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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 13
IRList Digest Sunday, 28 February 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 13
Today's Topics:
Call for Papers - Centre for the New OED 4th Annual Conference
COGSCI - Qualitative probabilistic networks
- Automated program recognition
CSLI - Default reasoning, nonmonotonic logics, frame problem; theory
of types and propositions
- New publications
News addresses are
Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet
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Date: Fri, 19 Feb 88 09:56:33 EST
From: Maureen Searle <msearle@watsol.UWaterloo.ca>
Subject: Call for papers for 4th U. of Waterloo New OED Conf.
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
CENTRE FOR THE NEW OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
4TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
CALL FOR PAPERS - CALL FOR PANELISTS
INFORMATION IN TEXT
October 27-28, 1988
Waterloo, Canada
This year's conference will focus on ways that text stored as electronic
data allows information to be restructured and extracted in response to
individualized needs. For example, text databases can be used to:
- expand the information potential of existing text
- create and maintain new information resources
- generate new print information
Papers presenting original research on theoretical and applied aspects of
this theme are being sought. Typical but not exclusive areas of interest
include computational lexicology, computational linguistics, syntactic
and semantic analysis, lexicography, grammar defined databases, lexical
databases and machine-readable dictionaries and reference works.
Submissions will be refereed by a program committee. Authors should send
seven copies of a detailed abstract (5 to 10 double-spaced pages) by
June 10, 1988 to the Committee Chairman, Dr. Gaston Gonnet, at:
UW Centre for the New OED
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada, N2L 3G1
Late submissions risk rejection without consideration. Authors will be
notified of acceptance or rejection by July 22, 1988. A working draft
of the paper, not exceeding 15 pages, will be due by September 6, 1988
for inclusion in proceedings which will be made available at the
conference.
One conference session will be devoted to a panel discussion entitled
MEDIUM AND MESSAGE: THE FUTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC BOOK. The Centre invites
individuals who are interested in participating as panel members to submit
a brief statement (approximately 150 words) expressing their major
position on this topic. Please submit statements not later than
June 10, 1988 to the Administrative Director, Donna Lee Berg, at the above
address. Selection of panel members will be made by July 22, 1988.
The Centre is interested in specialists or generalists in both academic and
professional fields (including editors, publishers, software designers and
distributors) who have strongly held views on the information potential of
the electronic book.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Roy Byrd (IBM Corporation) Michael Lesk (Bell Communications Research)
Reinhard Hartmann (Univ. of Exeter) Beth Levin (Northwestern University)
Ian Lancashire (Univ. of Toronto) Richard Venezky (Univ. of Delaware)
Chairman: Gaston Gonnet (Univ. of Waterloo)
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1988 15:14 EST
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@xx.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.]
Date: Monday, 1 February 1988 11:31-EST
From: Paul Resnick <pr at ht.ai.mit.edu>
Re: Revolving Seminar Thursday Feb. 4-- Mike Wellman
Thursday 4, February 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom
The Artificial Intelligence Lab
Revolving Seminar Series
Qualitative Probabilistic Networks
Mike Wellman
Many knowledge representation schemes model the world as a collection of
variables connected by links that describe their interrelationships.
The representations differ widely in the nature of the fundamental
objects and in the precision and expressiveness of the relationship
links. Qualitative probabilistic networks occupy a region in
representation space where the variables are arbitrary and the
relationships are qualitative constraints on the joint probability
distribution among them.
Two basic types of qualitative relationship are supported by the
formalism. Qualitative influences describe the direction of the
relationship between two variables and qualitative synergies describe
interactions among influences. The probabilistic semantics of these
relationships justify sound and efficient inference procedures based on
graphical manipulations of the network. These procedures answer queries
about qualitative relationships among variables separated in the
network. An example from medical therapy planning illustrates the use
of QPNs to formulate tradeoffs by determining structural properties of
optimal assignments to decision variables.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 1988 10:06 EST
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@xx.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.]
Date: Thursday, 4 February 1988 11:05-EST
From: Paul Resnick <pr at ht.ai.mit.edu>
To: dejong at oz
Re: AI Revolving Seminar Feb. 11-- Linda Wills
Thursday, 11 February 4:00pm Room: NE43- 8th floor Playroom
The Artificial Intelligence Lab
Revolving Seminar Series
Automated Program Recognition
Linda Wills
By recognizing familiar algorithmic fragments and data structures in a
program, an experienced programmer can understand the program, based on
the known properties of the structures found. Automating this
recognition process will make it easier to perform many tasks which
require program understanding, e.g., maintenance, modification, and
debugging. This talk describes a recognition system which automatically
identifies occurrences of stereotyped computational structures in
programs. The system can recognize these standard structures, even
though they may be expressed in a wide range of syntactic forms or they
may be in the midst of unfamiliar code. It does so systematically by
using a parsing technique. Two important advances have made this
possible. The first is a language-independent graph representation for
programs, which canonicalizes many syntactic features of programs. The
second is an efficient graph parsing algorithm.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 88 17:30:51 PST
From: Emma Pease <emma%alan.stanford.edu@relay.cs.net>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, February 4, 3:16 [Extract - Ed.]
NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
Reading: "Default Reasoning, Nonmonotonic Logics,
and the Frame Problem"
by Steve Hanks and Drew McDermott
Proc. of AAAI-86, pp. 328-33
Discussion led by Hideyuki Nakashima
(nakashim@csli.stanford.edu)
11 February 1988
In the beginning was the frame problem. Then came nonmonotonic
logics. Nonmonotonic logics are meant to be the logical counterpart
of the human default-reasoning process, which is capable of jumping to
conclusions, neglecting irrelevant conditions without even thinking
about them. The history is explained clearly in the article, which is
a good introduction to the field.
However, the authors claim that nonmonotonic logics are not the
solution to the frame problem. They are too weak to capture human
default reasoning. The temporal projection problem (now known as "the
Yale shooting problem") is introduced as an example.
I want to discuss (0) the view that the frame problem is
unsolvable, (1) why humans do not seem to have the same problem, (2)
whether we need nonmonotonic logics to capture default reasoning.
--------------
NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
A Type-free Theory of Types and Propositions
Jon Barwise
(barwise@csli.stanford.edu)
11 February 1988
Since the beginning of the century, starting with Frege and Russell,
theories of types and propositions have played an important role in
logic and the foundations of mathematics. Recent applications in
computer science and in the analysis of natural language have brought
them back into the limelight. In this talk I will outline a theory of
types and propositions that not only avoids the paradoxes that plagued
Frege and Russell, but also "explains" them. Familiarity with
situation theory is needed only for the last ten minutes of the talk.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 88 19:23:49 PST
From: Emma Pease <emma%alan.stanford.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, February 11, 3:17 [Extract - Ed.]
NEW LECTURE NOTES
Two new titles in the CSLI Lecture Notes series have recently been
published. The first, by David Hilbert, is entitled "Color and Color
Perception: A Study in Anthropocentric Realism." A brief description
of the book appears below. "Natural Language Processing in the 1980s:
A Bibliography" (ed. Gerald Gazdar et al.) is the second volume.
This book contains over 1,700 entries and an introduction, as well as
two indexes, one to keywords, the other to second and subsequent
authors. An online version of this bibliography can be found on
Russell, and, according to Jeff Goldberg, "It is possible to search
this bibliography automatically by computer mail." As he points out,
"Mail to clbib@russell.stanford.edu with the word `help' as the
Subject line of your message for details. Most questions you may have
are likely to be answered in that file. Mail to
clbib-request@russell.stanford.edu
to report bugs in the program that handles the automatic searching."
Both titles are distributed by the University of Chicago Press and
may be ordered directly (5801 Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637)
or purchased at the Stanford University Bookstore.
Color and Color Perception
ISBN 0--937073--16--4 (Paper) $11.95
ISBN 0--937073--15--6 (Cloth) $24.95
Natural Language Processing in the 1980s
ISBN 0--937073--28--8 (Paper) $11.95
ISBN 0--937073--26--1 (Cloth) $29.95
Color and Color Perception
Color has often been supposed to be a subjective property, a property
to be analyzed correctly in terms of the phenomenological aspects of
human experience. In contrast with subjectivism, an objectivist
analysis of color takes color to be a property objects possess in
themselves, independently of the character of human perceptual
experience. David Hilbert defends a form of objectivism that
identifies color with a physical property of surfaces---their spectral
reflectance.
This analysis of color is shown to provide a more adequate account
of the features of human color vision than its subjectivist rivals.
The author's account of color also recognizes that the human
perceptual system provides a limited and idiosyncratic picture of the
world. These limitations are shown to be consistent with a realist
account of color and to provide the necessary tools for giving an
analysis of common-sense knowledge of color phenomena.
--------------
OTHER NEW PUBLICATIONS
The Sixth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics Proceedings
(WCCFL6) volume has just appeared. It is available at the Stanford
University Bookstore or may be purchased by writing to the CSLI
Publications office at Ventura Hall. (ISBN 0-937073-31-8; 352 pp.;
$12.00) This volume contains twenty-four papers presented at the 1987
WCCFL held at the University of Arizona. WCCFL proceedings are
published by the Stanford Linguistic Association.
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END OF IRList Digest
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