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IRList Digest Volume 3 Number 42
IRList Digest Wednesday, 25 November 1987 Volume 3 : Issue 42
Today's Topics:
Query - Matching knowledge representations
- Help needed in searching for AIDS research
- Hypertext thesis info.
Discussion - Hyperdocument discussion
Announcement - HUMANIST group
COGSCI - Using machine readable Longman's Dictionary for NLP
- Dynamic connectionism, Threshold of knowledge, Ideonomy
News addresses are
Internet or CSNET: fox@vtcs1.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: fox@vtcs1.bitnet
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 87 14:15 EDT
From: LEWIS%cs.umass.edu@RELAY.CS.NET
Subject: Refs on deciding relevance by matching knowledge reps
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]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 87 17:24:15 est
From: Dr Anna Olesinska Serafin, Kummelbyvagen 1K, 191 40 Sollentuna,
Sweden. <P2269@QZCOM>
Subject: AIDS Research for Poland
[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]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 87 22:35:20 EST
From: grads014@grumpy.cis.guelph.netnorth
To: hypertext thesis
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
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 87 16:10:40 EST
From: rada@mcs.nlm.nih.gov (Roy Rada CSB)
Subject: hyperdocument discussion
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
------------------------------
Date: 17 November 1987, 16:04:16 EST
From: MCCARTY at UTOREPAS
Subject: HUMANIST group
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)
------------------------------
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.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1987 10:12 EST
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]
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 OF IRList Digest
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