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IRList Digest Volume 2 Number 21
IRList Digest Tuesday, 22 Apr 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 21
Today's Topics:
Announcement - May be starting an information retrieval project
Query - Who and how do people search old electronic digests
CSLI - Part 1 of 2 part LONG extract from CLSI Monthly, V1. No. 1
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Date: Mon, 7 Apr 86 12:23:07 est
From: seismo!harvard!wjh12!mirror!rs (Rich Salz)
Subject: Please add
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]
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Date: 12 Apr 86 17:38 PST
From: William Daul / McDonnell-Douglas / APD-ASD <seismo!OFFICE-1.ARPA!WBD.MDC>
Subject: The Use Of Internet Digests
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//
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Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:24 est
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract of long, interesting newsletter: Pt.1 - Ed]
[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]
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END OF IRList Digest
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