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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 25
IRList Digest Saturday, 30 April 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 25
Today's Topics:
Announcement - AI-ED new AERA SIG
COGSCI - Justified Reformulations, How Language Structures its Concepts,
Palenque (Interactive Discovery-Based Learning)
- UNITRAN: A Principle-Based Parser for Machine Translation
News addresses are
Internet or CSNET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 29 Apr 88 2144-PDT
From: Moderator Steve Barnhouse... <AI-ED-REQUEST@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: AI-ED Digest V3 #16 [Extract - Ed.]
AI-ED Digest Saturday, 30 Apr 1988 Volume 3 : Issue 16
...
Date: 15 Apr 88 13:05:00 EST
From: "ARTIC::PSOTKA" <psotka%artic.decnet@ari-hq1.arpa>
Subject: New AERA AI & ED SIG
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & EDUCATION
A NEW Special Interest Group was formed at the annual meeting of AERA in
New Orleans in April. I am pleased to announce that Wallace Feurzeig of
BBN Laboratories is the first Chair of the SIG on AI&ED. Cathie Norris
of the University of North Texas is the Newsletter Editor, and Joe
Psotka of the U.S. Army Research Institute is the Secretary/Treasurer.
It was the consensus of the SIG organizational meeting that it is
time to put AI to use in schools by getting a broader range of researchers
to be aware of its potential. Artificial Intelligence is advancing
rapidly on a broad front of research issues. Many of these
issues are directly relevant to the interests and needs of teachers
and researchers at all levels of instruction, and in many different settings.
This SIG will provide an overview of the current issues that may have the
strongest effect on education.
Artificial Intelligence
is increasingly becoming more applicable to practical use in education.
In part, this is because the technology of AI, based as it
is on specific algorithms and understanding derived from areas of computer
science and cognitive science somewhat remote from the mainstream
of educational research, is maturing steadily and becoming less
arcane and more generally useful for instruction. The other main reason
for this increasing practicality of AI technology is the continuing
increase in the power of available personal computer technology at
an affordable price for schools and workplaces to purchase. The outstanding
example of this is the Hypercard environment on MACs, and the
powerful Lisp environments on all new PCs. Both of these fatant that educational researchers understand and become
familiar with AI technology.
powerful Lisp environments on all new PCs. Both of these factors make
it more important that educational researchers understand and become
familiar with AI technology.
This SIG will offer us an opportunity
to introduce other educational researchers to these topics. The SIG
on AI & ED will be mainly concerned with the use of AI and cognitive
science technologies for education. Primary areas for reporting research
in these technologies will be within Authoring systems for CBI
and ICAI; intelligent microworlds; machine learning; complex environments
for instruction; knowledge representation; qualitative modelling
techniques; structures of declarative knowledge; computer thinking
tools; rule systems for procedural knowledge; student modelling;
student diagnosis; teacher amplifiers; hypertext systems; natural
language processing; and other important outgrowths of AI that offer
significant potential for improving education in the schools, workplace,
and at home.
For more information, inquiries, suggestions for symposia, and other
offers of support, please contact :
Wallace Feurzeig,
BBN Laboratories
10 Moulton St
Cambridge, MA 02238 at (617)873-3448 or Feurzeig@g.bbn.com.arpa
Send newsletter contributions, announcements, and other information to:
Cathie Norris
University of North Texas
P. O. Box 5155
Denton, TX 76203 at (817)565-4189
Joseph Psotka, Ph.D.
Army Research Institute
5001 Eisenhower Avenue
Alexandria, Virginia 22333-5600
OR CALL: (202)274-5540 or Psotka@ARI-HQ1.Arpa
If you would like to join, please send this application.
Name:
Title:
Affiliation:
Home Address
Home Phone:
Business Address
Business Phone:
Electronic Address: ARPA
Bitnet
Compuserve
Other:
AERA member? Y or N
Division (A,B,C,etc.)
Check One or Two or Three:
1. New Member (One Year) - $5 2. New Member (Two Years) - $ 10
3. Student Member (One Year) - $2.
Check enclosed payable to AERA AI & ED SIG
Thanks!
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1988 14:50 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extracts - Ed.]
Date: Tuesday, 12 April 1988 13:04-EDT
From: Mary E. Spollen <SPOLS%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU at XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Re: Subramanian seminar: Tues. 4/19, 4:15, NE43-512A
A THEORY OF JUSTIFIED REFORMULATIONS
Devika Subramanian
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
Tuesday, April 19, 1988
Refreshments...4:00 p.m.
Lecture...4:15 p.m.
NE43-512A
ABSTRACT
Present day systems, intelligent or otherwise, are limited by the
conceptualizations of the world given to them by their designers.
This research explores issues in the construction of adaptive
systems that can incrementally reformulate their conceptualizations
to achieve computational efficiency or descriptional adequacy.
In this talk, a special case of the reformulation problem is
presented: we reconceptualize a knowledge base in terms of new
abstract objects and relations in order to make the computation
of a given class of queries more efficient.
Automatic reformulation will not be possible unless a reformulator
can justify a shift in conceptualization. We present a new class of
meta-theoretical justifications for a reformulation, called
irrelevance explanations. A logical irrelevance explanation proves
that certain distinctions made in the formulation are not necessary
for the computation of a given class of problems. A computational
irrelevance explanation proves that some distinctions are not
useful with respect to a given problem solver for a given class of
problems. Inefficient formulations make irrelevant distinctions and
the irrelevance principle logically minimizes a formulation by
removing all facts and distinctions in it that are not needed for
the specified goals. The automation of the irrelevance principle
is demonstrated with the generation of abstractions from first
principles. We also describe the implementation of an irrelevance
reformulator and outline experimental results that confirm our theory.
Host: Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman
Date: Thursday, 14 April 1988 14:11-EDT
From: Dori Wells <DWELLS at G.BBN.COM>
Re: Lang. & Cognition Seminar
BBN Science Development Program
Language & Cognition Seminar Series
HOW LANGUAGE STRUCTURES ITS CONCEPTS: THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR
Leonard Talmy
Program in Cognitive Science
University of California, Berkeley
BBN Laboratories Inc.
10 Moulton Street
Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor
10:30 a.m., Wednesday, April 20, 1988
Abstract: A fundamental design feature of language is that it has two
subsystems, the open-class (lexical) and the closed-class (grammatical).
These subsystems perform complementary functions. In a sentence, the
open-class forms together contribute most of the *content* of the
total meaning expressed, while the closed-class forms together determine
the majority of its *structure*. Further, across the spectrum of
languages, all closed-class forms are under great semantic constraint:
they specify only certain concepts and categories of concepts, but not
others. These grammatical specifications, taken together, appear to
constitute the fundamental conceptual structuring system of language.
I explore the particular concepts and categories of concepts that
grammatical forms specify, the properties that these have in common
and that distinguish them from lexical specifications, the functions
served by this organization in language, and the relations of this
organization to the structuring systems of other cognitive domains such
as visual perception and reasoning. The greater issue, toward which this
study ultimately aims, is the general character of conceptual structure
in human cognition.
Date: Thursday, 14 April 1988 14:32-EDT
From: Dori Wells <DWELLS at G.BBN.COM>
Re: Lang. & Cognition Seminar
BBN Science Development Program
Language & Cognition Seminar Series
PALENQUE: AN INTERACTIVE DISCOVERY-BASED LEARNING
EXPERIENCE FOR CHILDREN
Kathleen Wilson
Bank Street College
BBN Laboratories Inc.
10 Moulton Street
Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor
2:00 p.m., Thursday, April 21, 1988
Abstract: Educational technology designers have recently been exploring
the potential uses of new interactive video technologies and, in particular,
experimenting with a variety of structures and metaphors for the information
on a disk.
Palenque is a DVI (Digital Video Interactive) pilot application that uses
both spatial and thematic structures to provide students with a surrogate
travel experience through Palenque, an ancient Mayan site. It is designed to
be used with the second season of the Voyage of the Mimi project, an
interdisciplinary curriculum that includes broadcast TV shows, software and
classroom activities for grades 4 through 8.
The talk will include a description of the Mimi project (including a tape of
a TV excerpt), a discussion of design and pedagogical principles underlying
Palenque, and a description of its use in classrooms.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1988 11:57 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.]
Date: Thursday, 28 April 1988 11:59-EDT
From: KASH at OZ.AI.MIT.EDU
Re: Parsing Seminar announcement
Wednesday, 4 May 2:00 p.m. Room: Eighth Floor Playroom Building NE43 MIT
MIT Center for Cognitive Science
Parsing Seminar
UNITRAN: A PRINCIPLE-BASED PARSER FOR MACHINE TRANSLATION
Bonnie Dorr
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Many parsing strategies for machine translation systems are based
entirely on context-free grammars. To try to capture all natural
language phenomena, these systems require an overwhelming number of
rules; thus, a translation system either has limited linguistic
coverage or poor performance (due to formidable grammar size).
A parsing design that adheres to a principle-based linguistic theory
avoids the maladies of a rule-based design and approaches a solution
to the parsing problem for translation. In this talk, I will present
a parser that is based on the current linguistic theory of "Government
and Binding" (GB). The central idea of the theory is that the
linguistic knowledge common to all languages consists of independent
modules, each parameterized to account for the variation among
languages.
The parser consists of a skeletal structure-building component that
operates in conjunction with a linguistic constraint component. The
"co-routine" design allows control to be passed back and forth until
an underspecified skeletal phrase structure is converted into a fully
instantiated parse tree. Because of the modularity and
parameterization offered by the GB approach to parsing, the system
accommodates cross-linguistic generalization and promotes
extensibility.
In the context of translation, modularity and parameterization are
crucial in order to handle more than one language. Presently, the
system parses both Spanish and English. Research is currently under
way for the construction of a generator that adheres to the same
principles and parameters incorporated into the parser.
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END OF IRList Digest
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