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IRList Digest Volume 2 Number 56
IRList Digest Friday, 17 October 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 56
Today's Topics:
Discussion - Electronic authorship, books, and information retrieval
Announcement - Proceedings of ACM SIGIR Int'l Conf. (Pisa) available
- Table of contents of new ACM Trans. on Office Inf. Systems
Call for Papers - Workshop on Visual Languages
COGSCI - Inferring Domain Plans in Question Answering
CSLI - Categorial Unification Grammar
News addresses are ARPANET: fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet
CSNET: fox@vt UUCPNET: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq
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Date: Tue 7 Oct 86 09:13:18-PDT
From: Mark Frisse <FRISSE%SUMEX-AIM.ARPA%relay.cs.net@vpi.csnet>
Subject: electronic textbooks
Office: Medical Center TC-135, 725-3397
Message-ID: <12244923425.39.FRISSE@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
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]
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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.
------------------------------
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
------------------------------
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
------------------------------
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.
------------------------------
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.
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END OF IRList Digest
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