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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 106
AIList Digest Sunday, 19 Aug 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 106
Today's Topics:
AI & Society - Misrepresentations of AI,
AI Tools - Taxonomy Assistant, Fuzzy Operational Research,
Fifth Generation - Budget Cuts,
Abstracts - Natural Language Programming,
Natural Language - Crime Rate,
User Interface - The Ebstein Test
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Date: Tue 14 Aug 84 22:08:59-EDT
From: MM%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Misrepresentations of AI
[Forwarded from the MIT bboard by SASW@MIT-MC.]
I am looking for examples of outrageous representations of the current state of
AI appearing in any popular newspapers or magazines. If you know of any, I'd
appreciate hearing them.
Melanie Mitchell
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Date: 16 Aug 1984 15:57:11 PDT
From: Bill Mann <MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA>
Subject: Taxonomy Assistant
I would like to have some sort of computational aid for creating taxonomies.
In trying to understand a collection of objects or data, often one of
the most helpful things to do is to create a taxonomy of it. Comparing
and classifying things makes one think about their attributes and how
they relate. It also helps identify potential varieties of objects that
are "missing."
Often several attempts are required before a satisfactory result is
achieved, which can involve a lot of bookkeeping and an overwhelming
amount of detail, so much that significant patterns are missed.
Also, there are skills for doing taxonomies, and I don't have them all.
For all these reasons, it would be good to embed a lot of the support
operations for creating a taxonomy in a program, one that would let the
machine do bookkeeping, systematic evocation of data, consistency
checking and some pattern identification, but still leave me in charge.
(Perhaps it's already been done.)
What sorts of tools are out there? Is this already embedded in some
collection of intellectual prosthetics? Where should I look for such
programs?
Bill Mann
[There are indeed tools for creating numerical taxonomies --- see the
documentation for cluster analysis programs in statistical packages
such as BMD, SPSS, SAS, etc. For other leads I would suggest the
Pattern Recognition journal, the seven (massive) IEEE conferences on
pattern recognition, and the Classification Society (c/o Dr. George
W. Furnas, Room 2C-572, Bell Communications Research, Inc., Murray
Hill, NJ 07974). Can anyone suggest available software for nonnumeric
taxonomy construction or for handling the associated bookkeeping? -- KIL]
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Date: 15 Aug 84 15:44:00-PDT (Wed)
From: pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucuxc!chandra @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Fuzzy reasoning and AI in Operational Research and Management
Science.
Article-I.D.: uiucuxc.28900005
I am a graduate student who is trying to apply
expert systems to managerial Decision Making . My thesis deals with applying
knowledge based techniques to decision support systems which use mathematical
models and Operations Research techniques.
I would like to know if anybody is aware of some good references on
AI applications in Operations Research / Decision making . Any Symposia,
meetings, books etc.
I would really appreciate your help, thank you.
Navin Chandra
Phone 1-800-872-2375
(ask for extention 413)
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Date: 15 Aug 84 0418 PDT
From: Laws@SRI-AI
Subject: Japan's Fifth Generation Project
The following summary is from a NYT article, Japan Appears To Falter
Attempting To Create New Computer, by Andrew Pollack.
Kazuhiro Fuchi, research director of the 5th generation project,
says that the project budget has been drastically cut back on goals
of vision, speech understanding, and natural language translation.
The core program -- including reasoning, understanding written language,
and intelligent programming -- has been preserved.
The first phase, development of a database machine and a sequential
reasoning engine, has been completed on schedule. Funding has been
cut by 50% for the second phase, including development of a parallel
machine and research in perception and man-machine interfaces. Project
officials claim that: it is only natural the original vague goals would
be narrowed; the original funding proposals were overly generous; and
several private companies are researching the cut problems on their
own, so there is little need for the institute to work on them.
Finding qualified researchers was more of a problem than budget
limitations anyway. ("I personally felt it was rather difficult to
spend 100 billion yen," Fuchi said.)
On the other hand, there will now be less opportunity for exploring
different approaches. The third phase may be jeapardized if dead
ends are encountered in the second phase.
The Japanese government is trying to reduce a large deficit by
eliminating spending increases in all areas except defense and foreign
aid. If no exception is made for advanced technology, the ministry
would have to make cuts elsewhere to increase the budget of the Fifth
Generation project or find new sources of revenue. The ministry has
continued to give the project favorable budget treatment, even though
the agency's overall budget for high technology has dropped 20 percent
during the last three years.
One way to increase the budget is to ask industry to provide money.
Eight computer companies are providing researchers to the project and
are building machines for it, but they are not eager to provide
speculative, long-term research funds. Fuchi also is concerned that
corporate funding would limit the project's freedom to pursue its own
goals.
The institute wants to increase its staff from 50 researchers to
100 next year. But artificial intelligence reseachers are rare in
Japan, and the companies are reluctant to part with more. "The
Fifth Generation will produce technology for the 1990s," said
one official of Fujitsu Ltd., Japan's largest computer company.
"But we need products for our customers before the 1990s."
-- Ken Laws
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Date: Fri 17 Aug 84 18:01:05-PDT
From: Kenji Sugiyama <SUGIYAMA@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Abstracts - Natural Language Programming
Here are two abstracts of the papers that concern with a Natural Language
Programming System under development in Fujitsu Laboratories in Japan.
* "Understanding of Japanese in an Interactive Programming System"
by Kenji Sugiyama, Masayuki Kameda, Kouji Akiyama & Akifumi Makinouchi
in COLING84 (10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics).
Abstract: KIPS is an automatic programming system which generates
standrdized business application programs through interactive natural
language dialogue. KIPS models the program under discussion and the
content of the user's statements as organizations of dynamic objects
in the object-oriented programming sense. This paper describes the
statement-model and the program-model, their use in understanding Japanese
program specifications, and how they are shaped by the linguistic
singularities of Japanese input sentences.
* "An Experimental Interactive Natural Language Programming System"
by Kenji Sugiyama, Kouji Akiyama, Masayuki Kameda & Akifumi Makinouchi
to appear in Electronics and Communications in Japan which is published
by Scripta Technical, Inc. (Silver Spring, MD 20910) in cooperation
with IECEJ (the Institute of Electronics and Communication Engineers
of Japan, Tokyo 105).
Abstract: This paper discusses the problems encountered in the
development of the interactive natural language programming system (KIPS)
from three aspects, which are input sentence, target program and communication
between the user and the system. Based on the recognitin of the problems,
an interactive natural language programming system is proposed, which is
constructed on a model of the task domain consisting of active objects
in the object-oriented programming sense. The proposedd system is composed
of four modules, which are parser, specification acquisitor, coder and
user interface. Those modules realize the functions of information
extraction from Japanese sentence, assimilation of fragmentary informations,
automatic programming and man-machine interface, respectively. Lastly,
future development of the system is discussed.
Contact point is as follows:
Kenji Sugiyama
(until Sept. 5 and thereabout)
SRI International, BS253
Menlo Park, CA 94025
(415)852-4402
Sugiyama@SRI-AI
(afterwards)
Software Laboratory, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd.
Kawasaki-shi, 211 Japan
(044)777-1111
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Date: 15 Aug 84 10:46:31-PDT (Wed)
From: hplabs!hao!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!ritcv!ccivax!abh @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: On having virtually no crime rate.
Article-I.D.: ccivax.195
This kind of sentence structure is highly dependent upon
perspective and context. If a problem is found on first parse
perhaps a simple substitution by synonym would do the trick.
In this case substituting 'nearly' for 'virtually' would do the trick.
Contextually, though, the program would have to know that rates
are for numerical comparison. In which case one of the better
semantic results might be "nearly no crime rate in comparison."
The reasons for which people interpret the same written words
would be an interesting endeavor.
Andrew Hudson
--
"Freedom of choice is what you got
Freedom from choice is what you want"
- DEVO
...[rlgvax | decvax | ucbvax!allegra]!rochester!ritcv!ccivax!abh
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Date: 20 Aug 84 7:44:08-EDT (Mon)
From: ihnp4!drutx!houxe!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!ukc!west44!westcsr!pkelly
@ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: The Ebstein Test, or DHSS loses to AI.
Article-I.D.: westcsr.169
I read in today's Guardian newspaper of an unpublished report describing
an experiment performed at British Department of Health and Social
Security offices (D.H.S.S. or colloquially 'the SS'). People
claiming social security benefit often queue for literally hours
to see DHSS staff about what benefits they're entitled to.
In a small selection of offices computers were installed
which people could choose to use instead of queueing to see a
person. The machines took about half an hour to do a
consultation, and produced an extensive print-out at the end.
Finally, the clients were questionned on their experience.
Despite often never having communicated with a computer
before, 85 percent said they found the machines a better source
of information than DHSS staff.
The mechanised interview took a bit longer than talking to a
human, but as the report's author, Joyce Ebstein, concludes,
"What the professionals don't appreciate is that people don't
object to long periods of service and attention. What they do
object to is long periods of waiting for service and attention".
Of course, this is no evidence to support wholesale
redundancies - it simply underlines the abominable service being
provided.
But it does bring to mind an alternative to the Turing test,
in which it is unimportant whether users can distinguish between
a machine and a human. What counts is which they prefer.
The test no longer defines Artificial Intelligence, but
perhaps it makes a more sensible objective for artificial
intelligence research.
Yours, Paul Kelly, Westfield College, Univ. of London.
(..vax135!ukc!west44!westcsr)
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End of AIList Digest
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