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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 136
AIList Digest Thursday, 11 Oct 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 136
Today's Topics:
AI Tools LMI (Uppsala) Prolog & Kahn's DCG's,
Law - Liabilities of Sofware Vendors,
Games - Preliminary Computer Chess Results,
Psychology - Distributed Intelligence,
Linguistics - Sastric Sanskrit,
Conference - Computational Linguistics Call for Papers
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Date: 8 Oct 84 13:53:26-PDT (Mon)
From: hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrba!logico!burge @ Ucb-Vax.arpa
Subject: LMI (Uppsala) Prolog + Kahn's DCG's: User Experiences
Article-I.D.: logico.124
Does anyone have any experiences to relate about "LM-Prolog", implemented in
Zetalisp at the University of Uppsala by Ken Kahn and Mats Carlsson? And/or
of the DCG and "Grammar Kit" that comes with it? (We've been using the DEC-11
implementation for several years, but now it's time to expand...)
Also, our site is new to the net, and if anyone could send me previous
items, it would help me find out what all has been happening out there...!!
--John Burge [818] 887-4950
LOGICON, Operating Systems Division, 6300 Variel #H, Woodland Hills, Ca. 91367
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Date: Wed, 10 Oct 84 13:55:07 cdt
From: "Walter G. Rudd" <rudd%lsu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Liabilities of Sofware Vendors
Maybe I am being naive or something, but I don't see why AI software should
be different from any other when it comes to the liability of the vendor.
My attorney has written me a boilerplate contract that contains a clause
something to the effect that "vendor is not liable for third-party or
consequential damages that result from the use of the product."
Doesn't that take care of the problem? If not, maybe I had better find
an expert attorney system.
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Date: Wed 10 Oct 84 01:57:07-PDT
From: Donald S. Gardner <GARDNER@SU-SIERRA.ARPA>
Subject: Preliminary computer chess results
The computer chess championship is almost over and BELLE has severly
bitten the dust. This special purpose hardware (with ~1600 integrated
circuits and a PDP-11/23) first tied a program called Phoenix running
on a VAX-11/780 and then was beat by NuChess running on a CRAY 1M.
NuChess was the program previously called chess 4.7 and was the champion
until 1980 when it was beaten by BELLE.
The first place winner during the fourth round was declaired to be
the program CRAY BLITZ running on a cluster of 4 (FOUR) CRAY's.
This system checks in at 420 million instructions per second.
Now, CRAY time costs appx $10,000 per hour per computer and each
game lasts around 5 hours. This adds up to a cool $1M in computer time!
Of course that is in "funny money", but still impressive. There was also
a program from Canada which ran on 8 Data General computers (Novas and
an Eclipse), two more CRAYs (80 mips each), two Amdahl computers (10 &
13 mips), one CDC Cyber 176 (35 mips) and a Burrough's 7800 (8 mips).
------------------------------
Date: 9 Oct 84 11:53:24 PDT (Tuesday)
From: Jef Poskanzer <Poskanzer.PA@XEROX.ARPA>
Reply-to: SocialIssues^.PA@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Distributed Intelligence
[Excerpted from Human-Nets Digest by Laws@SRI-AI.]
By Erik Eckholm
New York Times
Computer buffs call it "flaming." Now scientists are documenting
and trying to explaim the surprising prevalence of rudeness,
profanity, exultation and other emotional outbursts by people when
they carry on discussions via computer. [...] "It's amazing," said Kiesler.
"We've seen messages sent out by managers - messages that will be seen
by thousands of people - that use language normally heard in locker rooms."
[...] in addition to calling each other
more names and generally showing more emotion than they might face to
face, people "talking" by computer took longer to agree, and their
final decisions tended to involve more risks than those reached by
groups meeting in person. [...]
"This is unusual group democracy," said Sara Kiesler, a
psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon. "There is less of a tendency for
one person to dominate the conversation, or for others to defer to the
one with the highest status." [...]
------------------------------
Date: 9 Oct 1984 11:09-PDT (Tuesday)
From: Rick Briggs <briggs@RIACS.ARPA>
Subject: Sastric Sanskrit
I would like to respond to recent criticisms concerning Sastric
Sanskrit.
Firstly, Kiparsky is confusing Sanskrit in general from Sastric
Sanskrit. His example, "bhikshuna rajna..." is NOT Sastric Sanskrit but
plain ordinary Classical Sanskrit. I did not mean to imply that lack of
word order is a sufficient condition for unambiguity, only that it is
an indication.
As to Dr. Dyer's comments: Yes, a parser will be needed due to
the difficulty with translations but this is due to the nature of what
one translates into. In the case of English, the difference between
the two languages creates the difficulty in translation, not inherent
complexities in Sastric Sanskrit. The work I mentioned was edited by
Pandit Sabhapati Sharma Upadhyaya in Benares, India and published
recently(1963) by the Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office. Also, there
is something like a concept of scripts in that subsets of discourse
(possibly nested) are marked off("iti" clauses) and therefore the
immediate context is defined.
My comments about English stem from its lack of case. Languages
like Latin are potentially capable of rendering logical formulation
with less ambiguity since a mapping from its syntactic cases can be made
to a set of "semantic cases", depending on how good the case system is.
Sanskrit has 8(including the vocatice) and a correspondance(though
not complete) is made between the cases of Classical Sanskrit and the
"karakas" or auxiliary actions in grammatical Sastric Sanskrit. For
example, the dative case is "usually" mapped onto the semantic case
"recipient" but not always. The exceptions make up the extension
from the commonly known language and the Sastra.
An example is in order:
"Caitra cooks rice in a pot" is expressed ordinarily in
Sanskrit as
"Caitra: sthaalyaam taNDulam pacati" (double vowels indicate
length, capitals indicate retroflex)
In Sastric Sanskrit:
sthaliiniSTataNDulaniSTa:
viklittijanakashcaitraabhinnaashrayako: vyaapaara:
which translates into English:
"There is an activity(vyaapaara:) , subsisting in the pot,
with agency residing in one substratum not different from
Caitra, which produces the softening which subsists in rice."
The vocabulary is the same as in Classical Sanskrit, with
the addition of terms such as "none other than", and "not different
from". Syntax is eliminated in the sense that the sentence is read
as "there is an abstract activity" with a series of "auxiliary
activities" which "agree" semantically with vyaapaara:. Thus each
agreement here ends with ah: which indicates its SEMANTIC agreement with
the abstract activity. What I am saying is that each "karaka" is
equivalent to a semantic net triple, which can be stored away as
eg. "activity, agent, none other than Caitra" etc.
Thirdly, the first two points of O'Keefe's have been addressed.
Sanskrit is definitely Indo-European but its daughter languages
inherited the verbal roots(dhatus) not the methodology of its
grammarians. Even though no other(that I know of) natural language
has found it worthwhile to pursue the developement of unambiguous
languages for a thousand years or so, one parallel can be found:
recent work in natural language processing. The difference is
that THEY used it in ordinary communication and AI techniques have
computer processing in mind. Even though the language is dead there
are theoretical works which deal specifically with unambiguity.
After reading these, even though you may argue that ambiguity exists
(I'd like to see those arguments), you must concede that total
precision and an escape from syntax and ambiguity was a primary aim
of these scientists. I find that interesting in itself. It is
a possible indication that we do actually think "in semantic nets"
at some deep level. Point e) again is a confusion with regular
Sanskrit. The example of 4 people in a room A,B,C,D would not
be a problem in this language. Since precision is required in
utterances(see the example above) one would simply not say
"we came from X", you would say "there was an activity connected
to a coming-activity, having as object X and having agency residing
in none other that (we 2, we 3 etc.)." The number would have to
be specified. "Blackbird" would be specified as either "a color-event
residing in a bird or "blackbird" would be taken as a primitive
nominal.
Lastly, Jeff Elman's criticisms. A comparison between
mathematics and Satsra is not a fair one. Sastric texts have
been written in the domains of Science, Law, Mathematics, Archery,
Sex,Dance, Morality... I wonder how these texts could be written
in mathematical formulisms; the Sastric language is, however,
beautifully and elegently suitable for these texts (Sastra means
basically "scientific"). I disagree with the statement that
"Surface ambiguity gives the language a flexibility of expression.
That flexibility does not necessarily entail lack of clarity."
Even if ambiguity adds flexibility I do not see how it follows
that clarity is maintained. If there are 4 people in the room and
one says "we", that is less clear than the case where the language
necessitates saying we 3. I also disagree with "...structural
ambiguity is not particularly bad nor incompatible with 'logical'
expression." Certainly ambiguity is a major impediment to designing
an intelligent natural language processor. It would be very desireable
to work with a language that allows natural flexibility without
ambiguity. And I still maintain that the language is syntax free,
word order or no word order. And maybe this is the linguistic
find of the century.
One last point about metaphor, poetry etc. As an example
to illustrate these capabilities in Sastric Sanskrit, consider
the "bahuvrihi" construct (literally "man with a lot of rice")
which is used currently in linguistics to describe references outside of
compunds. "Bahuvrihi" is itself an example, literally "bahu"-many
"vrihi" rice. Much rice is taken here as he who posesses a lot of
rice, and in Classical Sanskrit different case endings can make
"bahu-vrihi" mean "he or she who wants a lot of rice" , "is on a
lot of rice" etc. Aha! Ambiguity? Only in Classical, in Sastric
Sanskrit the use of semantic cases instead of syntactic do
not allow any ambiguity.
Rick
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Date: 8 Oct 1984 11:10:37 PDT
From: Bill Mann <MANN@USC-ISIB.ARPA>
Subject: Conference - Computational Linguistics Call for Papers
CALL FOR PAPERS
23rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
8-12 July 1985
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
This international conference ranges over all of computational linguistics,
including understanding, generation, translation, syntax and parsing,
semantics, natural language interfaces, speech understanding and generation,
phonetics, discourse phenomena, office support systems, author assistance,
translation, and computational lexicons. Its scope is intended to encompass
the contents of an Applied Natural Language Processing Conference as well as
one on Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing. In short, we are
striving for comprehensiveness.
The meeting will include presented papers, system demonstrations, and, on
8 July, a program of computational linguistics tutorials.
Authors should submit, by 18 January 1985, 6 copies of an extended summary
(6 to 8 pages) to William C. Mann, ACL85 Program Chairman, USC/ISI,
4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA; (213)822-1511;
mann@isib.
The summaries should describe completed work rather than intended work, and
should indicate clearly the state of completion and validation of the
research reported, identify what is novel about it, and clarify its status
relative to prior reports.
Authors will be notified of acceptance by 8 March 1985. Full length
versions of accepted papers prepared on model paper must be received,
along with a signed copyright release notice, by 26 April 1985.
All papers will be reviewed for general acceptability by one of
the two panels of the Program Committee identified below. Authors
may designate their paper as either an Applications Paper or a
Theory Paper; undesignated papers will be distributed to one or
both panels.
Review Panel for Applications Papers:
Timothy Finin University of Pennsylvania
Ralph Grishman New York University
Beatrice Oshika System Development Corporation
Gary Simons Summer Institute of Linguistics
Jonathan Slocum MCC Corporation
Review Panel for Theory Papers:
Robert Amsler Bell Communications Research
Rusty Bobrow Bolt Beranek and Newman
Daniel Chester University of Delaware
Philip Cohen SRI International
Ivan Sag Stanford University
Those who wish to present demonstrations of commercial, developmental,
and research computer programs and equipment specific to computational
linguistics should contact Carole Hafner, College of Computer Science,
Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston MA 02115, USA;
(617)437-5116 or (617)437-2462; hafner.northeastern@csnet-relay. For
planning purposes, we would like this information as early as possible,
but certainly before 30 April.
Local arrangements will be handled by Martha Evens, Computer Science
Department, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA;
(312)567-5153 or (312)869-8537; evens@sri-ai.
For other information on the conference, on the 8 July tutorials, and
on the ACL more generally, contact Don Walker (ACL), Bell Communications
Research, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ 07960, USA; (201)829-4312;
bellcore!walker@berkeley.
Please note that the dates of the conference will allow people to
attend the National Computer Conference, which will be held in Chicago
the following week.
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