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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 138
AIList Digest Monday, 15 Oct 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 138
Today's Topics:
Metadiscussion - Citing AIList,
AI - Definition,
Linguistics - Mailing List & Sastric Sanskrit & Language Evolution,
Conference - SCAIS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 14 Oct 84 19:56:17 EDT
From: Allen <Lutins@RU-BLUE.ARPA>
Subject: AILIST as a source of info....
Many recent AILIST discussions have fascinated me, and I'm sure that
at some point in the near future I'll be using information presented
here for a paper or two. Just exactly how do I credit an electronic
bboard in a research paper? And who (i.e. moderator, author of
info, etc.) do I give credit to?
-Allen LUTINS@RU-BLUE
[Certainly the author must be credited. I am indifferent as to
whether AIList is mentioned since I consider the digest just a
communication channel by which authors circulate their unpublished
ideas. (You wouldn't cite Ma Bell or your Xerox copier.) This
viewpoint is intended to avoid copyright difficulties. On the
other hand, a reference to AIList might help someone look up the
full context of a discussion. Does any librarian out there know
a good citation form for obscure newsletters, etc., that the
reader could not be expected to track down by name alone? -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: 14 Oct 84 14:49:51 EDT
From: McCord @ DCA-EMS
Subject: Model for AI Applications
Since the beginning, some intelligence, albeit explicit and highly
focused, has been built into nearly every program written. This is
obviously not the "artificial" intelligence we now talk, market, and
sell. Surely, to be worthy of the title "artificial" intelligence,
an AI application must exhibit some minimum characteristics such as
a specified level of control over its environment, the ability to learn,
and its transportability or adaptability to related applications.
Has anyone developed a model of an AI application that may be used to
discriminate between "programs" and "artificial" intelligence?
Also, does anyone have any comments on Dr. Frederick Brook's (of
The Mythical Man-Month fame) pragmatitic approach ("Intelligence
Amplification (IA) Is Better Than Artificial Intelligence (AI)")
to AI?
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 84 17:09:29 edt
From: Douglas Stumberger <des%bostonu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: natural language mailing list
Does anyone know of a mailing list devoted solely to
linguistics/computational linguistics?
douglas stumberger
csnet: des@bostonu
bitnet: csc10304@bostonu
------------------------------
Date: Thu 11 Oct 84 18:15:59-MDT
From: Uday Reddy <U-REDDY@UTAH-20.ARPA>
Subject: Sastric Sanskrit
Coming from India and having learnt a little bit of Sanskrit, let me make a
few comments to add to Rick Briggs's claims. I do not know for a fact if
Sastric Sanskrit is unambiguous. In fact, I have not heard of it before.
But, its unambiguity seems plausible.
First of all, as to the history of Sanskrit. It is an Indo-European
language but it has an independent line of development from all the
languages spoken outside the Indian subcontinent, i.e., all its daughters
are spoken, to the best of my knowledge, only in the subcontinent. Not
only its dhatus but its methodologies have been inherited by its daughters.
Even the Dravidian languages (the other family of languages spoken in the
subcontinent which are not daughters of Sanskrit) have been influenced by
its methodologies. For example, the first formal grammar of my own mother
tongue, which is not born of Sanskrit, was written in Sanskrit
Panini-style.
Strictly speaking, neither Sanskrit nor its daughters have a word order.
The sophisticated case system makes it possible to communicate without word
order. The subject and object are identifiable from their own cases
independent of their position in a sentence. Incidentally, the cases are
merely a convenience. The prepositions (which become suffixes in Sanskrit
and its daughters) serve the same purpose, though they are more verbose.
However, the role of various words in a sentence is not always
independently identifiable. This leads to ambiguity rather than
unambiguity. Kiparsky's example
"rajna bhikshuna bhavitavyam"
has BOTH the meanings
"the beggar will have to become the king"
and
"the king will have to become the king"
The latter meaning is normally understood, because it interprets the
sentence in the word order "subject-object-verb" which is the most
frequently used. This kind of unambiguity is more of an exception than
the standard. I would say it occurs not more than 5% of the time in normal
prose. It is resolved by resorting to the "natural" word order.
Sastric Sanskrit is a subset of normal Sanskrit, i.e., every sentence of
Sastric Sanskrit is also a sentence of normal Sanskrit. This also means
that Sastric Sanskrit did not evolve naturally on its own, but was the
result of probably hundreds of years of research to eliminate ambiguity in
communication. It should be possible for the initiated and knowledgeable
to dig up the research that went into the development of this subset.
What seems to be important is whether an unambiguous subset of a language
can be formed by merely imposing rules on how sentences can be formed. I
am not convinced about that, but I cannot also say it is impossible.
Ancient Indian scholars had a curious mixture of dogma and reason. One
cannot take their claims at their face value.
If an unambiguous subset of Sanskrit could be developed, it should also be
possible for all the languages. What is special about Sanskrit is that the
redundancy needed to disambiguate the language could be added in Sanskrit
without substantial loss of convenience. In English, adding this
redundancy leads to a lot of awkwardness, as Briggs's examples exemplify.
Uday Reddy
------------------------------
Date: 12 Oct 84 09:30 PDT
From: Kahn.pa@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Language Evolution
This discussion of Sanskrit leads me to ask the question of why
languages have evolved the way they have. Why have they moved away
from case? Generalizing from the only example I know of (Old Norse to
Modern Swedish) I wonder why distinctions that seem useful have
disappeared.
For example, Old Norse had singular, plural, and dual (when two people
were involved). Why would such a distinction come into a language and
then disappear hundreds of years later. Why did Sastric Sanskrit die?
[Otto Jesperson (1860-1943), famous Danish linguist, studied such matters
at a time when classical Greek and Latin were very much in vogue and
modern languages with few cases, genders, tenses, and moods were
considered retrogressive. He held the opposed view that English and
Chinese were the most advanced languages, and that the superiority
of modern languages stems from seven characteristics:
1) Shorter forms, easier and faster to speak. The Gospel of St.
Matthew contains 39k syllables in Greek, 33k in German, 29k
in English.
2) Fewer forms to burden memory. Gothic habaida, habaides,
habaidedu, and 12 other forms map to just "had" in English.
3) Regular formation of words.
4) Regular syntactic use of words.
5) Flexible combinations and constuctions. Danish "enten du
cller jeg har uret" is straightforward, whereas the inflected
"either you or I am wrong" or "either you are wrong, or I"
is awkward.
6) Lack of repetitious concord. Latin "opera virorum omnium
bonorum veterum" expresses plurality four times, genitive
case four times, and masculine gender twice; the English
"all good old men's works" has no such repetition.
7) Ambiguity is eliminated through regular word order.
Jesperson designed his own artificial language, Novial, after working
on a modified (and never adopted) form of Esperanto called Ido.
For more information, see Peter Naur's Programming Languages, Natural
Languages, and Mathematics in the December 1975 issue of Communications
of the ACM. -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 84 13:39:03 PDT
From: Southern California AI Society <scais@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
Subject: Conference - SCAIS
I noticed the announcement of AISNE on AIList. Since SCAIS is
inspired by AISNE, it seems appropriate to announce it in
AIList also. Here goes:
************************************************************************
1ST MEETING OF SCAIS
SCAIS -- Southern California Artificial Intelligence Society
(Pronounced "skies".)
The purpose of SCAIS is to help create an AI community spirit among AI
researchers and research labs in the Southern California area. (As far
south as San Diego and as far north as Santa Barbara, but probably
concentrated in the greater LA area.)
SCAIS is inspired by AISNE (AI Society of New England). AISNE meets at
least once a year, at locations such as Yale, MIT, UMass, Stoneybrook,
etc. in the New England area. (See prior AIList announcement of AISNE.)
Our first SCAIS meeting is intended to give everyone an opportunity to
meet other active AI researchers and graduate students in the area.
Short talks on research projects will be given by students and AI lab
project leaders, who will describe what AI research is going on in the
area. In addition, we hope to generate a list of the names, phone
numbers, net mailing addresses, and research interests of the attendees.
If our first SCAIS meeting is successful, future meetings will then be
held on a periodic basis at different sites.
SCAIS is intended for serious AI researchers and graduate AI students
who reside in S. Calif., who are working in the field and who are
interested in learning about the research of others in the 'greater' LA
area. SCAIS is NOT intended as a forum for industrial recruiting or for
interested on-lookers. Attendance at our first SCAIS meeting is
expected to be 100-150 people and is by invitation only.
AI researchers in the S. Calif. area can request an invitation by
contacting: SCAIS-REQUEST@UCLA-CS.ARPA or SCAIS-REQUEST@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA
(or ...!ucla-cs!scais-request on uucp). You should include your name,
affiliation, address, net-address, phone number, and research area.
************************************************************************
(almost complete) AGENDA of 1st SCAIS Conference
(Oct 29, 8:00am-7:00pm, California Room, UCLA Faculty Center)
8:00 - 8:30 Morning OPEN HOUSE at UCLA AI Lab & Demos
8:30 - 8:40 Michael Dyer -- Welcome and Overview of UCLA AI
8:40 - 10:15 SESSION #1
UCLA (75 min)
==============
Sergio Alvarado (stu) -- "Comprehension of Editorial Text"
Uri Zernik (stu) -- "Adult Language Learning"
Erik Mueller (stu) -- "Daydreaming and Story Invention"
Charlie Dolan (stu) -- "Reminding and Analogy"
Judea Pearl -- "Learning Hidden Causes from Raw Data"
Ingrid Zuckerman (stu) -- "Listener Model for Generation
of Meta-Technical Utterances in Math Tutoring"
Rina Dechter (stu) -- "Mechanical Generation of Heuristics for
Constraint-Satisfaction Problems.
Tulin Mangir -- "Applications of Expert Systems to CAD and CAT of VLSI"
Vidal -- "Reconfigurable Logic Knowledge Representation and
Architectures for Compact Expert Systems"
Aerospace Corp. (20 min)
========================
Steve Crocker -- "Overview"
Paul Mazaika -- "False Event Elimination"
Ann Brindle -- "Automated Satellite Control"
John Helly -- "Representational Basis for A Distributed Expert System"
*Break* (coffee & danish) 10:15 - 10:30
10:30 - 11:50 SESSION #2
UC Irvine (60 min)
==================
Pat Langley -- "Overview of UCI AI Research"
Rogers Hall (stu) -- "Learning in Multiple Knowledge Sources"
Student (w/ Rick Granger) -- " NEED TITLE "
IBM (20 min)
============
John Kepler -- "Overview of IBM Scientific Center Activities in AI"
Gary Silverman -- "The Robotics Project"
Alexander Hurwitz -- "Intelligent Help for Computer Systems"
11:50 - 1:10 LUNCH (Sequoia Rooms 1,2,3 in Faculty Center)
1:10 - 2:40 SESSION #3
USC/ISI (90 min)
================
Kashif Chaudhry (stu) -- "The Advance Robot Programming Project"
Shari Naberschnig (stu) -- "The Distributed Problem Solving Project"
Yigal Arens -- "Natural Language Understanding Research at USC"
Ram Nevatia -- "Overview of Computer Vision Research at USC"
Dan Moldovan -- "Parallel Processing in AI"
Jack Mostow -- "Machine Learning Research at ISI"
Bill Mann -- "Natural Language Generation Research at ISI"
Norm Sondheimer -- "Natural Language Interface Research at ISI"
Tom Kaczmarek -- "Intelligent Computing Environment Research at ISI"
Bob Neches -- "Expert Systems Research at ISI"
Bob Balzer -- "Specification-Based Programming Research at ISI"
*Break* 2:40 - 2:55 (coffee & punch)
3:00 - 4:20 SESSION #4
Hughes AI Center (20 min)
=========================
D. Y. Tseng -- "Overview of HAIC Activities"
JPL (20 min)
====================
Steven Vere -- "Temporal Planning"
Armin Haken -- "Procedural Knowledge Sponge"
Len Friedman "Diagnostics and Error Recovery"
TRW (20 min)
============
Ed Taylor -- "AI at TRW"
Rand Corp (20 min)
==================
Phil Klahr -- "Overview of Rand's AI Research"
"AI in Simulation"
Henry Sowizral -- "Time Warp"
"ROSIE: An Expert System Language"
Don Waterman -- "Explanation for Expert Systems"
"Legal Reasoning"
Randy Steeb -- "Cooperative Intelligent Systems"
*Break* 4:20 - 4:40 (coffee & punch)
4:40 - 6:00 SESSION #5
UC San Diego (20 min)
======================
Paul Smolensky -- "Parallel Computation: The Brain and AI"
Paul Munro -- " Self-organization and the Single Unit: Learning
at the Neuronal Level"
SDC (20 min)
=============
Dan Kogan -- "Intelligent Access to Distributed Data Management"
Robert MacGregor -- "Logic-Based Knowledge Management System"
Beatrice T. Oshika -- "User Interfaces: Speech and Nat. Lang."
Cal State, Fullerton (10 min)
=============================
Arthur Graesser -- "Symbolic Procedures of Question Answering"
Rockwell Science Center (5 min)
===============================
William Pardee -- "A Heuristic Factory Scheduling System"
General Research Corp (5 min)
=============================
Jim Kornell -- "Analogical Inferencing"
Northrup (5 min)
=================
Steve Lukasis -- 'NEED TITLE"
Aerojet (5 min)
===============
Ben Peake -- "NEED TITLE"
Litton (5 min)
==============
speaker -- "NEED TITLE"
Logicon (5 min)
===============
John Burge -- "Knowledge Engineering at Logicon"
6:00 - 7:00 GENERAL MEETING OF SCAIS MEMBERS
SCAIS Panel & General Meeting
possible themes:
* Assessment - Where from here?
* State of AI in S. Calif.
* Organization of SCAIS
* Future Hosting
* Univ - Industry connections
* Software - hardware community sharing
* Arrival of IJCAI-85 in LA
* LA AI Consortium/Institute ???
7:00 - 7:30 Evening OPEN HOUSE at UCLA AI Lab & Demos
(3677 Boelter Hall)
> 7:30pm Interested parties may form groups and dine
at various restaurants in Westwood Village
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
********************
