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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 52
IRList Digest Saturday, 12 November 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 52
Today's Topics:
Call for Papers - Computers and Information Processing
COGSCI - Bayesian/Dempster-Shaffer, Qualitative Reasoning
CSLI - Resolution problem for NLP
- High level lexical structures
Abstracts - Software Psychology Society (Potomac)
News addresses are
Internet: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtcc1.bitnet (replaces foxea@vtvax3)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 88 10:30 PST
From: Christine Borgman <IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: (COPY) Call for Papers - Computers and Inf. Processing
[Note: this was forwarded by C. Borgman, who received it
from roberts@src.dec.com, who received the msg from Jeff
Johnson, who received it from Jim Katz as below - Ed.]
>From thumper!katz Wed Nov 9 09:02:22 1988
To: SocialIssuesOfComputing.DL
Re: PLEASE FORWARD: Call for papers
Dear colleagues:
I'd appreciate your forwarding message to potential
interested parties. Of course you're also invited to send
me a submission.
Call for Papers
American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 1989
August 9-13 1989
San Francisco Hilton Square
Session: COMPUTERS AND INFORMATION PROCESSING
I'm looking for papers that will be path-breaking and
exciting in terms of their findings about computers' impact
on society/groups/individuals. The papers will hopefully
also attract the non-specialist to the session.
Where to send papers:
Members of the ASA and other interested persons should
submit papers directly to:
James Katz/ASA Session
Room 2E-264
Bell Communications Research
445 South Street
Morristown, NJ
07960-1910
Detailed information regarding the submissions follows.
All papers will be judged competitively on universalistic
criteria.
Deadline. Papers should be submitted by December 15, 1988.
Length and Style. Papers as submitted are limited to 20
pages, including footnotes, tables and bibliographies. For
presentations at the meetings, papers should be turned into
15-minute talks. Presentations should highlight and
interpret major points only and the delivery should be
carefully paced. (Details of empirical data and procedures
of collection and analysis should be reserved
for handouts or written versions).
Original Contribution. Papers must reflect original work
or major developments in previously reported work. Papers
are not eligible if they have been published prior to the
meeting or accepted for publication before being submitted
to organizers for consideration, or if they have been
modified in only secondary respects after similar readings
or publication.
Only manuscripts that are accompanied by a stamped,
self-addressed envelope will be returned. Authors who want
an acknowledgment of receipt of the paper by the organizer
should also include a self-addressed, stamped postcard.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 88 13:06:10 EDT
From: Peter de Jong <dejong@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed.]
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 88 14:41:23 EDT
From: reiter@harvard.harvard.edu (Ehud Reiter)
Subject: Harvard AI colloquim
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Center for Research in Computing Technology
Colloquium Series Presents
BAYESIAN AND DEMPSTER-SHAFER FORMALISMS FOR
EVIDENTIAL REASONING: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
Judea Pearl
Cognitive Systems Laboratory
Computer Science Department
University of California, Los Angeles.
Thursday, October 27, 1988
4 PM, Aiken Computation Lab. 101
(Tea: 3:30 pm, Aiken Basement Lobby)
ABSTRACT
Evidential reasoning is the process of drawing plausible conclu-
sions from uncertain clues and incomplete information. In
most AI applications (e.g., diagnosis, forecasting, vision,
speech recognition and language understanding), this process has
been handled by ad-hoc techniques, embedded in domain-
specific procedures and data structures. Recently, there has
been a strong movement to seek a more principled basis for evi-
dential reasoning, and the two most popular contenders that
have emerged are the Bayesian and the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) ap-
proaches.
The Bayesian approach is by far the more familiar between the two,
resting on the rich tradition of statistical decision theory, as
well as on excellent axiomatic and behavioral arguments. Its
three defining attributes are (1) reliance on complete proba-
bilistic model of the domain (2) willingness to accept sub-
jective judgments as an expedient substitute for empirical data
and (3) the use of Bayes conditionalization as the primary
mechanism for updating beliefs in light of new information.
D-S belief functions offer an alternative to Bayesian inference,
in that they do not require the specification of a complete
probabilistic model and, consequently, they do not (and cannot)
use conditionalization to represent the impact of new evi-
dence. Instead, belief functions compute PROBABILITY INTERVALS,
the meaning of which has been a puzzling object to many researchers,
and a subject of much confusion.
The main purpose of this talk is to offer a clear interpretation
of belief functions, thus facilitating a better appreciation of
their power and range of applicability vis a vis those of Baye-
sian inference. We view a belief function as the PROBABILITY-OF-
NECESSITY, namely, the probability that the uncertain constraints
imposed by the evidence, together with the steady constraints
which govern the environment, will be sufficient to compel the
truth of a proposition (by excluding its negation). We shall
demonstrate this interpretation on simple examples, then address
the more general issues of computational, epistemological and
semantic adequacies of the Bayesian and D-S approaches.
Host: Professor Barbara Grosz
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1988 15:41 EDT
From: annette@xx.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Judea Pearl
Date: Friday, October 28
Time: 9:30
Place: 8th floor playroom
PROBABILISTIC SEMANTICS FOR QUALITATIVE REASONING:
PRELIMINARY RESULTS AND OPEN QUESTIONS
Judea Pearl
Computer Science Department
University of California, Los Angeles
The prospect of attaching probabilistic semantics to con-
ditional sentences promises to provide current theories of
commonsense reasoning with useful norms of coherence. For exam-
ple, if we interpret the sentence "Birds fly" to mean "If x is
a bird, it is highly probable that x can fly", then the
logic of high probabilities (Adams,1966) imposes some desir-
able disciplines on how default theories should behave -- it
posts requirements of consistency on default statements, it per-
mits the derivation of plausible conclusions that have been
missed by other formalisms and it is free of spurious exten-
sions. Using nonstandard analysis for infinitesimals
(Spohn, 1988), this logic can be further refined to represent
shades of likelihood, e.g., "likely", "very likely", "extremely
likely", etc.
However, shades of likelihood are not sufficient to capture
many plausible patterns of reasoning, and must be augmented with
assumptions invoking notions of independence and causation.
The maximum-entropy approach succeeds in emulating conventions
of independence, but it appears to have a basic clash with
human understanding of causation. I shall illustrate the na-
ture of these problems using the "Yale shooting problem" and
the "UCLA party problem".
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 88 17:31:00 PDT
From: Emma Pease <emma@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, October 20, 4:5 [Extract - Ed.]
The Resolution Problem for Natural-Language Processing
Week 4: Psychological Processes
Herb Clark
(herb@psych.stanford.edu)
20 October
I will review part of what is known about the process of resolving
ambiguities and indeterminacies from work in psychology. Last week I
took up, among other things, the issues of automaticity and modularity
in resolving structural ambiguities--that is, ambiguous words,
attachment ambiguities, and other local parsing ambiguities. The
question is, how are these ambiguities resolved so quickly and
apparently automatically on the basis of lexical, syntactic, semantic,
and pragmatic information, and what does this say about the process of
understanding in general? This week I will take up the more pragmatic
issues in resolution, such as how people resolve references,
illocutionary force, and implicatures, and how speakers and listeners
manage to do this collectively.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 88 17:28:12 PST
From: Emma Pease <emma@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: CSLI Calendar, November 3, 4:7 [Extract - Ed.]
Higher-Level Lexical Structure and Parsing
Michael Tanenhaus
University of Rochester
(mtan@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu)
November 10
Sentences with long-distance dependencies (filler-gap sentences)
present interesting problems of ambiguity resolution. This paper will
present results from a series of experiments, using both behavioral
measures and brain-evoked potential measures, that provide a detailed
picture of how people use verb argument structure and verb control
information to posit and fill gaps. The results provide intriguing
suggestions about the interaction among syntactic, semantic, and
lexical information in parsing.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 88 15:25:37 EDT
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
Subject: Software Psychology Society announcement
SOFTWARE PSYCHOLOGY SOCIETY
POTOMAC CHAPTER
VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1 FALL 1988
Note: All meetings will be held at the George Washington University's Marvin
Center (800 21st Street, N.W.) between 10:00 AM and noon. Coffee and
doughnuts will be provided by the Department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences.
Send correspondence for this newsletter to: Software Psychology Society, c/o
Skip Williamson, Knowledge Systems, Inc., 5705 Stillwell Rd., Rockville, MD
20851.
September 9 Room 413-414
ASSIMILATIVE STRUCTURING, FRAGMENTED
STRUCTURING AND INTEGRATIVE MODELING:
SOME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS ON THE ROLE OF
'MENTAL MODELS' DURING EARLY SKILL ACQUISITION
Marc Sebrechts, Department of Psychology
Catholic University, Washington, DC 20071
Two studies were conducted to clarify the meaning and utility of "mental
models" for initial learning of basic UNIX operating system commands. More
specifically, we examined how manipulating the types of "explicit models"
presented to the user could influence resultant mental models and related
performance. The explicit models were characterized by different types of
conceptual elaborations (i.e. functional models and analogies) and syntactic
elaborations (i.e. examples). Our results indicate that the utility of
different instructional elaborations interacts with both task requirements and
subjects' own elaborations. The transitions that we observed during learning
are used to support a three component description of how mental models develop.
Analyses of errors and protocols indicate that some of the subjects' models
are closely linked to prior knowledge and form reasonably coherent structures,
a process termed "assimilative structuring." At the same time, performance
indicates that much of the learner's knowledge consists of discrete facts
or isolated models, what we call "fragmented structuring." The modified
schemata and facts that result from these processes are combined by
"integrative modeling" into a more coherent representation.
October 14 Room 413-414
AN OPTOMETRIC VIEW OF CRT SCREEN VISUAL EFFICIENCY
AND WORKSTATION DESIGN"
Alan H. Grant, OD, FAAO
2813 University Blvd., West, Kensington, MD 20895
This talk previews a new computer hardware configuration that is harmonic
with human ocular neurology and hand-wrist biomechanics. We deal with
questions such as: Does visual perception or tactile requirements predominate
in system usage? Should the screen, keyboard, and copy-viewing area be
one and the same (i.e. a co-visualization system)?
These issues are gaining governmental recognition, for example the
Suffolk County, NY legislation requiring 15 minute breaks every 3 hours
and employer subsized eye care.
Most conventional computer hardware systems have been inadequately
designed for the functional comfort and efficient usage by human operators.
The effects of excyclotorsion, inadequate depression-of-gaze, excessive
hand-wrist pronation, and ulnar abduction are discussed. The neurology
of ocular movements, synkinesis, saccades, pursuits, and orthopedic hand-wrist
biomechanics are reviewed. The interrelationships of these ocular
and orthopedic phenomenon have been synthesized into a comprehensive
hypothesis, in an effort to create a computer configuration that
permits greater integration of the keyboard with the
screen visualization, and improves visual feedback.
November 11 Room 413-414
EVALUATING HYPERTEXT APPLICATIONS
Gary Marchionini, College of Library and Information Services
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
Hypertext computing environments are finding widespread
acceptance by both authors and users. As increasing numbers of
"hyperdocuments" are produced, however, more attention must be
given to evaluating the effects of hypertext. Effects of
hypertext will depend on users, tasks, and the computing
environment. A series of studies of novice users of hypertext
systems has been conducted in the College of Library and
Information Services in conjunction with the Human Computer
Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. These
studies have involved users from elementary and high schools, and
university settings; a variety of information retrieval tasks;
and several systems. Results from these studies and descriptions
of work in progress will be discussed with special attention to
the issues of user control and authoring.
December 9 Room 413-414
HUMAN FACTORS CONSIDERATIONS FOR HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEMS
Jim Battaglia, American Voice & Robotics
1115 Paint Branch Drive (Suite 3181), College Park, MD 20742
Kent Norman, Catherine Plaisant & Dan Wallace
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
Sophisticated electronic control over complex systems has been used in
industrial applications, but the operators were highly trained
technologists. Today untrained consumers desire control over increasingly
complex domestic environments. American Voice & Robotics and the
University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory are jointly
researching human factors in home automation systems. The project
involves the design and development of advanced user interface devices
for these systems, such as touch screens, hand-held remote controls,
and voice recognition.
AVR builds sophisticated home automation systems for up-scale homes,
integrating available entertainment, security, lighting, climate control,
and communication products into a comprehensive easy-to-use package.
Well-designed user interfaces are critical to success in the emerging
home automation market.
The joint research includes formal evaluation of user responses to existing
designs, and development of new approaches for touch
screens, menu selection, online help, information services, alarms, and events.
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END OF IRList Digest
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