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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 20
IRList Digest Thursday, 7 April 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 20
Today's Topics:
Announcement - Open position - new chair in CL
- Open positions in Dept. of Inf. Sci., Univ. of Pittsburgh
CSLI - Panel discussion on compositionality
- Learning at the knowledge level, Formal semantics of point of view
News addresses are
Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet
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Subject: New Chair in CL
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 88 15:33:15 +0000
From: jock%language-linguistics.umist.ac.uk@RELAY.CS.NET
I would be grateful if you could arrange for the display of the
following announcement.
John McNaught
Lecturer
*****************************************************************
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
(UMIST)
Department of Language and Linguistics
and
Centre for Computational Linguistics
CHAIR IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Applications are invited for a new chair in Computational
Linguistics whose purpose is to provide new leadership in this
subject field and generally to strengthen the department's
research base. Candidates should have a strong record of
academic and/or professional experience within the broad field of
computation applied to natural language processing. The
department's well-established and funded Centre for Computational
Linguistics concentrates on postgraduate studies and largely
applied research. The successful applicant is expected to play a
leading part in the stimulation of research as well as
developing teaching programmes and generally contributing to the
administration of the department.
Informal enquiries may be made to Professor J C Sager or the
Registrar.
Salary will be in the professorial range with a minimum of 23,380
pounds sterling per annum (max. permitted average 28,820 pounds
sterling). Requests for application forms and further particulars
should be sent to the Registrar, Room B9, UMIST, P O Box 88,
Manchester M60 1QD, United Kingdom, to whom completed application
forms should be returned as soon as possible.
UMIST is an equal opportunities employer.
E-mail contact addresses:
jcs%ccl.umist.ac.uk@ean-relay.ac.uk (ean)
jcs%ccl.umist.ac.uk@cunyvm.cuny.edu (arpa)
jcs%ccl.umist.ac.uk@ac.uk (earn)
...!ukc!ccl.umist.ac.uk!jock (uucp)
Telephone: +44.61.236.3311 extension 2333
------------------------------
From: sch@idis.lis.PITTSBURGH.EDU (stephen hirtle)
Subject: Information Science Faculty Search
Keywords: telecommunications, database management, software engineering
Date: 29 Mar 88 21:57:35 GMT
Organization: LIS Laboratories, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
Department of Information Science
The Department of Information Science announces three open
positions for tenure track Assistant or Associate Professors, with
appointments beginning in the Fall Term, 1988. Candidates must have
a Ph.D. in information science, computer science, or a closely related
field. We are particularly seeking applicants with teaching and
research interests in information systems design, telecommunications,
database management, knowledge bases, information storage and
retrieval, microcomputer systems, text processing, electronic publishing,
office automation, software engineering, network design, simulation, or
the design of interactive systems. We strongly encourage women and
minority candidates to apply. The Department has eighteen faculty members
and offers a Ph.D. and master's degrees in information science. Current
research interests within the Department include information storage
and retrieval, telecommunications, standards, natural language processing,
visual languages, human-computer interface design, human information
processing, electronic publishing, and database systems design, including
image databases. The Department has extensive computing facilities, including
a VAX 11/780, six Sun workstations, three TI Explorers, three Xerox
Viewpoints, and a large number of microcomputers. The Telecommunications
Laboratory is also well equipped with an AT&T 3B/15, several smaller
computers, and a wide variety of communications equipment. In addition the
Department has access to the University's computing resources, which include
VAX Clustered 8650s, 8800s and the Cray XMP/48 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer
Center.
The University of Pittsburgh offers a wide variety of opportunities to
interact with faculty of other departments and schools including an
interdisciplinary program in intelligent systems and a joint program
(with Carnegie-Mellon University) in computational linguistics. In
addition, the Department and the University have close relations with
several major corporations that are funding research and teaching
(Texas Instruments, XEROX, AT&T, IBM, and DEC).
We seek applicants with balanced research and teaching interests. Our
salaries, benefits, and teaching schedules are highly competitive. Applicants
should send a vita, a statement of research interests, any relevant
reprints or preprints, and three references to: Robert R. Korfhage, Chairman,
Department of Information Science, LIS Building, University of Pittsburgh,
Pittsburgh, PA 15260. The University of Pittsburgh is an Equal
Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 88 17:35:59 PST
From: Emma Pease <emma@RUSSELL.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, March 24, 3:21 [Extract - Ed.]
NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
Panel Discussion on Compositionality
Per-Kristian Halvorsen, Stanley Peters, and Craige Roberts
March 31
Compositionality, conceived as a strong constraint on the relationship
between sentential structures and interpretations, has been one of the
central issues in semantic theory. Since Montague's seminal work on
this question, a number of analyses of specific interpretive problems
have called into question whether we can maintain compositionality as
a guiding principle in constructing semantic theories. And some
recent theories call into question in a more general way whether
compositionality is the kind of constraint we want on semantic theory.
These include theories which take seriously the contribution of
contextual information to interpretation, including situation
semantics and discourse representation theory, and also the recent
work by Fenstad, Halvorsen, Langholm, and van Benthem exploring
constraint-based interpretative theories operating on unification
grammars. In this panel discussion, we will briefly consider how
compositionality has generally been understood in the semantic
literature, give an overview of what we take to be the central
problems that call its utility into question, and discuss some
alternative conceptions of how semantic theory can be appropriately
constrained.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 88 18:04:51 PST
From: Emma Pease <emma@RUSSELL.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, March 31, 3:22 [Extract - Ed.]
THIS WEEK'S CSLI TINLUNCH
Reading: "Learning at the Knowledge Level"
by Thomas G. Dietterich
Discussion led by Kurt Konolige
(konolige@bishop.ai.sri.com)
March 31
When Newell introduced the concept of the knowledge level as a useful
level of description for computer systems, he focused on the
representation of knowledge. This paper applies the knowledge level
notion to the problem of knowledge acquisition. Two interesting
issues arise. First, some existing machine learning programs appear
to be completely static when viewed at the knowledge level. These
programs improve their performance without changing their 'knowledge.'
Second, the behavior of some other machine learning programs cannot be
predicted or described at the knowledge level. These programs take
unjustified inductive leaps. The first programs are called symbol
level learning (SLL) programs; the second, nondeductive knowledge
level learning (NKLL) programs. The paper analyzes both of these
classes of learning programs and speculates on the possibility of
developing coherent theories of each. A theory of symbol level
learning is sketched, and some reasons are presented for believing
that a theory of NKLL will be difficult to obtain.
--------------
NEXT WEEK'S CSLI TINLUNCH
Reading: "The Formal Semantics of Point of View"
by Jonathan E. Mitchell
PhD dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 1986
Discussion led by Syun Tutiya
(tutiya@csli.stanford.edu)
April 7
Some sentences are ambiguous in an interesting way. When you tell
your friend standing across a table that the cat is in front of the
table, the cat could be either between you and the table or between
the table and her. You might be tempted to say the sentence you have
just used should be interpreted relative to the point of view.
Problems concerning the concept point of view are unlikely to be
covered by the conventional notions in terms of which indexical
expressions have been dealt with in the tradition of formal semantics,
since the point of view normally is not expressed as a constituent of
a sentence used. There are also some languages in which the concept
point of view plays such an important role that you might think any
selection of a lexical item refers to the point of view from which the
speaker is speaking. In Japanese, for example, it is said that you
have to use different words to describe the same transference of a
property depending on from which point of view you are speaking, the
donor's, the donee's, or yours. There are a lot more sentences in
English and a lot more languages which are relevant to the problem of
point of view, or perspectivity.
It is natural, therefore, the concept point of view deserve linguists'
attention. But once you try to come up with a formal treatment of the
concept which is consistent with linguistic intuition and
philosophical insight, you are bound to be involved in the discussion
of the formal semantics of belief sentences, of the nature of mental
states, and the belief de se. Mitchell seems to have decided to take
on the whole job and concludes, among other things, that "the notion
of self-ascription is central to the explanation of perspectivity in
language." This led him to the idea of representing, within situation
semantics, the interpretation of a sentence in a bifurcated formalism
by ascribing to the sentence both the external and the internal
contents. The external content of a sentence is almost the same as
the propositional content or proposition expressed of an utterance of
the sentence. Well, what is the internal content, then? This is the
very question I want to be answered in the discussion.
The paper is naturally very long so I will compile some excerpts from
the dissertation to be picked up. Please be warned that my selection
of the parts to be read does not necessarily reflect the ultimate
claims of the dissertation.
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END OF IRList Digest
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