.  An alternate source for copies is sometimes
provided at the end of the abstract.

The dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published
with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers
of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright by University
Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced without their
prior permission.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-13877.
AU ACKLEY, DAVID HOWARD.
IN Carnegie-Mellon University Ph.D. 1987, 238 pages.
TI Stochastic iterated genetic hillclimbing.
DE Computer Science.
AB     In the "black box function optimization" problem, a search
   strategy is required to find an extremal point of a function without
   knowing the structure of the function or the range of possible
   function values.  Solving such problems efficiently requires two
   abilities.  On the one hand, a strategy must be capable of learning
   while searching: It must gather global information about the space
   and concentrate the search in the most promising regions.  On the
   other hand, a strategy must be capable of sustained exploration: If
   a search of the most promising region does not uncover a
   satisfactory point, the strategy must redirect its efforts into
   other regions of the space.
       This dissertation describes a connectionist learning machine
   that produces a search strategy called stochastic iterated genetic
   hillclimbing (SIGH).  Viewed over a short period of time, SIGH
   displays a coarse-to-fine searching strategy, like simulated
   annealing and genetic algorithms.  However, in SIGH the convergence
   process is reversible.  The connectionist implementation makes it
   possible to diverge the search after it has converged, and to
   recover coarse-grained information about the space that was
   suppressed during convergence.  The successful optimization of a
   complex function by SIGH usually involves a series of such
   converge/diverge cycles.
       SIGH can be viewed as a generalization of a genetic algorithm
   and a stochastic hillclimbing algorithm, in which genetic search
   discovers starting points for subsequent hillclimbing, and
   hillclimbing biases the population for subsequent genetic search.
   Several search stratgies--including SIGH, hillclimbers, genetic
   algorithms, and simulated annealing--are tested on a set of
   illustrative functions and on a series of graph partitioning
   problems.  SIGH is competitive with genetic algorithms and simulated
   annealing in most cases, and markedly superior in a function where
   the uphill directions usually lead away from the global maximum.  In
   that case, SIGH's ability to pass information from one
   coarse-to-fine search to the next is crucial.  Combinations of
   genetic and hillclimbing techniques can offer dramatic performance
   improvements over either technique alone.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-16349.
AU CHANG, HSI ALEX.
IN The University of Arizona Ph.D. 1987, 407 pages.
TI An architecture for electronic messaging in organizations: a
   distributed problem-solving perspective.
DE Information Science.
AB     This dissertation provides a foundation for electronic
   information management in organizations.  It focuses on the
   relationships among communication, control, and information flows of
   the organization.  The main thesis addresses the question of how
   electronic mail messages may be managed according to their contents,
   ensuring at the same time, the preservation of organizational and
   social relationships.
       A taxonomy for the management of unstructured electronic
   information relevance based on the treatment of information is
   derived from current research.  Among the three paradigms, the
   information processing, the information distribution, and the
   information sharing paradigms, the inadequacy of the first two is
   recognized, and the treatment of information in its active mode is
   proposed.  This taxonomy can be used to quickly differentiate one
   research from another and evaluate its adequacy.
       Three concepts, four cornerstones, and an architecture
   constitute our framework of information relevance management.  The
   cornerstones are knowledge of the organization, knowledge of the
   individual, information construction, and information interpretation.
   Through knowledge of the organization and the individual, the
   machine production systems are able to distribute and manage
   information according to the logic of human production systems.  The
   other two cornerstones together improve the unity of interpretation
   among the organizational members.
       The physical architecture can adapt a number of applications,
   each of which, may not only have different knowledge presentations
   and inference mothods, but also may co-exist in the system
   simultaneously.  An integrated knowledge-based electronic messaging
   system, the AI-MAIL system, is built, tested, and evaluated through
   a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture and
   its applicability to the real-world environment.
       The three operating levels, interorganizational,
   intraorganizational, and individual, are illustrated through a study
   of the U.S.  Army.  From three large scale field studies, the
   existing AUTODIN I system, a backbone of the Army's communications,
   is analyzed and evaluated to illustrate the applicability and
   benefits of the three operating levels.
       This dissertation contributes to the field of Management
   Information Systems by offering a methodology, a taxonomy, a new
   paradigm, a framework, and a system for information management and a
   method of adaptive organizational design.  In addition, it points
   toward future research directions.  Among them are research to deal
   with ethical issues, organizational research, knowledge engineering,
   multi-processor configuration, and internal protocols for
   applications.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-16352.
AU FJELDSTAD, OYSTEIN DEVIK.
IN The University of Arizona Ph.D. 1987, 394 pages.
TI On the reapportionment of cognitive responsibilities in information
   systems.
DE Information Science.
AB     As the number of information system users increases, we are
   witnessing a related increase in the complexity and the diversity of
   their applications.  The increasing functional complexity amplifies
   the degree of functional and technical understanding required of the
   user to make productive use of the application tools.  Emerging
   technologies, increased and varied user interests and radical
   changes in the nature of applications give rise to the opportunity
   and necessity to re-examine the proper apportionment of cognitive
   responsibilities in human-system interaction.
       We present a framework for the examination of the allocation of
   cognitive responsibilities in information systems.  These cognitive
   tasks involve skills associated with the models and tools that are
   provided by information systems and the domain knowledge and problem
   knowledge that are associated with the user.  The term cognitor is
   introduced to refer to a cognitive capacity for assuming such
   responsibilities.  These capacities are resident in the human user
   and they are now feasible in information system architectures.
   Illustrations are given of how this framework can be used in
   understanding and assessing the apportionment of responsibilities.
   Implications of shifting and redistributing cognitive task from the
   system-user environment to the system environment are discussed.
   Metrics are provided to assess the degree of change under
   alternative architectures.
       An architecture for the design of alternative responsibility
   allocations, named Reapportionment of Cognitive Activities, (RCA),
   is presented.  The architecture describes knowledge and
   responsibilities associated with facilitating dynamic allocation of
   cognitive responsibilities.  Knowledge bases are used to support and
   describe alternative apportionments.  RCA illustrates how knowledge
   representations, search techniques and dialogue management can be
   combined to accommodate multiple cooperating cognitors, each
   assuming unique roles, in an effort to share the responsibilities
   associated with the use of an information system.  A design process
   for responsibility allocation is outlined.
       Examples of alternative responsibility allocation feasible
   within this architecture are provided.  Cases implementing the
   architecture are described.  We advocate treating the allocation of
   cognitive responsibilities as a design variable and illustrate
   through the architecture and the cases the elements necessary in
   reapportioning these responsibilities in information systems
   dialogues.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-13959.
AU MASTERS, GARY EVERETT.
IN North Texas State University Ph.D. 1987, 175 pages.
TI The effects of increased equipment speed on online database
   searching practices.
DE Library Science.
AB     This study reports changes in online database searching at North
   Texas State University when equipment speed was increased.  Data
   were from database vendor invoices and price and sale data of online
   equipment.  The hypotheses examined the relationship between the
   decrease in the cost of online equipment and the change to faster
   online equipment and the change in the number of databases that
   changed for online types.  The change in equipment was related to
   changes in the number of offline prints per hour, the average time
   per search, the average number of descriptors per search, the number
   of searches per month, and the rank order of database use over the
   studied period.  The increase in the number of databases with billed
   types was related to the number of online billed types produced.
   The number of prints was related to the number of billed types.
   Time spent online was examined for annual seasonal cycles.  The
   major statistical tool was time-series analysis, although other
   methods were applied.
       The conclusions were that searching practices at NTSU changed
   when the equipment changed in 1982.  The major effect was the
   increase in online types and the decrease in offline prints.  The
   number of searches per month, the number of descriptors per search,
   the rank order of databases searched, and the average time per
   search did not change.  The decrease in cost for online equipment
   was correlated to an increase in its speed and in the number of
   databases with online type charges.  This increase in type charges
   was linked to an increase in the number of online billed types and a
   decrease in prints.
       Based on the conclusions, the following specific recommendations
   were made: (1) maintain access to several database vendors, (2) use
   a modular system for searching, (3) keep complete records of search
   activities, (4) evaluate online search activities constantly, (5)
   establish and support user groups, and (6) provide continuing
   training for searchers.

AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG87-15163.
AU STANSBERY, MARY KAY MATTHEW.
IN Texas Woman's University Ph.D. 1986, 184 pages.
TI Attitudes of selected graduate faculty toward the use of library
   funds to pay for electronic access to scholarly journals.
DE Library Science.
AB     Current and future technology can affect the allocation of
   resources normally committed to the acquisition of hardcopy
   scholarly journals.  Data from the study of full-time graduate
   teaching faculty at seven academic institutions in the North Texas
   area show the effects of three variables upon their attitudes
   towards reallocation of library resources to spend less money on
   subscriptions to scholarly journals and to spend more money to pay
   for online access and searching of bibliographic and full-text
   databases with online or offline printing capabilities.  Of the
   three variables--seniority and age of faculty (tenured vs.
   non-tenured), discipline (pure science vs.  social
   science-humanities), and level and intensity of graduate degree
   granting program (master's vs.  doctoral)--the discipline in which
   the faculty members were based (pure science vs.  social
   science-humanities) proved to be the significant factor in
   accounting for differing faculty attitudes toward the issue.
       While the majority of the respondents indicated they would
   regret not having local ownership of hardcopy scholarly journals in
   their university library, the majority of them also indicated that
   they supported the use of library funds to pay for guaranteed access
   to full-text scholarly journal databases with offline or online
   printing capabilities rather than to purchase hardcopy journals to
   be housed in their university library.  This suggests the time may
   be right for academic librarians to take the lead in educating their
   faculties to today's technological and fiscal realities in the world
   of information procurement for research.  Perhaps the increasing
   application of and presence of CD-ROM technologies in libraries will
   serve to bridge the psychological gap between local ownership of
   hardcopy and the viewing of materials on a cathode ray tube (CRT) or
   computer generated printouts.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
39
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 14 Oct 87 10:25:04 CST
-FROM-
From:         JEFF HUESTIS <C81350JH@WUVMD>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      LEXICON DEVELOPMENT
-BODY-
I've been doing some keyword work with our catalog (an online KWOC
index has been the only thing ... possible to do at this time
because of other commitments on programmer time) which, of course,
included some word counting for development of a "stoplist".  The
results are, not surprisingly, somewhat different from the distribution
found in the Brown Corpus, the top 400 words from which formed our
original stoplist.  I thought something like this approach would be
useful in doing anything with term-weighting.  However, it would
presumably duplicate the resource you already have in your VTLS data.

[Note: we could generate such statistics but it may differ from yours
due to the difference between library collections - that might be
interesting to see. - Ed]
On the other hand, we also have several million log records from user
searches in our online catalog.  The subject searches would, like
the catalog data, be skewed toward information retrieval, as compared
with the Brown Corpus, and might be useful as representing the concept
space of real people, as opposed to librarians, computer scientists, and
other information workers.  Again, the value of the data, as I see it,
is primarily related to term weighting.  Let me know if you're
interested in this data, either in raw or condensed form.  . . .
Of course, given that you're working with AILIST, maybe the Brown
Corpus is the most appropriate text for word counting, other than the
digests themselves.  But comparing the different distributions may
still be useful, if someone wants to do it.

[Note: this might be of interest to others - has any one developed
statistics of this type? Does anyone have comments?  One thing I might
be able to do is to put up a merged word list with frequency info.
from various sources, on one of the CDROMs we will be mastering - let
me know if anyone thinks these statistics might be of value for
weighting experiments. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 87 23:48:02 EDT
From: dws@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Don W. Saklad)
Subject: barriers to library access
Subtle pervasive censorship by library officials at our Boston Public Library
still continues after the appointment of the new director.  Savvy visitors
and users ask for documentation such as annual reports and library system
manuals so to know the system and thus develop effective and efficient
techniques like people who've made careers in libraries.  Reference services
decline these inquiries and related requests sometimes as whimsical or
intrusive.
The point is that the 130 year old public library should conserve and maintain
archives.  Even our library board's public meetings should be accessible,
instead of the intimidation that has discouraged civic interest.  Also
marketing the library should encourage civic participation with comment,
criticism, praise and suggestions.  BPL public relations seems to be this
formulated paternalistic approach to constituent groups that through long
experience they know what's best for everyone without asking.
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:     Wed, 7 Oct 87 14:31 N
From:     <CELEX@HNYMPI52>
Subject:  CELEX lexical databases
To:       foxea@vtvax3
X-Original-To:  foxea@vtvax3, CELEX
We think the work of the CELEX project may be of interest to the readers
of your digest, and would be grateful if you could include this short
notice in a future edition.
With thanks, Marcel Bingley
             Gavin Burnage
                           -- CELEX Nijmegen --
================================================================================
              C E L E X   -  CENTRE FOR LEXICAL INFORMATION
              =============================================
  CELEX is a new and rapidly-developing project undertaken by several Dutch
  institutions which aims to provide extensive information on the English
  and Dutch languages for use in many types of research. Detailed
  information on orthography, morphology, phonology, word frequency,
  syntactical categories etc. has been collected and collated from several
  sources and, by means of the ORACLE relational database management
  system, structured to form a highly flexible and wide-ranging source of
  lexical information.
  Newsletters detailing the development and current standing of the first
  stage of the CELEX project (the first stage covers all but semantic
  information, which will be added in the second stage beginning 1989) are
  now available to anyone who is interested. If you have not already been
  placed on our mailing list, then please send your surface and electronic
  addresses to :
                      CELEX@HNYMPI52
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date:         Sat, 17 Oct 87 15:42:53 DNT
From:         Jakob Nielsen  Tech Univ of Denmark <DATJN@NEUVM1>
Subject:      Announcement of ACM CHI'88 Workshop on user interface consistency


                            Call for Participation

                              CHI'88 Workshop on
              COORDINATING USER INTERFACES FOR CONSISTENCY

A limited attendance, invitational workshop on Coordinating User Interfaces
for Consistency is being organized for the ACM CHI'88 Conference in
Washington, DC. The workshop will be held on Monday, May 16, 1988.

The goal of the workshop is to discuss methods for coordinating the design of
user interfaces for consistency and to produce a set of recommendations for
people responsible for this aspect of user interface design. This workshop will

not cover the subject of user interface standards in the sense of how a
standard is arrived at or what standards should be recommended. (The workshop
will focus on HOW user interfaces can be made to look and feel similar
rather than WHAT they should look and feel like.)

One of the most important aspects of usability is consistency in user
interfaces. Consistency should apply both within the individual application
and across complete computer systems and product families. Practical methods
for coordinating user interface design are not well known. Issues of interest
would include:

   * What we mean by consistency
   * User Interface Architectures
   * In-house standards
   * Methods for quality assurance of compliance with consistency rules
   * Methods for coordinating small-scale projects
   * Methods for coordinating large-scale projects
   * Automated methods for checking user interface consistency

Participation in the workshop will be limited to twelve people. Individuals
wishing to attend the workshop may request an invitation by submitting a
two-page position paper. Applicants should also briefly list major projects
in user interface coordination in which they have participated.

Position papers are due no later than
                  March 1, 1988
Four copies, single-spaced should be sent (use airmail to ensure arrival by
March 1) to:
  Jakob Nielsen
  Department of Computer Science
  Technical University of Denmark
  DK-2800 Lyngby Copenhagen
  DENMARK

  Telephone: International access +45-1-38 23 20
  BITnet:  datJN@NEUVM1
  ArpaNET: datJN%NEUVM1.bitnet@csnet-relay

Please submit position papers in hardcopy.

Notification to invited participants will be mailed by airmail March 15,
1988. Invited participants will also be sent copies of the selected position
papers along with a final agenda for the workshop.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 87 10:05:26 EDT
Subject: Reply to your message and a job posting
From: j.a.king%dayton.ncr.com@RELAY.CS.NET
 . . .

Enclosed is a job-posting for a position at NCR R&D.  If you know of any
doctoral students or other interested parties, please forward this posting.
 . . .
Thanks.  Jim King  j.a.king@dayton.ncr.com
                               Job Posting
NCR Corporation
Available Position in Advanced Software Development
October 15, 1987
Consulting Analyst - AI
Resposibilities:  Programming in the areas of intelligent interface design,
                  information retrieval, planning, knowledge-based systems
                  and other areas of advanced office information systems -
                  through the use of object-oriented techniques.
Preferred Background: Applicant should possess a solid background in UNIX
                  AI workstation environments, specifically Symbolics.
                  Experience with object-oriented programming, e.g. Flavors,
                  Smalltalk, Common Loops, C++, etc. is required.  Minimum
                  of a B.S. in Computer Science and two years experience
                  required, graduate level degree preferred.
Location:         NCR Corporate Research and Development Division in Dayton,
                  Ohio.
Contact:          Nelson Hazeltine or James King at (513)-445-1060 or 1090.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1987  18:46 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

	Date: Friday, 2 October 1987  16:17-EDT
	From: Paul Resnick <pr at ht.ai.mit.edu>
	Re:   AI Revolving Seminar-- Michael Kashket

Thursday 8, October  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom

		    The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series

			 Order Parser Word A Free-

			 Mike Kashket
  			 (kash@oz.ai.mit.edu)

                         MIT AI Lab


Free-word order languages (where the words of a sentence may be spoken
in virtually any order with little effect on meaning) pose a great
problem for traditional natural language parsers.  Standard, rule-based
parsers have operated with some degree of success on fixed-word order
languages (e.g., English), relying on the order between words to
drive the construction of the parse tree.  In order to cover the varying
sequences of free word order, however, these parsers have had to use
grammars that contain one rule for each permutation of a sentence.  The
result was a linguistically uninteresting parse that did not even
represent the basic distinction between the verb's subject and object.

A shift from rule-based to  principle-based parsing seems to be the
answer.  A parser grounded on a linguistically principled theory---in
this case, the recently developed Government-Binding theory---has a
grammar that consists of independent modules, each representing a
different facet of the language.  For order phenomena two
representations are mandated:  one that encodes linear precedence, and
one that encodes hierarchical, syntactic relations (such as subject and
object).  In this scheme, linear ordering is represented only where it
is syntactically relevant.

This new parsing technique should also work for fixed-word order
languages.  Here we take advantage of the parameters of GB theory.
The claim is that, rather than allowing unconstrained differences
between grammars, we can account for the variation among languages of
the world by encoding the grammar for each language with only a simple,
finite list of parameter settings.  For ordering phenomena, there are
two parameters:  the part of speech that identifies the subject and the
object, and whether words or morphemes are involved.

In this talk, I will present an implemented, GB-based parser that
handles Warlpiri, a free-word order aboriginal language of central
Australia.  I will also discuss the promise of this approach for
handling fixed-order languages such as English.


Ngakarnanyarra nyanyi.
(All come.)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1987  09:58 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

	Date: Monday, 19 October 1987  17:51-EDT
	From: Paul Resnick <pr at ht.ai.mit.edu>
	Re:   AI Revolving Seminar Thursday-- Janet Kolodner


Thursday 22, October  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom

		        The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series


			 Experience, Memory, and Reasoning

			 Janet Kolodner


    Much of the reasoning people do is based on previous experiences
similar to their current situation.  The process of using a previous
experience to reason about a current one is called case-based
reasoning.  In case-based reasoning, a reasoner remembers a
previous case and then adapts it to fit the current situation.
A reasoner that uses case-based reasoning can take reasoning
shortcuts, avoid previously-made errors, and focus on important
parts of a problem and important knowledge that might otherwise
have been missed.

    To build usable case-based reasoning systems on the computer,
we must discover the best ways to make case-based inferences,
how to best organize and retrieve cases in memory, and how to
integrate case-based with other reasoning methods.

    In this talk, I will present several case-based reasoning
methods and present some of the problems involved in developing
case-based problem solving systems.  Examples will come from
several expert and common-sense domains, and examples from
several experimental programs will be shown.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Wed 14 Oct 87 17:42:31-PDT
From: Emma Pease <Emma@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, Oct. 15, 3:3 [Extract - Ed]

              External Language and Internal Representation
                                Pat Hayes
                          (Hayes.pa@xerox.com)
                               October 22

   Language evolved, and is used, for communication between intelligent
   agents.  Internally represented information is used quite differently,
   and different assumptions must be made in thinking about ways of
   encoding it for use inside a mind.  In particular, communication can
   assume an intelligent decoder on the other end but is severely
   constrained by the bandwidth of speech, while internal representations
   seem to have much wider channels of communication available between
   their component parts but must be explicit and detailed to an extent
   that would be inappropriate for a `natural' language.  I will argue
   that general talk of `information' ignores this important distinction
   and is therefore sometimes confusing in discussions of situated
   agency.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu 22 Oct 87 09:09:09-PDT
From: Emma Pease <Emma@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, Oct. 22, 3:4 [Extract - Ed]

                  An Introduction to Situated Automata
                         Part I: Basic Concepts
                            Stan Rosenschein
                               October 29

   This is the first of two lectures on the situated-automata approach to
   the analysis and design of embedded systems.  This approach seeks to
   ground our understanding of embedded systems in a rigorous, objective
   analysis of their informational properties, where information is
   modeled mathematically in terms of correlations between states of the
   system and conditions in the environment. In this talk we motivate the
   general framework, present the central mathematical ideas on how
   information is carried in the states of automata, and relate the
   mathematical properties of the model to key theoretical issues in AI
   including the nature of knowledge, its representation in machines, the
   role of syntactic deduction, "nonmonotonic" reasoning, and the
   relation of knowledge and action.  Some general technological
   implications of the approach, including reduced reliance on
   conventional symbolic inference and increased opportunities for
   parallelism, will be discussed.

   The second lecture will describe the application of the
   situated-automata perspective to specific problems arising in the
   design of integrated intelligent agents, including problems of
   perception, planning and action selection, and linguistic
   communication.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
40
-DATE-
Date:  2 Nov 87 14:47 PST
-FROM-
From: William Daul / McAir / McDonnell-Douglas Corp  <WBD.MDC@OFFICE-1.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: path to send to IRList submitter
-BODY-
There was a mail item from the following contributor to the IRList Digest:

   From:    Donald Case                  <IIN8PXB@UCLAMVS>

How can I address him from my world on the MIL/ARPnet?  Thanks,  --Bi//

[Note: Bill, thanks for sending on the message.  Donald Case, whose
BITNET address is shown above, and who I believe is receiving IRList
that way, can use the address shown at the top of this and other
digests to send in news from MIL/ARPAnet.  That is:
   Internet or CSNET: fox@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu
Now, if there is any problem,
	fox%vtcs1.cs.vt.edu@relay.cs.net
should certainly get here. We expect that "vt" will have full domain
support within the next month, but I am sure that csnet-relay can get
mail to us now if mail is sent through them. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 2 Nov 1987  07:27 EST (Mon)
-FROM-
From: Wayne McGuire <Wayne%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Missing Issues
-BODY-
Ed,

I don't think issue 36 reached me here at MIT-OZ.  Could you send me a
copy?  I am especially interested in the topic of literature
browsers and hypertext.

[Note: I hope #36 made it through! - Ed]

Are you having trouble in general reaching MIT-OZ with IRLIST?  The
"To" field in the most recent digest is slightly peculiar:



-VOL-
3

-N-
37
-DATE-
Date:         Sun,  1 Nov 87 17:25 EST
Reply-To:     IRList Digest <IRLIST-L%VTVM2.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Sender:       IRList Digest <IRLIST-L%VTVM2.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
-FROM-
From:         "Edward A. Fox" <FOX%VTCS1.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      IRList Digest V3 #37
-TO-
To:           "(no name)" <ingria%mit-oz@mc.lcs.mit.edu>,
              "(no name)" <jcma@mc.lcs.mit.edu>,
              "(no name)" <jeremy%mit-oz@mc.lcs.mit.edu>,
              "(no name)" <mdcg.wayne%mit-oz@mc.lcs.mit.edu>,
              "(no name)" <sun@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
-BODY-
[Note: First, note hypertext discussion below.  Second, yes, there has
been trouble with some mail to MIT. They keep retiring machines and
changing names -- I think the sun@mc... address was routed to a
machine that is defunct.  Finally, I should say that the BITNET
Listserv handlers seem to send out mail in batches to people with
somewhat similar addresses, and that you should not be surprised by
that.  But I hope people who get mail to "no name" will tell me their names
so we can be more personalized in our service. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 87 10:05:04 PST
-FROM-
From: utt%closet.DEC@decwrl.dec.com (Mary Utt)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: RE:      IRList Digest V3 #37
-BODY-
I have been receiving issues 37, 38, 39 repeatedly over the last 24 hours,
to the tune of (I estimate) 25 copies of each! Is this happening to
other people? Have you any idea where the problem lies (your end or
mine)? Can you turn the faucet off?

Thanks.

Mary Utt
DIGITAL

[Note: see next msg from person on this end who has been most helpful
with handling mail problems etc. for IRList - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	VTCS1::JARRELLRA    "Ronald A. Jarrell" 12-NOV-1987 12:31
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	RE: Ron - help!  Can you find out the problem with Listserv and fix it?
-BODY-
It's not listserv.  Wiscvm must be believing that they aren't delivering and
trying again.  But in each case her system is actually delivering them to
her.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri,  6 Nov 87  20:14:46 EST
-FROM-
From: nutto@UMass (Andy Steinberg)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList coverage
-BODY-
I saw that you run an information retrieval list. I have a question,
are each of the topics seperate digests or are all the topics incorporated
in the same list? The particular one I am interested in is cognitive
psychology. Thank you.
                                     nutto%umass.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
                                     nutto%umass.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu

[Note: As long as it relates in some way to information retrieval,
that is fine.  I recently had a msg from someone asking to be removed
from the list because they felt it was not focussed enough.  I hope
that does not bother others - I try to include things that relate to
my view of what IR is all about.  I personally have a wide variety of
interests that I believe do relate, and hope that IR will become more
widely taught and receive more support from industrial and
governmental agencies. It strikes me as odd that ACM SIGIR actually
lost members last year, at a time when interest in information
retrieval and related issues (e.g., hypertext, hypermedia, CDROM,
etc.) is rapidly growing.  Perhaps more people should join SIGIR and
that organization can thereby change and adapt to address a broader
community - witness SIGGRAPH! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 01 Nov 87 18:16:55 EST
-FROM-
From:         "James H. Coombs" <JAZBO@BROWNVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Hypertext
-TO-
To:           ZRCC1001@SMUVM1
-BODY-
You mentioned that you are supervising a Hypertext project.  Can you give
us a description of the project?  Thanks.  --Jim

Dr. James H. Coombs
Adjunct Lecturer in English
Software Engineer, Research, IRIS (as of December)
Brown University
Acknowledge-To: <JAZBO@BROWNVM>

[Note: this refers to the message in V3 #37 where Robin C. Cover
mentions in his PS that he is working on a hypertext project. Robin,
can you tell us more? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Wed, 04 Nov 87 09:20:43 EST
-FROM-
From:         Len Simutis <SIMUTIS@MIAMIU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Hyppertext '87
-BODY-
In a recent issue of IRList you made passing reference to Hypertext '87.
Do you know whom I could contact for more details about its wherabouts
and whenabouts?

[Note: It is going on now, Nov. 13-15, at Univ. of NC, Chapel Hill.
Contacts are:
   John B. Smith, Dept. of Comp. Sci., (919) 962-5021, jbs@unc.csnet
   Frank Halasz, MCC, (512) 338-3648, halasz@mcc.csnet
By the way, this was announced several times earlier and I did reply
immediately to Len in case you wonder why I am sending out this news
now.  I have asked several people to: send in a personal report to
IRList on the conference, tell me how we can obtain copies of the
proceedings, and give a fuller report for next SIGIR Forum. - Ed]

By the way--I'm a former Tech person. I was there from 71-84 in the
College of Architecture and Urban Studies. Sorry to see all the really
bad publicity that's come out of late about Tech. It's a great school
and I hope long-term that you can put all this stuff behind you.

[Note: Thanks for the good word about Viginia Tech (VPI&SU).  I think the
athletics situation is getting straightened out.  We are finishing up
a university wide self-study, and so I think the faculty input from
that will help the university make it through the transition of
getting a new Provost and President.  I think there are exciting
opportunities for growth here in the future. - Ed]

Best wishes

Len Simutis, Dean
The Graduate School and Research
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 01 Nov 87 18:22:51 EST
-FROM-
From:         "James H. Coombs" <JAZBO@BROWNVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Hypertext
-BODY-
Since hypertext was mentioned several times in the latest issue of IR-LIST, we
should make sure that everyone knows about the recent SIGCUE Outlook special
issue on Information Retrieval (vol.  19, no.  3/4, Spring/Summer 1987).  This
issue contains an article on an hypertext educational project:  "Creating
Hypermedia Materials for English Literature Students," Yankelovich, Landow,
and Cody.  Landow will also be presenting a paper on "Relationally Encoded
Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext" at Hypertext 87.  (Apologies to any
of my Brown/IRIS colleagues who are also presenting papers; only Prof.
Landow has given me a copy so far.)

Hypertext is not my specialty.  Hopefully, you will all soon see my article on
"Markup Systems and the Future of Scholarly Text Processing" in the November
CACM (with Allen H. Renear and Steven J. DeRose).  At the end of this semester,
however, I put down my chalk to join our Institute for Research in Information
and Scholarship, where I will be working with a hypermedia system:  Intermedia.
(A hypertext system supports non-sequential writings; a hypermedia system
supports non-sequential organization of information in a variety of media:
text, graphics, video, etc.)

Oh, my first project will be an on-line dictionary for Intermedia.  If anyone
has pointers to suffix-stripping algorithms, please send them along.

Thanks.  --Jim

Dr. James H. Coombs
Adjunct Lecturer in English
Software Engineer, Research, IRIS (as of December)
Brown University
Acknowledge-To: <JAZBO@BROWNVM>

[Note: Jim, sounds like you have indeed been busily involved in
interesting hypermedia related projects!  Thanks for the citations --
the SIGCUE special issue as a whole is interesting too.  I have a
variety of algorithms for stemming used in information retrieval that
we use here, and can give you two other names, Bill Frakes at Bell
Labs in Holmdel (who did his dissertation at Syracuse on stemming in
information retrieval) and Donna Harman, at NLM Lister Hill Center,
who is now working on further testing of stemming methods.  We are
also now working on building up a morphological analyzer to go along
with the Collins dictionary fact base we put together here.  Can you
tell more about your project and what will be in the on-line
dictionary? - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 87 11:01:14 EST
-FROM-
From: mnetor!lsuc!dave@uunet.UU.NET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hypertext discussion group
-BODY-
> From: omepd!littlei!foobar!sdp!sdp@seismo.CSS.GOV
> Subject: Hypertext

> Is there a hypertext mailing list or discussion group anywhere on the net?

A new Usenet newsgroup called comp.sys.mac.hypercard was
created a few days ago.  It's specific to the Macintosh
Hypercard program.

David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto
dave@lsuc.uucp

[Note: Dave, thanks for the news.  I will be happy to continue
handling discussion on other aspects of hypertext and hypermedia, and
to also accept submissions relating to hypercard if people cannot
get onto Usenet.  By the way, Info-Mac Digest also has been handling
discussion of Hypercard. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 87 15:46:03 mst
-FROM-
From: ihnp4!alberta!auvax!kevinc (Kevin Crocker Athabasca University)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: IRList Digest V3 #37
-BODY-
Dear Dr. Fox,

I have just perused the above IRL digest and find it fascinating.  I am
especially interested in hypertext type applications.  I noticed a
message from Scott Peterson about hypertext mailing lists on the net.
As one of the people who originally sent a message over the net asking
for info on hypertext (which Scott responded to and thus he set up a
mailing list on his machine, which alas I have been unable to access
through bounced mail) I feel very enthused and ivigorated about the
explosion of this form of info massage.

I have a small (it should only require something like an ATT 6386 with
about 800 Mb of storage) research project that I want to do but lack
the wherewithall to implement it.  I would appreciate getting in
contact with those people who might offer advice etc.

This digest looks very promising.

ihnp4!alberta!auvax!kevinc (Kevin Crocker Athabasca University)
Do our employers have opinions or is that what we get paid for!

[Note: you call 800Mb small?  Tell us more about your research
project! - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-FROM-
From:	VTCS1::FOX          "Edward A. Fox" 10-NOV-1987 16:09
-SUBJECT-
Subj:	Hypercard
-BODY-
Tim Oren of Apple Computer will give a talk next Tue, 17 Nov, 10am-noon,
McB201. Actually, the talk will probably be an hour but we have the room
in case discussion results.

He will discuss Hypercard, which runs on the Mac II systems.  He is
doing R&D in the area of hypertext, and has worked with file systems
and drivers on Mac's so should be able to answer a variety of questions
from those interested in the Mac's (though he has not worked much with A/UX).

Everyone is invited, and you can let students know though the room is
somewhat small.  Hope to see you - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
41
-DATE-
Date:         Mon, 5 Oct 1987 12:37 CST
-FROM-
From:         Robin C. Cover <ZRCC1001@SMUVM1>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      IRList Request (for Directory of Archived Digests)
-BODY-
Ed:  Please forgive me if there's a way to request a directory of archived
digests of the IRList discussions.  I would like to receive the digests from
the past four months -- assuming that the files are of reasonable, or even of
substantial size. Could you indicate if there's a way to request these without
bothering you?  Many thanks!  Professor Robin C. Cover

[Note: I hope I sent you enough - please let me know if you want more.
I have not made a type of yearly index or directory - would someone
like to volunteer to do that or is there need for me to do so?
I still hope to set up an archive for FTP access but it will probably
be a few months at least before we can do that.  It might be possible
to keep a listserv archive for recent issues, perhaps starting in V4,
if there is interest.  Meanwhile, I and others keep their own archives
and you can tap into or request from those. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 87 13:40:44 CST
From: Richard Pollard <rpollard@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Subject: Text retrieval progs
Would it be possible to post the following request for information on IRList
Digest?
I recently saw an announcement in a microcomputer trade weekly about the text
retrieval programs FastFind and WordCruncher.  The note suggests that these
programs use a "bit map algorithm" approach rather than an inverted file.
I'd be interested in hearing from people who are familiar with either of these
programs.  Exactly what approach do they use?  I'd also like to know if there
are any IR programs for microcomputers that use text signatures for retrieval.
Thanks.
Richard Pollard
School of Library and Information Science
University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201
<rpollard@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>

[Note: I know that there is work at Univ. Waterloo, Univ. Maryland,
and I think also at NC State on signature files - can we get any
comments from those places or others? - Ed]
>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 87 14:51 EST
From: Jan Walker <JWalker@YUKON.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>
Subject: need an address

You seem to be the clearing-house who knows where
everybody is so maybe you can help me!  At the SIGIR
conference in June I was talking with Martin Dillon from
OCLC.  I didn't get a list of attendees at the conference
so I don't know how to contact him.  Do you know an
address for OCLC or can you give me a pointer?

[Note: OCLC is 6565 Frantz Rd., Dublin, Ohio 43017-0702 (614) 764-6000
I was told that they will have a BITNET node soon and believe they are
on UUCPnet too but don't have any addresses for those. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 01 Nov 87 18:04:47 EST
-FROM-
From:         "James H. Coombs" <JAZBO@BROWNVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      RDB Tools
-TO-
To:           RICHER@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU
-BODY-
C-Tree from Faircom provides a b-tree system that can be used as a basis for
developing a relational dbms.  They have an excellent reputation, and their
code looks very good.  I have not used the system yet, so I cannot give a full
evaluation.  They have a report generator, R-Tree, and are appraently working
on query facilities.  They advertise regularly in the PC magazines, and you
can get a substantial discount from Programmer's Connection.  C-Tree has
been ported to a variety of systems, possibly already to the Mac.  (Ports
are by individual developers though, not from Faircom.)
Oh, yes, already to the Macintosh.
FairCom
2606 Johnson Drive
Columbia, MO 65203
(314) 445-6833
Stay in touch.  I will be developing a dbms as soon as I finish my editor.
>-Jim
Dr. James H. Coombs
Adjunct Lecturer in English
Software Engineer, Research, IRIS (as of December)
Brown University
Acknowledge-To: <JAZBO@BROWNVM>

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: 4 November 1987, 20:37:14 CST
From: Leff (Southern Methodist University)           E1AR0002 at SMUVM1
Subject: U. Melbourne bibliography for compact disc

Are you aware of the University of Melbourne bibliography for possible
inclusion in your Compact Disk.  It is abuot eight megabytes of BIB
format materials including various magazines, conferences, technical
report lists and the like that might be useful to add.  It includes
my bibliography series sent to AILIST and my Technical Report List
Series.

[Note: thanks for the tip - I have been trying to get a message
through to them to ask about this. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 87 09:28:53 CST
From: Richard Pollard <rpollard@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Subject: CD-ROM collection
I would like to express an interest in your proposal for putting several IR
test collections on CD-ROM.  I think the idea is an excellent one and would be
interested in purchasing the discs for research purposes.
My research interest is focused on comparing retrieval methods for both
bibliographic records and full text.  This includes use of conventional and
non-conventional approaches (such as text signatures).  I think the discs
would also be useful for teaching courses in IR.
To answer some of your questions:  the Cranfield collection would be most
useful if you could get hold of it; indexed as well as text forms would also
be useful if that were possible; queries and relevance judgements would be of
great value.
A couple of questions about accessing the data on the discs.
1. We currently use Philips CM100 CD-ROM drives, do you anticipate that the
   discs will be compatible with these drives?
2. We have a variety of discs here (Wilson Disc, OCLC ERIC, ISI Science
   Citation Index, DIALOG ERIC, etc) and each uses its own retrieval software
   and its own device drivers to allow MS-DOS to access the CD-ROM drive.  Do
   you anticipate allowing a standard device driver such as the Microsoft MS-
   DOS extensions to be used with your discs or will they use yet another
   proprietary system?
Richard Pollard
School of Library and Information Science
University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201
<rpollard@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
[Note: I expect the discs will have to come with drivers for at least
the most popular drives like Philips, Sony, Hitachi. Yes, we will use
the Microsoft Extensions with new "High Sierra" standard.  Any other
requests? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From:	VTCS1::JARRELLRA    "Ronald A. Jarrell"  9-NOV-1987 15:09
To:	FOX,JARRELLRA
Subj:	got this from the newswire

Reut 11/02       ATARI (ATC) ADDS CD PLAYER AND WORKSTATION


    LAS VEGAS, NOV 2 - ATARI CORP SAID IT INTRODUCED A COMPACT DISK PLAYER, AND
A HIGH-PERFORMANCE WORKSTATION TO ITS COMPUTER PRODUCT LINE.
    THE PRODUCTS WERE INTRODUCED AT THE COMDEX/FALL'87 COMPUTER SHOW HERE.
    OTHER NEW PRODUCTS INCLUDE A CONNECTIVITY SYSTEM, DESKTOP PUBLISHING
SOFTWARE AND TWO MODELS OF PC-COMPATIBLES.
    THE CD PRODUCT PLAYS MUSIC AND CONNECTS TO THE COMPANY'S ST AND MEGA
COMPUTERS THROUGH A COMMUNICATIONS CHANNEL TO TRANSMIT DATA.
    THE CD PLAYER WILL AVAILABLE EARLY NEXT YEAR FOR ABOUT 600 DLRS.
    THE COMPANY SAID ITS NEW WORKSTATION, KNOWN AS ABAQ, RUNS TEN TIMES FASTER
THAN A PC AT MADE BY INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORP (IBM).
    IT DESCRIBED THE ABAQ AS A MICRO VERSION OF A SUPERCOMPUTER.
    THE CONNECTIVITY SYSTEM FROM ATARI CAN CONNECT UP TO 17 PERSONAL COMPUTERS
IN A STAR CONFIGURATION USING OFF-THE-SHELF TELEPHONE WIRE, THE COMPANY SAID.
    THE SYSTEM IS COMPATIBLE WITH IBM PCS AND COMPATIBLES AND ALLOWS A
CONNECTION OF APPLE MACINTOSHES, MADE BY APPLE COMPUTER INC (AAPL.O). THE
COMPANY ALSO SAID IT EXPANDED ITS LINE OF PC COMPATIBLE COMPUTERS BY ADDING TWO
MODELS WITH MORE POWER AND FEATURES THAN THE IBM PC AND IBM AT.
    SIX NEW SOFTWARE PROGRAMS GIVES THE COMPANY'S ST AND MEGA COMPUTERS
MULTI-USER AND MULTI-TASKING CAPABILITIES.
 REUTER 2044

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
From:	VTCS1::FOX          "Edward A. Fox" 10-NOV-1987 16:37
To:	FACULTY,FOX
Subj:	Gary Nunn's defense

Gary Nunn, one of our former instructors who is now teaching at Radford
Univ., will defend his M.S. project "Regression Analysis of Extended Vectors
to Obtain Coefficients for Use in Probabilistic Information Retrieval
Systems" on Thur, 19 Nov, 9-11am, McB 558.  Everyone is invited - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1987  10:28 EST
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

  Date: Sunday, 8 November 1987  17:42-EST
  From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   BBN AI Seminar -- Bran Boguraev

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

    THE USE OF AN ON-LINE DICTIONARY FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

                             Bran Boguraev
                          Computer Laboratory,
                        University of Cambridge (UK)
          (bkb%computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Friday November 13


This talk is an attempt at a retrospective analysis of the collective
experience stemming from the use of the machine-readable version of the
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English for natural language processing. It
traces the relationships between specific requirements for lexical data and
issues of making such data available for diverse research purposes. A
particular model of on-line dictionary use is presented, which promotes a
strong separation between the processes of extracting information from
machine-readable dictionaries and using that information within the pragmatic
context of computational linguistics. The talk further analyses some
characteristics of the raw lexical data in electronic sources and outlines a
methodology for making maximal use of such potentially rich, but inherently
unreliable, resources.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
42
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 87 14:15 EDT
-FROM-
From: LEWIS%cs.umass.edu@RELAY.CS.NET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Refs on deciding relevance by matching knowledge reps
-BODY-
Dear IRLIST:

I would be interested in hearing of references on determining the relevance
of documents to a query based on matching some sort of non-surface text
representations of the contents of document and query. Best example is a
recent dissertation by DeeAnn Emmel Lewis (no relation) which looks at the
correlation between relevance judgments and similarity of case frame
representations of query and document. Other examples which hover around the
edge of this topic would be Farradane's relational indexing, use of
thesauri, work on indexing on multi-word phrases (especially ala
Sparck-Jones and Tait, where phrases are generated by NLP techniques), etc.
Many thanks,

David D. Lewis                         CSNET: lewis@cs.umass.edu
COINS Dept.                            BITNET: lewis@umass
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003

[Note: Some points that come to mind -- dissertation by S. Weiss,
work by Oddy and Belkin on ASKs, work on IR for chemistry.  Please
let us know what others you collect. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 87 17:24:15 est
-FROM-
From: Dr Anna Olesinska Serafin, Kummelbyvagen 1K, 191 40 Sollentuna,
       Sweden. <P2269@QZCOM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: AIDS Research for Poland
-BODY-
[Forwarded from CRTNET 111 -  November 23, 1987 - Ed]

I am a doctor from the Department of Education at the Warsaw Medical
School, Poland, and currently here in Sweden as a guest scientist doing
research on AIDS. I have come to know about computer communication
during my desperate search for information on AIDS and I hope that
this electronic message and request will help provide me with some
answers that I could not find in databases and libraries. The
information obtained will be tremendously useful to the Ministry of
Health in Poland for the formulation of the National AIDS program.

I would also appreciate it if you could also copy this message either
electronically or in print to others whom you think might help. Your
answers could be mailed to P2269@QZCOM or to me by post. Thank you in
anticipation.

I would like to seek CONTACT SOURCES and REFERENCES TO  PUBLICATIONS
on the following :

1) guidelines for AIDS campaigns (local, national, international)

2) programs for public AIDS education and prevention and for the "risk
groups", and their evaluations.

3) AIDS testing programs and regulations

[Note: I included this since I figure there are lots of sources that
could be consulted that Poland could be made aware of. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 87 22:35:20 EST
-FROM-
From: grads014@grumpy.cis.guelph.netnorth
-TO-
To: hypertext thesis
-BODY-
        I am currently researching browsing and navigation problems in
large loosely structured information bases (hypertext). I intend to write
a thesis on this topic towards a Master of Science in Computing &
Information Science at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Could you ple

[Note: message was cut off - I expect David is looking for references.
There was a very nice bibliography handed out at Hypertext '87 from
folks at Brown - I suggest that as a good starting point. - Ed]

                grads014%uogvax2.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu

                                                David Hendry

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 87 16:10:40 EST
-FROM-
From: rada@mcs.nlm.nih.gov (Roy Rada CSB)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: hyperdocument discussion
-BODY-
Ed,

In the latest IRList Digest there was a call for interest in a hypertext
discussion group (through a note from Scott Peterson).  I'm interested in
participating.

Yours, Roy

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 17 November 1987, 16:04:16 EST
-FROM-
From: MCCARTY  at UTOREPAS
-SUBJECT-
Subject: HUMANIST group
-BODY-
Yaacov Choueka (Bar-Ilan Univ.) sent me a reference concerning your
electronic discussion group. I would be very interested in hearing more
about it. Would you kindly send me whatever information you have? Thanks
very much.
I run a ListServ discussion group, HUMANIST, that may interest you. I
append information about it below.
Yours, Willard McCarty

                        What is HUMANIST?

HUMANIST is a Bitnet/NetNorth/EARN discussion group for people
who support computing in the humanities. Those who teach, review
software, answer questions, give advice, program, write
documentation, or otherwise support research and teaching in this
area are included. Although HUMANIST is primarily intended to
help these people exchange all kinds of information, it is
primarily meant for interaction rather than publication or
advertisement.

In general, members of the network are encouraged to ask
questions and offer answers, to begin and contribute to
discussions, to suggest problems for research, and so forth. One
of the specific motivations for establishing HUMANIST was to
allow people involved in this area to form a common idea of the
nature of their work, its requirements, and its standards.
Institutional recognition is not infrequently inadequate, at
least partly because computing in the humanities is an emerging
and highly cross-disciplinary field. Its support is significantly
different from the support of other kinds of computing, with
which it may be confused.

HUMANIST is a project of the Special Interest Group for
Humanities Computing Resources, which is affiliated with the
Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) and the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC).
Although participants in HUMANIST are not required to be members
of either organization, membership is highly recommended.
Information about the SIG may be obtained from George Brett
(ecsghb@tucc.bitnet), Michael Sperberg-McQueen
(u18189@uicvm.bitnet), or the undersigned.

New members of HUMANIST are welcome, provided that they fit the
broad guidelines described above. To subscribe send a message to
me at the network address below, giving your name, address,
telephone number, and a short description of what you do to
support computing in the humanities. (This description will
eventually be distributed to all HUMANISTs as a means of
introducing you to the community and helping us define ourselves
professionally. It may subsequently be printed in the Newsletter
of the ACH unless you declare otherwise.) Please describe your
academic background and research interests, both in computing and
otherwise; the nature of your job; and, if relevant, its place in
your university.

Willard McCarty
Editor of HUMANIST
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
University of Toronto
(MCCARTY@UTOREPAS.BITNET)

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1987  10:28 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Sunday, 8 November 1987  17:42-EST
  From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   BBN AI Seminar -- Bran Boguraev

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

    THE USE OF AN ON-LINE DICTIONARY FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

                             Bran Boguraev
                          Computer Laboratory,
                        University of Cambridge (UK)
          (bkb%computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Friday November 13


This talk is an attempt at a retrospective analysis of the collective
experience stemming from the use of the machine-readable version of the
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English for natural language processing. It
traces the relationships between specific requirements for lexical data and
issues of making such data available for diverse research purposes. A
particular model of on-line dictionary use is presented, which promotes a
strong separation between the processes of extracting information from
machine-readable dictionaries and using that information within the pragmatic
context of computational linguistics. The talk further analyses some
characteristics of the raw lexical data in electronic sources and outlines a
methodology for making maximal use of such potentially rich, but inherently
unreliable, resources.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1987  10:12 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Monday, 9 November 1987  12:20-EST
  From: Elizabeth Willey <ELIZABETH%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
  Re:   CBIP CONNECTIONIST SEMINAR

                       DYNAMICAL CONNECTIONISM

                           Elie Bienenstock
                       Universite de Paris-Sud

                        Wednesday, 11 November
                            E25-406, 12:00

In connectionist models, computation is usually carried out in a space
of activity levels, the connectivity state being frozen.  in contrast,
dynamical connectionist models manipulate connectivity states.  For
instance, they can solve various graph matching problems.  They also
have the typical associative memory and error-correcting properties of
usual connectionist models.  Applications include invariant pattern
recognition; dynamical connectionist models are able to generalize
over transformation groups rather than just Hamming distance.  It is
proposed that these principles underlie much of brain function; fast-
modifying synapses and high-resolution temporal correlations may
embody the dynamical links used in this new connectionist approach.

 ==============

                           NE43, 8TH FLOOR
                         THUR, 11/12, 4:00PM

                    ON THE THRESHOLD OF KNOWLEDGE
                       The Case for Inelegance

                         Dr. Douglas B. Lenat
                       Principal Scientist, MCC


In this talk, I would like to present a surprisingly compact, powerful,
elegant set of reasoning methods that form a set of first principles
which explain creativity, humor, and common sense reasoning -- a sort of
"Maxwell's Equations" of Thought.  I'd like very much to present them,
but, sadly, I don't believe they exist.  So, instead, I'll tell you what
I've been working on down in Texas for the last three years.

Intelligent behavior, especially in unexpected situations, requires
being able to fall back on general knowledge, and being able to
analogize to specific but far-flung knowledge.  As Marvin Minsky said,
"the more we know, the more we can learn".

Unfortunately, the flip side of that comes into play every time we build
and run a program that doesn't know too much to begin with, especially
for tasks like semantic disambiguation of sentences, or open-ended
learning by analogy.  So-called expert systems finesse this by
restricting their tasks so much that they can perform relatively narrow
symbol manipulations which nevertheless are interpreted meaningfully
(and, I admit, usefully) by human users.  But such systems are
hopelessly brittle:  they do not cope well with novelty, nor do they
communicate well with each other.

OK, so the mattress in the road to AI is Lack of Knowledge, and the
anti-mattress is Knowledge.  But how much does a program need to know,
to begin with?  The annoying, inelegant, but apparently true answer is:
a non-trivial fraction of consensus reality -- the few million things
that we all know, and that we assume everyone else knows.  If I liken
the Stock Market to a roller-coaster, and you don't know what I mean, I
might liken it to a seesaw, or to a steel spring.  If you still don't
know what I mean, I probably won't want to deal with you anymore.

It will take about two person-centuries to build up that KB, assuming
that we don't get stuck too badly on representation thorns along the
way.  CYC -- my 1984-1994 project at MCC -- is an attempt to build that
KB.  We've gotten pretty far along already, and I figured it's time I
shared our progress, and our problems, with "the lab."  Some of the
interesting issues are: how we decide what knowledge to encode, and how
we encode it; how we represent substances, parts, time, space, belief,
and counterfactuals; how CYC can access, compute, inherit, deduce, or
guess answers; how it computes and maintains plausibility (a sibling of
truth maintenance); and how we're going to squeeze two person-centuries
into the coming seven years, without having the knowledge enterers'
semantics "diverge".

 ==============

Friday,  13 November  12:00pm  E25-401

Ideonomy: Founding a 'Science of ideas'

In a book published in 1601, Francis Bacon urged that modern science
should have the equivalent of an 'ideonomic' character, as well as
being based on experimentation and induction.  My talk concerns a
five-year effort to lay foundations for a science of ideas which I
call Ideonomy.

Whereas the field of Artificial intelligence is primarily aimed at the
automation of mind, cognitive science at the modeling of human
intelligence and thought, and logic at the formalization of reasoning,
ideonomy is preoccupied with the discovery, classification, and
systematization of universal ideas, with aiding and abetting man's use
of ideas, and with automating the generation of ideas.  The ideonomist
holds that inattention to the latter things has hobbled the
development, and limited the success of the other fields; and that
properly all four subjects should be developed simultaneously and in
close coordination, being mutually necessary and synergistic.

At present ideonomy is divided into  some 320 subdivisions, a few of
which are: the study of ignorance, the study of analogies, the study
of form, the study of causes, the study of questions, the study of
answers, the  study of processes, and the study of cognitive and
heuristice principles.  In each of these cases it seeks to identify:
the types (of these things), higher and lower taxa, examples,
interrelationships, causes, effects, reasons for studying, needed
materials and methods, fundamental concepts, abstract and practical
relations to other ideonomic divisions, and the like.

We can also characterize ideonomy in another way, such as:

the study of how elementary ideas can be combined, permuted, and
trnsformed as exhaustive groups of ideas;

A new language designed to facilitate thought and creativity;

An attempt to exploit the qualitiative laws of the universe.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
43
-DATE-
Date:         Thu, 15 Oct 87 11:06:59 CST
-FROM-
From:         JEFF HUESTIS <C81350JH@WUVMD>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      RE: RE: LEXICON DEVELOPMENT
-BODY-
[Note: This is a continuation of some discussion with Jeff Huestis
from earlier IRList issues.  Jeff has the opportunity to do
experiments with real online catalog data, and so I thought it might
be of interest to IRList readers to consider how "advanced" retrieval
methods might be tested there, and to suggest what studies could be
done with the data that is accumulating. I think that is enough
background to get you into the context of the discussion. - Ed]

I don't have the Brown corpus either, although "we could get it", I
suppose.  What I have (or "had", since I haven't seen it lately) is a
dittoed sheet of the 400 most common words, that Dillon passed out in
the first, introductory, programming course I took from him when I was
still a graduate student in linguistics.  I had somebody key that sheet
into machine-readable form when I was up at Michigan Tech.

[Now discussing idea of research project ... - Ed]
 ...  When we talk about more commitment of people resources or
extensions to our hardware environment then ... I need to
think in terms of at least a ... grant, or alternatively, I need
to find ... something "interesting" also contributes to our
support for library operations (I've done a good deal of that).  On the
other hand, if you want to talk about an intelligent front-end that
could interface with VTLS and/or NOTIS, extensible to other systems (say
other library systems as well as database searching utilities), possibly
in a distributed framework oriented toward the OSI "Linked Systems"
project that LC, RLIN, et al, are involved in, then some place
 ... might be willing to [provide funds] ...  Foundations that give
money to libraries are a lot like venture capitalists investing in expert
systems.

[Note: Well, any comments?  See next note too. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 16 Oct 87 16:16:10 CST
-FROM-
From:         JEFF HUESTIS <C81350JH@WUVMD>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      A WEIGHTY MATTER
-BODY-
I got started thinking about "angles" this morning while waiting for
recovery from a disk crash, and started looking at your "Extended
boolean information retrieval" paper.  I noticed the location beside
your name under the title--Ibadan--and was surprised to discover you're
an old Third World hand; there aren't too many in this business.  I did
a stint in Nepal, back in '72-'73.  In fact, that is where I got
interested in linguistics, which led to libraries and computers.

[Note: I have heard that the agricultural community is doing some
interesting work with CDROM database, and is trying to use SGML for
some of the international centers. - Ed]

The general idea of extending boolean with other techniques may be a
good "angle" ...
The arguments put forward in yours and other articles
about the shortcomings of basic boolean, and ways in which it might be
improved, may be useful in arguing against acquisition of a system that
we can't modify.

[Note: we have done some testing here with extended Boolean retrieval
on a large library catalog.  Preliminary information should come out
in an article that I expect to appear in "Information Services and
Use" in 1988 - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 87 17:08:28 PST
-FROM-
From: emma
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Calendar, November 5, 3:6 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
[Note: I thought it might be of interest to find out about visitors to
CSLI and their work. - Ed]

			    CURRENT VISITORS

   SYLVAIN BROMBERGER
   Professor of Philosophy
   Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
   Massachusetts Institute of Technology
   Dates of visit: September 1987--July 1988

   Bromberger is currently interested in the philosophy of linguistics
   and in rational acquisition of knowledge.  In the philosophy of
   linguistics he is working on conceptual issues arising in
   phonology/phonetics.  Under rational acquisition of knowledge he is
   interested in the limits that constrain search for knowledge guided by
   questions and in the semantics of interrogatives.  He is a regular
   participant of the RATAG project.

   KEITH DEVLIN
   Reader in Mathematics
   Department of Mathematics
   University of Lancaster
   Dates of visit: September 1987--August 1988

   Devlin is a mathematical logician.  About three years ago, his
   interest in set theory gave way (via a brief passage through computer
   science) to a desire to work out a genuine, mathematical theory of
   information.  He thought that the approach to this problem adopted by
   Barwise and his colleagues at CSLI was the best way to proceed, and
   has subsequently thrown his lot in with this gang.  He is presently
   writing a book on situation theory.

   CARL GINET
   Chair, Sage School of Philosophy
   Cornell University
   Dates of visit: June--December 1987

   Ginet is a philosopher on sabbatic leave from Cornell.  During his
   stay at CSLI, he will be finishing a book on action, catching up on
   the literature in epistemology, and refining software he has written
   that guides students in constructing derivations in formal logic.

   KIYONG LEE
   Department of English
   Korea University
   Dates of visit: December 1986--December 1987

   Lee is visiting CSLI on a senior research grant from the
   Korean-American Educational Commission and the Council for
   International Exchange of Scholars.  He hopes to acquaint himself with
   new developments in situation theory and semantics, and to write an
   introductory book for Korean readers.  While working on some
   foundational aspects of situation theory, he is very much interested
   in testing its adequacy in treating some concrete problems, especially
   those related to negation, quantification, and tense/aspect in Korean.
   He is participating in the STASS project while he is here and also
   continues developing a computationally tractable, functor-driven,
   phrase structure grammar of natural language by amalgamating a
   categorial grammar with HPSG.

   SALLY MCCONNELL-Ginet
   Professor
   Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics
   Cornell University
   Dates of visit: June--December 1987

   During her time at CSLI (the first half of a year's sabbatic leave
   from Cornell), McConnell-Ginet will be working on a book about formal
   approaches to the analysis of vagueness.  She will also be working on
   a semantics text for linguistics that she and Gennaro Chierchia are
   coauthoring.

   HIDEYUKI NAKASHIMA
   Senior Researcher
   Man-Machine Systems Section
   Electrotechnical Laboratory
   Dates of visit: September 1987--August 1988

   Nakashima is interested in knowledge representation, reasoning, and
   learning.  He is also interested in a model of language acquisition.
   He has his own knowledge-representation system based on logic
   programming, called Uranus.  He is planning to create a programming
   language based on situation theory.

   RONALD NASH
   Dates of visit: January 1987--July 1988

   Nash is at CSLI on a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences
   and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  He is interested in the
   philosophy of mind and normative psychology, and is particularly
   interested in the work of CSLI's RATAG and DIA projects with respect
   to the cognitive theory of emotion on which he has recently worked.
   He hopes to construct a more formal model while he is here, and will
   be looking at the various formal models being considered at CSLI.

   KASPER OSTERBYE
   Institute of Electronical Systems, Aalborg
   University of Aarhus
   Dates of visit: September 1986--September 1987

   Osterbye's recent work has been on programming languages, especially
   dealing with interactive higher-level debugging.  At CSLI, he is
   participating in the SDL project.

   GORDON PLOTKIN
   Professor
   Department of Computer Science
   University of Edinburgh
   Dates of visit: September 1987--October 1988

   Plotkin is interested generally in issues of language and logic and
   particularly in the modeling and formalization of situation theory and
   in learning situation semantics.  He is also interested in a variety
   of issues in the denotational semantics of programming languages, such
   as concurrency and probabilistic computation, and also in a usefully
   implementable general proof theory.  He is an active participant in
   the STASS project.

   BILL ROUNDS
   Associate Professor
   Department of Computer Science
   University of Michigan
   Dates of visit: September 1987--June 1988

   Rounds is a computer scientist interested in mathematical and
   computational linguistics.  He is developing logics for expressing
   grammars and for understanding grammatical properties, with special
   emphasis on unification-based grammatical systems.  These logics can
   also be used directly in implementations of such systems.  He is
   participating in the MOST project at CSLI.

   HIROYUKI SUZUKI
   Researcher
   Systems Tokyo Research Department
   Corporate Engineering Division
   Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,Ltd.
   Dates of visit: September 1986--March 1988

   Suzuki's main interest lies in building Japanese dialog systems.  He
   is currently interested in designing a representation language for a
   computer as a participant of conversations, and clarifying strategies
   for generating sentences that are employed by human beings to keep
   conversations coherent.

   SYUN TUTIYA
   Associate Professor
   Department of Philosophy
   Faculty of Letters
   Chiba University
   Dates of visit: November 1986--September 1988

   Tutiya is interested in the development of speech acts theory within
   the framework of situation theory and situation semantics.  He is also
   interested in quantification in Japanese, in Frege and the history of
   logic after him, and has been translating `Situations and Attitudes'
   into Japanese.  He is an active participant in the STASS project.

   SUSON YOO
   Doctoral Candidate and Instructor
   Department of Linguistics
   Korea University
   Dates of visit: March 1987--February 1988

   Yoo is continuing her work with Kiyong Lee, currently at CSLI, and is
   especially interested in learning more about situation theory and
   unification grammar and investigating their universal ramifications by
   testing their linguistic significance and computational applicability
   to the analysis of Korean.

   LOTFI ZADEH
   Professor
   Department of Computer Science
   University of California, Berkeley
   Dates of visit: Fall Quarter 1987

   Zadeh developed "fuzzy" logic and set theory---the central idea being
   that truth or membership in a set isn't simply binary, but permits a
   continuum of values.  He has attended many CSLI functions over the
   past four years, especially on Thursdays, and we are pleased that he
   has arranged to be here several days a week during fall quarter.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-BODY-
END OF IRList Digest
********************

-VOL-
3

-N-
44
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 87 18:13:42 est
-FROM-
From: Don Walker <walker@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ACL Applied Natural Language Conference announcement
-BODY-
The printed version of the following program and registration information
will be mailed to ACL members early in December.  Others are encouraged
to use the attached form or write for a booklet to the following address:
Dr. D.E. Walker (ACL), 445 South Street - MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960,
USA, or to walker@flash.bellcore.com, specifying "ACL Applied" on the
subject line.

 			     ASSOCIATION
				 FOR
		      COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

       SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

			 9 - 12 February 1988

	  Austin Marriott at the Capitol, Austin, Texas, USA
Tutorials: Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin

			   ADVANCE PROGRAM

			      Features:
	       Six introductory and advanced tutorials
	    Three days of papers on the  state-of-the-art
		   Distinguished luncheon speakers
		     A panel of industry leaders
		     Exhibits and demonstrations


REGISTRATION : 7:30am - 3:00pm, Tuesday, 9 February,
  Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin, 26th
  and Red River.
		7:00pm - 9:00PM, Tuesday, 9 February
		8:00am - 5:00pm, Wednesday, 10 February
                8:00am - 5:00pm, Thursday, 11 February
		8:00am - 12:00n, Friday, 12 February
  Austin Marriott at the Capitol, 701 East 11th Street


EXHIBITS :  10:00am - 6:00pm, Wednesday, 10 February
            10:00am - 6:00pm, Thursday, 11 February
             9:00am - 12:00n, Friday, 12 February
  Austin Marriott at the Capitol


TUTORIALS: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1988
  Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin, 26th
  and Red River.

8:30 12:30 INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
	  James Allen, University of Rochester

8:30 12:30 MACHINE-READABLE DICTIONARIES: A COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
	  PERSPECTIVE
	  Bran Boguraev, Cambridge University, and
 	  Beth Levin, Northwestern University

8:30 12:30 SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEMS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
	  Salim Roucos, BBN Laboratories, Inc.

1:30 5:30 THE TECHNOLOGY OF NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES
	  Carole Hafner, Northeastern University

1:30 5:30 THE ROLE OF LOGIC IN REPRESENTING MEANING AND KNOWLEDGE
	  Bob Moore, SRI International

1:30 5:30 MACHINE TRANSLATION
	  Sergei Nirenburg, Carnegie Mellon University


RECEPTION: 7:00pm - 9:00pm, Tuesday, 9 February
  Austin Marriott at the Capitol, 701 East 11th Street


			   GENERAL SESSIONS
	WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1988

9:00 9:15	OPENING REMARKS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
		Norman Sondheimer, General Chair (USC/Information Sciences
			Institute)
		Bruce Ballard, Program Chair (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
		Jonathan Slocum, Local Arrangements Chair (MCC)
		Donald E. Walker, ACL Secretary-Treasurer (Bell Communications
			Research)

	SESSION 1: SYSTEMS

9:15 9:40	The Multimedia Articulation of Answers in a Natural Language
		Query System
		Susan E. Brennan (Hewlett Packard)

9:40 10:05	A News Story Categorization System
		Philip J. Hayes, Laura E. Knecht and Monica J. Cellio
		(Carnegie Group)

10:05 10:30	An Architecture for Anaphora Resolution
		Elaine Rich and Susann Luper-Foy (MCC)

	SESSION 2: GENERATION

11:00 11:25	The SEMSYN Generation System: Ingredients, Applications,
		Prospects
		Dietmar Roesner (Universitaet Stuttgart)

11:25 11:50	Two Simple Prediction Algorithms to Facilitate Text Production
		Lois Boggess (Mississippi State University)

11:50 12:15	From Water to Wine: Generating Natural Language Text from
		Today's Applications Programs
		David D. McDonald (Brattle Research Corporation) and
		Marie M. Meteer (Bolt, Beranek and Newman)

12:15 2:00	LUNCHEON
		Guest Speaker: Grant Dove
		Chairman and CEO of MCC.  Prior to joining MCC in July l987,
		Mr. Dove had been with Texas Instruments for 28 years,
		having served as Executive Vice President since l982.

	SESSION 3: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS

2:00 2:25	Improved Portability and Parsing Through Interactive
		Acquisition of Semantic Information
		Francois-Michel Lang and Lynettte Hirschman (Unisys)

2:25 2:50	Handling Scope Ambiguities in English
		Sven Hurum (University of Alberta)

2:50 3:15	Responding to Semantically Ill-Formed Input
		Ralph Grishman and Ping Peng (New York University)
		  and
		Evaluation of a Parallel Chart Parser
		Ralph Grishman and Mahesh Chitrao (New York University)

	SESSION 4: MORPHOLOGY AND THE LEXICON

3:45 4:10	Triphone Analysis: A Combined Method for the Correction of
		Orthographical and Typographical Errors
		Koenraad DeSmedt (University of Nijmegen) and
		Brigette van Berkel (TNO Institute of Applied Computer
		  Science)

4:10 4:35	Creating and Querying Hierarchical Lexical Databases
		Mary S. Neff, Roy J. Byrd, and Omneya A. Rizk
		(IBM Watson Research Center)

4:35 5:00	Cn yur cmputr raed ths?
		Linda G. Means (General Motors)

5:00 5:25	Building a Large Thesaurus for Information Retrieval
		Edward A. Fox, J. Terry Nutter (Virginia Tech), Thomas Ahlswede,
		Martha Evens (Illinois Institute of Technology), and
		Judith Markowitz (Navistar International)

6:30 ****      RECEPTION
	       Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC)


	THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1988

	SESSION 5: SYSTEMS

8:30 8:55	Application-Specific Issues in NLI Development for
		a Diagnostic Expert System
		Karen L. Ryan, Rebecca Root and Duane Olawsky (Honeywell)

8:55 9:20	The MULTIVOC Text-to-Speech System
		Olivier Emorine and Pierre Martin (Cap Sogeti Innovation)

9:20 9:45	Structure from Anarchy: Meta Level Representation of
		Expert System Predicates for Natural Language Interfaces
		Galina Datskovsky Moerdler (Columbia University)

	SESSION 6: TEXT PROCESSING

10:15 10:40	Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies in a Text
		Processing System
		Lisa F. Rau and Paul S. Jacobs (General Electric)

10:40 11:05	A Stochastic Parts Program and Noun Phrase Parser for
		Unrestricted Text
		Kenneth W. Church (AT&T Bell Laboratories)

11:05 11:30	A Tool for Investigating the Synonymy Relation in a Sense
		Disambiguated Thesaurus
		Martin S. Chodorow, Yael Ravin (IBM Watson Research Center)
		and Howard E. Sachar (IBM Data Systems Division)

11:30 11:55	Dictionary Text Entries as a Source of Knowledge
		for Syntactic and Other Disambiguations
		Karen Jensen and Jean-Louis Binot (IBM Watson Research Center)

12:00 1:45	LUNCHEON
		Guest Speaker: Donald E. Walker
		Manager of Artificial Intelligence and Information Science
		Research at Bell Communications Research, and
		Secretary-Treasurer of ACL and IJCAII..

	SESSION 7: MACHINE TRANSLATION

1:45 2:10	EUROTRA: Practical Experience with a Multilingual Machine
		Translation System under Development
		Giovanni B. Varile and Peter Lau (Commission of the
		European Communities)

2:10 2:35	Valency and MT: Recent Developments in the METAL System
		Rudi Gebruers (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

3:00 5:00	PANEL: Natural Language Interfaces: Present and Future
		Moderator: Norman Sondheimer (USC/Information Sciences
			Institute)
		Panelists: Robert J. Bobrow (BBN Laboratories),
				Developer of RUS
	                   Jerrold Ginsparg (Natural Language Inc.),
				Developer of DataTalker
	                   Larry Harris (Artificial Intelligence Corporation),
                                Developer of Intellect
	                   Gary G. Hendrix (Symantec), Developer of Q&A
			   Steve Klein (Singular Solutions Engineering)
				Co-Developer of Lotus HOW

5:00 6:00       RECEPTION
	        Austin Marriott at the Capitol


	FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1988

	SESSION 8: SYSTEMS

8:30 8:55	Automatically Generating Natural Language Reports
		in an Office Environment
		Jugal Kalita and Sunil Shende (University of Pennsylvania)

8:55 9:20	Luke: An Experiment in the Early Integration of Natural
		Language Processing
		David A. Wroblewski and Elaine A. Rich (MCC)

9:20 9:45	The Experience of Developing a Large-Scale Natural
		Language Text Processing System: CRITIQUE
		Stephen D. Richardson and Lisa C. Braden-Harder
		(IBM Watson Research Center)

	SESSION 9: MORPHOLOGY AND THE LEXICON

10:15 10:40	Computational Techniques for Improved Name Search
		Beatrice T. Oshika (Sparta), Bruce Evans (TRW),
		Janet Tom (Systems Development Corporation), and Filip Machi
		(UC Berkeley)

10:40 11:05	The TICC: Parsing Interesting Text
		David Allport (University of Sussex)

11:05 11:30	Finding Clauses in Unrestricted Text by Stochastic and
		Finitary Methods
		Eva Ejerhed (University of Umea)

11:30 11:55	Morphological Processing in the Nabu System
		Jonathan Slocum (MCC)

	SESSION 10: SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS

1:30 1:55	Localizing Expression of Ambiguity
		John Bear and Jerry R. Hobbs (SRI International)

1:55 2:20	Combinatorial Disambiguation
		Paula S. Newman (IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center)

2:20 2:45	Canonical Representation in NLP System Design:
		A Critical Evaluation
		Kent Wittenburg and Jim Barnett (MCC)




REGISTRATION INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS

PREREGISTRATION MUST BE RECEIVED BY 25 JANUARY; after that date, please
wait to register at the Conference itself.  Complete the attached
``Application for Registration'' and send it with a check payable to
Association for Computational Linguistics or ACL to Donald E. Walker
(ACL), Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street MRE 2A379,
Morristown, NJ 07960, USA; (201) 829-4312; walker@flash.bellcore.com;
ucbvax!bellcore!walker.  If a registration is cancelled before 25
January, the registration fee, less  $15 for administrative costs, will
be returned.  Full conference registrants will also receive lunch on
the 10th and 11th.   Registration includes one copy of the Proceedings,
available at the Conference.  Copies of the Proceedings at $20 for
members ($30 for nonmembers) may be ordered on the registration form or
by mail prepaid from Walker.

TUTORIALS : Attendance is limited.  Preregistration is encouraged
to ensure a place and the availability of syllabus materials.

RECEPTIONS : The Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation
(MCC) will host a reception for the conference at its site on
Wednesday evening.  To aid in planning we ask that you complete the
RSVP on the registration form.  In addition there will be receptions
at the conference hotel on Tuesday evening and Thursday afternoon.

EXHIBITS AND DEMONSTRATIONS : Facilities for exhibits and system
demonstrations will be available.  Persons wishing to arrange an
exhibit or present a demonstration should contact Kent Wittenburg,
MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TX 78759; (512)338-3626;
wittenburg@mcc.com as soon as possible.

HOTEL RESERVATIONS : Reservations at the Austin Marriott at the
Capitol MUST be made using the Hotel Reservation Form included with
this flyer.  Reservations subject to guest room availability for
reservations received after 25 January 1988.  Please mail to:
	Austin Marriott at the Capitol
	Attn: Reservation Office
	701 East 11th Street
	Austin, Texas 78701
	(512) 478-1111

AIR TRANSPORTATION : American Airlines offers conferees a special 35%
off full coach fare, 30% off full Y fares for passengers originating in
Canada, or 5% off any published roundtrip airfare applicable to and
from Austin.  Call toll free 1-800-433-1790 and give the conference's
STAR number S81816.  If you normally use the service of a travel agent,
please have them make your reservations through this number.

DIRECTIONS : There is one public exit from Robert Mueller Airport in
Austin; at the traffic light, turn right (onto Manor Rd.) and drive to
Airport Blvd.  (approx. 1/4 - 1/2 mile).  Turn right on Airport Blvd.,
and drive to highway I-35 (approx. 1-2 miles).  Turn left (south) onto
I-35, heading toward town.  Get off at the 11th-12th St. (Capitol)
exit, and drive an extra block on the access road, to 11th St.  The
Marriott is on the SW corner of that intersection (across 11th St., on
the right).  A parking garage is attached.

The Marriott at the Capitol operates a free shuttle to and from the
airport.  Cab fare would be approx. $6.

The Joe C. Thompson Conference Center parking lot is on the SW corner
of Red River and 26th Street; the entrance is on Red River, and a guard
will point out the center (adjacent, to the west).  Directions to JCT
from Marriott parking garage: Turn right (S) on I-35 frontage road,
turn right (W) on 10th St., turn right (N) on Red River, and drive
[almost] to 26th.




 APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION

Association for Computational Linguistics, Second Conference on
Applied Natural Language Processing, 9 - 12 February 1988, Austin, Texas


NAME  _________________________________________________________________
      Last                             First                        Middle
AFFILIATION (Short form for badge ID)
___________________________________________________________

ADDRESS _______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

TELEPHONE  ____________________________________________________________

COMPUTER NET ADDRESS  _________________________________________________

REGISTRATION INFORMATION  (circle fee)
NOTE: Only those whose dues are paid for 1988 can register as members.

       		 	ACL	NON-	FULL-TIME
			MEMBER*	MEMBER*	STUDENT*

by 25 JANUARY 		$170	$205	$85
at the Conference	$220	$255	$110
*Member and Non-Member fees include Wednesday and Thursday luncheons;
Students can purchase luncheon tickets at a reduced rate.

LUNCHEON TICKETS FOR STUDENTS:  $10  each; Wednesday _____;
Thursday ________; amount enclosed  $ ______

LUNCHEON TICKETS FOR GUESTS:  $15  each; Wednesday _____;
Thursday ________; amount enclosed  $ ______

SPECIAL MEALS: VEGETARIAN ______  KOSHER ______

EXTRA PROCEEDINGS:  $20  members;  $30  non-members; amount enclosed  $ ______

TUTORIAL INFORMATION  (circle fee and check at most two
tutorials)

FEE PER TUTORIAL 	ACL	NON-	FULL-TIME
			MEMBER	MEMBER*	STUDENT

by 25 January		$75	$110	$50
at the Conference	$100	$135	$65
*Non-member tutorial fee includes ACL membership for 1988;
do not pay non-member fee for BOTH registration and tutorials.

Morning Tutorials:
 select ONE: INTRODUCTION: Allen  LEXICONS: Boguraev &  SPEECH: Roucos
				              Levin
Afternoon Tutorials:
 select ONE: INTERFACES: Hafner   LOGIC: Moore	        TRANSLATION: Nirenburg

TOTAL PAYMENT MUST BE INCLUDED :   $ ____________

(Registration, Luncheons, Extra Proceedings, Tutorials)


Make checks payable to  ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS  or
ACL.  Credit cards cannot be honored.

RSVP for MCC Reception: Please check if you plan to attend the MCC
reception on Wednesday evening, February 10th. _________

Send Application for Registration WITH PAYMENT before 25 January to
the address below; AFTER 25 January, wait to register at Conference:

	Donald E. Walker (ACL)
	Bell Communications Research
	445 South Street, MRE 2A379
	Morristown, NJ 07960, USA
	(201)829-4312
	walker@flash.bellcore.com
	ucbvax!bellcore!walker




 APPLICATION FOR HOTEL REGISTRATION

Reservations subject to guest room availability for reservations
received after 25 January 1988.  In the event of unanticipated demand,
rooms will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.  Please
send in your reservation request as early as possible.


NAME  _________________________________________________________________
      Last                             First                        Middle
AFFILIATION
 ___________________________________________________________

ADDRESS _______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

TELEPHONE  ____________________________________________________________

Room Requirements

  Single  $64 ________

  Double  $74 ________

Date and time of arrival _________________________________________

Date and time of departure _______________________________________

Complete if arrival after 6PM

__________________________________________________________________
Credit Card Name	 	Number		Expiration Date



Send  Application for Hotel Reservation to:
	Austin Marriott at the Capitol
	Attn: Reservation Office
	701 East 11th Street
	Austin, Texas 78701
	(512) 478-1111




	      ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
       SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
			      TUTORIALS
			   9 February 1988
   Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas at Austin

		    Morning 8:30 A.M. - 12:30 P.M.


8:30 12:30 INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
	  James Allen, University of Rochester

ABSTRACT

This tutorial will cover the basic concepts underlying the construction
of natural language processing systems.  These include basic parsing
techniques, semantic interpretation and the representation of sentence
meaning, as well as knowledge representation and techniques for
understanding natural language in context.  In particular, the topics
to be addressed in detail will include augmented transition networks
(ATNs), augmented context-free grammars, the representation of lexical
meaning, especially looking at case-grammar based representations, and
the interpretation of pronouns and ellipsis.  In addition, there will
be an overview of knowledge representation, including semantic
networks, frame-based systems, and logic, and the use of general world
knowledge in language understanding, including scripts and plans.

Given the large range of issues and techniques, an emphasis will be
placed on those aspects relevant to existing practical natural
language systems, such as interfaces to database systems.  The
remaining issues will be more quickly surveyed to give the attendee
an idea of what techniques will become important in the next
generation of natural language systems.  The lecture notes will
include an extensive bibliography of work in each area.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This tutorial is aimed at people who are interested in learning the
fundamental techniques and ideas relevant to natural language
processing.  It will be useful to managers who want an overview of
the field, to programmers starting research and development in the
natural language area, and to researchers in related disciplines such
as linguistics who want a survey of the computational approaches to
language.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dr. James Allen is an Associate Professor and Chairman of the
Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester.  He is
editor of the journal Computational Linguistics and author of the
book Natural Language Understanding, published in 1987.  In 1984, he
received a five-year Presidential Young Investigator award for his
research in Artificial Intelligence.




8:30 12:30 MACHINE-READABLE DICTIONARIES: A COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
	  PERSPECTIVE
	  Branimir Boguraev, Cambridge University, and
 	  Beth Levin, Northwestern University



ABSTRACT

The lexical information contained explicitly and implicitly in
machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs) can support a wide range of
activities in computational linguistics, both of theoretical interest
and of practical importance.  This tutorial falls into two parts.
The first part will focus on some characteristics of raw lexical data
in electronic sources, which make MRDs particularly relevant to
natural language processing applications.  The second part will
discuss how theoretical linguistic research into the lexicon can
enhance the contribution of MRDs to applied computational
linguistics.

The first half will discuss issues concerning the placement of
rich lexical resources on-line; raise questions related to the
suitability, and ultimately the utility, of MRDs for automatic
natural  language processing;  outline a  methodology aimed at
extracting maximally usable subsets of the dictionary with minimal
introduction of errors; and present ways in which specific use can be
made of the lexical data for the construction of practical language
processing systems with substantial coverage.

The second half of the tutorial will review current theoretical
linguistic research on the lexicon, emphasizing proposals concerning
the nature of lexical representation and lexical organization.  This
overview will provide the context for an examination of how the
results of this research can be brought to bear on the problem of
extracting syntactic and semantic information encoded in dictionary
entries, but not overtly signaled to the dictionary user.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This tutorial presupposes some familiarity with  work in both
computational and theoretical linguistics.  It is aimed at
researchers in natural language processing and theoretical linguists
who want to take advantage of the resources available in MRDs for
both applied and theoretical purposes.  The issues of providing
substantial lexical coverage and system transportability are
addressed, thus making this tutorial of particular relevance to those
concerned with the automatic acquisition, on a large scale and in a
flexible format, of phonological, syntactic, and semantic information
for nlp systems.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

Dr. Branimir Boguraev is an SERC (UK Science & Engineering Research
Council) Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.  He
has been with the Computer Laboratory since 1975, and completed a
doctoral thesis in natural language processing there in 1979.
Recently he has been involved in the development of computational
tools for natural language processing, funded by grants awarded by
the UK Alvey Programme in Information Technology.

Dr. Beth Levin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.  She was a System
Development Foundation Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Cognitive
Science from 1983-1987 where she assumed major responsibility for
directing the MIT Lexicon Project.  She received her Ph.D. in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in June 1983.




8:30 12:30 SPOKEN LANGUAGE SYSTEMS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
	  Salim Roucos, BBN Laboratories, Inc.

ABSTRACT:

This tutorial will present the issues in developing spoken language
systems for natural speech communication between a person and a
machine.  In particular, the performance of complex tasks using large
vocabularies and unrestricted sentence structures will be examined.
The first Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Speech Understanding
Research project during the seventies will be reviewed, and then the
current state-of-the-art in continuous speech recognition and natural
language processing will be described.  Finally, the types of spoken
language systems' capabilities expected to be developed during the next
two to three years will be presented.

The technical issues that will be covered include acoustic-phonetic
modeling, syntax, semantics, plan recognition and discourse, and the
issues for integrating these knowledge sources for speech understanding.
In addition, computational requirements for real-time understanding,
and performance evaluation methodology will be described.  Some of the
human factors of speech understanding in the context of performing
interactive tasks using an integrated interface will also be
discussed.

INTENDED AUDIENCE:

This tutorial is aimed at technical managers, product developers, and
technical staff interested in learning about spoken language systems
and their potential applications.  No expertise in either speech or
natural language will be assumed in introducing the technical details
in the tutorial.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:

Dr. Salim Roucos has worked for seven years at BBN Laboratories in
speech processing such as continuous speech recognition, speaker
recognition, and speech compression.  More recently, he has been the
principal investigator on integrating speech recognition and natural
language understanding for developing a spoken language system. His
areas of interest are statistical pattern recognition and language
modeling.  Dr. Roucos is chairman of the Digital Signal Processing
committee of the IEEE ASSP society.



		   Afternoon 1:30 P.M. - 5:30 P.M.

1:30 5:30 THE TECHNOLOGY OF NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACES
	  Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University

ABSTRACT

This tutorial will describe the development of natural language
processing from a research topic into a commercial technology.  This
will include a description of some key research projects of the 1970's
and early 1980's which developed methods for building natural language
query interfaces, initially restricted to just one database, and later
made "transportable" to many different applications.  The further
development of this technology into commercial software products will
be discussed and illustrated by a survey of several current products,
including both micro-computer NL systems and those offered on
higher-performance machines.  The qualities a user should look for in a
NL interface will be considered, both in terms of linguistic
capabilities and general ease of use.  Finally, some of the remaining
"hard problems" that current technology has not yet solved in a
satisfactory way will be discussed.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This tutorial is aimed at people who are not well acquainted with
natural language interfaces and who would like to learn about 1) the
capabilities of current systems, and 2) the technology that underlies
these capabilities.


BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dr. Carole D. Hafner is Associate Professor of Computer Science at
Northeastern University.  After receiving her Ph.D. in Computer and
Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan, she spent
several years as a Staff Scientist at General Motors Research
Laboratories working on the development of a natural language
interface to databases.





1:30 5:30 THE ROLE OF LOGIC IN REPRESENTING MEANING AND KNOWLEDGE
	  Robert C. Moore, SRI International

ABSTRACT

This tutorial will survey the use of logic to represent the meaning
of utterances and the extra-linguistic knowledge needed to produce
and interpret utterances in natural-language processing systems.
Problems to be discussed in meaning representation include
quantification, propositional attitudes, comparatives, mass terms and
plurals, tense and aspect, and event sentences and adverbials.
Logic-based methods (unification) for systematic specification of the
correspondence between syntax and semantics in natural language
processing systems will also be touched on.  In the discussion of the
representation of extra-linguistic knowledge, special attention will
be devoted to the role played by knowledge of speakers' and hearers'
mental states (particularly their knowledge and beliefs) in the
generation and interpretation of utterances and logical formalisms
for representing and reasoning about knowledge of those states.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This tutorial is aimed at implementors of natural-language processing
systems and others interested in logical approaches to the problems
of meaning representation and knowledge representation in such
systems.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dr. Robert C. Moore is a staff scientist in the Artificial
Intelligence Center of SRI International.  Since joining SRI in 1977,
Dr. Moore has carried out research on natural-language processing,
knowledge representation, automatic  deduction, and nonmonotonic
reasoning.  In 1986-87 he was the first director of SRI's Computer
Science Research Centre in Cambridge, England.  Dr. Moore received
his PhD from MIT in 1979.





1:30 5:30 MACHINE TRANSLATION
	  Sergei Nirenburg, Carnegie Mellon University

ABSTRACT

The central problems faced by a Machine Translation (MT) research
project are 1) the design and implementation of automatic natural
language analyzers and generators that manipulate morphological,
syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge; and 2) the design,
acquisition and maintenance of dictionaries and grammars.  Since a
short-term goal (or even medium term goal) of building a system that
performs fully automated machine translation of unconstrained text is
not feasible, an MT project must carefully constrain its objectives.

This tutorial will describe the knowledge and processing requirements
for an MT system.  It will present and analyze the set of design
choices for MT projects including distinguishing features such as
long-term/short-term, academic/commercial, fully/partially automated,
direct/transfer/interlingua, pre-/post-/interactive editing.  The
knowledge acquisition needs of an MT system, with an emphasis on
interactive knowledge acquisition tools that facilitate the task of
compiling the various dictionaries for an MT system will be
discussed.  In addition, expectations, possibilities and prospects
for immediate application of machine translation technology will be
considered.  Finally, a brief survey of MT research and development
work around the world will be presented.

INTENDED AUDIENCE

This tutorial is aimed at at a general audience that could include
both students looking for an application area and testbed for their
ideas in natural language processing and people contemplating
starting an MT or machine-aided translation project.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Dr. Sergei Nirenburg, Research Scientist at the Center for Machine
Translation at Carnegie-Mellon University, holds an M.Sc. in
Computational Linguistics from Kharkov State University, USSR, and a
Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Hebrew  University of Jerusalem,
Israel.  He has published in the fields of parsing, generation,
machine translation, knowledge representation and acquisition, and
planning.  Dr. Nirenburg is Editor of the journal Computers and
Translation.




       SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
			 Conference Committee

General Chair
Norman Sondheimer, USC/Information Sciences Institute

Secretary-Treasurer
Donald E. Walker, Bell Communications Research

Program Committee
Bruce Ballard (Chair), AT&T Bell Laboratories
Madeleine Bates, BBN Laboratories
Tim Finin,  Unisys
Ralph Grishman, New York University
Carole Hafner, Northeastern University
George Heidorn, IBM Corporation
Paul Martin, SRI International
Graeme Ritchie, University of Edinburgh
Harry Tennant, Texas Instruments

Tutorials
Martha Palmer, Unisys

Local Arrangements
Jonathan Slocum, MCC (Chair)
Elaine Rich, MCC

Exhibits and Demonstrations
Kent Wittenburg, MCC

Publicity
Jeffrey Hill and Brenda Nashawaty, Artificial Intelligence Corporation


>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
45
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 87 00:43:51 est
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: email changes
-BODY-
Friday, 11 Dec. 1987, vtcs1 will be unplugged.  Be sure to stop sending to
	fox@vtcs1 ...
Use BITNET: foxea@vtvax3
or  Internet: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu

There may be some disruption - please bear with IRList! - Ed

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 27 November 1987, 08:08:47 EST
-FROM-
From: Dr Abigail Ann Young      1-416-585-4504       YOUNG at UTOREPAS
-SUBJECT-
Subject:   online access to standard reference works
-BODY-
Dear Prof. Fox,

I am a member of HUMANIST, and just received your mailing
about IRList.  I'd like to subscribe, and if possible to receive
the last archived digest, to get an idea of the level of discussion
(ie, whether I understand it or not!).   I'm trying to devise
a sensible scheme for making the information in a standard
reference work in my field (which is the history of biblical
exegesis) accessible on-line, and need to find
out as much as possible about information retrieval and
databases.

Thank you very much,

Abigail Ann Young (Dr)
Research Associate
Records of Early English Drama
Victoria College
University of Toronto
YOUNG@UTOREPAS

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:    Sun, 29 Nov 87 11:23 PST
-FROM-
From:    IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRLIST question
-BODY-
Ed,
  re:  IRLIST.  I was intrigued by the list of current visitor
to CSLI -- very impressive.  But what is CSLI???

  Thanks for the info...

Chris

[Note: CSLI is the Center for the Study of Language and Information.
I occasionally include news from CSLI in IRList under that heading.
CSLI is located on Stanford campus, and involves people from a number
of neighboring organizations as well as visitors. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 87 22:03:19 EST
-FROM-
From: dws@eddie.mit.edu (Don W. Saklad)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Re: IRList Digest V3 #41
-BODY-
Greetings,

...just noticed that "Discussion - Lexicon development: terms used
by library catalog searchers" article wasn't in
the digest v3 #41, yet was listed in the table
of contents?

[Note: Right!  It was in the table of contents from an earlier issue
and should have been deleted. Sorry - Ed]

Best wishes,

Don

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 87 17:34:16 +0100
-FROM-
From: "Anthony Tomasic" <tomasic@ecrcvax.uucp>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: ir-list subscription
-BODY-
please stop my ir-list subscription as we recieve ir-list under newsgroup
comp.theory.info-retrieval.  By the way, IR shouldn't be under the
"comp.theory" classification with all the theoretical people.  Someone must
have misunderstood IR to have something to do with information theory.
                                                Anthony

[Note: others who receive USENET may want to get IRList that way too
instead of directly.  I also wonder how the newsgroup was placed in
that category. Does anyone know? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Sat, 28 Nov 87 11:56:58 EST
-FROM-
From:         "Gerry Gold, York University (Anthropology)" <YFAN0001@YORKVM1>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      IRNET - please sign me up
-BODY-
Within anthropology, I have been most interested in the problem of data
retrieval. This has led me to other disciplines and their work .. from
sociology to the physical sciences. If you are managing a newsletter on
data retrieval, please sign me up and I wull contribute if and when I can.

[Note: yes, information retrieval does involve data retrieval.  Let us
know more about what is done in anthropology with information storage
and retrieval, please. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Mon, 30 Nov 87 14:33:27 CST
-FROM-
From:         JEFF HUESTIS <C81350JH@WUVMD>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      JOB POSTING
-BODY-
 . . .

JOB POSTING

The following is a job posting as it appeared (more or less) in the
November 1987 issue of American Libraries.
                       ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^
The applications have been even more meager than expected.  Granted, the
starting pay is rather low for the caliber of person we are looking for.
However, I am looking more for potential than experience.  Also, it is
recognized by most of the right people here that the pay is too low.  I
expect that there will continue to be upward pressure until something is
done about it.

I would appreciate it if anyone on the IRLIST could recommend some of
their more promising present or former students to me or the names of
other people who might be in a position to make such recommendations and
whose recommendations would have some weight.  If a copy of this posting
could be distributed to such persons, that would also be helpful.

While this position is most likely to appeal to a library "type", I
would consider going as far afield as a linguistics, philosophy, or
education degree (we won't even talk about CS) if the individual could
convince me of his or her interest in information retrieval.  More
particularly, this position necessarily involves a certain amount of
getting one's hands dirty with library problems--we still have a lot of
foundation work to do here.

As far as programming languages are concerned, the reference to
assembler is more to cover some basic understanding of machine semantics
than the ability to code extensively in assembler.  (The ability to read
assembler with the help of a manual is, however, important.)  Pascal, C,
etc. are fine in lieu of PL/I.

Finally, let me reiterate that this is an excellent position in terms of
the exposure (opportunity to learn) it gives to the right person,
especially someone coming straight out of graduate school and, for
whatever reason, not immediately considering the pursuit of a terminal
degree.

>-Jeffrey C. Huestis
  Head, Library Systems Services
  Washington University Libraries
  St. Louis, MO 63130
  (314) 889-5409      c81350jh@wuvmd.bitnet

************************************************************************

Systems Librarian:  [This is the official posting, with emendations.]

Participates in the ongoing development of an automated library
information system and helps to maintain the efficient operation of all
existing automated processes on a dedicated library-owned IBM machine.
[Currently a 4361 with 12 Mbytes real memory, 2 gigabytes of mass
storage.] The Olin Library System automation program receives
substantial funding from a dedicated endowment [$4 million].

Desirable qualifications are: working experience in an academic research
library; programming experience and/or coursework in assembler language
(preferably IBM360/370) and a block-structured higher-level language
(preferably PL/I); knowledge of interactive applications and
text-processing applications in an experimental context.

Required:  an MLS from an ALA-accredited library school or a graduate
degree in a discipline related to information science.

Minimum salary: $20,904.

Applications will be accepted until Nov. 30 or until the position is
filled.  Send letter of application, resume [and transcripts], and 3
letters of reference to:  Virginia F. Toliver, Director of Library
Personnel and Administrative Services, Olin Library, Washington
University, St. Louis, MO 63130.

The submission of programming samples is encouraged, but not required.

Washington University is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action
employer.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 87 12:09:09 est
-FROM-
From: isfac stephen hirtle <idis!sch>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Classification Society Mtg
-BODY-
          CLASSIFICATION SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA

           1988 ANNUAL MEETING CALL FOR PROPOSALS

     New York City, NY    Co-Chair, Program Committee:
     June 16 - 18         Stephen C. Hirtle & Sharon L. Weinberg

     The 1988 Classification Society of North America (CSNA)
Annual Meeting will be held June 16 - 18 at the Greenwich
Village campus of New York University in New York City.  The
CSNA is a interdisciplinary organization whose purposes are
to promote the scientific study of classification and
clustering (including systematic methods of creating
classifications from data), and to disseminate scientific
and educational information related to its fields of
interests.  Programs for previous meetings may be found in
the _Journal of Classification_.

     Proposals for papers and/or symposia should be
submitted as soon as possible, and must be received by March
1, 1988.  Each proposal should consist of three copies (8
1/2 X 11 paper) of a single spaced summary for use in
judging the merits of the proposed paper and/or symposium.
The amount of time required should be indicated (15-20
minutes recommended for papers);  and, each paper should be
classified into one of the following areas:  applications,
classification, data analysis, factor analysis, mathematical
models, measurement theory, multivariate analysis, pattern
recognition, scaling, statistical methods, other (specify).
The heading of the summary should use the following format.
In the upper left corner, type the title of the paper,
author(s), institution(s).  In the upper right corner, state
the name of presenting author and the mailing address.

     For U.S. mail, please include one self-addressed,
stamped, business-size envelope for notification of
acceptance and scheduling and submit to Stephen C. Hirtle,
Interdisciplinary Department of Information Science, 752 LIS
Building, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260,
USA;  412-624-9434.

For e-mail, submit to Stephen C. Hirtle at
     UUCP:   {cadre, pitt, decvax, floyd, mcnc}!idis!sch
     CSNET:  sch%idis.uucp@pitt.csnet
     BITNET: IDIS!SCH@PITT or IDIS!SCH@PSUVAX1
Notification of acceptance and scheduling will be mailed
soon after April 1, 1988.

     Information on registration will be sent to all members
of CSNA.  If you are not a member and would like
registration information and/or other information related to
the meeting, please notify Sharon L. Weinberg, Program of
Educational Statistics, 933 Shimkin Hall, New York
University, New York, NY 10003, USA; 212-998-5206.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
46
-DATE-
Date:     30-NOV-1987 19:17:17 GMT
-FROM-
From:     LOU@VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  an interesting problem
-BODY-
Here's an interesting problem someone may have an answer to: what's the best
way of automatically detecting the language in which something is written?
We have a library here in Oxford with a large (well, very large actually)
catalogue of book titles in just about every european language you can think
of: english greek latin german hebrew french russian... in order to get the
indexing strategy right (it's a bit dim to mark "the" as a stop word if the
title is in French) to say nothing of the hyphenation points, it would be
nice to get each title tagged by its language. As there are something like
one and a quarter million titles (I did say it was large) it would be even
nicer
to do this at least semi-automtically. Any suggestions? High frequency words
might be one possibility, except that titles are mostly (but not all) quite
short. Has anyone done anything similar with trigrams?

Lou Burnard  (LOU @ UK.AC.OXFORD.VAX )

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Tue, 1 Dec 1987 11:00 EST
-FROM-
From:         James Nolte <$JSN@CLVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Brown Bibliography on Hypertext from Hypertext 87
-BODY-
You mentioned in the IRLIST Digest of Wednesday, 25 November that Brown
distributed a bibliography on Hypertext. Is that Brown University?  Do
you have an address or contact person from whom I could obtain such
a bibliography?

[Note: try ny@iris.bitnet which will get you to the IRIS Project at
Brown. Maybe we will get some news from IRIS soon? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 87 08:59 EST
-FROM-
From: Roland Zito-Wolf <RJZ@JASPER.Palladian.COM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Knowledge-based bibliographies
-BODY-
I am looking for references regarding knowledge-bases and KB-based tools
for organizing a bibliographic database on AI. I want to be able to retrieve
references by various indices.

Specific issues I'd like to know about:
    - friendly data entry
    - searching through alternate paths (say, finding articles related
      to a given article in some way: by author, topic, system name,
      etc.)
    - ability to "evolve" the structure of the KB with time
    - what is areasonable conceptual structure for reference databases, in
      general?

I'll post a digest of responses to the list.

Roland J. Zito-wolf
Palladian Software
4 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, Mass 02142
617-661-7171
RJZ%JASPER@LIVE-OAK.LCS.MIT.EDU

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:       Thu, 3 Dec 87 09:40:12 GMT
-FROM-
From:       F.E.Candlin@VME.GLASGOW.AC.UK
-SUBJECT-
Subject:    SUBSCRIPTION TO IRList
-BODY-
Dear Professor Fox, This note is to ask you if you would be willing to put me
down for subsription to IRList. I work as the programmer at the DISH History
and Computing Lab at Glasgow University,  Scotland. At Glasgow, we have a
number of fairly large databases - bankruptcies, marriage records, property
valuations, trade accounts etc - which were produced largely using software
developed by ourselves. In addition about half of the academic staff involved
in using computers in history teaching are now producing smaller datasets
specifically related to their courses. One of the interesting things about this
kind of data is the fact that it usually existed in retrievable form long
before
computers were invented. To maintain the integrity of the source, we usually
try to reflect the original form of the data in our databases (be it the
marriage register, the account book or whatever). Very few dbms's cope well
with such data - normally preferring explicit relationships between items
of interest and disliking small inconsistencies whem carrying out analysis.
More strain is put on the dbms by the demands of the typical historian, who
is as interested in exceptions as general statistics. He is also interested
in following up specific people who may pop up in a number of otherwise
unrelated sources. None of this is unique to historians, of course, but the
insight that we have gained has inspired us to set up a new project to look
into ways of instructing information managers in the implications of large-
sets of messy data.

My address is: F.E.Candlin,
               DISH History Computing Laboratory,
               2 University Gardens,
               Glasgow University,
               Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND
Telephone:     041 339 8855 x 4510
Email:         F.E.Candlin@UK.AC.Glasgow.VME

Many Thanks

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 27 Nov 87 11:50:02 MST
-FROM-
From:         Terry Butler <TBUTLER@UALTAVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      Join IRList
-BODY-
I would like to join IRList.  I am an IR analyst in the computing department
at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  Our unit provides
computing support for academics at our university. Our major offering is
SPIRES on the mainframe; and we are supporting several micro data base
packages.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 87 20:05:19 EST
-FROM-
From: dws@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Don W. Saklad)
Message-Id: <8711300105.AA11893@EDDIE.MIT.EDU>
-TO-
To: FOX@VTCS1.BITNET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: notice posted at our local public library
-BODY-
Summary:  interesting notice posted on our local public library bulletin board
Keywords:  library libraries
The Graduate School of Library & Information Science
Simmons College

invites you to attend
a lecture in

The Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture Series sponsored by
The Institute for Scientific Information

featuring

Dr. Elizabeth Young
Vice-President, INMARSAT, Policy and Representation
COMSAT Maritime Services

An executive in one of the nations's leading satellite
communications companies, Dr. Young will share her
insights:  "the impact of new technologies on the role
and status of the information professional."

Wednesday, December 9, 1987
Simmons College Auditorium
300 The Fenway
Boston

Schedule of Events
>---------------------
-END-
2:00-2:30  Registration
-BODY-
2:30-4:00  Welcome and Introduction
             Dean Robert D. Stueart

           Lazerow Lecture
             Dr. Elizabeth Young

4:00-5:00  Reception and refreshments, GSLIS Lounge
           Open House, GSLIS Computer Access Laboratory

Hardware and software recently acquired by the School will be on
display in the Computer Access Laboratory.  Faculty and students will be
available to discuss and demonstrate some of the new technologies
which include BiblioFile, SilverPlater, Dissertation Abstracts on Disc,
DATEXT, Dialog on Disc, OCLC's Search CD-450, WilsonDisc and the Library
Students Association electronic bulletin board.

Attendance by reservation only.
RSVP to Linda Willey, at 617-738-2223 by Monday December 7

[Note: Can anyone tell us what happened? - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1987  13:17 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Saturday, 14 November 1987  11:36-EST
  From: Paul Resnick <pr at ht.ai.mit.edu>
  Re:   AI Revolving Seminar

  Thursday 19, November  4:00pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom


		        The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series


			THE USE OF GROUPING IN VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION


           		David Jacobs


Many systems have been developed for recognizing two and three
dimensional objects in images.  Some problems emerge, however, when we
try to extend these approaches to handle more complex tasks.  More
complex tasks might include using knowledge of large libraries of
different objects instead of looking for just a single object, knowing
about flexible objects instead of rigid ones, or recognizing objects in
large, complex images.  All these tasks require much more computation
from existing recognition systems, and make them more prone to commit
errors.

This talk will describe an object recognition system which attempts to
deal with these problems of accuracy and complexity by using grouping.
The system, called GROPER, knows about a library of different
two-dimensional objects, and examines images which contain some of these
objects, perhaps partially occluded.  It proceeds by forming groups of
image edges which seem particularly likely to have come from a single
object.  It then matches these groups of image edges to groups of model
edges by hashing.  Grouping allows GROPER to first try to perform
recognition with the groups of edges most likely to lead to the correct
recognition of an object.  A comparison between GROPER's performance and
that of a similiar recognition system which does not use grouping shows
that this can dramatically reduce the amount of computation required
for recognition and dramatically reduce the number of mistakes made.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1987  12:40 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Tuesday, 24 November 1987  18:22-EST
  From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   BBN AI Seminar -- Daniel Weld

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

                    THEORIES OF COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

                             Daniel S. Weld
                    MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
                        (WELD@REAGAN.AI.MIT.EDU)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Tuesday December 1


This talk analyzes two approaches to a central subproblem of automated
design, diagnosis, and intelligent tutoring systems: comparative
analysis. Comparative analysis may be considered an analog of
qualitative simulation. Where qualitative simulation takes a structural
model of a system and qualitatively describes its behavior over time,
comparative analysis is the problem of predicting how that behavior will
change if the underlying structure is perturbed and also explaining why
it will change.

For example, given Hooke's law as the model of a horizontal,
frictionless spring/block system, qualitative simulation might generate
a description of oscillation. Comparative analysis, on the other hand,
is the task of answering questions like: ``What would happen to the
period of oscillation if you increase the mass of the block?'' I have
implemented, tested, and proven theoretical results about two different
techniques for solving comparative analysis problems, differential
qualitative (DQ) analysis and exaggeration.

DQ analysis would answer the question above as follows: ``Since force is
inversely proportional to position, the force on the block will remain
the same when the mass is increased. But if the block is heavier, then
it won't accelerate as fast. And if it doesn't accelerate as fast, then
it will always be going slower and so will take longer to complete a
full period (assuming it travels the same distance).''

Exaggeration can also solve this problem, but it generates a completely
different answer: ``If the mass were infinite, then the block would
hardly move at all.  So the period would be infinite. Thus if the mass
was increased a bit, the period would increase as well.''

Both of these techniques has advantages and limitations. DQ analysis is
proven sound, but is incomplete. It can't answer every comparative
analysis problem, but all of its answers are correct.  Because
exaggeration assumes monotonicity, it is unsound; some answers could be
incorrect. Furthermore, exaggeration's use of nonstandard analysis makes
it technically involved.  However, exaggeration can solve several
problems that are too complex for DQ analysis. The trick behind its
power appears to have application to all of qualitative reasoning.

==============================

  Date: Thursday, 19 November 1987  12:09-EST
  From: Eric Sven Ristad <RISTAD%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
  Tuesday,  1  December   7:30pm   Room: 34-401 (Grier Conference Room)


                     TRUTH AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

                           Hilary Putnam
              Department of Philosophy, Harvard University

The following facts are commonly cited as examples of
"intentionality": (i) the fact that words, sentences, and other
"representations" have meaning; (ii) the fact that representations may
refer to some actually existing thing or each of a number of actually
existing things; (iii) the fact that representations may be about
something which does not exist; and (iv) the fact that a state of mind
may have a "state of affairs" as its object, as when someone says,
"she believes that [he is trustworthy]."

When the computer revolution burst upon the world, it was widely
expected (and claimed) that computer models would explain the nature
of these various phenomena. In short, people expected that a reductive
account of the various topics included under the chapter-heading
"intentionality" would be given. Now that this has not proved so easy,
a number of thinkers are beginning to suggest that it isn't so bad if
this can't be done; intentionality is only a feature of "folk
psychology" anyway. If a first class scientific account of intentional
facts and phenomena can't be given, that is not because scientific
reductionism is not the right line to take in metaphysics, but rather
it is because there is, so to speak, nothing there to reduce. I want
to argue that both attitudes are mistaken; that intentionality won't
be reduced and won't go away.


Commentary: Jerry Fodor
            Department of Philosophy, CUNY


Copies of paper Karen persinger, 20B-225, 253-7358

==============================

  Date: Tuesday, 24 November 1987  12:34-EST
  From: Rosemary B. Hegg <ROSIE at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
  Re:   Komorowski Seminar


              DATE: Wednesday, December 2, 1987
              TIME: Refreshments: 1.45PM
              Lecture: 2.00PM
              PLACE: NE43-8th floor playroom

            THE UNIFIED MEDICAL LANGUAGE SYSTEM

                   HENRYK JAN KOMOROWSKI

                Decision Systems  Laboratory
     Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women's Hospital
           MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Knowledge systems in medical applications had several undeniable
successes, yet it is fair to say that only very few of the systems
found their way to everyday use.  One well recognized impediment to
progress is the lack of a knowledge-base (KB) which would encompass
a broad spectrum of medical knowledge.  Instead of embarking on a
200 man/year project to encode a comprehensive KB of modern
medicine, a group of academic institutions joined efforts and
expertise to develop a canonical taxonomy of medical terms and
relations.  This canonical taxonomy, called a Unified Medical Language
System, will provide standards for structuring, indexing, retrieving,
and communicating medical knowledge.  It is anticipated that the
UMLS will be the kernel of most future biomedical applications.  An
application may develop its knowledge-base as an extension to the
taxonomy and use the UMLS as an interlingua to communicate with
other applications.  In this scenario parallel development and sharing
of multiple expert resources will be possible.

One critical issue in the creation of UMLS and a particular focus in
our research  is the identification of semantic features and relations
which should be represented in the taxonomy, and the design of
appropriate structures and tools for storing, displaying, and authoring
these features and relations.  The currently developed prototypical
taxonomy and the viewing and authoring environment has begun to
open the road to a magnitude of applications.  They include an
environment for learning the structure of medicine, efficient
preparation of queries to the external body of the existing medical
literature, automatic acquisition of medical knowledge, automatic
identification of related concepts, free browsing in pursuit of
curiosity, etc.

The development of the UMLS continues to challenge both the
computer scientists and the medical community.

HOST: Peter Szolovits

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
47
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1987  12:05 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Sunday, 29 November 1987  15:07-EST
  From: Paul Resnick <pr at ht.ai.mit.edu>
  Re:   AI Revolving Seminar; Allen Ward.  NOTE UNUSUAL TIME
  Thursday 3, December  4:45pm  Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom


		        The Artificial Intelligence Lab
			Revolving Seminar Series


			MECHANICAL DESIGN: MEANING AND REPRESENTATION


           		Allen Ward

Mechanical design has been much more resistant to automation than
digital design, or mechanical analysis and drafting.  Artificial
intelligence methods offer both an explanation for and means to
partially resolve this problem.

Mechanical design programs, like all programs, work by changing
arrangements of symbols.  These symbol arrangements can be
interpreted as representing sets of sequences of design and
manufacturing operations, or equivalently the sets of physical
artifacts those operations might produce.  Mechanical design is hard
to automate because these sets are diverse; because the traditional
mathematical languages of engineers are unable to describe the sets
in the quantitative detail required; and because the reasoning
processes or design operations which change the symbol arrangements
have not been clearly defined.

I have developed languages for quantitatively representing
specifications and components in a limited domain, that of power
trains.  I can use re-write rules to define a number of design
operations.  These operations can select components from catalogs,
completing the design of power trains meeting an input set of
specifications.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1987  12:31 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Tuesday, 1 December 1987  16:11-EST
  From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   BBN AI/Education Seminar -- Andee Rubin

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

                      REASONING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

                              Andee Rubin
                     Education Department, BBN Labs
                            RUBIN@G.BBN.COM

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                      10:30 am, Tuesday December 8


Statistical reasoning is an important prerequisite for both ordinary and
scientific thinking.  Yet statistical reasoning is seldom taught to
pre-college students, and when it is, the emphasis is often on formulaic
manipulation, rather than on the concepts that are the foundation of
reasoning about statistical matters.

To address these concerns, we have developed, with funding from the
National Science Foundation, a computer-enhanced curriculum in
statistical reasoning called Reasoning Under Uncertainty that
incorporates the ELASTIC (TM) software system.  The course is designed to
help high school students develop statistical reasoning abilities by
using real world activities with which they have practical experience.

The ELASTIC (TM) software, implemented on a Macintosh computer, is a tool
for recording, representing, and manipulating statistical information.
It has standard capabilities such as the ability to represent different
types of variables and create appropriate graphs, including confidence
intervals.  Its most experimental features are three interactive
programs: Stretchy Histograms, Sampler, and Shifty Lines, each of which
allows students to interact directly with statistical graphics in order
to achieve a deeper understanding of the underlying statistical
concepts.

The curriculum and software were field-tested in Belmont and Cambridge
High Schools in the spring of 1987.  The talk will describe and
demonstrate the pedagogical principles underlying the course and
software, some results of the field test, and our plans for future
development.

==================

  Date: Thursday, 3 December 1987  10:30-EST
  From: Rosemary B. Hegg <ROSIE at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
  Re:   Jon Doyle seminar on 12/8/87

                  SEMINAR  SEMINAR  SEMINAR

               DATE: Tuesday, December 8, 1987
               TIME:  Refreshments: 12:45PM
                      Lecture: 1:00PM
               PLACE: NE43-8th floor playroom

             ON UNIVERSAL THEORIES OF DEFAULTS

                        JON DOYLE
              Department of Computer Science
                Carnegie Mellon University

                         ABSTRACT

Though unifications of some of the numerous theories of
default reasoning have been found, we bolster doubts about the
existence of universal theories by viewing default reasoning from the
standpoint of decision theory as a case of rational self-government of
inference.  Default rules express not only methods for deriving new
conclusions from old, but also preferences among sets of possible
conclusions.  Conflicting default rules, which form the central
difficulty in the theories, represent inconsistent preferences about
conclusions.  These conflicting rules arise naturally in practice,
especially in databases representing the knowledge of several experts.
We formally compare these theories of rational inference with theories
of group decision making, and develop doubts about universal theories
of the former by considering well-known negative results about the
latter.

HOST:  Prof. Peter Szolovits

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Mon, 7 Dec 87 12:01 EST
-FROM-
From:         Tom Benson 814-238-5277 <T3B@PSUVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      CRTNET 114 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
Date:     Sun,  6-DEC-1987 12:38 EST
<contributor>     Janet F. Asteroff <ASTEROFF@CUTCV1>
Subject:  Computer-mediated Communication


 . . .

I recently completed my dissertation on paralanguage in electronic
mail, the abstract of which is appended to this posting. I found,
among the 16 people I studied, many forms of "extra expression" in
the form of "paralanguage." Ultimately, I documented enough
differences between writing on the computer and writing through other
media to identify it as "electronic paralanguage" with its own formal
definition.

Many people believe that face-to-face communication is the richest
form of communication because of the variety of signals and channels,
and as well the potential for channel redundancy. I have no problem
with this assumption. I do, however, take issue with comparing other
forms of communication to face-to-face and then judging any other
medium as "information poor." Some scholars of computer-mediated
communication carry this negative frame of reference over to their
own work. While the computer may not provide as many channels as
face-to-face communication, and the channel itself may be somewhat
more limited, there is considerable research to indicate that
computer users have done some interesting things to convey their
meaning and message.

Since I am not a fan of clogging up bboards with long messages,
anyone interested in my work can contact me directly at
Asteroff@cutcv1.bitnet and I will be happy to send you more material.

The dissertation is also available through University Microfilms:

Janet F. Asteroff, "Paralanguage in Electronic Mail: A Case Study."
Teachers College, Columbia University, May, 1987.


/Janet
(Asteroff@cutcv1.bitnet)


                               ABSTRACT


                   PARALANGUAGE IN ELECTRONIC MAIL:

                             A CASE STUDY


                          Janet F. Asteroff


This study explores the use of paralanguage in electronic mail
communication. It examines the use of paralanguage according to the
electronic mail and computing experience and technical expertise of
16 library science graduate students who fall into two groups by rank
of experience, novice and advanced.  These respondents used
electronic mail in a non-elective and task-related situation to
communicate with their instructor. This case study is based on a
multi-level qualitative content analysis of the electronic mail
exchanged between the respondents and the instructor, and the
attitudes and experiences of the respondents about their use of
electronic mail and computers.  This research interprets the roles
and functions of paralanguage in computer-mediated communication and
explores the phenomenon as an indicator of certain kinds of
expression.

Paralanguage is a component of spoken, written, and electronic
communication.  It gives to what is being communicated a character
over and above that which is necessary to convey meaning in the
linguistic or grammatical sense.  Paralanguage in electronic mail is
positioned between spoken and written paralanguage in its visual and
interpretive structures. Electronic paralanguage, a term developed to
describe paralanguage in computer-mediated communication, is defined
as: features of written language which are used outside of formal
grammar and syntax, and other features related to but not part of
written language, which through varieties of visual and interpretive
contrast provide additional, enhanced, redundant or new meanings to
the message.

Electronic paralanguage is revealed to be a component of
communication which in some situations showed substantial differences
by the rank of the respondent, as well as differences in individual
behaviors. Novice respondents used more paralanguage in more types of
messages than did advanced respondents.  Electronic paralanguage also
provides a robust picture of the character of communication.  The use
of exclamation points by novice respondents in task-related messages
showed that electronic paralanguage can in certain cases be a general
measure of stress and experience, and as well is a precise indicator
of different kinds of positive and negative psychological stress.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
48
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 87 01:54:16 est
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: correction
-BODY-

-VOL-
5

-N-
144
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 87 10:33:52 PST
-FROM-
From: emma@russell.stanford.edu
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Revised title and abstract for CSLI Seminar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
 ...


                            CSLI SEMINAR
		      Interpretation as Abduction
			     Jerry R. Hobbs
                           December 17, 1987
                        2:15, Redwood Hall G-19

The goal of the TACITUS project at SRI is investigate the use of
commonsense knowledge in the interpretation of discourse.  We have
recently developed a new scheme for abductive inference that yields a
dramatic simplification of our characterization of what interpretation
is.  I will discuss its use in solving various local pragmatics
problems, such as the resolution of reference, metonymy, and syntactic
ambiguity problems and the interpretation of compound nominals.  The
scheme also suggests an elegant way to integrate syntactic and
pragmatic processing, and this will be discussed briefly.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1987  16:22 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Monday, 14 December 1987  10:07-EST
  From: Rosemary B. Hegg <ROSIE at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
  Re:   Jon Doyle seminar on 12/18 at 2pm

                DATE: December 18, 1987
                TIME: Refreshments: 1.45 pm
                      Lecture: 2:00PM
               PLACE: NE43-8th floor playroom

             ON UNIVERSAL THEORIES OF DEFAULTS

                        JON DOYLE
              Department of Computer Science
                Carnegie Mellon University

                         ABSTRACT

Though unifications of some of the numerous theories of
default reasoning have been found, we bolster doubts about the
existence of universal theories by viewing default reasoning from the
standpoint of decision theory as a case of rational self-government of
inference.  Default rules express not only methods for deriving new
conclusions from old, but also preferences among sets of possible
conclusions.  Conflicting default rules, which form the central
difficulty in the theories, represent inconsistent preferences about
conclusions.  These conflicting rules arise naturally in practice,
especially in databases representing the knowledge of several experts.
We formally compare these theories of rational inference with theories
of group decision making, and develop doubts about universal theories
of the former by considering well-known negative results about the
latter.

HOST:  Prof. Peter Szolovits

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
494
-DATE-
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 87 10:09:02 EST
-FROM-
From: mnetor!lsuc!dave@uunet.UU.NET
-SUBJECT-
Subject: IRList Digest V3 #47
-BODY-
I'm now able to receive IRList through the Usenet newsgroup
comp.theory.info-retrieval, so I don't need it mailed here
separately anymore. Thanks.

You might mention in the next IRList about the newsgroup, so that
people who have access to Usenet can access it there and cut
down on their mailer traffic.

David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Fri, 11 Dec 87 10:19 EST
-FROM-
From:         Tom Benson 814-238-5277 <T3B@PSUVM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      CRTNET 115 [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date:         8 December 1987, 19:12:29 EST
  Subject:      The Humanities Computing Yearbook

Contributed by Willard McCarty (in this case as YEARBOOK@UTOREPAS)

. . . I am gathering information about interesting
and worthy software for a new serial, the Humanities Computing Yearbook,
to be published by Oxford U.P. The announcement for the Yearbook
follows. Please send your recommendations to me, c/o
yearbook@utorepas.bitnet.
Thanks very much for your help.

                  The Humanities Computing Yearbook

On behalf of Oxford University Press, the publishers, the Centre
for Computing in the Humanities is pleased to announce a new
periodical, The Humanities Computing Yearbook. Ian Lancashire and
Willard McCarty are the co-editors. An editorial board is in
process of being set up.

The first volume, scheduled for publication in the summer of
1988, aims to give a comprehensive guide to publications,
software, and specialized hardware organized by subject or area
of application. Research and instructional work in many fields
will be covered: ancient and modern languages and literatures,
linguistics, history, philosophy, fine art, archaeology, and areas of
computational linguistics affecting text-based disciplines in the
humanities. The more notable software packages will be described
in some detail.

We welcome your suggestions of what we should consider. We are
especially interested in discovering innovative software that may
not be widely known, including working prototypes of systems in
development.

Electronic correspondence should be sent to
YEARBOOK@UTOREPAS.BITNET, conventional mail to the Editors, The
Humanities Computing Yearbook, Centre for Computing in the
Humanities, Univ. of Toronto, 14th floor, Robarts Library, 130
St. George Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 1A5. Our telephone number
is (416) 978-4238. Please feel free to distribute this notice.

Ian Lancashire
Willard McCarty

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 87 17:06:00 EST
-FROM-
From: geri@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Geri Pinkham)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Requested abstracts for TR881 & 828
-BODY-
[Note: Here are abstracts for 2 recent technical reports available from
the Dept. of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY - Ed]


TR 87-828:

                Parallel Text Search Methods

              Gerard Salton and Chris Buckley*

Abstract

     An evaluation of  recently  proposed  parallel  text  search
methods  does  not  support  the notion that the parallel methods
provide large-scale gains in either  retrieval  effectiveness  or
efficiency, compared with alternative available search strategies
using serial processing machines.
_________________________
*Department of Computer  Science,  Cornell  University,
Ithaca, NY 14853.
This study was supported in part by the  National  Sci-
ence  Foundation  under grants IST 83-16166 and IST 85-
44189.


and TR 87-881:

      Term Weighting Approaches in Automatic Text Retrieval

                Gerard Salton and Chris Buckley *

Abstract

     The experimental evidence accumulated over the past 20 years
indicates  that  text indexing systems based on the assignment of
appropriately weighted single  terms  produce  retrieval  results
that  are  superior to those obtainable with other more elaborate
text representations.  These  results  depend  crucially  on  the
choice  of  effective term weighting systems.  This paper summar-
izes the insights gained in automatic term  weighting,  and  pro-
vides  baseline single term indexing models with which other more
elaborate content analysis procedures can be compared.
_________________________
*Department of Computer Science, Cornell University,  Ithaca,  NY
14853.
This study was supported in part by the National Science  Founda-
tion under grants IST 83-16166 and IRI 87-02735.



TR 87-828 was made into a TR report 4/87
TR 87-881 was made into a TR report 11/87

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:         Sun, 13 Dec 87 09:54:22 -0800
Sender: "(ARPA-MHS  Discussions)" <ARPA-MHS%BYUADMIN.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
-FROM-
From: Einar Stefferud <stef@nma.com>
-SUBJECT-
Subject:      DRAFT IFIP 6.5 CALL FOR PAPERS
-BODY-
FYI   -John
>---------------------------Original message----------------------------
THIS CALL FOR PAPERS IS SUBJECT TO SOME MINOR REVISIONS OF DETAIL,
              BUT IS SOLID IN TERMS OF SUBSTANCE.

For example, the topic areas in which we seek papers is firm.

For example, the list of contact addresses will be expanded if we get
volunteers on various networks to offer forwarding arrangements so mail
can easily be addressed to the conference organizers.  We are seeking
volunteer arrangements for this purpose.

The long list of Program Committee Members actually represents the
current list of reviewers, and we are seeking additional reviewers to
deal with the expected 60-75 submitted papers.  Please contact us if you
want to be added to out list of reviewers, or if you want to serve on
the main program committee.


.PAGE

CALL FOR PAPERS -- 1988 IFIP6.5 INTERNATIONAL WORKING CONFERENCE
                               ON MESSAGE HANDLING
                        AND DISTRIBUTED APPLICATION SYSTEMS

        -- 10 to 12 October, 1988

        -- Costa Mesa, Orange County,
                   Southern California, USA

SPONSORED BY: IFIP TC 6 & the University of California at Irvine

PROGRAM:  The purpose of the conference is to provide an
international forum for the exchange of information on the
technical, economic, social, and political impacts and
experiences with computer messaging and distributed application
infrastructures in the automated workplace environment.  The
conference format will be two days of conference paper
presentations combined with one day of workshops.  Papers are
desired in the following topic areas:

International Standards and Profiles -- 1988
    Current Status of CCITT/ISO and Future Plans
    Implementors' Agreements and Harmonization
    Implementation Issues and Experience
    Testing and Conformance Activities

Interconnection and Interworking
    Interconnection Issues and Experiences
      (X.400 ADMD/ADMD, ADMD/PRMD, PRMD/PRMD)
    Multi-Vender Private Domains
    Gateways to/from Non-X.400 Domains and Architectures
    TELEX and TELETEX Interworking
    Postal System Interworking
    Facsimile Interworking
    Voice Mail Interworking
    Multilateral and Bilateral Agreements

User Agent Models and Designs
    User Agent Functions and Services
    Distributed User Agents (Such as X.400 Message Store)
    User Interface Designs and Experience
    User Agents and User Interfaces for Impaired Users
    Object Collection Management -- Personal and Institutional
      (Store, Organize, Search, Retrieve, Share, Purge, Archive)

Group Communication Models and Services
    Organizational Communication Flows
    Distribution Lists for MHS
    Distributed Conferencing Services
    Real-Time, Multi-Media, Mixed-Mode Conferencing
      (Video, Voice, Graphics, Text -- MHS, FTAM, VTP)
    Models for Group Communication

Information Object Standards for Interchange
    Abstract Syntax and Structure Encoding
      Open Document Architecture
          Open Document Interchange Format
      Electronic Document Interchange
          Electronic Funds Transfer
    Multi-Media Objects (Graphics, FAX, Voice, Text)

Distribution of Services and Applications
    Workstations and Servers in Networks
    Services Based on Cooperating Distributed Processes
      (MHS, FTAM, Directory, DBMS, Conferencing)

Security, Authentication, Privacy, Confidentiality
    Authentication Framework Standards
    Exchange of Encrypted Information Objects
    TransBorder Data Flow
    Legal Issues

Management and Operation of Distributed Services
    Registration of Entities and Domains
    Administration of Directory Information Bases
    Distribution of Authority and Responsibility
    Fault Isolation    and Reporting
    Queuing, Routing, and Congestion
    Quality of Service Management

Directory Services
    Naming and Addressing
    Public Directory Services
    Interworking Between Public and Private Services
    Interworking of Directory with other Applications

Policy Issues
    International Issues
    National Issues
    Public Regulatory Issues
    Public Access Issues

Impacts of MHS and Distributed Services
    Social and Behavioral Impacts
    Organizational Impacts
    National and Governmental Impacts

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUTHORS:  Prospective Authors are invited to
submit for review, unpublished original contributions (not
exceeding 5000 words) which describe recent developments on any
design or service aspect of computer message systems and
distributed application systems.

DEADLINES --

Today:  Fill out the enclosed form stating your intention
        to submit a paper, or your general interest in the
        conference.

February 29, 1988: Draft versions of papers due for review.
   April 30, 1988: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection.
    June 30, 1988: Camera-Ready papers required for publication.

 SUBMIT PAPERS TO: Dr. Peter Schicker
                   Zellweger Telecomunications AG
                   CH-8634 Hombrectikon, Switzerland

                   Telephone: +41 55 416 377
                   Telex:            875 558
                   Facsimile: +41 55 416 385
                   EAN:       Schicker@ean.cs.nott.ac.uk


            OR TO: Ole-Jorgen Jacobsen
                   Advanced Computing Environments
                   21370 Vai Avenue
                   Cupertino, California, USA 95014

                   Telephone: +1 408 996 2042
                              +1 415 325 9542
                   Internet:  Ole@CSLI.Stanford.EDU

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:   Peter Schicker (CH - European CoChair)
                     Ole Jacobsen (USA - North American CoChair)

David Biran (IL)       Tim Bishop (CDN)       Bert Boutmy (NL)
Ebe Butrini (I)        Ian Cunningham (CDN)   Andre' Danthine (B)
Harry Forsdick (USA)   Jose' Granado (P)      H.G. Hegering (D)
Christian Huitema (F)  W.J. Jaburek (A)       Dipak Khakhar (S)
Thomas Kalin (YU)      Farouk Kamoun (TN)     Steve Kille (GB)
Albert Ku"ndig (CH)    Susan Lebeck (USA)     Erik Lillevold (N)
Dan Lynch (USA)        James McHugh (USA)     Manuel Medina (E)
Richard Miller (USA)   Najah Naffah (F)       Yukio Nakagome (J)
S. Ramani (IND)        Steve Rothwell (USA)   Horst Santo (D)
Erik Skovgaard (CDN)   Hugh Smith (GB)        Otto Spaniol (D)
Rolf Speth (B)         Doug Steedman (CDN)    Einar Stefferud (USA)
John Stidd (USA)       Tibor Szentivany (H)   Fred Szatnjnkrycer (F)
David Taylor (USA)     Liane Turoco (BR)      Ronald Uhlig (USA)
James White (USA)      Paolo Zupa (I)


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:  Einar Stefferud (General Chair)
                       James McHugh (Local Arrangements Chair)
                       Jeff Cole (UCI Conference Coordinator)

NETWORK MAIL CONTACTS:

     "Peter Schicker EAN"         <Schicker@ean.cs.nott.ac.uk>
     "Ole Jacobsen INTERNET"           <Ole@CSLI.Stanford.EDU>
     "Einar Stefferud INTERNET" <EStefferud@NRTC.Northrop.COM>
     "Einar Stefferud INTERNET" <EStefferud@ICS.UCI.EDU>
     "Einar Stefferud BITNET"        <EStef@UCI>
     "Jeff Cole BITNET"             <JTCOLE@UCI>
     "Jeff Cole INTERNET"           <JTCole@ics.uci.edu>
     "Conference Office BITNET"     <IFIP65@UCI>
     "Conference Office INTERNET"   <IFIP65@ics.uci.edu>

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
504
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 87 22:50:46 est
-FROM-
From: amsler@flash.bellcore.com (Robert Amsler)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Text Encoding Standard for the Humanities - Vassar Workshop report
-BODY-
[The following is a summary prepared by Michael Sperberg-McQueen for
the HUMANIST mailing list of the first workshop on the preparation of
an encoding standard for text in the humanities held at Vassar
College last month. As an attendee and steering committee member, I
would be willing to answer further questions concerning this effort
for the IRLIST or NL-KR communities.  The effort to develop a standard for
encoding texts in the humanities is just starting and anyone with
interest in this noble and ambitious goal should not feel the
slightest hesitancy about becoming a part of the effort.  What is at
stake is nothing less than the creation, use and preservation of our
global electronic cultural heritage - R. Amsler, (amsler@flash.bellcore.com)]

Contributor: "Michael Sperberg-McQueen" <U18189@UICVM>

A followup on the current status of the ACH effort to formulate
guidelines for text encoding practices.

   ******************************************************************
   * NOTE: The following encoding conventions have been used to     *
   *       represent French accents throughout this message:        *
   *                                                                *
   *   To Represent Accents  --  Pour la representation des accents *
   *    /       acute accent - accent aigu                          *
   *    `       grave accent - accent grave                         *
   *                                                                *
   * The accent codes are typed    Les codes pour les accents se    *
   * AFTER the letter, and are     trouvent APRES la lettre qu'ils  *
   * used with both upper and      modifient, et s'utilisent avec   *
   * lower case letters.           les majuscules aussi bien que    *
   *                               les minuscules.                  *
   ******************************************************************


On November 12 and 13, 1987, 31 representatives of professional
societies, universities, and text archives met to consider the
possibility of developing a set of guidelines for the encoding of texts
for literary, linguistic, and historical research. The meeting was
called by the Association for Computers and the Humanities and funded
by the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The list of participants
is appended to this document.

The participants heartily endorsed the idea of developing encoding
guidelines. In order to guide such development, they agreed on
the following principles:


       The Preparation of                 Re/daction des directives
     Text Encoding Guidelines             pour le codage des textes

                         Poughkeepsie, New York
                            13 November 1987

1.  The guidelines are intended   1.  Le but des directives est de cre/er
    to provide a standard format      un format standard pour l'e/change
    for data interchange in           des donne/es utilise/es pour la
    humanities research.              recherche dans les humanite/s.

2.  The guidelines are also       2.  Les directives sugge/reront
    intended to suggest principles    e/galement des principes pour
    for the encoding of texts         l'enregistrement des textes
    in the same format.               destine/s a` utiliser ce format.

3.  The directives should         3.  Les directives devraient

  a.  define a recommended          a.  de/finir une syntaxe recommande/e
      syntax for the format             pour exprimer le format,

  b.  define a metalanguage         b.  de/finir un me/ta-langage
      for the description               de/crivant les syste`mes de
      of text-encoding schemes,         codage des textes,

  c.  describe the new format       c.  de/crire par le moyen de ce
      and representative                me/talangage, aussi bien qu'en
      existing schemes both in          prose, le nouveau syste`me de
      that metalanguage and             codage aussi bien qu'un choix
      in prose.                         repre/sentatif de syste`mes
                                        de/ja` en vigueur.

4.  The guidelines should         4.  Les directives devraient proposer
    propose sets of coding            des syste`mes de codage utilisables
    conventions suited for            pour un large e/ventail
    various applications.             d'applications.

5.  The guidelines should         5.  Sera incluse dans les directives
    include a minimal set of          l'e/nonciation d'un syste`me de
    conventions for encoding          codage minimum, pour guider
    new texts in the format.          l'enregistrement de nouveaux textes
                                      conforme/ment au format propose/.

6.  The guidelines are to be      6.  Le travail d'e/laboration des
    drafted by committees on:         directives sera confie/ a` quatre
                                      comite/s centre/s sur les sujets
                                      suivants:

  a.  text documentation            a.  la documentation des textes,

  b.  text representation           b.  la repre/sentation des textes,

  c.  text interpretation           c.  l'analyse et l'interpre/tation
      and analysis                      des textes

  d.  metalanguage definition       d.  la de/finition du me/talangage et
      and description of                son utilisation pour de/crire le
      existing and proposed             nouveau syste`me aussi bien que
      schemes                           ceux qui existent de/ja`.

    co-ordinated by a steering        Ce travail sera coordonne/ par un
    committee of representatives      comite/ d'organisation ou`
    of the principal                  sie`geront des repre/sentants des
    sponsoring organizations.         principales associations qui
                                      soutiennent cet effort.

7.  Compatibility with existing   7.  Dans la mesure du possible, le
    standards will be maintained      nouveau syste`me sera compatible
    as far as possible.               avec les syste`mes de codage
                                      existants.

8.  A number of large text        8.  Des repre/sentants de plusieurs
    archives have agreed in           grandes archives de textes en form
    principle to support the          lisible par machine acceptent en
    guidelines in their function      principe d'utiliser les directives
    as an interchange format.         en tant que description des formats
    We encourage funding agencies     pour l'e/change de leurs donne/es.
    to support development of         Nous encourageons les organismes
    tools to facilitate this          qui fournissent des fonds pour la
    interchange.                      recherche de soutenir le
                                      de/veloppement de ce qui est
                                      ne/cessaire pour faciliter cela.

9.  Conversion of existing        9.  En convertissant des textes
    machine-readable texts to         lisibles par machine de/ja`
    the new format involves the       existants, on remplacera
    translation of their              automatiquement leur codage actuel
    conventions into the syntax       par ce qui est ne/cessaire pour les
    of the new format.  No            rendre conformes au format nouveau.
    requirements will be made for     Nul n'exigera l'ajout
    the addition of information       d'informations qui ne sont pas
    not already coded in the          de/ja` repre/sente/es dans ces
    texts.                            textes.

                                         (trad. P. A. Fortier)

                            ******************

The further organization and drafting of the guidelines will be
supervised by a steering committee selected by the three sponsoring
organizations:  ACH (the Association for Computers and the Humanities),
ACL (the Association for Computational Linguistics), and ALLC (the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing).  Drafts of the
guidelines will be submitted for comment to an editorial committee with
representatives of all participating organizations (in addition to the
sponsors, thus far:  the Modern Language Association, the Association
for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Information
Retrieval, and the Association of American Publishers; the following
groups have indicated interest informally but have not yet formally
pledged participation, in most cases pending a formal vote: the
Linguistic Society of America, the Association for Documentary Editing,
the American Philological Association. The American Anthropological
Association, plus several organizations within Europe, are now being
asked to consider participation.

The interchange format defined by the guidelines is expected to be
compatible with the Standard Generalized Markup Language defined
by ISO 8859, if that proves compatible with the needs of research.  The
needs of specialized research interests will be addressed wherever it
proves possible to find interested groups or individuals to do the
necessary work and achieve the necessary consensus.  Formation of
specific working groups will be announced later; in the meantime, those
interested in working on specific problems are invited to contact
either Dr. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Computer Center, University of
Illinois at Chicago (M/C 135), P.O. Box 6998, Chicago IL 60680 (on
Bitnet: U18189 at UICVM), or Prof. Nancy Ide, Dept. of Computer
Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY 12601 (on Bitnet:  IDE at
VASSAR).

                                                 - N.I., C.M.S-McQ

>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-END-
                    List of Participants
-BODY-
  NOTE: Association names are given following the names of their
        representatives at this meeting.

   Helen Aguera, National Endowment for the Humanities
   Robert A. Amsler, Bell Communications Research
   David T. Barnard, Department of Computing and Information Science,
      Queen's University, Ontario
   Lou Burnard, Oxford Text Archive
   Roy Byrd, IBM Research
   Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa
   David Chestnutt  (Assoc. for Documentary Editing, American Historical
      Assoc.), Department of History, University of South Carolina
   Yaacov Choueka (Academy of the Hebrew Language), Department of
      Mathematics and Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University
   Jacques Dendien, Institut National de la Langue Francaise
   Paul A. Fortier, Department of Romance Languages, University of
      Manitoba
   Thomas Hickey, OCLC Online Computer Library Center
   Susan Hockey  (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing),
      Oxford University Computing Service
   Nancy M. Ide (Association for Computers and the Humanities),
      Department of Computer Science, Vassar College
   Stig Johansson, International Computer Archive of Modern English,
      University of Oslo
   Randall Jones  (Modern Language Association), Humanities Research
      Computing Center, Brigham Young University
   Robert Kraft, Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts, University of
      Pennsylvania
   Ian Lancashire, Center for Computing in the Humanities, University of
      Toronto
   D. Terence Langendoen (Linguistic Society of America), Graduate
      Center, City University of New York
   Charles (Jack) Meyers, National Endowment for the Humanities
   Junichi Nakamura, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kyoto
      University
   Wilhelm Ott, Universitaet Tuebingen
   Eugenio Picchi, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa
   Carol Risher (American Association of Publishers), American
      Association of Publishers, Inc.
   Jane Rosenberg, National Endowment for the Humanities
   Jean Schumacher, Centre de traitement e/lectronique de textes,
      Universite/ catholique de Louvain a` Louvain-la-neuve
   J. Penny Small (American Philological Association), U.S. Center for
      the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, Rutgers
      University
   C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Computer Center, University of Illinois at
      Chicago
   Paul Tombeur, Centre de traitement e/lectronique de textes,
      Universite/ catholique de Louvain a` Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium
   Frank Tompa, New Oxford English Dictionary Project, University of
      Waterloo
   Donald E. Walker (Association for Computational Linguistics), Bell
      Communications Research
   Antonio Zampolli, Istituto di linguistica computazionale, Pisa, Italy

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
514
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 87 13:05:30 EST
-FROM-
From: "Paul D. Kahn" <pdk%iris.bitnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hypermedia bibliography
-BODY-
********************************************************************
I used tags to identify the type of each record (Procite "workforms")
and then a set of three-character tags to mark each field. Each field
begins a new line, each record is separated by a blank space. Here is the
key to the coding.

::BOOKLONG:     chapter in a book
ANA:    analytic author
ANR:    analytic author role
ATL:    analytic title
MTL:    monographic title
AMR:    monographic author role
MOA:    monographic author
LOC:    location in book
STL:    series title
SVO:    series volume
SID:    series issue id
PLP:    place of publicatin
PUB:    publisher
DAT:    date

::JOURNALS      serial
ANA:    author
ATL:    article title
MTL:    journal title
VID:    volume number
IID:    issue number
LOC:    location in book
DAT:    date

::REPORT:
ANA:    analytic author
ATL:    title
MTL:    report title
AMR:    monographic author role
MOA:    monographic author
PUB:    publisher
AVL:    availability
PLP:    place of publicatin
STL:    series title
RID:    report id
DAT:    date

::BOOKSHORT     full book
MTL:    monographic title
MOA:    monographic author
PLP:    place of publicatin
PUB:    publisher
DAT:    date

::DISSERTATION:
ANA:    author
ATL:    title
PUB:    publisher
DAT:    date

::CONFPROC:
ANA:    analytic author
ATL:    title
AMR:    mongraphic author role
MOA:    monographic author
MTL:    monographic title
PLM:    place of meeting
DMT:    date of meeting
DAT:    date of publication
*************************************************************************

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Akscyn, Robert, McCracken, Donald L., and Yoder, Elise
ATL:KMS: A Distributed Hypertext System for Sharing Knowledge in Organizations
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Akscyn, Robert, and McCracken, Donald L.
ATL:The ZOG Approach to Database Management
MTL:Proceedings of the Trends and Applications Conference: Making Database Work
PLM:Gaithersburg, MD
DAT:May, 1984

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Allen, Todd, Nix, Robert, and Perlis, Alan
ATL:PEN: A hierarchical document editor
MTL:Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOA Conference on Text Manipulation
PLM:Portland, Oregon
DAT:June, 1981

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Backer, D., and Gano, S.
ATL:Dynamically Alterable Videodisk Displays
MTL:Proceedings Graphics Interface 82
PLM:Toronto, Canada
DAT:May 1982

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Baskin, A. B.
ATL:Logic Nets: Variable-valued Logic Plus Semantic Networks
MTL:International Journal on Policy Analysis and Information Systems
VID:4
DAT:1980
LOC:269

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Beeman, William O., Anderson, Kenneth T., Bader, Gail, Larkin, James,
McClard, Anne P., McQuillan, Patrick J., and Shields, ark
ATL:Hypertext and Pluralism: From Lineal to Non-lineal Thinking
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Begeman, Michael L., Cook, P., Ellis, C., Graf, M., Rein, G., and Smith, T.
ATL:PROJECT NICK: Meetings Augmentation and Analysis
MTL:Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86) Proceedings
PLM:Austin, TX
DMT:December 3-5
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Bender, W.
ATL:Imaging and Interactivity
MTL:Fifteenth Joint Conference on Image Technology
PLM:Tokyo, Japan
DMT:November
DAT:1984

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Bigelow, James, and Riley, Victor
ATL:Manipulating Source Code in DynamicDesign
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Biggerstaff, T., Ellis, C., Halasz, F. G., Kellog, C., Richter, C., and
Webster, D.
MTL:Information Management Challenges in the Software Design Process
STL:MCC Technical Report
RID:STP-039-87
DAT:January, 1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Bolt, R. A.
ATL:Put-that-there:  Voice and Gesture at the Graphics Interface
MTL:Computer Graphics
VID:15
IID:3
DAT:August 1980
LOC:262-270

::REPORT:
ANA:Bolt, R. A.
MTL:Spatial Data-Management, DARPA Report
PUB:MIT Architecture Machine Group
PLP:Cambridge, MA
DAT:1979

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Bolter, Jay David
ATL:Hypertext and Creative Writing
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Borning, Alan, Lenat, D. B., McDonald, D., Taylor, C., and Weyer, Steven A.
ATL:Knoesphere:  Toward a Searcher's Guide to Encylocpedic Knowledge
MTL:IJCAI-83
DAT:1983

::REPORT:
ANA:Brown, John Seely
MTL:Notes Concerning Design Functionality, Issues and Philosophy for an
AuthoringLand
PUB:Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
PLP:Palo Alto, CA
STL:Xerox PARC CIS Working Paper
DAT:February 1982

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Brown, John Seely
ATL:Process versus Product:  A Perspective on Tools for Communal and Informal
Electronic Learning
MTL:Education in the Electronic Age:  A Report from the Learning Lab
MOA:WNET/Thirteen Learning Lab
LOC:41-58
PLP:New York
DAT:1983

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Brown, Peter J.
ATL:A Simple Mechanism for Authorship of Dynamic Documents
MTL:Text Processing and Document Manipulation: Proceedings of the International
Conference
AMR:editor
MOA:von Vliet, J. C.
LOC:34-42
PUB:Cambridge University Press
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Brown, Peter J.
ATL:Turning Ideas into Products: the Guide System
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Buchert, R. F., Evers, K. H., and Santucci, P. R.
ATL:SADT/SAINT Simulation Technique
MTL:National Aerospace and Electronics Conference Proceedings
DAT:1981

::REPORT:
ANA:Bulick, Stephen
MTL:A Network Information Retrieval System
PUB:Bellcore Database Symposium, Bell Communications Research
DAT:September, 1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Bush, Vannevar
ATL:As We May Think
MTL:Atlantic Monthly
VID:176
IID:1
DAT:July 1945
LOC:101-108

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Bush, Vannevar
ATL:Memex Revisited
MTL:Science Is Not Enough
MOA:Bush, Vannevar
LOC:75-101
PUB:William Morrow
DAT:1967

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Campbell, Brad, and Goodman, Joseph M.
ATL:HAM:  A General Purpose Hypertext Abstract Machine
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Carmody, S. et al.
ATL:A Hypertext Editing System for the /360
MTL:Pertinent Concepts in Computer Graphics
AMR:editors
MOA:M. Faiman, and J. Nievergelt
LOC:63-88
PUB:University of Illinois Press
DAT:1969

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Cashin, P., Robinson, M., and Yates, D.
ATL:Experience with SCRAPBOOK, A Non-formatted Data Base System
MTL:Proceedings IFIPS Congress
DMT:1973

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Catano, J.
ATL:Poetry and Computers:  Experimenting with Communal Text
MTL:Computers and the Humanities
VID:13
DAT:1979
LOC:269-275

::REPORT:
ANA:Cattell, R. G.
MTL:An Entity-Based Database Interface
PUB:Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
PLP:Palo Alto, CA
STL:Technical Report
RID:CSL-79-9
DAT:August 1979

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Charney, Davida
ATL:Comprehending Non-Linear Text: The Role of Discourse Cues and Reading
Strategies
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Charney, Davida, and Reder, L.
ATL:Designing interactive tutorials for computer users
MTL:Human-Computer Interaction
VID:2
LOC:297-317

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Collier, George H.
ATL:Thoth-II: Hypertext with Explicit Semantics
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Collier, George H.
MTL:Thoth-II:  A Hypertext Browser
PUB:Bell Communications Research
PLP:Morristown, NJ
STL:Technical Report, Artificial Intelligence and Information Science Research

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Combelic, D.
ATL:User Experience with New Software Methods (SADT)
MTL:Proceedings of the National Computer Conference
DAT:1978

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Conklin, Jeff
ATL:Hypertext: a Survey and Introduction
MTL:IEEE Computer
VID:20
IID:9
DAT:September, 1987
LOC:17-41

::REPORT:
ANA:Conklin, Jeff
MTL:A Survey of Hypertext
PUB:MCC Software Technology Program
PLP:Austin, TX
RID:MCC Technical Report STP-356-86
DAT:October 1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Conklin, Jeff, and Begeman, Michael L.
ATL:gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Team Design Deliberation
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Corda, U., and Facchetti, G.
ATL:Concept Browser: A System for Interactive Creation of Dynamic Documentation
MTL:Text Processing and Document Manipulation: Proceedings of the International
Conference
AMR:editor
MOA:van Vliet, J. C.
PUB:Cambridge University Press
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Crane, Gregory
ATL:From the Old to the New: Integrating Hypertexts into Traditional
Scholarship
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:Novewmber 13-15
DAT:1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Delisle, Norman
MTL:Neptune:  A Hypertext System for CAD Applications
PUB:Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory
PLP:Beaverton, OR
STL:Technical Report
RID:CR-85-50
DAT:January 1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Delisle, Norman, and Schwartz, Mayer
ATL:Context-A Partitioning Concept for Hypertext
MTL:Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86) Proceedings
PLM:Austin, TX
DMT:December 3-5
DAT:1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:di Sessa, Andrea
ATL:A Principled Design for an Integrated Computational Environment
MTL:Human-Computer Interaction
VID:1
IID:1
DAT:1985
LOC:1-47

::JOURNALS:
ANA:di Sessa, Andrea, and Abelson, Harold
ATL:Boxer: A Reconstructable Computational Medium
MTL:Communications of the ACM
VID:29
IID:9
DAT:September, 1986
LOC:859-868

::REPORT:
ANA:Ehrlich, K., and Walker, Janet H.
ATL:High Functionality, Information Retrieval, and the Document Examiner
MTL:Personalized Intelligent Information Systems, Report on a Workshop
(Breckenridge, CO)
AMR:editors
MOA:Fischer, G., and Nieper, H.
RID:87-9
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C.
ATL:Authorship Provisions in Augment
MTL:IEEE 1984 COMPCON Proceedings
DAT:Spring, 1984

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C.
ATL:Collaboration Support Provisions in Augment
MTL:AFIPS Office Automation Conference
DAT:1984

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C.
ATL:A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect
MTL:Vistas in Information Handling, Volume 1
AMR:editors
MOA:Howerton, P. D., and Weeks, D. C.
LOC:1-29
PLP:Washington, D.C.
PUB:Spartan Books
DAT:1963

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C.
ATL:Coordinated Information Services for a Discipline or Mission-Oriented
Community
MTL:Second Annual Computer Communications Conference
PLM:San Jose, CA
DAT:January, 1973

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C.
ATL:Design Considerations for Knowledge Workshop Terminals
MTL:AFIPS Conference Proceedings
DAT:1973

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C.
ATL:Toward Integrated Evolutionary Office Automation Systems
MTL:Proceedings of the International Engineering Management Conference
PLM:Denver, CO
DMT:October 16-18
DAT:1978

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C., and English, W. K.
ATL:A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect
MTL:AFIPS Proceedings, Fall Joint Computer Conference
DAT:Fall 1968

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Engelbart, Douglas C., Watson, R. W., and Norton, J. C.
ATL:The Augmented Knowledge Workshop
MTL:Proceedings of the National Computer Conference
PLM:Arlington, VA
DAT:1973

::JOURNALS:
ANA:English, W. K., Engelbart, Douglas C., and Berman, M. L.
ATL:Display-Selection Techniques for Text Manipulation
MTL:IEEE Transactions on Human Factors and Electronics
VID:HFE-8
IID:1
DAT:March 1967
LOC:5-15

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Fahnestock, J., and Secor, M.
ATL:Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types
MTL:College Compostion and Communication
VID:34
LOC:20-30

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Fairchild, K. F., Poltrock, S. E., and Furnas, G. W.
ATL:SemNet: Three-dimensional Graphic Representations of Large Knowledge Bases
MTL:Cognitive Science and its Applications for Human-Computer Interaction
AMR:editor
MOA:Guindon, R.
PLP:Hillsdale, NJ
PUB:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
DAT:in press

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Feiner, S.
ATL:Interactive Documents
MTL:Design in the Information Environment
AMR:editors
MOA:Whitney, P., and Kent, C.
LOC:118-132
PLP:New York
PUB:Alfred Knopf
DAT:1985

[Note: continued in next 2 issues - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
524
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 87 13:05:30 EST
-FROM-
From: "Paul D. Kahn" <pdk%iris.bitnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hypermedia bibliography
-BODY-
[Note: continued from last issue and onto next - Ed]

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Feiner, S., Nagy, S., and van Dam, Andries
ATL:An Experimental System for Creating and Presenting Interactive Graphical
Documents
MTL:ACM Transactions on Graphics
VID:1
IID:1
DAT:January 1982
LOC:59-77

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Feiner, S., Nagy, S., and van Dam, Andries
ATL:An Integrated System for Creating and Presenting Complex Computer-Based
Documents
MTL:Computer Graphics
VID:15
IID:3
DAT:August 1981
LOC:181-189

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Feiner, S., Nagy, S., and van Dam, Andries
ATL:Online Documents Combining Pictures and Texts
MTL:Proceedings of the International Conference on Research Trends in Document
Preparation Systems
PLM:Lausanne, Switzerland
DMT:February 27-28
DAT:1981

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Foster, Edward
ATL:Outliners: A New Way of Thinking
MTL:Personal Computing
DAT:May, 1985
LOC:74

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Foster, G., and Stefik, M.
ATL:Cognoter, Theory and Practice of a Colab-orative Tool
MTL:Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86) Proceedings
PLM:Austin, TX
DMT:December 3-5
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Frisse, Mark E.
ATL:Searching for Information in a Hypertext Medical Handbook
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::DISSERTATION:
ANA:Frisse, Mark E.
ATL:Searching for Information in a Hypertext Medical Therapeutics Manual
PUB:Medical Information Group, Stanford University School of Medicine
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Garg, Pankaj K.
ATL:Abstraction Mechanisms in Hypertext
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Garg, Pankaj K., and Scacchi, Walt
ATL:A Hypertext System to Manage Software Life Cycle Documents
MTL:The 21st Hawaii International Conference on Systems
PLM:Honolulu HI
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Garg, Pankaj K., and Scacchi, Walt
ATL:On Designing Intelligent Hypertext Systems for Information Management in
Software Engineering
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Garrett, L. N., and Smith, Karen E.
ATL:Building a Timeline Editor from Prefab Parts:  The Architecture of an
Object-oriented Application
MTL:Proceedings of the Conference on Object-oriented Programming Systems,
Languages and Applications (OOPSLA '86)
PLM:Portland, Oregon
DMT:September 29-October 2
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Garrett, L. N., Smith, Karen E., and Meyrowitz, Norman
ATL:Intermedia:  Issues, Strategies, and Tactics in the Design of a Hypermedia
Document System
MTL:Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86) Proceedings
PLM:Austin, TX
DMT:December 3-5
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Goldstein, I. P., and Bobrow, D. G.
ATL:Descriptions for a Programming Environment
MTL:Proceedings of the First Conference on AAAI
DMT:August 1980

::REPORT:
ANA:Goldstein, I. P., and Bobrow, D. G.
MTL:An Experimental Description-Based Programming Environment:  Four Reports
PUB:Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
PLP:Palo Alto, CA
STL:Technical Report
RID:CSL-81-3
DAT:March 1981

::REPORT:
ANA:Gonnet, Gaston H., and Tompa, Frank Wm
MTL:Mind Your Grammar: A New Approach to Modelling Text
PLP:Waterloo, Ontario
RID:OED-87-01
DAT:June 1986

::BOOKSHORT:
MOA:Goodman, Danny
MTL:The Complete HyperCard Handbook
PLP:New York
PUB:Bantam Books
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Greenes, R. A.
ATL:Knowledge Management as an Aid to Medical Decision Making and Education: The
Explorer-1 System
MTL:Proceedings MEDINFO '86
PLM:North-Holland
DAT:1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Gregory, R.
ATL:Xanadu-Hypertext from the Future
MTL:Dr. Dobb's Journal
IID:75
DAT:January, 1983
LOC:28-35

::REPORT:
ANA:Gullichsen, E., D'Souza, D., Lincoln, P., and Casey, T.
MTL:The PlaneTextBook
PUB:MCC Software Technology Program
PLP:Austin, TX
STL:MCC Technical Report
RID:STP-333-86(P)
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Halasz, Frank G.
ATL:Reflections on NoteCards: Seven Issues for the Next Generation of Hypermedia
Systems
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Halasz, Frank G., Moran, T. P., and Trigg, Randall H.
ATL:NoteCards in a Nutshell
MTL:CHI+GI 1987
DAT:April 1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Hammwohner, Rainer, and Thiel, Ulrich
ATL:Content Oriented Relations Between Text Units-A Structural Model for
Hypertexts
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Herot, C., Carling, R., Friedell, M., and Kramlich, D.
ATL:A Prototype Spatial Data Management System
MTL:Computer Graphics
VID:14
IID:3
DAT:July 1980
LOC:63-70

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Hershey, W.
ATL:Idea Processors
MTL:BYTE
DAT:June, 1985

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Hiltz, Starr Roxanne
ATL:The 'Virtual Classroom': Using Computer-Mediated Communication for
University Teaching
MTL:Journal of Communication
DAT:Spring, 1968
LOC:95-104

::BOOKSHORT:
MOA:Hiltz, Starr Roxanne, and Turoff, Murry
MTL:The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer
PUB:Addison-Weseley
DAT:1978

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Hjerppe, Roland
ATL:Project HYPERCATalog: Visions and preliminary conceptions of an extended and
enhanced catalog
MTL:Intelligent Information Systems for the Information Society
AMR:editor
MOA:Brookes, B. C.
LOC:211-232
PLP:Amsterdam
PUB:Elsevier Science Publishers
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Irby, C. H.
ATL:Display Techniques for Interactive Text Manipulation
MTL:AFIPS Conference Proceedings
DAT:1974

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Jonassen, D. H.
ATL:Hypertext principles for text and courseware design
MTL:Educational Psychologist
VID:21
DAT:1986
LOC:269-292

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Kay, Alan C.
ATL:Computer Software
MTL:Scientific American
VID:251
IID:3
DAT:September, 1984
LOC:53-59

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Kay, Alan C., and Goldberg, A.
ATL:Personal Dynamic Media
MTL:IEEE Computer
VID:10
IID:3
DAT:March 1987
LOC:31-43

::BOOKSHORT:
MOA:Kerr, Elaine, and Hiltz, Starr Roxanne
MTL:Computer-Mediated Communication Systems
PLP:New York
PUB:Academic Press
DAT:1982

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Kochen, M.
ATL:WISE: A World Information Sysnthesis and Encyclopedia
MTL:Journal of Documentation
VID:28
DAT:1972
LOC:322-343

::REPORT:
ANA:Koved, Larry
MTL:Restructuring Textual Information for Online Retrieval
PUB:IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
PLP:Yorktown Heights, NY
RID:11278(#50830)
DAT:July 23, 1985

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Lair, D. C., and Maron, M. E.
ATL:An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-text Document-Retrieval
System
MTL:Communications of the ACM
VID:28
IID:3
DAT:March 1985
LOC:289-299

::BOOKSHORT:
MOA:Lambert, Steve, and Ropiequet, Suzanne
MTL:CD ROM: The New Papyrus
PLP:Redmond WA
PUB:Microsoft Press
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Landow, George P.
ATL:Context32: Using Hypermedia to Teach Literature
MTL:Proceedings of the 1987 IBM Academic Information Systems University AEP
Conference
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Landow, George P.
ATL:Relationally Encoded Links and the Rhetoric of Hypertext
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Larson, J.
ATL:A Visual Approach To Browsing in a Database Environment
MTL:IEEE Computer
DAT:June, 1986

::REPORT:
ANA:Learning Research Group
MTL:Personal Dynamic Media
PUB:Xerox Palo Alto Reserach Center
PLP:Palo Alto, CA
STL:Technical Report
RID:SSL-76-1
DAT:March 1976

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Lenat, D. B., Borning, Alan, McDonald, D., Taylor, C., and Weyer, Steven A.
ATL:Knoesphere: Building Expert Systems with Encyclopedic Knowledge
MTL:Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence
PLM:Karslruhe, West Germany
DAT:1983

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Lenat, D. B., and Borning, Alan et al.
ATL:A Prototype Electronic Encyclopedia
MTL:ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
VID:3
DAT:January 1985
LOC:63-88

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Lowe, David G.
ATL:Co-operative Structuring of Information: The Representation of Reasoning and
Debate
MTL:International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
VID:23
DAT:1985
LOC:97-111

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Lowe, David G.
ATL:SYNVIEW: The Design of a System for Cooperative Structuring of Information
MTL:Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86) Proceedings
PLM:Austin, TX
DMT:December 3-5
DAT:1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Malone, T., Grant, K., Turbak, F., Brobst, S., and Cohen, M.
ATL:Intelligent Information-Sharing Systems
MTL:Communications of the ACM
VID:30
IID:5
DAT:May, 1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Mantei, M., and McCracken, Donald L.
ATL:Issue Analysis with ZOG, A Highly Interactive Man-machine Interface
MTL:Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Policy Analysis and
Information Systems
DAT:1979

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Marshall, Catherine C.
ATL:Exploring Representation Problems Using Hypertext
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Maxemchuck, N. F., and Wilder, H. A.
ATL:Virtual Editing: I. The Concept
MTL:Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Office Information
Systems
PLM:Couvent Royal de St. Maximin
DMT:October 13-15
DAT:1982

::JOURNALS:
ANA:McCracken, Donald L., and Akscyn, Robert
ATL:Experience with the ZOG Human-Computer Interface System
MTL:International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
VID:21
IID:2
DAT:1984
LOC:293-310

::REPORT:
ANA:McCracken, Donald L., and Akscyn, Robert
MTL:The ZOG Approach to Database Management
PUB:Carnegie-Mellon University
PLP:Pittsburgh, PA
RID:CS-34-113

::JOURNALS:
ANA:McQuillan, Patrick J.
ATL:Computers and Pedagogy: The Invisible Presence
MTL:Journal of Computer-Based Educational Research
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Meyrowitz, Norman
ATL:Intermedia:  The Architecture and Construction of an Object-Oriented
Hypertext/Hypermedia System and Applications Framework
MTL:Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programing Systems,
Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '86)
PLM:Portland, Oregon
DMT:September 29-October 2
DAT:1986

::REPORT:
ANA:Meyrowitz, Norman
MTL:Networks of Scholar's Workstations: End-User Computing in a University
Community
PUB:Brown University, IRIS
PLP:Providence, RI
STL:IRIS Technical Report
RID:85-3
DAT:June 1985

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Michel, Stephen
ATL:Guide-A Hypertext Solution
MTL:CD-ROM Review
DAT:July/August 1987
LOC:22-24

::DISSERTATION:
ANA:Mohl, R. F.
ATL:Cognitive Space in the Interactive Movie Map: An Investigation of Spatial
Learning in Virtual Environments
PUB:Department of Architecture, MIT
DAT:1982

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Monty, M. L.
ATL:Temporal Context and Memory for Notes Stored in the Computer
MTL:ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
VID:18
IID:2
DAT:October, 1986
LOC:50-51

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Monty, M. L., and Moran, T. P.
ATL:A Longitudinal Study of Authoring Using NoteCards
MTL:ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
VID:18
IID:2
DAT:October, 1986
LOC:59-60

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Negroponte, Nicholas
ATL:Books Without Pages
MTL:IEEE International Conference on Communications IV
DAT:1979

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Negroponte, Nicholas
ATL:An Idiosynchratic Systems Approach to Interactive Graphics
MTL:ACM/SIGGRAPH Workshop on User-Oriented Design of Interactive Graphics
Systems
PLM:Pittsburgh, PA.
DAT:October, 1976

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:As We Will Think
MTL:Online 72: Conference Proceedings of the International Conference on Online
Interactive Computing
PLM:Brunel University, Uxbridge, England
DMT:September, 1972
DAT:1973

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:A Conceptual Framework for Man-Machine Everything
MTL:AFIPS National Computer Conference and Exposition, Proceedings
DAT:1973

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:Dream Machines:  New Freedoms through Computer Screens - A Minority Report
MTL:Computer Lib:  You Can and Must Understand Computers Now
PLP:Chicago, IL
PUB:Hugo's Book Service
DAT:1974

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate
MTL:Association for Computing Machinery, Proceedings of the National Conference,
20th
DAT:1965

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:Getting it Out of our System
MTL:Information Retrieval:  A Critical View
AMR:Editor
MOA:G. Schecter
LOC:191-210
PLP:Washington, D.C.
PUB:Thompson Book Co.
DAT:1967

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:The Hypertext
MTL:Proceedings International Documentation Federation Annual Conference
DMT:1965

::BOOKSHORT:
MOA:Nelson, Theodor H.
MTL:Literary Machines
PLP:Swathmore, PA
PUB:T.H. Nelson
DAT:1981

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:A New Home for the Mind
MTL:Datamation
DAT:March, 1982
LOC:169-180

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Nelson, Theodor H.
ATL:Replacing the Printed Word:  A Complete Literary System
MTL:Information Processing 80
AMR:editor
MOA:S.H. Lavington
LOC:1013-1023
PUB:North-Holland Publishing Co.
DAT:IFIO 1980

[Note: last part is in next issue - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
3

-N-
534
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 87 13:05:30 EST
-FROM-
From: "Paul D. Kahn" <pdk%iris.bitnet@RELAY.CS.NET>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Hypermedia bibliography
-BODY-
[Note: this is last of 3 parts - Ed]

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Newell, A., McCracken, Donald L., Robertson, G., and Akscyn, R.
ATL:ZOG and the USS CARL VINSON
MTL:Computer Science Research Review
DAT:1981
LOC:95-118

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Nguyen, L. T., and Greenes, R. A.
ATL:A Framework for the Use of Computed Links in the EXPLORER-1 Knowledge
Management System
MTL:MEDINFO 86, IFIP-IMIA
AMR:Editors
MOA:Salamon, R., Blum, B., and Jorgensen, M.
LOC:891-894
PLP:North-Holland
PUB:Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Oren, Tim
ATL:The Architecture of Hypertexts
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Palay, Andrew J., and Fox, Mark S.
ATL:Browsing through databases
MTL:Information Retrieval Research
AMR:editors
MOA:Oddy, R. N. et al.
PLP:London
PUB:Butterworths
DAT:1981

::REPORT:
ANA:Pasquier, Jacques
MTL:The Method and Model Base of the Electronic Book: Markov Chains and
Reliability Modelling
PUB:Institute for Automation and Operations Research
PLP:University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
STL:Technical Report
DAT:June 1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Pontecorvo, Michael S.
ATL:A Hypermedia Multiple Perspective Mechanism
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Ragland, Craig
ATL:Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Macintosh
MTL:MacA.P.P.L.E.
DAT:August, 1987

::DISSERTATION:
ANA:Ramakrishna, K.
ATL:Schematization as an Aid to Organizing ZOG Information Nets
PUB:Computer Science Department, Carnegie-Mellon University
DAT:1981

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Raskin, Jef
ATL:The Hype in Hypertext: A Critique
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Raymond, Darrell R.
MTL:Personal Data Structuring in Videotex
PUB:University of Waterloo, Department of Computer Science Technology
RID:Cs-84-7
DAT:February, 1984

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Raymond, Darrell R., and Tompa, Frank Wm
ATL:Hypertext and the New Oxford English Dictionary
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Reitman, W., Roberts, R., Sauvain, R., Wheeler, D., and Lynn, W.
ATL:AUTONOTE - A Personal Information Storage and Retrieval System
MTL:Proceedings of the 24th National Conference of the ACM
DAT:1969

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Remde, Joel R., Gomez, Louis M., and Landauer, Thomas K.
ATL:SuperBook: An Automatic Tool for Information Exploration-Hypertext?
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Rittel, H., and Webber, M.
ATL:Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning
MTL:Policy Sciences
VID:4
DAT:1973

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Robertson, C. K., McCracken, Donald L., and Newell, A.
ATL:Experimental Evaluation of the ZOG Frame Editor
MTL:Proceedings of the 7th Canadian Man-Computer Communications Conference
DAT:June, 1981

::REPORT:
ANA:Robertson, C. K., McCracken, Donald L., and Newell, A.
MTL:The ZOG Approach to Man-Machine Communication
PUB:Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University
PLP:Pittsburgh, PA
STL:Technical Report
RID:CMU-CS-79-148
DAT:October 1979

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Russell, D. M., Moran, T. P., and Jordan, D. S.
ATL:The Instructional Design Environment
MTL:Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Lessons Learned
AMR:editors
MOA:Psotka, J., Massey, L. D., and Mutter, S. A.
PLP:Hillsdale, NJ
PUB:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
DAT:in press

::REPORT:
ANA:Schatz, B. R.
MTL:Telesophy: A System for Browsing and Sharing Inside a Large Information
Space
PUB:Bell Communications Research
PLP:Morristown, NJ
RID:TM-ARH-006-094
DAT:September 1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Schneiderman, Ben
ATL:User Interface Design for the Hyperties Electronic Encyclopedia
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Schneiderman, Ben
MTL:User interface design and evaluation for an electronic encyclopedia
PUB:Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland
PLP:College Park, MD
RID:CS-TR-1819
DAT:March, 1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Schneiderman, Ben, Shafer, Philip, Simon, Roland, and Weldon, Linda
MTL:Display Strategies for Program Browsing: Concepts and an Experiment
PUB:Department of Compuer Science, University of Maryland
PLP:College Park, MD
RID:CAR-TR-192, CS-TR-1635
DAT:1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Seybold, Jonathan B.
ATL:Tymshare's Augment:  Heralding a New Era
MTL:Seybold Report on Word Processing
VID:1
IID:9
DAT:October 1978
LOC:1-16

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Shapiro, E.
ATL:A First Look at Dayflo
MTL:Byte
VID:9
IID:3
DAT:March 1984
LOC:81-86

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Shasha, Dennis
ATL:NetBook-A Data Model to Support Knowledge Exploration
MTL:Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Very Large Data
Bases
PLM:Stockholm
DAT:August, 1985

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Shasha, Dennis
ATL:When Does Non-linear Text Help?
MTL:Proceedings of the Expert Database Systems Conference
DMT:1986
DAT:1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Smith, John B., Weiss, Stephen P., and Ferguson, Gordon J.
ATL:A Hypertext Writing Environment and its Cognitive Basis
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::REPORT:
ANA:Smith, John B., Weiss, Stephen F., Ferguson, Gordon J., Bolter, Jay David,
Lansam, M., and Beard, D. V.
MTL:WE: A Writing Environment for Professionals
PUB:University of North Carolina, Department of Computer Science
PLP:Chapel Hill, NC
RID:86-025
DAT:August, 1986

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Smith, Karen E., and Zdonik, Stanley B.
ATL:Intermedia: A Case Study of the Differences Between Relational and
Object-Oriented Database Systems
MTL:Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems,
Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA '87)
PLM:Orlando, FL
DMT:October 4-8
DAT:1987

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Smith, L. C.
ATL:'Memex' as an Image Potentiality in Information Retrieval Research and
Development
MTL:Information Retrieval Research
AMR:editors
MOA:Oddy, R. N. et al.
LOC:345-369
PLP:London
PUB:Butterworths
DAT:1981

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Smolensky, Paul, Bell, Brigham, Fox, Barbara, King, Roger, and Lewis,
Clayton
ATL:Constraint-based Hypertext for Argumentation
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Stefik, M., Foster, G., Bobrow, D. G., Kahn, K. M., Lanning, S., and
Suchman, Lucy
ATL:Beyond the Chalkboard: Using Computers to Support Collaboration and Problem
Solving in Meetings
MTL:Communications of the ACM
VID:30
IID:1
DAT:1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Svibely, J. R., and Smith, J. W.
ATL:A Prototypic Hypertext Information System for Pathologist
MTL:Informatics in Pathology
VID:1
DAT:1986
LOC:133-142

::REPORT:
ANA:Tanguay, David A.
MTL:A General System for Managing Videotex Information Structures
PUB:University of Waterloo, Department of Computer Science Technology
RID:CS-86-23
DAT:June 1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Thompson, Bev, and Thompson, Bill
ATL:Hyping Text: Hypertext and Knowledge Representation
MTL:AI Expert
DAT:August, 1987
LOC:25-28

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Thorsen, Linda J., and Bernstein, Mark
ATL:Developing Dynamic Documents:  Special Challenges for Technical
Communicators
MTL:Proceedings of the 34th International Technical Communications Conference
PLM:Denver, CO
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Thursh, D., Mabry, F., and Levy, A. H.
ATL:Computers and Videodiscs in Pathology Education: ECLIPS as an Example of One
Approach
MTL:Human Pathlology
VID:17
DAT:1986
LOC:216-218

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Thursh, D., and Mabry, F.
ATL:A Knowledge-Based System for Pathology Education
MTL:Bulletin of Pathology Education
VID:6
IID:2
DAT:Fall 1980
LOC:36-45

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Thursh, D., and Mabry, F.
ATL:A knowledge-based hypertext of pathology
MTL:Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in
Medical Care
DAT:1980

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Thursh, D., Mabry, F., and Levy, A. H.
ATL:The Knowledge Access, Management, and Extension System in Pathology
AMR:editors
MOA:A. H. Levy, and B. T. Williams
MTL:Proceedings of the AAMSI Congress
DAT:1985

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Tompa, Frank Wm
ATL:Retrieving data through Telidon
MTL:Proceedings CIPS
DAT:1982

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Tompa, Frank Wm, Gecsei, Jan, and Bochmann, Gregor V.
ATL:Alternative Database Facilities for Videotex
MTL:The Telidon Book
AMR:editors
MOA:Godfrey, D., and Chang, E.
PUB:Press Porcepic
DAT:1981

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Tou, F., Williams, M., Fikes, R., Henderson, D. A., and Malone, T.
ATL:RABBIT: An Intelligent Database Assistant
MTL:Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
PLM:Pittsburgh
DMT:August 16-20
DAT:1982

::DISSERTATION:
ANA:Trigg, Randall H.
ATL:A Networked-based Approach to Text Handling for the On-line Scientific
Community
PUB:University of Maryland
DAT:1983

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Trigg, Randall H., and Irish, Peggy M.
ATL:Hypertext Habitats: Experiences of Writers in NoteCards
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Trigg, Randall H., Moran, T. P., and Halasz, Frank G.
ATL:Adaptibility and Tailorability in NoteCards
MTL:Proceedings of INTERACT '87
PLM:Stuttgart, West Germany
DAT:1987

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Trigg, Randall H., Suchman, Lucy, and Halasz, Frank G.
ATL:Supporting Colaboration in NoteCards
MTL:Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '86) Proceedings
PLM:Austin, TX
DMT:December 3-5
DAT:1986

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Trigg, Randall H., and Weiser, M.
ATL:TEXTNET:  A Network-Based Approach to Text Handling
MTL:ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
VID:4
IID:1
DAT:January, 1986
LOC:1-23

::BOOKSHORT:
MOA:van Dam, Andries
MTL:FRESS (File Retrieval and Editing System)
PLP:Barrington, RI
PUB:Text Systems
DAT:July 1971

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:van Dam, Andries, and Rice, D. E.
ATL:Computers and Publishing:  Writing, Editing and Printing
MTL:Advances in Computers
PLP:New York
PUB:Academic Press
DAT:1970

::JOURNALS:
ANA:van Dam, Andries, and Rice, D. E.
ATL:On-Line Text Editing:  A Survey
MTL:Computing Surveys
VID:3
IID:3
DAT:September 1971
LOC:93-114

::REPORT:
ANA:VanLehn, K.
MTL:Theory Reform Caused by an Argumentation Tool
PUB:Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
RID:ISL-11
DAT:1985

::REPORT:
ANA:Walker, D.
MTL:Knowledge Resource Tools for Accessing Large Text Files
PUB:Bell Communications Research
RID:85-21233-25
DAT:1985

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Walker, Janet H.
ATL:Document Examiner: Delivery Interface for Hypertext Documents
MTL:Hypertext '87 Papers
PLM:Chapel Hill, NC
DMT:November 13-15

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Walker, Janet H.
ATL:The Document Editor:  A Support Environment for Preparing Technical
Documents
MTL:Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOA Conference on Text Manipulation
DAT:June 1981

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Walker, Janet H.
ATL:Symbolics Sage: A Documentation Support System
MTL:Intellectual Leverage: The Driving Technologies, IEEE Spring Compcon84
DAT:1984

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Walker, Janet H., and Bryan, R. L.
ATL:An Editor for Structured Technical Documents
MTL:Protext IV

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Weyer, Steven A.
ATL:As We May Learn
MTL:Multimedia in Education: Interfaces to Knowledge- Education Advisory Council
Conference Proceedings
DAT:April 1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Weyer, Steven A.
ATL:The Design of a Dynamic Book for Information Search
MTL:International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
VID:17
DAT:1982
LOC:87-107

::REPORT:
ANA:Weyer, Steven A.
MTL:Searching for Information in a Dynamic Book
PUB:Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
PLP:Palo Alto, CA
RID:Report SCG-1
DAT:February 1982

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Weyer, Steven A., and Borning, Alan
ATL:A Prototype Electronic Encyclopedia
MTL:ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems
VID:3
IID:1
DAT:January 1985
LOC:66-88

::CONFPROC:
ANA:White, J. E.
ATL:A High-Level Framework for Network-based Resource Sharing
MTL:AFIPS Proceedings, National Computer Conference
DAT:1976

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Wilder, H. A., and Maxemchuck, N. F.
ATL:Virtual Editing:  II.  The User Interface
MTL:Proceedings of SIGOA Conference Office Automation Systems
PLM:Philadelphia, PA
DMT:June 21-23
DAT:1982

::REPORT:
ANA:Wilson, K. S.
MTL:Palenque: An Interactive Multimedia Optical Disk Prototype for Children
PUB:Bank Street College of Education, Center for Children and Technology
PLP:New York
STL:Technical Report
RID:#2
DAT:1987

::BOOKLONG:
ANA:Woods, William A.
ATL:What's in a Link:  Foundations for Semantic Networks
MTL:Readings in Knowledge Representation
AMR:editors
MOA:Brachman, Ronald J., and Levesque, Hector J.
PLP:Los Altos, CA
PUB:Morgan Kaufmann
DAT:1975

::CONFPROC:
ANA:Yankelovich, Nicole et al.
ATL:The Sampler Companion: Four Educational Software Samples
MTL:Proceedings of Frontiers in Education Fifth Annual Conference
PLM:Golden, CO
DMT:October 19-22
DAT:1985

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Yankelovich, Nicole, Hann, Bernard, and Meyrowitz, Norman
ATL:Intermedia: The Concept and the Construction of a Seamless Information
Environment
MTL:IEEE Computer
DAT:January 1988

::REPORT:
ANA:Yankelovich, Nicole, Landow, George P., and Heywood, Peter
MTL:Designing Hypermedia 'Ideabases'-The Intermedia Experience
PUB:Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship, Brown University
PLP:Providence, RI
STL:IRIS Technical Report
RID:87-4
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Yankelovich, Nicole, Meyrowitz, Norman, and van Dam, Andries
ATL:Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
MTL:IEEE Computer
VID:18
IID:10
DAT:October 1985
LOC:15-30

::REPORT:
ANA:Yankelovich, Nicole, and van Dam, Andries
MTL:Spinning Scholarly Webs: The Annenberg/CPB Project Report to Higher
Education
PUB:The Annenberg/CPB Project
PLP:Washington, D.C.
DAT:1987

::JOURNALS:
ANA:Young, J. S.
ATL:Hypermedia
MTL:MacWorld
VID:3
IID:3
DAT:March 1986
LOC:16-21

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
4

-N-
1
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 88 13:13:35 est
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: welcome message to IRList to start off the year
-BODY-
Welcome to the IRList.  I am the moderator of the IRList discussion.
I am responsible for composing the digest from pending submissions,
controlling the volume and frequency of mail, keeping an archive, and
answering administrative requests.  You may submit material for the
digest to a variety of places, depending on what network you are on
and how quickly and reliably you want mail to reach me.  We do not
have to pay for mail deliveries, but they do vary in speediness and
reliability.  Possibilities include:
     If on ARPANET and can use domains, or on CSNET, use
        fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
        foxea%vtvax3.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu
     If on ARPANET and can't use domains use
        fox%vtopus.cs.vt.edu@csnet-relay.arpa
     If on BITNET, use foxea@vtvax3
     If on UUCPNET, use something like
        ... seismo!vtvax3.bitnet!foxea

As you might expect, archival copies of all digests will be kept; feel
free to ask for recent back issues.  Note that FTP is now finally
possible but details have yet to be worked out regarding access.  Meanwhile,
all communication must be by EMAIL or phone or letter.  IRList is open
to discussion of any topic (vaguely) related to information retrieval.
Certainly, any material relating to ACM SIGIR (the Special Interest
Group on Information Retrieval of the Association for Computing
Machinery) is of interest.  Our field has close ties to artificial
intelligence, database management, information and library science,
linguistics, ...  A partial list of topics suitable are:
     Information Management/Processing/Science/Technology
     AI Applications to IR        Hardware aids for IR
     Abstracting                  Hypertext and Hypermedia
     CD-ROM / CD-I / ...          Indexing/Classification
     Citations                    Information Display/Presentation
     Cognitive Psychology         Information Retrieval Applications
     Communications Networks      Information Theory
     Computational Linguistics    Knowledge Representation
     Computer Science             Language Understanding
     Cybernetics                  Library Science
     Data Abstraction             Message Handling
     Dictionary analysis          Natural Languages, NL Processing
     Document Representations     Optical disc technology and applications
     Electronic Books             Pattern Recognition, Matching
     Evidential Reasoning         Probabilistic Techniques
     Expert Systems in IR         Speech Analysis
     Expert Systems use of IR     Statistical Techniques
     Full-Text Retrieval          Thesaurus construction
     Fuzzy Set Theory

Contributions may be anything from tutorials to rampant speculation.
In particular, the following are sought:
     Abstracts of Papers,Reports,Dissertations   Address Changes
     Bibliographies                              Conference Reports
     Descriptions of Projects/Laboratories       Half-Baked Ideas
     Histories                                   Humorous,Enlightening
Anecdotes
     Questions                                   Requests
     Research Overviews                          Seminar
Announcements/Summaries
     Work Planned or in Progress

The only real boundaries to the discussion are defined by the topics
of other mailing lists.  Please do not send communications to both
this list and AIList or the Prolog list, except in special cases.
I will try not to overlap much with NL-KR, except when we both receive
materials from contributors or from some bulletin board or researchers.

PLEASE "sign" subscriptions with full name and address so that people
can access you from Internet and/or BITNET (many other networks can be
reached through them and are certainly urged to participate).  Editing
of contributions will usually be limited to text justifications and
spelling corrections.  Editorial remarks and elisions will be marked
with square brackets.  The author will be contacted if significant
editing is required.  I have no objection to distributing material
that is destined for conference proceedings or any other publication.

I support ACM SIGIR Forum and unless you request otherwise may encourage
inclusion of submissions in whole or in part in future paper versions of
the FORUM.  Indeed, this is one form of solicitation for FORUM
contributions!  Both IRList and the FORUM are unrefereed, and opinions
are always those of the author and not of any organization unless
there are other indications.  Copies of list items should credit the
original author, not necessarily the IRList.  If you are interested in
submitting to Information Processing and Management (IP&M), I would to
entertain a discussion with you as well.  Also with The Laserdisk
Professional, a new publication about CD-ROM and optical discs.

The list does not assume copyright, nor does it accept any liability
arising from remailing of submitted material.  Further, no liability
is accepted for use of such materials for information retrieval research,
including distribution of test collections.  I reserve the right,
however, to refuse to remail any contribution that I judge to be of
commercial purpose, obscene, libelous, irrelevant, or pointless.
Replies to public requests for information should be sent, at least
in "carbon" form, to this list unless the request states otherwise.
If necessary, I will digest or abstract the replies to control the
volume of distributed mail.  However, PLEASE DO contribute! I would
rather deal with too much material than with too little.  -- Ed Fox
    Edward A. Fox,  Assistant  Professor,  Dept. of Computer Science,
    Virginia Tech  (VPI&SU),  McBryde Hall Rm. 562, Blacksburg VA 24061
    (703) 961-5113 or 6931

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 27 Dec 87 09:35 EST
-FROM-
From: science@nems.ARPA (Mark Zimmermann)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: free text retrieval software for SUN, VAX, Macintosh
-BODY-
Hi there!  Ed, if you could forward this note to SUN-SPOTS and/or to Igor
Metz, who asked about text retrieval software for the Sun, I'd greatly
appreciate it -- I am terrible at figuring out addresses to send things to
from here, and my mailer is even worse.

I wrote up a bunch of programs in C about 6 months ago that run on Sun,
VAX, Macintosh, etc., which generate simple complete inverted indices to
every word in an ascii text file.  (Leaving out 'stop words' turns out to
be something of a waste of the computer's time and doesn't save a significant
amount of disk space either.)  If anybody wants to see copies of the best
of these programs, 'qndxr.c' and 'brwsr.c', and can get me an address on
the net to send them to (from arpanet, from a picky mailer) I'd be more
than happy to do so.

'qndxr.c' is about 50 kB long, including comments, and seems pretty
transportable ... I've sent out dozens of copies and haven't heard of
any bugs from the latest version.  It takes an arbitrarily-large text
file (disk space limits you, until you get to 2 or 4 GB where my 32-bit
pointers run out) and breaks it up into chunks that fit into memory,
then does a quicksort on pointers to every word in the chunk, and writes
the resulting chunks of index files to disk ... then, it goes through
and merges the chunks of index together until there is a single (pair)
of index files (one holding keys, the other holding pointers to every
occurrence of words).  Very very simple ... I'm working on extensions,
but more on that later.

  Current version seems to build indices at roughly 10-15 MB/hour pace
  on a Sun or Mac II, and at 3-4 MB/hour on a Mac Plus....


'brwsr.c' lets you browse through the index ... gives you a display of
words and their occurrence rates, like:
   100 aardvark
  9876 aaron
    21 aarons
etc.  If you are interested in aardvarks, you can pop down into a
complete key-word-in-context display of the occurrences of the string
aardvark (all 100 of them), like:
 was eaten by a voracious aardvark in 1492, when his boat landed...
 took the left leg of his aardvark and painted it blue without a...
 among the earliest known aardvark civilizations.  Now it can be...
etc.  Then, if any of these lines of the KWIC display look promising,
you can pop down into the full text around that chosen line, and
read, copy to a file of notes, etc.  The C code for brwsr is also about
50 kB long including comments.

I have been spending the past few weeks rewriting most of the above to
integrate it into HyperCard (Macintosh program ... my routines become
external functions and commands) ... should have some good stuff to
start distributing in a few weeks, if all goes well.  My sabbatical
time is running out, so my work will be slower next year, alas.

Oh, I forgot to mention, 'brwsr.c' above has simple proximity searching ...
you can define a working subset of the dataspace as, for example, only
to include words within a few sentences of '1492', for instance, in
which case the index display shows the counts in that subset, e.g.,
  1/100 aardvark
 17/9876 aaron
  2/21   aarons
etc.  Now, if you ask for a KWIC display of aardvark, you only see the
one occurrence in the neighborhood of '1492'.

I use my Macintosh versions of brwsr and qndxr all the time ... have
accumulated over 12 MB of text from the past year or so of arpanet
and usenet and delphi digests, mostly related to Macintosh programming,
information retrieval, etc. -- it's easy to browse and pull out tidbits
that I vaguely recall the existence of.

As stated earlier, the programs are free (at the moment), but I can't
afford to spend a lot of time distributing them or supporting them at
that price, and my time will be even scarcer starting next week.

Best,   ^z   (Mark Zimmermann, 'science@nems.arpa')

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 87 16:50:37 EST
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Software Psychology Newsletter - Winter 1988
-FROM-
From: ("Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>") <ben%MIMSY.UMD.EDU@UMD2>
-BODY-
 ...

Happy New Year...Ben

___________________________________________

SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY

  POTOMAC CHAPTER

VOLUME 12 NUMBER 2                              WINTER 1988

   Note: All meetings will be held at the George Washington University's  Mar-
vin  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.

____________________

January 8
Room 413-414

                       PERCEPTION AND COMPREHENSION OF
                    COLOR CHARACTERS ON COLOR BACKGROUNDS

                John T. Christian (1) and Bruce H. Thomas (2)
           Computer Sciences Corporation, System Sciences Division
                    8728 Colesville Rd., Silver Spring, MD

         (1) now at CSC, 4600 Powder Mill Rd., Beltsville, MD   20705
       (2) now at National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD 20899

Often during the design of a user-system interface,  human  factors  engineers
are  asked  if  and how color can be used to code information.  Frequently the
response is that color can be used but in limited ways (e.g., follow  cultural
stereotypes  and  use less than six colors).  On the other hand, designers and
practitioners in the software field (e.g., word  processing  and  presentation
graphics)  have used color, sometimes in highly artistic ways, to enhance pro-
cessing of presented information.  With the advent of improved high resolution
color  graphics monitors, more people want to use color coding presumably as a
strategy to improve productivity.  The basis for  making  color  coding  deci-
sions, for example in a word processing task, are unclear at best.

In an attempt to sort out the consequences of  color  coding  information  for
user  productivity,  several  experiments were conducted.  We investigated the
effects of color character - color background combinations on people's percep-
tion  and comprehension of information in a timed target detection and reading
comprehension tasks.  In two other studies, we examined  cultural  stereotypes
for coding meteorological parameters.   The  mixed  results  may  serve  as  a
palette to color future decisions on color coding.

____________________


February 12                                                     Room 413-414


                  THE OPERATING PERSONNEL PERFORMANCE MODEL:
                   AN AID TO DESIGNERS OF AUTOMATED SYSEMS

           Sylvia B. Sheppard, Elizabeth D. Murphy, Lisa J. Stewart
                    Computer Technology Associates, Inc.,
                    14900 Sweitzer Lane, Laurel, MD 20702

         Walter Truszkowski, NASA Goddard Space Center, Greenbelt, MD


A theoretical model has been designed to predict the performance of  users  of
automated  systems.  The Operating Personnel Performance Model is based on the
premise that user performance  in  control  rooms  can  be  predicted  from  a
knowledge of the cognitive, sensory, and motor demands imposed on the users in
the performance of their tasks  and  from  a  knowledge  of  the  capabilities
required  to  meet those demands.  Two studies, related to the Network Control
Center (NCC) and the Georgia Tech.  Multi-Satellite Operations Control  Center
(GT-MSOCC)  at  NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center, were conducted to test the
model's  predictive validity.  The results supported the conclusion  that  the
model is an aid in the rapid, systematic evaluation of design alternatives.

____________________


March   11
Room 413-414


                           USER-CENTERED DESIGN OF
                        AN INTELLIGENT DATABASE SYSTEM

                Eizabeth Roop, Carlow Associates Incorporated
                8315 Lee Highway, Suite 410, Fairfax, VA 22031

To facilitate the dissemination of  its  collection  and  compilation  of  UCI
(User-Computer  Interface) reports and literature, U.S. Army's Human Engineer-
ing Lab is applying an intense R&D effort toward a fully  automated,  intelli-
gent  database system.  Specifications for this state-of-the-technology system
were based on user preferences, determined by surveys of the intended users of
the  system,  and  a  review  of  the current literature for both hardware and
software techniques.

Results from early testing of the prototype will be presented.  The  prototype
includes hardware to scan documents for rapid data entry, a character recogni-
tion  server to divide the data into separate ASCII and bitmap files, and  the
latest  in  WORM (Write Once Read Many) drive technology.  HEL's database sys-
tem is supported by an intelligent front end, which provides new features  for
a  traditional  query  and retrieval subsystem, hypertext capability, and per-
sonal files.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
4

-N-
2
-FROM-
From: Ralf Cordes <cordes@dbsinf6>
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 88 15:08:25 -0100
-SUBJECT-
Subject: interest in user-oriented and/or adaptible retrieval techniques
-BODY-
  DATE : 18. Jan. 1988
  NAME : Ralf Cordes  , cordes@infbs.uucp, cordes@DBSINF6.BITNET
  TOPIC: user-oriented and/or adaptible retrieval techniques

I work in the field of "user-oriented" and "adaptible" retrieval
techniques including machine learning approaches such as mentionend in
Wong/Ziarko "A machine learning approach to IR" (Proc. SIGIR R&D in IR
Conf., Pisa 86).

So I'm in search for papers which were focussed on the problem
mentioned above.

Thanks in advance

Ralf Cordes

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 88 14:14:33 GMT
-FROM-
From: steinmetz!uunet!mcvax!cnetlu!gilloux (Gilloux)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Seeking machine readable dictionaries for the french language
-BODY-
  I am in search of machine readable dictionaries in French.
The intended use is to extract automatically semantic information
needed in a NL parser.
Any help would be appreciated on that topic.


 Michel Gilloux
 Centre National d'Etudes des Telecommunications
 LAA/SLC/AIA
 Route de Tregastel, BP 40
 22301 Lannion CEDEX
 FRANCE

 UUCP: mcvax!inria!cnetlu!gilloux

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Fri, 22 Jan 88 17:06 EDT
-FROM-
From: krovetz@UMass.bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  dictionary stories
-BODY-
Ed,
  Robert France posted a msg to the net that mentioned you had
some stories to tell about your experience with machine readable
dictionaries.  Well, I'd be interested to hear them!  We recently
got a copy of the Longman dictionary.  It took me almost two years
to get it.  I've had a few hassles with it, but nothing major (I
had to convert from the cambridge lisp escape character to that
of common lisp, and I found a message in the middle of the file
that said "processing priority changed from 1.39 to 1.45").
Bran Boguraev took care of the worst of it by converting the
typesetting tape to a sequence of s-expressions.  So, what kind
of war stories do you have to tell?

>bob
[Note: there has been discussion in AIList, which I won't duplicate,
that led to the above msg.  I believe Robert will put together a
reply to several inquiries and send it in to IRList - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 88 18:13:36 est
-FROM-
From: batesdl@gecrdvm1.bitnet (David Bates)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Query by Abigail Ann Young
-BODY-
Ed: I sent the following E-Mail in response to a request from Abigail
Ann Young in a recent IR-List.  If you think there would be more general
interest, feel free to reprint part or all of it.

Dr. Young:

I read your inquiry in the IR-List.  As it happens, there was a passing
reference in the List a couple months back to something called the
Responsa project, which aroused my curiosity.  Responsa is apparently
a full-text system storing (I suspect in Hebrew) (Jewish)Talmudic
Responsas.  I was curious enough to do a quick search of two or
three bibliographic databases (although not curious enough  to
get copies of the articles.  Several citations follow:

   Choueka, Y. Computerized full-text retrieval systems & research in
the humanities: the Responsa project.  Comput. & Hum., v.14, no.3,
Nov. 1980 .  pp. 153-169.

    Borko, H. The Responsa project: a full text retrieval system for
Hebrew case law.  ASIS '85 (Proceedings of the 48th ASIS Annual Mtg.)
pp. 367-8.

(Additionally there was a citation to a group called
the Institute for Computers in Jewish Life (in Chicago) which
has mounted for the use of scholars, etc. a copy of the Responsa
data base. This was mentioned in Softalk, vol.3, no.6, Feb. 1983,
p. 229).

Finally, a comparison of Responsa and some other info-retrieval
systems can be found in:
     Silberglad, I. Full test information retrieval software...
Online Review, v.11, no.2, April 1987, pp. 107-117.

I don't know if any of this helps you at all, but here it is.
I have not seen any of these articles, so I can't vouch for much
about it.

Sincerely,
David Bates
Whitney Library
G.E. R&D Center
Schenectady NY
(518) 387-7538
(E-mail:  via bitnet  on node gecrdvm1 , username BATESDL )

[Note: Yaacov Choueka might want to comment more. I have found the
Responsa Project to be an important effort well worth following. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date:     Tue, 19 Jan 88 19:25 EDT
-FROM-
From: LEWIS@UMass.bitnet
-SUBJECT-
Subject:  query on Weiss dissertation, chemistry & IR refs
-BODY-
Dear Dr. Fox:
   In your addendum to my November query to IRLIST re determining relevance
by matching non-surface text representations you mentioned a dissertation
by a "S. Weiss" as worth looking at.  I haven't run into this name anywhere
since, so I was wondering if you could give me a pointer to where to find
out more--do you know their school.  I'd also be interested to hear any
specific references you suggest on IR for chemistry, which you also
mentioned.
   Many thanks,

David D. Lewis                         CSNET: lewis@cs.umass.edu
COINS Dept.                            BITNET: lewis@umass
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA  01003

[Note: I was referring to dissertation of Stephen F. Weiss, who is at
UNC Chappel Hill.  I read his dissertation about 9 years ago in the
library at Cornell - don't know how easy it is to get access to a
copy.  He is on the net and might be able to give pointers.  Regarding
IR and chemistry, I suggest you look into the recent CACM article on
ARIADNE - others may have suggestions to share too. - Ed]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 88 11:18:07 est
-FROM-
From: vtvax3::foxea
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Microsoft CD-ROM Conf. and SIGIR session (comments welcome!)
-BODY-
The 3rd International Conference on CD-ROM will be sponsored by
Microsoft and will be held March 1-3, 1988 in Seattle.  On Thursday
March 3 there will be 1 1/2 hours for SIGs to meet.  ACM SIGIR will be
given a room and there should be interesting discussions.  I am in the
process of drawing up plans for the session, and so welcome any
comments or volunteers to help - we should make it serve SIGIR as
best as possible.  I look forward to seeing some of you there, Ed

Note that you can obtain more details about the conference by calling
(206) 867-3341 or (206) 882-8080 x7213 or writing to Microsoft Corp.,
Sherrie Eastman, Dept. CDR1, Box 97017, Redmond WA 98073-9717

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 88 10:23:43 est
-FROM-
From: fox (Ed Fox)
-SUBJECT-
Subject: demonstration and MS thesis defense
-BODY-
  What:       M.S. Thesis Defense
  Who:        Marybeth T. Weaver
  Moderator:  Edward A. Fox
  Date:       January 29, 1988
  Time:       9:00 a.m. [Note: vtopus is reserved then for demo!]
  Place:      Virginia Tech, 558 McBryde Hall

  Title:     Implementing an Intelligent Information Retrieval System
                          The CODER System, Version 1.0

Abstract:
For individuals requiring interactive access to online text, information
storage and retrieval systems provide a way to retrieve desired documents
and/or text passages.  The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/effective/extended
Retrieval) system is a testbed for determining how useful various artificial
intelligence techniques are in increasing the effectiveness of information
storage and retrieval systems.  The system, designed previously, has three
components: an analysis subsystem for analyzing and storing document contents,
a central spine for manipulation and storage of world and domain knowledge,
and a retrieval subsystem for matching user queries to relevant documents.
This thesis discusses the implementation of the retrieval subsystem and
portions of the spine and analysis subsystem.  It illustrates that logic
programming, specifically the Prolog language, is suitable for development of
an intelligent information retrieval system.  Furthermore, it shows that
system modularity provides a flexible research testbed: many individuals
may work on different parts of the system which can later be quickly
integrated.

The retrieval subsystem has been implemented in a modular fashion so that new
approaches to information retrieval can be easily compared to more traditional
ones.  A powerful knowledge representation language, a comprehensive lexicon
and individually tailored experts using standardized blackboard modules for
communication and control allowed rapid prototyping, incremental development
and ready adaptability to change.  The system executes on a DEC VAX 11/785
running ULTRIX, a variant of 4.2 BSD UNIX.  It has been implemented as a set
of MU-Prolog and C modules communicating through TCP/IP sockets.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 88 20:49:02 est
-FROM-
From: Don Walker <walker@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: TINLAP3 Position Papers available from ACL
-BODY-
TINLAP-3 POSITION PAPERS AVAILABLE FROM ACL

The Association for Computational Linguistics has just published the
Position Papers prepared for TINLAP-3, the Third Conference on
Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing.  TINLAP-3 was
organized by Yorick Wilks and held at New Mexico State University, 7-9
January 1987.  There were sessions on "Words and World
Representations," "Unification and the New Grammatism," "Connectionist
and Other Parallel Approaches to Natural Language Processing,"
"Discourse Theory and Speech Acts," "Why Has Theoretical NLP Made so
Little Progress?," "Formal Versus Common Sense Semantics," "Reference:
The Interaction of Language and the World," "Metaphor," "Natural
Language Generation."  Many of the papers in this proceedings were
revised by their authors following the meeting, so it is different from
the one distributed there.  The price is $20 for ACL personal and
student members, $30 for individual nonmembers, and $40 for
institutions.  Copies are available from the ACL Office:  D.E. Walker
(ACL), Bell Communications Research, 435 South Street - MRE 2A379,
Morristown, NJ 07960-1961, USA.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: 3 Jan 88 17:54 EST
-FROM-
From: Mark Zimmermann <science@NEMS.ARPA>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: TEXAS indexer/browser/database Hypercard stack news
-BODY-
     I found your various net addresses in an old file of folks who, somehow
or other, expressed interest in my indexing/browsing/database software (or
who were subjected to my ravings on that subject).  Well, my sabbatical time
is over, and I've got a nifty HyperCard stack for the Apple Macintosh that
incorporates in a friendly fashion much of what I've accomplished in the
area of free-text database tools.
     If you're interested in the stack (HyperCard program), and can make
use of a Binhex'd Stuffit format file (compressed hex dump of a compressed
Macintosh file), drop me a note on the net here and I'll be happy to zap
it to you ... it is about 67kB long.  I've posted copies to Info-Mac and to
HyperHackers on arpanet, and it should be available in their archives and
at Simtel20.arpa for anonymous ftp capture.
     If you want to get a copy for the Mac and the above paragraph makes no
sense to you, drop me a disk, a self-addressed stamped envelope, and a few
dollars for me to give to my son (who does the disk duplicating), and I'll
send you the stack and all the Lightspeed C source code for the 13 external
Hypercard functions which are included (compiled) in the stack.
     Here is the msg announcing the program which I sent off to various
folks; it explains what the program is all about....  ^z
>-----------
-END-
     I've just uploaded TEXAS01.SIT - HyperCard stack which lets you browse
through multi-megabyte collections of free-text information.  TEXAS
includes facilities for building and sorting a complete inverted index
to every word in a 'dataspace' text file.  Very friendly and easy to use!
     To browse and retrieve information, begin with the index display, a
scrolling list of key words, e.g.:
     3 HYPERBOLIC
    28 HYPERBUG
     2 HYPERBUTTONS
    10 HYPERC
  2545 HYPERCARD
 ...etc. -- whatever words are in your input file.  If you're interested in
hypercard, just click on that word in the index and get a key word in
context display (a scrolling window), e.g.:
    ay with these new tools.  HyperCard, I believe, will be even better
    he pyramid is an index in HyperCard which knows something about the
    Bill Atkinson talks about HyperCard  -----------------------------
    y seeing products such as HyperCard, and we are too, as soon-to-be
 ...etc. -- a line of the actual text around every occurrence of your chosen
word, centered on that word.  If you want to read what Bill had to say,
just click on that line in the context display, and get the full text in a
scrolling window on your dataspace.
     This upload is version 0.1 -- it works great, but many features remain
on my list to be added.  It uses 13 XFCNs (written in Lightspeed C) to
open, index, browse, etc. through files.  Everything is included in the
stack -- extensive help, documentation of all features, etc.  TEXAS builds
indices at a rate of over 3 MB/hour on my Mac Plus; browsing speeds are
limited by HyperCard response times to a screenful/second or so.
     If you like TEXAS 0.1, send me encouraging words, ideas, or other
contributions to keep me going further on it!  (And contact me if you
want copies of all the source code for my XFCNs, at nominal cost.)
     TEXAS has evolved out of my earlier Indexer/Browser programs during
the past year.  I use it to think with and to remember items from the Mac
Tech Notes, from various online discussion groups, etc.  The more info you
put into it, the better it gets (until you run out of disk space)!
>-------------
Mark^Zimmermann        science@nems.arpa      [75066,20444] CompuServe
9511 Gwyndale Dr.
Silver Spring, MD  20910              301-565-2166
USA
-BODY-
>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
4

-N-
3
-DATE-
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1988  15:55 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Monday, 4 January 1988  10:02-EST
  From: Dori Wells <DWELLS at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   Reminder Lang. & Cognition Seminar

                      BBN Science Development Program
                       Language and Cognition Seminar

        THE EMERGENCE OF UTTERANCE MEANING THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION

                        Charles and Marjorie Goodwin
                         Department of Anthropology
                        University of South Carolina
                          Columbia, South Carolina

                             BBN Laboraatories
                             10 Moulton Street
                      Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor

                  10:30 a.m., Thursday, January 7, 1988

Abstract:  Using micro-analysis of  video-taped materials, we  will
show how utterances (and the sentences being made visible through
them) are shaped by ongoing processes of interaction between speaker and
recipient(s) that is occurring while the utterance is being spoken.
The emerging utterance is modified as various contingencies emerge within the
interaction.  For example as speaker moves his or her gaze from one
possible recipient to another, the emerging sentence is changed so that it
remains appropriate to its recipient of the moment.  As the
interaction unfolds new segments are added to the emerging utterance,
other projected segments are deleted and the emerging meaning of the
utterance is reconstructed. The utterance thus emerges not from the
actions of speaker alone, but rather as the result of an
collaborative process of interaction that includes the active participation of
recipient(s) as well.

For information about this Seminar Series contact Livia Polanyi
at 873-3455 [lpolanyi@g.bbn.com]

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1988  17:46 EST
-FROM-
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
  Date: Friday, 15 January 1988  11:39-EST
  From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM>
  Re:   BBN AI Seminar -- Grosz & Sidner

                    BBN Science Development Program
                       AI Seminar Series Lecture

                   COLLABORATIVE PLANS AND DISCOURSE

                   Barbara Grosz, Harvard University
                   Candy Sidner,  BBN Laboratories, Inc.
             (grosz@HARVARD.HARVARD.EDU, sidner@G.BBN.COM)

                                BBN Labs
                           10 Moulton Street
                    2nd floor large conference room
                     10:30 am, Tuesday January 19th


Discourses are fundamentally instances of collaborative behavior among
multiple agents. The collaborative nature of discourse is most
apparent in dialogues.  The participants in a dialogue work together
to satisfy various of their individual and joint needs.  Their
utterances are actions that contribute to the satisfaction of these
needs. From this perspective communication is a means for working
collaboratively to achieve shared objectives.

Because collaborative action comprises actions by different agents,
collaborative plans involve the intentions of multiple agents.
Furthermore, the collaborative planning process is a refinement
process; a partial plan description is modified over the course of
planning by the [multiple] agents involved in the collaboration.  Most
existing theories of actions, plans, and the plan recognition process
do not deal adequately with collaboration.

In this seminar we will discuss recent joint work on defining a
model for plans that involve actions by two agents, and on
specifying the process of developing a collaborative plan for
satisfying a jointly agreed upon objective.  Collaborative plans
will be defined in terms of intentions of the agents and beliefs
they share about actions and intentions. We will show how
utterances are used to establish shared beliefs, to establish the
holding of intentions, and to refine a partial plan.  Examples
will be presented involving several different types of actions
performed by multiple agents, including simultaneous actions.

>-----------------------------
-END-
-DATE-
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 88 17:10:22 PST
-FROM-
From: Emma Pease <emma@RUSSELL.STANFORD.EDU>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract - Ed]
-BODY-
						January 1988

Dear Monthly Subscriber:

CSLI has decided to suspend publication of the Monthly, at least
temporarily.  On request, I will send you a copy of our Fourth Year
Report, which contains the project reports that were promised for the
next few issues of the Monthly.  Please send e-mail with your postal
address to hyde@russell.stanford.edu if you would like to receive a
copy of the report.

Attached is a report from Ivan Sag about the 1987 Linguistic
Institute, an announcement about CSLI's postdoctoral fellow program
for 1988-89, ...

Thank you for your interest in CSLI.  I hope you will continue to keep
in contact with us via our CSLI reports and CSLI lecture notes.  For
further information about these series, please write to:

	Dikran Karagueuzian
	Editor
	Center for the Study of Language and Information
	Ventura Hall
	Stanford University
	Stanford, CA 94305-4115


					Sincerely,

					Elizabeth Macken
					Associate Director
					CSLI


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


		    THE 1987 LINGUISTIC INSTITUTE

>From 29 June to 7 August 1987, the Stanford Linguistics Department was
host to the 54th Linguistic Institute, whose theme was "Computational
and Contextual Dimensions of Language."  The program we mounted
offered more than sixty courses in a number of different research
areas, including linguistic theory, computational linguistics,
discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, artificial
intelligence, historical linguistics, the philosophy of language,
educational linguistics, theories of information, and African
linguistics.  These courses were taught by more than eighty faculty,
including many CSLI researchers, and attracted more than a thousand
participants.  In addition, there were eight conferences, five ongoing
workshops, and three lecture series.  It was exhausting, but it was
exhilarating.

Since the 1920s, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has sponsored
Linguistic Institutes on any number of university campuses.  They have
always been the locus of intellectual excitement, featuring courses by
distinguished scholars from all over the world.  And our Institute was
no exception.  But ours was unique in a number of ways: it was
probably the biggest (counting all the diverse sorts of participants);
it was the most interdisciplinary (the faculty included a bevy of
computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers); it was the most
"hi-tech" (hundreds of linguists took their first crack at
sophisticated computing facilities) and it was the most intense.  I've
participated in nine previous Institutes, and never have I seen people
attend lectures virtually nonstop from early in the morning to late at
night and still have the energy to boogie 'til they dropped on
weekends.

What got these hundreds of people so excited?  It wasn't just the
well-catered parties and the rock 'n' roll (was it?).  It was the
enthusiasm of the individual instructors, the quality of the courses,
the richness of the special events, and -- in hundreds of cases -- the
opportunity to get a first-hand acquaintance with the work being done
around CSLI.  Computational linguistics in particular seemed to be the
most popular area of study, but situation semantics, information-based
grammatical theories, and discourse/pragmatics also generated
enthusiastic responses from the large number of students, visiting
scholars, and other auditors who attended courses in these areas.

At the 1974 Institute at UMass (Amherst), there were two courses in
particular that generated this same sort of excitement: Barbara
Partee's Montague Grammar course, and David Perlmutter and Paul
Postal's course in relational grammar.  In both cases, Institute
participants from all over the world took away new ideas,
perspectives, and analytic techniques, which gave rise to new research
communities in many distant lands.  Both research traditions have had
a major impact on the field of linguistics, due in no small part to
the Amherst Institute.  It will be interesting to watch the effects of
our Institute in the years to come.

But even if you missed it (while you were on vacation in the south of
France), all is not lost.  Thanks to the efforts of Fernando Pereira,
Ray Perrault, and Bob Moore, SRI International agreed to finance the
videotaping of eleven Institute courses (those taught by Kay, Pereira,
Shieber, Pollard and Sag, Bresnan, Hayes and Nilsson, Gazdar and
Mellish, Chierchia, and Gazdar and Pullum).  These will be available
for sale in the near future, with part of the royalties going to a
fund to support fellowships for future Linguistic Institutes.

There are many debts to acknowledge.  The Institute received generous
support from its cosponsoring organizations, the Linguistic Society of
America, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence, as well as from the
Sloan Foundation and the Soros Foundation.  In addition, the System
Development Foundation made a generous gift to the LSA to support
student fellowships.  Thanks are also due to the Xerox Corporation,
which contributed the services of several Institute faculty and
support for the Logic and Linguistics Conference; to the
Hewlett-Packard Company, which sponsored the symposium on Evaluating
Natural Language Systems and an elegant post-symposium reception; to
AT&T Bell Laboratories and Schlumberger Laboratories, each of which
contributed the services of a faculty member; and to the IREX Board of
ACLS, which supported the symposium on Lexical Semantics.

But in particular, I would like to take this opportunity to thank
CSLI, which (under the inspired leadership of Tom Wasow) provided
constant support for every aspect of the 1987 Linguistic Institute,
including our computer needs, our brochures, our posters, virtually
every conference and workshop, and most importantly, our students.  It
would have been a very different Institute without the help of the
CSLI staff (thanks to Emma, Rich, Brad, Doug, and Joyce in
particular), and the various individuals supported by CSLI research
funds who graciously contributed their lecturing services.

It was an honor and a privilege to serve as director of the Institute,
an honor and a privilege I will gladly pass on to one of you, should
we ever decide (God help us!) to do it again.

				Ivan A. Sag
				Director: 1987 Linguistic Institute
				(on sabbatical: 1987--1988)


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


		       POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS

The Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at
Stanford University is currently accepting applications for a small
number of one-year postdoctoral fellowships commencing 1 September
1988.  The awards are intended for people who have received their
Ph.D. degrees since June 1985.

Postdoctoral fellows will participate in an integrated program of
basic research on situated language -- language as used by agents
situated in the world to exchange, store, and process information,
including both natural and computer languages.

Awards are intended for scholars interested in at least one of the
following areas of research: situation theory and situation semantics,
discourse as rational activity, and embedded computation.

For more information about CSLI's research programs and details of
postdoctoral fellowship appointments, write to:

        Dr. Elizabeth Macken
	Associate Director
	Center for the Study of Language and Information
	Ventura Hall
	Stanford University
	Stanford, CA 94305-4115

APPLICATION DEADLINE: 7 MARCH 1988

>-----------------------------
-END-
-VOL-
4

-N-
4
-DATE-
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 88 17:14:13 est
-FROM-
From: Don Walker <walker@FLASH.BELLCORE.COM>
-SUBJECT-
Subject: User-Oriented Content-Based Text and Image Handling Conference
-BODY-
************************************************************************

                             RIAO 88
                           CONFERENCE
 with presentation of prototypes and operational demonstrations

       USER-ORIENTED CONTENT-BASED TEXT AND IMAGE HANDLING
              Massachusets Institute of Technology
                          Cambridge MA.
                        March 21-24 1988

                          organized by

  CENTRE DE HAUTES INTERNATIONALES d'INFORMATIQUE DOCUMENTAIRE

                     with the assistance of
     CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE (C.N.R.S.)
INSTITUT NATIONAL DE RECHERCHE EN INFORMATIQUE ET AUTOMATISME (INRIA)
          ECOLE NATIONALE SUPERIEURE DES MINES DE PARIS
     CENTRE NATIONAL D'ETUDES DES TELECOMMUNICATIONS (CNET)

                 US Participating Organizations

 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF INFORMATION PROCESSING SOCIETIES (AFIPS)
         AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE (ASIS)
             INFORMATION INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION (IIA)

          under the direction of Professor Lichnerowicz
               de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris

                        Conference Chair
                         Pierre Aigrain


       			SPECIFIC THEMES

      A)  Linguistic  processing and interrogation  of  full
text databases:
          - automatic indexing,
          - natural language queries,
          - computer-aided translation,
          - multilingual interfaces.
      B)  Automatic thesaurus construction,
      C) Expert system techniques for retrieving information
in  full-text  and multimedia databases:
          - expert  systems  reasoning on open-ended domains
          - expert   systems  simulating   librarians   accessing
            pertinent information.
       D)  Friendly user interfaces to classical information
retrieval systems.
       E) Specialized machines and system architectures designed
for  treating  full-text data,  including managing and  accessing
widely distributed databases.
      F)  Automatic  database construction  scanning  techniques,
optical character readers, output document preparation, etc...
      G)    New  applications   and  perspectives  suggested   by
emerging new technologies:
              - optical storage techniques  (videodisk,
                CD-ROM, CD-I, Digital Optical Disks);
              - integrated  text,  sound and image retrieval
                systems;
              - electronic mail and document delivery  based
                on content;
              - voice  processing technologies for  database
                construction;
              - production    of    intelligent     tutoring
                systems;
              - hypertext, hypermedia.


                 CONFERENCE PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

                        GENERAL SESSION

          MONDAY, MARCH 21, 1988

 9:00 - 9:15 WELCOME STATEMENT
 Pierre Aigrain
President of CID and Conference Chair of RIAO88

 9:15 - 9:30 AIMS AND GOALS for RIAO88
Donald Walker
US Co-Chair, RIAO88 Program Committee

 9:30 - 9:50 INVITED SPEAKER
Goery Delacotte
Directeur de l'Information Scientifique et Technique aux CNRS

 9:50 - 10:30 INVITED SPEAKER
Karen Sparck Jones
Cambridge University ( United Kingdom )

          SESSION 1: HYPERMEDIA (Room 10-250)

Chair: Edward A. Fox

10:30 - 10:50  Hypermedia Design.
Brian R. Gaines, Joan N. Vickers
University of Calgary  (  Canada )

10:50 - 11:10  CLORIS:  A Prototype Video-Based Intelligent Compu-
ter-Assisted Instruction System.
Alan P. Parkes
University of Lancaster  (  United Kingdom )

11:10 - 11:30  A Multimedia Information Based and Career  Guidance
of Secondary School pupils.
Jean Paul Anton, Francoise Dagorret, Francoise Larrieux
Universite Paul Sabatier  (  France )

11:30 - 11:50  Multimedia Information Management and Optical  Disk
Technologies as a Basis for Advanced Information Retrieval.
Ray Cordes, R. Buck-Emden, H. Langendorfer
Technische Universitat Braunschweig  (  Federal Republic of Germany )

12:00 - 1:30  LUNCH

                       PARALLEL SESSIONS

          SESSION 2: HYPERTEXT (Room 10-250)

Chair: Roland Hjerppe

 1:30 - 1:50  Effective Browsing in Hypertext Systems.
Carolyn L. Foss
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique  (France )

 1:50 - 2:10  Introducing Hypertext in Primary Health Care:  Sup-
porting the Doctor-Patient Relationship.
Toomas Timpka, Roland Hjerppe, John Zimmer, Marie Ekstrom
University of Linkoping  (  Sweden )

 2:10 - 2:30  A New Multimedia Electronic Book and its  Functional
Capabilities.
Yoshinori Hara, Asao Kaneko
NEC Corporation  (  Japan )

 2:30 - 2:50  Documentation Management for Large Systems of Equi-
pment.
Peter L. Van Sickel,  Kenneth F. Sierzega, Catherine A. Herring,
Jonathan J. Frund
ALCOA Technical Center  (  United States )

          SESSION 3: IR INTERROGATION IMPROVEMENTS (Room 4-270)

Chair: Christoph Schwarz

 1:30 - 1:50  National Language-Specific Evaluation Sites for  Re-
trieval Systems and Interfaces.
Paul B. Kantor
OCLC Inc.  (  United States )

 1:50 - 2:10  A Technique to Improve the Precision  of  Full-Text
Database Search.
Gregory S. Hoppenstand, David K. Hsiao
Naval Postgraduate School  (  United States )

 2:10 - 2:30  Intelligent Search of Full-Text Databases.
Susan Gauch, John B. Smith
University of North Carolina  (  United States )

 2:30 - 2:50  Towards a Friendly Adaptable Information  Retrieval
System
Shih-Chio Chang, Anita Chow
GTE Laboratories Inc.  (  United States )

 2:50 - 3:10  Structure of Information in Full-Text Abstracts.
Elizabeth D. Liddy
Syracuse University  (  United States )

 3:10 - 4:00  BREAK AND PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

          SESSION 4: OPTICAL STORAGE (Room 10-250)

Chair: Xavier Dalloz

 4:00 - 4:20  Inverted Signature Trees:  An Efficient Text  Sear-
ching Technique for Use with CD-ROMs.
Alan L. Tharp, Lorraine K. D. Cooper
North Carolina State University  (  United States )

 4:20 - 4:40  Integration of Write Once Optical Disk with  Multi-
media DBMS.
B. C. Ooi, A. D. Narasimhalu, I. F. Chang
National University of Singapore  (  Singapore )

 4:40 - 5:00   FLAME  - An Efficient Access  Method  for  Optical
Disks.
Uri Shani, Michael Rodeh, Alan J. Wecker, Ike Sagie
IBM Israel Scientific Center  (  Israel )

 5:00 - 5:20  An Object-Oriented Approach to Interactive Access to
Multimedia Databases on CD-ROM.
Daniel A. Menasce, Roberto Ierusalimschy
Pontifica Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro  (  Brazil )

          SESSION 5: NOVELTIES (Room 4-270)

Chair: Patrick Mordini

 4:00 - 4:20  Transmedia Machine and its Keyword Search over Image
Texts.
Y. Tanaka, H. Torii
Hokkaido University  (  Japan )

 4:20 - 4:40  STARGUIDE: A Generator for Self Training.
Gerard Claes, O. Ounis, Z. Razoarivelo, P. Salembier, M.S.
Sridharan
BULL MTS  (  France )

 4:40 - 5:00   Voice Recognition in Database Building :  A  Model
Workstation.
R. David Nelson
Chemical Abstracts Service  (  United States )

 5:00 - 5:20  French Yellow Pages,  Access to the nomenclature in
natural language
Bernard Normier
ERLI ( France )

 5:20 - 6:30  PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

                         GENERAL SESSION

          TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 1988

          SESSION 6: NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING - Part 1
                      (Room 10-250)

Chair: Donald Walker

 8:30 - 8:50  Using English for Indexing and Retrieval
Boris Katz
Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (  United States )

 8:50 - 9:10  Inflections and Compounds:  Linguistic Problems  for
Automatic Indexing.
Harri Jappinen, J. Niemisto
SITRA Foundation  (  Finland )

 9:10 - 9:30  About Reformulation in Full-Text IRS
Fathi Debili, Pierre Radasoa, Christian Fluhr
Centre National de Recherche Scientifique  (  France )

 9:30 - 9:50   The  TINA Project:  Text Content Analysis  at  the
Central Research Laboratories at SIEMENS.
Christoph Schwarz
Siemens  (  Federal Republic of Germany )

 9:50 - 10:10  TEX-NAT:  A Tool for Indexing and Information  Re-
trieval.
J. M. Lancel, N. Simonin
Cap Sogeti Innovation  (  France )

10:10 - 11:10  BREAK AND PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

          SESSION 7: NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING - Part 2

Chair: R. Marcus

11:10 - 11:30  Who Knows:  A System Based on Automatic  Representa-
tion of Semantic Structure.
Lynn A. Streeter, Karen E. Lochbaum
Bell Communications Research  (  United States )

11:30 - 11:50  Information Aids for Technological Decision-Making:
New  Data  Processing  and  Interrogation  for  Full-Text  Patent
Databases.
William A. Turner
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique ( France )

11:50 - 12:10  AMI: An Intelligent Message Routing System.
C. Vansteelandt
CIMSA-SINTRA  (  France )

12:10 - 12:30  Conceptual Information Extraction and Retrieval from
Natural Language Input.
Lisa F. Rau
GE Company  (  United States )

12:30 - 2:00  LUNCH

                        PARALLEL SESSIONS

          SESSION 8: USER INTERFACES - Part 1  (Room 10-250)

Chair: Agnes Beriot

 2:00 - 2:20   Self-Structured Data Banks Semantic Integrity  and
Query Assistance Interface.
Patrick Mordini, Mostafa Jarmouni Idrissi, Anne-Marie Guimier-Sorbets
Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris  (  France )

 2:20 - 2:40 The Electronic Directory Service.
Jean-Claude Marcovici
Direction Generale des Telecommunications  (  France )

 2:40 - 3:00  A Desktop Tool for Computer-Assisted Research in the
Humanities.
Christophe Schnell
Saint Gall Graduate School of Econ., Law, Business and Pub. Admin.
(  Switzerland )

          SESSION 9: NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING (Room 4-270)

Chair: Ezra Black

 2:00 - 2:20  CONTEXT:  Natural Language Full-Text Retrieval System.
Zeev Menkes
Contahal Ltd.  (  Israel )

 2:20 - 2:40  Natural Language Data Bases on Small Computers.
Hans Paymans
Katholic University Brabant  (  Netherlands )

 2:40 - 3:00  An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques
to Automated Key-Wording.
James R. Driscoll
University of Central Florida  (  United States )

 3:00 - 4:00  BREAK AND PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

          SESSION 10: USER INTERFACES - Part 2  (Room 10-250)

Chair: Anne-Marie Guimier-Sorbets

 4:00 - 4:20  User Interfaces to Scientific Databases.
Mary G. Reph, Blanche W. Meeson, Lola M. Olsen
Goddard Space Flight Center  (  United States )

 4:20 - 4:40  Image and Text Information Retrieval Systems in the
Registro de la Propiedad Industrial (Spain).
Luis Roberto Martinez Diez
Registro de la Propiedad Industrial  (  Spain )

 4:40 - 5:00  Hypermedia-Based Documentation System for the Office
Environment.
Fumiyasu Hirano
NEC Corporation  (  Japan )

 5:00 - 5:20  MenUSE for Medicine: End-User Browsing and Searching
of MEDLINE via The MeSH Thesaurus.
Arthur S. Pollitt
National Library of Medicine  (  United States )

 5:20 - 5:40  Conceptual Methods for Text Retrieval.
Jon Bing
University of Oslo  (  Norway )

          SESSION 11: AUTOMATIC THESAURUS CONSTRUCTION (Room 4-270)

Chair: Christian Fluhr

 4:00 - 4:20    Automatic  Thesaurus  Construction  by   Machine
Learning from Retrieval Sessions.
Ulrich Guntzer, G. Juttner, G. Seegmuller, F. Sarre
Technical University of Munich  (  Federal Republic of Germany )

 4:20 - 4:40  Automatic Construction of a Phrasal Thesaurus for an
Information Retrieval System from a Machine Readable Dictionary.
Martha Evens, T. Ahlswede, J. Anderson, J. Neises, S. Pin-
Ngern, J. Markowitz
Illinois Institute of Technology  (  United States )

 4:40 - 5:00  Looking for Needles in a Haystark or Locating  Inte-
resting Collocational Expressions in Large Textual Databases.
Yaacov Choueka
Bar-Ilan Univ.  (  Israel )

 5:00 - 5:20  Browsing and Authoring Tools for a Unified  Medical
Language System.
Henryk Jan Komorowski, Robert A. Greenes, Charles Barr,
Edward Pattison-Gordon
Harvard Medical School  (  United States )

 5:20 - 5:40   The Informatics Calculus:  A Graphical  Functional
Query Language for Information Resources.
Gary Epstein
West Chester University  (  United States )

 5:40 - 6:30  PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS


                         GENERAL SESSION

          WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1988

          SESSION 12: IR AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
                     (Room 10-250)

Chair: Yaacov Choueka

 8:30 - 8:50   Factors Affecting Interface Design  for  Full-Text
Retrieval.
Martha J. Gordon, Martin Dillon
OCLC, Inc.  (  United States )

 8:50 - 9:10   Semantics of User Interface for  Image  Retrieval:
Possibility Theory and Learning Techniques Applied on Two  Proto-
types.
Gilles Halin, N. Mouaddib, O. Foucaut, M. Crehange
Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique  (  France )

 9:10 - 9:30  A Logic Programming Approach to Full-Text  Database
Manipulation.
R. Marshall
Loyola College  (  United States )

 9:30 - 9:50  Implementing a Distributed Expert-Based Information
Retrieval System.
Edward A. Fox, Marybeth T. Weaver, Qi-Fan Chen, Robert K. France
Virginia  Polytechnic Institute and State University   (   United
States )

 9:50 - 10:50 BREAK AND PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

          SESSION 13: DATA BASES FOR GRAPHICS & ANIMATION
                          (Room 10-250)

Chair: Ching-Chih Chen

10:50 - 11:10  A Picture Display Language for a Multimedia Database
Environment.
Gregory Y. Tang
National Taiwan University  (  Taiwan, Republic of China )

11:10 - 11:30 From Concepts to Film Sequences.
Gilles R. Bloch
Yale University  (  United States )

11:30 - 11:50  RAVI:  Representation for Audiovisual  Interactive
Applications.
Joseph Fromont, Francis Kretz, Pierre Louazel, Maryse Quere,
Christine Schwartz
Centre  Commun d'Etudes de Telediffusion et Telecommunications  (
France )

11:50 - 1:30    LUNCH

            SESSION 14: AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION (Room 10-250)

Chair: Gregory Grefenstette

 1:30 - 1:50  Universal Multilingual Information Interchange  Sys-
tems.
Suban Krishnamoorthy, Ching Y. Suen
Framingham State College  (  United States )


 1:50 - 2:10   A Statistical Approach to French/English  Transla-
tion.
P. Brown, J. Cocke, S. and V. Della Pietra, F. Jelinek, R.
Mercer, P. Roossin
IBM Research Division  (  United States )

 2:10 - 2:30  METEO: An Operational Translation System.
John Chandioux
John Chandioux Consultants Inc.  (  Canada )

 2:30 - 3:30  BREAK AND DEMONSTRATIONS

          SESSION 15: KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEMS
                     (Room 10-250)

Chair: Jean-Claude Bassano

 3:30 - 3:50  IRX:  An Information Retrieval System for Experimen-
tation and User Applications.
Donna Harman, Dennis Benson, Larry Fitzpatrick, Rand Huntzinger,
Charles Goldstein
National Library of Medicine  (  United States )

 3:50 - 4:10  GENNY: A Knowledge Based Text Generation System.
Mark T. Maybury
Cambridge University  (  United Kingdom )

 4:10 - 4:30  DOD Gateway Information System (DGIS) Common Command
Language; The Decision for Artificial Intelligence.
Allan D. Kuhn
Defense Technical Information Center  (  United States )

 4:30 - 4:50  Interactive Knowledge-Based Indexing:  The  MedIndEx
System.
Susanne M. Humphrey
National Library of Medicine  (  United States )

 4:50 - 5:10  Conceptual Information Retrieval from Full-Text.
Richard M. Tong, Lee A. Appelbaum
Advanced Decision Systems  (  United States )

          THURSDAY, MARCH 24, 1988

          SESSION 16: DATABASE CONSTRUCTION (Room 10-250)

Chair: Ernesto Garcia Camarero

 8:30 - 8:50   Automatic  Recognition  of  Sentence   Dependency
Structures.
Timothy Craven
The University of Western Ontario  (  Canada )

 8:50 - 9:10   Parsing Textual Structures from a Typewritten  Au-
thor's Work.
Said Tazi
Universite des Sciences Sociales de Toulouse  (  France )

 9:10 - 9:30  Document Description and Analysis by Cuts.
Andreas Dengel, Gerhard Barth
University of Stuttgart  (  Federal Republic of Germany )

 9:30 - 9:50   Information Retrieval System  Manipulation  and  a
Posteriori Structuring.
Florence Sedes
Centre National de Recherche Scientifique  (  France )

 9:50 - 10:50  BREAK AND PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATION

          SESSION 17: DOCUMENT AND IMAGE ANALYSIS

Chair: Jean Rohmer

 10:50 - 11:10 Adding Analysis Tools to Image Data Bases:  Facili-
tating Research in Geography & Art History.
Howard Besser
University of California Berkeley  (  United States )

 11:10 - 11:30  Query Processing for Information Extraction  from
Image of Paper-Based Maps.
Mukesh Amlane, Rangachar Kasturi
Pennsylvania State University  (  United States )

11:30 - 11:50  A Segmentation Method of Color Document Images  for
Multimedia Content Retrieval Systems.
Yoshihiro Shima, T. Murakami, J. Higashino, Y. Nakano, H. Fujisawa
Hitachi Ltd.  (  Japan )

11:50 - 1:30 LUNCH

          SESSION 18: HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE FOR IR
                      (Room 10-250)

Chair: Pierre Asancheyev

 1:30 - 1:50  The Utah Retrieval System Architecture:  A  Distri-
buted  Information Retrieval System Using  Workstations,  Windows
and Specialized Backend Processors.
Lee A. Hollaar
University of Utah  (  United States )

 1:50 - 2:10  Adaptive Information Retrieval Using a Fine-Grained
Parallel Computer.
Robert N. Oddy, B. Balakrishnan
Syracuse University  (  United States )

 2:10 - 2:30   Browsing  Image Databases Via  Data  Analysis  and
Neural Networks.
Alain Lelu
Direction Generale des Telecommunications  (  France )

 2:30 - 2:50  Multilingual Information Retrieval Mechanism  Using
VLSI.  Requirements and Approaches for Information Retrieval Sys-
tem in the Computer-Aided Software Engineering and Document  Pro-
cessing Environment.
Hiroaki Kitano
NEC Corporation  (  Japan )

 2:50 - 3:10   An Intelligent Backend System for Text  Processing
Applications.
Hans Diel, H. Schukat
IBM Laboratory Boeblingen  (  Federal Republic of Germany )

 3:10 - 3:30  Integrated Image Management on a Local Area Network.
M. Fantini, F. Prampolini, A. Turtur
IBM Italy  (  Italy )

 3:30  - 3:50   A Fast Machine for Prototyping String  Correction
Algorithms.
Patrice Frison, Dominique Lavenier
Institut  de  Recherche en Informatique  et  Systemes  Aleatoires
( France )

 3:50 - 4:00 BREAK

 4:00  CONCLUSIONS
J. Arsac, A. Bookstein, R. Marcus

          FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 1988

10:00 - 12:00 Visit to the MIT Media Laboratory.

                         DEMONSTRATIONS

         PROTOTYPE DEMONSTRATIONS

In conjunction with the presentation of papers at the conference,
prototypes  will  be  demonstrated in an exhibit  hall  near  the
conference room (lobby of bldg.  13).   These demonstrations will
take  place on a rotating basis during the breaks,  following  the
presentation  of the author's work.   A detailed program of these
demonstrations will be available at the conference.

          OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS DEMONSTRATIONS

21  operational  systems will be displayed throughout the  confe-
rence  in the Exhibit Hall (lobby of bldg.  13).   Some of  these
systems  will be demonstrated with an oral presentation (room  4-
270).  A detailed program of these demonstrations will be availa-
ble at the conference.


REGISTRATION INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS

PREREGISTRATION SHOULD BE RECEIVED PREFERABLY BY MARCH  4,  1988;
The  registration fee for the conference is $ 275.00 if  received
before March 4,  and $325.00 after that date.  It includes admis-
sion to all sessions, luncheons Monday through Wednesday, and the
Conference Proceedings.

     Registration  will be conducted on Sunday,  March  20,  1988
from 5 PM - 8 PM and Monday,  March 21, 1988 beginning at 7:30 AM
in  Room 10-280,  opposite the conference meeting room (Room  10-
250).   This area will be staffed from 8:00 AM until 6:00 PM each
day  of the conference.   A telephone and message board  will  be
located  in this area.  The conference telephone number is  (617)
253-8864;   Participants  may  give out this number and  messages
will be posted in this room.

RECEPTIONS  :  There will be a cocktail and dinner at the  Boston
Museum of Science,  Wednesday,  March 23,  1988 at 6:30 PM.   The
fee  is  $30.00  and includes a visit of the  West  Wing  of  the
Museum.  There will a number of guest speakers at this event.  To
assist in planning this event,  we ask that you complete the RSVP
on the registration form.  The maximum capacity for this event is
200 persons.   Reservations will be handled on a first come first
serve basis.

TOURS :  A visit of the MIT Media Laboratory will be held Friday,
March 25, 1988 from 10 AM - 12 PM. Major areas of interest of the
lab are computer graphics,  3D imaging,  computer animation,  new
media  for  communication and computer music.   There will  be  a
general  presentation of the laboratory's work during the   first
hour.    The   second  hour  will  allow  for  exchanges  between
scientists and researchers of the lab and conferees.  There are a
limited number of spaces.



FOR INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION FORMS, CONTACT:

In the United States:
RIAO88-CID
MIT Conference Services Office
Room 7-111
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
Telephone: (1-617)253-1703

In Europe:
RIAO88-CID
36 bis rue Ballu
F-75009 PARIS
FRANCE
(33-1) 42 85 04 75

>-----------------------------
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