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IRList Digest Volume 2 Number 22
IRList Digest Friday, 9 May 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 22
Today's Topics:
Query - Iconic Repersentation of Financial Concepts
Announcement - Workshop: Writing to Be Searched
CSLI - Part 2 of 2 part LONG extract from CLSI Monthly, V1. No. 1
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Date: Sat 3 May 86 08:52:49-EDT
From: John C. Akbari <AKBARI@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Subject: RE: CONIT Intermediary = Intellignet Front End
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]
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Date: Tue 6 May 86 10:58:17-MDT
From: Lee Hollaar <Hollaar@utah-20.arpa>
Subject: Workshop Announcement
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.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 86 05:07:24 est
From: EMMA@su-csli.ARPA
Subject: CSLI Monthly [Extract of long, interesting newsletter: Pt.2 - 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.
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
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END OF IRList Digest
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