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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 113
AIList Digest Monday, 3 Sep 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 113
Today's Topics:
Humor - Eliza Passes Turing Test (again),
AI Tools - Taxonomy Assistant & User Aids,
Psychology - User Modeling,
Speech Recognition - Separating Syllables,
Conferences - Functional Languages
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Date: 29 Aug 84 18:22:02-PDT (Wed)
From: decvax!minow @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Eliza Passes Turing Test (again)
Article-I.D.: decvax.59
Readers of net.ai might enjoy this extract from "Computing Across
America," Chapter 11: A High-tech Oasis in the Texas Sun, written by
Stephen K. Roberts, published originally in (and Copyright 1984 by)
Online Today, September 1984 (a CompuServ Publication).
The Phantom SysOp
(Austin SYSOP speaking)
"Personally, I get a little tired of answering CHAT
requests. That's why I brought up Eliza."
"You mean..."
He twinkled with wry humor. "You got it. It's the
perfect Turing test. I have a second computer hooked
up to my board system. When someone issues a CHAT
request, it says 'Hello? Can I help you?' I changed
all the messages so it emulates a sysop instead of a
psychiatrist. Some people never do catch on."
I groaned. "That's cruel!"
(Transcribed by my collegue, John Wasser.)
Martin Minow
decvax!minow
------------------------------
Date: 31 Aug 1984 11:31:36 PDT
From: Bill Mann <MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA>
Subject: reply to McGuire about taxonomy assistant
(Reply to Wayne McGuire's comments on the need for a taxonomy assistant: )
I agree with the notion that representing and using conceptual relations
effectively is one of the central problems of AI research. You say
"It seems to me that in the knowledgebase management systems which
I hope we will see developed in the near future will be embedded rich
resources for evoking and representing taxonomies. Semantic nets
provide an ideal scheme with which to do just that."
How do we know that semantic nets are so good? Isn't this a complex
unsolved problem, for which the effectiveness of semantic nets is still
an open issue?
I suspect that semantic nets are useful for these problems just as
binary notation is useful. The representative power is there, but
success depends not so much on the distinctive properties of nets as on
the techniques that create and use the nets. I agree that they look
promising. (Promises, promises.)
You suggest that a taxonomy assistant might work by operating on the
vocabulary of the domain, relating items. That sounds like another
promising idea that might lead to a very powerful set of
generalizations if it was tried.
In the case that prompted all this, there is no recognized domain or
literature. I have an experimental program which includes a specialized
internal interface language having several hundred predefined operators.
Doing a taxonomy is one way to increase my understanding of the
interface language. So I would like to have a taxonomy assistant that
did not have to presume a domain.
Bill Mann
------------------------------
Date: 31 Aug 1984 12:20:08 PDT
From: Bill Mann <MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA>
Subject: aids to the mind
I've gotten several interesting replies to my inquiry about finding a
"taxonomy assistant" that could help me in thinking about the
organization of a collection of items. It raises a larger issue:
What intellectual operations are worth developing programmed
aids for?
Nobody came up with a pointer to an existing program for the taxonomy
task (except for something named PEGASUS, on the related topic of
vocabulary construction; I need to check it out.) But still, there
might be other sorts of programmed assistants out there.
Here is a wish list for programmed assistants that could potentially be
important for my lifestyle:
RESOURCE ALLOCATION ASSISTANT: Given a supply or a flow of resources,
help allocate them to particular uses. Budgeting, personal time
allocation and machine scheduling are special cases.
TIME ALLOCATION ASSISTANT: (a specialization, very important to me)
Help work through allocation of my time so that feasible things get
done, infeasible things don't get started, the things that get done are
the important ones, things tend to get done on time, allocations get
revised appropriately in the face of change, and the allocation provides
suitable flexibility and availability to other people.
I have in mind here much more than just the scratchpad-and-alarm-clock
kind of time allocation resource. Those are fine as far as they go, but
they don't go nearly deep enough. I want something that will ask me the
pertinent questions when they are timely.
EXPOSITORY WRITING ASSISTANT: In this case, my research on text
generation has gone far enough to assure me that such a program is
feasible. I have a systematic manual technique that works pretty well
for me, that could be developed into an interactive aid. It would be
very different from the sentence-critic sort of programs that are now
emerging.
NEGOTIATION ASSISTANT: There is a viewpoint and a collection of skills
that are very helpful in bargaining to an agreement. A program could
raise a lot of the right questions.
***
That is just a starter list. What other sorts of assistants can we
identify or conceive of?
Other ideas can probably be developed from the problem-solving
literature, e.g. Polya, Wickelgren and Lenat.
This sort of thing could go far beyond the capabilities of autonomous AI
programs. Often there are well known heuristics that are helpful to
people but too indefinite for programs to apply; an assistant could
suggest them. Proverbs are one sort.
In sum, What do we want, and What do we have?
Bill Mann
------------------------------
Date: 29 Aug 84 14:21:56-PDT (Wed)
From: hplabs!hpda!fortune!amd!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-bartok!shubin @
Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Replies to query for citations on user modeling
Article-I.D.: decwrl.3473
I posted a request for some papers on modeling users and/or user behavior,
and promised to post the results of my query. (The original posting was on
or about 18 July 84). Here is a summary of the results; a line of hyphens
separates one person's response from another. I haven't had to check all
of them, and I may wind up with more references, which may be posted
later. Any more suggestions are welcome. Thanks to all.
------
Elaine Rich, "Users are Individuals: Individualizing User Models"
Int.J.Man-Machine Studies 18(3), March, 1983.
Zog project at CMU
Elliot Soloway at Yale -- modeling novice programmer behavior
"The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction" by Card, Moran, and Newell
Current work at Penn by Tim Finin, Ethel Shuster, and Martha Pollock
at UT at Austin by Elaine Rich
Work on on-line assistance:
Wizard program by Jeff Shrager and Tim Finin (AAAI 82)
Integral help by Fenchel and Estrin
Lisp tutor - John Anderson at CMU
------
Regarding users' models of computer systems:
a. Schneiderman, B. and Meyer R. "Syntactic/Semantic Interactions
in Programmer Behaviour: A Model and Experimental Results"
Int. J. of Computer and Information Sciences, Vol 8, No. 3, 1979
b. Caroll, J.M., and Thomas, J.C. "Metaphor and the Cognitive
Representation of Computing Systems" IEEE Trans. on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics, Vol SMC - 12, No. 2, March/April 1982.
c. Anything from the CHI'83 conference -- Human Factors in
Computing Systems sponsored by ACM.
About Modelling the User:
a. Card, Newell and Moran, a book whose title escapes me
offhand -- it has a chapter entitled The human Information
Processor.
b. Rich, E. "Users are Individuals: Individualizing user Models"
Int. J. Man-Machine Studies 18, 1983
--------
Peter Polson (U.COlorado) and David Kieras (U.Arizona) have a paper in this
year's Cognitive Science Conference on a program that tests user interfaces
by testing high-level descriptions of user behavior against expected system
behavior.
--------
There was a lot of work done at Xerox PARC in the late
70's on task times and such. They were interested
in work relating to I/O device design (mice, etc.), as
well as general models. Some very good task timing
models came out of that work, I believe.
-------
Take a look at the work of Elaine Rich at Texas (formerly CMU).
-------
Chapter 6,The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction,SK Card,
SP Moran,A Newell
-------
...Some of the results of this are published in the 1983 AAAI Proceedings
in the paper "Learning Operator Semantics by Analogy" by S. Douglas
and T. Moran.
"A Quasi-Natural Language Interface to UNIX"; S. Douglas; Proceedings of
the USA-Japan Conference on Human-Computer Interaction; Hawaii; 18-20 Aug
84; Elsevier.
------------------------------
Date: 31 Aug 84 13:05:13-PDT (Fri)
From: ihnp4!houxm!mhuxl!ulysses!burl!clyde!watmath!utzoo!dciem!mmt @
Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: Re: Hearsay II question in AIList Digest V2 #110
Article-I.D.: dciem.1098
It turns out that even to separate the syllables in continuous speech
you need to have some understanding of what the speaker is talking
about! You can discover this for yourself by trying to hear the sounds
of the words when someone is speaking a foreign language. You can't
even repeat them correctly as nonsense syllables.
I used to believe this myth myself, but my various visits to Europe for
short (1-3 week periods, mostly) trips have convinced me otherwise. There
is no point trying to repeat syllables as nonsense, partly because the
sounds are not in your phonetic vocabulary. More to the point, syllable
separation definitely preceded understanding. I HAD to learn to separate
syllables of German long before I could understand anything (I still
understand only a tiny fraction, but now I can parse most sentences
into kernel and bound morphemes because I now know most of the common
bound ones). My understanding of written German is a little better,
and when I do understand a German sentence, it is because I can transcribe
it into a visual representation with some blanks.
(Incidentally, I also do some research in speech recognition, so I am
well aware of the syllable segmentation problem. There do exist
segmentation algorithms that correctly segment over 95% of the syllables
in connected speech without any attempt to identify phonemes, let
alone words or the "meaning" of speech. Mermelstein, now in Montreal,
and Mangold in Ulm, Germany, are names that come to mind.)
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt
{uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsrgv!dciem!mmt
------------------------------
Date: Wed 29 Aug 84 10:53:53-EDT
From: Joseph E. Stoy <JES@MIT-XX.ARPA>
Subject: Call For Papers
CALL FOR PAPERS
FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
A Conference Sponsored by
The International Federation for Information Processing
Technical Committees 2 and 10
Nancy, France
16 to 19 September, 1985
This conference has been planned as a successor to the highly successful
conference on the same topics held at Wentworth, New Hampshire, in October
1981. Papers are solicited on any aspect of functional or logic programming
and on computer architectures to support the efficient execution of such
programs.
Nancy, in the eastern part of France, was the city of the Dukes of Lorraine; it
is known for its "Place Stanistlas" and its "Palais Ducal". "Art Nouveau"
started there at the beginning of this century. There are beautiful buildings
and museums and, of course, good restaurants.
Authors should submit five copies of a 3000 to 6000-word paper (counting a full
page figure as 300 words), and ten additional copies of a 300-word abstract of
the paper to the Chairman of the Programme Committee by 31 January 1985. The
paper should be typed double spaced, and the names and affiliations of the
authors should be included on both the paper and the abstract.
Papers will be reviewed by the Programme Committee with the assistance of
outside referees; authors will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 30
April 1985. Camera-ready copy of accepted papers will be required by 30 June
1985 for publication in the Conference Proceedings.
Programme Committee:
Makoto Amamiya (NTT, Japan)
David Aspinall (UMIST, UK)
Manfred Broy (Passau University, W Germany)
Jack Dennis (MIT, USA)
Jean-Pierre Jouannaud (CRIN, France)
Manfred Paul (TUM, W Germany)
Joseph Stoy (Oxford University, UK)
John Willliams (IBM, USA)
Address for Submission of Papers:
J.E. Stoy, Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, England.
Paper Deadline: 31 January 1985.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To receive a copy of the advance programme, return the following information to
J.E. Stoy, Balliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ, England
or by electronic mail to JESTOY@UCL-CS.ARPA
I plan to submit a paper: [ ]
Subject:
Name:
Organisation:
Address:
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End of AIList Digest
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