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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 176
AIList Digest Thursday, 13 Dec 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 176
Today's Topics:
AI Companies - Survey,
Machine Translation - Folklore & Aymara',
Linguistics - Language Deficiencies,
Humor - Nondeficient Christmas Tidings,
Conferences - Machine Translation & JASIS Call for Papers
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thursday, 13 December 1984 00:24:23 EST
From: Duvvuru.Sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa
Subject: Information about AI companies
I am trying to put together a survey of various tools available in the
market for AI work. In particular I am interested in an assessment of the
tools (user experiences). Also would appreciate any information about the
kind of systems that AI companies are building.
sriram@cmu-ri-cive.arpa
------------------------------
Date: 10 Dec 84 11:37 EST
From: Gocek.henr@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Re: Automatic Chinese translation
I remember the story about "Out of sight, out of mind" differently. The
phrase was translated into Chinese and then retranslated into English.
The result was "invisible idiot". Again, the person requesting the
translation was a government official.
Gary Gocek (Gocek.Henr@Xerox.ARPA)
[I first heard it as "blind idiot". -- KIL]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 1984 16:14 EST
From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Translation Folklore V2 #174
I'm getting sick of hearing those two stories: "Blind and Stupid,"
and "The drinks were good but the meat was rotten."
It is time for you computer-people to start being serious! Those
stories are only folklore, and did not come from the
machine-translation milieu at all; they circulated long before
computers, and were invented by cynic to make fun of bad human
translators!
If you think about it for a minute, you will realize that none of the
old translating machines were even nearly subtle enough to make such
coherent mistakes! Modern ones are only a little better, and probably
not quite up to that standard yet.
Has anyone heard of a genuine translation blunder by a working
translation machine -- that is, one which is bad enough to be
considered really funny? I consider a few of the paraphrases
produced by FRUMP to be in that class.
------------------------------
Date: Tue 11 Dec 84 09:46:43-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Aymara'
I just ran across an article in the S.F. Sunday Examiner and Chronicle
by Peter McFarren, Associated Press, Sept. 23, 1984, p. A17. Most of
the content has been published in AIList already, but the following
may be new.
"Atamiri [Guzman de Rojas' program] is 10 times faster than any of the
others," said Bill Page, a computer specialist at the International
Research Center in Ottawa, Canada. The center published Guzman de
Rojas' first study of Atamiri's potential in 1980, and Wang has just
offered him a $50,000 grant and a $100,000 computer to refine his
system.
The creator of Atamiri hopes to expand its vocabulary from the current
3,000 to 8,000 words per language [English, French, German, Portugese,
and Spanish] to about 30,000. Then, he says, it will be possible to
translate prosaic texts such as newspaper articles with about 90 percent
accuracy. Literary translations would come later, but human translators
will always have to be around to make corrections.
-- Ken Laws
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 16:21:58 pst
From: ucdavis!lakhota@Berkeley (Lakhota)
Subject: Language deficiencies (AI List Digest 2:167,168,172)
The interesting discussion of possible language deficiencies was triggered
by two anecdotes, one involving Australian Aborigines and the other American
Indians. It would be useful in this context to look at some empirical facts
relating to these languages. Australian languages are perfectly capable of
forming conditional and hypothetical expressions. Examples of languages with
references follow below:
Dyirbal - Dixon, THE DYIRBAL LANGUAGE OF NORTH QUEENSLAND. CUP, 1972.
Tiwi - Osborne, THE TIWI LANGUAGE. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies
[AIAS], Australian Aboriginal Studies no. 55, Linguistic Series no. 21,
1974.
Walmatjari - Hudson, THE CORE OF WALMATJARI GRAMMAR. AIAS, 1978.
Guugu Yimidhirr - Haviland, Guugu Yimidhirr. In Dixon & Blake (eds.),
HANDBOOK OF AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES [HAL], v. 1. John Benjamins, 1979.
Djapu - Morphy, Djapu, a Yolngu dialect. HAL, v. 3. John Benjamins, 1983.
Yukulta - Keen, Yukulta. HAL, v. 3.
Nunggubuyu - Heath, A FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR OF NUNGGUBUYU. Humanities Press, 1984.
The same holds true for American Indian languages. It is worth mentioning
that there is now more on Hopi than Whorf's papers. E. Malotki has written two
700 page books on Hopi concepts of space and time: HOPI TIME, Mouton, 1983, and
HOPI RAUM (not yet translated into English). These volumes should lay to rest
speculation about what Hopi does and doesn't have. Examples of American Indian
languages and references follow:
Nootka - Sapir & Swadesh, NOOTKA TEXTS. LSA, 1939.
Yokuts - Newman, YOKUTS LANGUAGE OF CALIFORNIA. VFPA 2, 1944.
Cree - Wolfart, PLAINS CREE: A GRAMMATICAL SKETCH. Trans. APS, 1973.
Takelma - Sapir, The Takelma Language of Southwestern Oregon. HANDBOOK OF
AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES [HAIL], v. 2 (BBAE 40, 2), 1922.
Tunica - Haas, TUNICA. HAIL, v. 4. J.J. Augustin, 1940.
Uto-Aztecan - Langacker, AN OVERVIEW OF UTO-AZTECAN LANGUAGES. STUDIES IN
UTO-AZTECAN GRAMMAR, v. 1. SIL Publ. in Ling. 56, 1977.
There are hundreds of Aboriginal and American Indian languages, and these
are only a handful of examples. Nevertheless, they illustrate the point that
these languages do have the capacity for forming conditional, counterfactual,
and hypothetical expressions. If anyone desires any further references, I'd
be happy to supply them.
Robert Van Valin (ucdavis!lakhota@BERKELEY)
Linguistics, UC Davis
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 84 10:40:02 pst
From: Peter Karp <karp@diablo>
Subject: Christmas Tidings
[Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
A VISIT FROM ST. NICHOLAS
-------------------------
Twas the nocturnal segment of the diurnal period preceding the annual
yuletide celebration, and throughout our place of residence, kinnetic
activity was not in evidence among the possessors of this potential,
including that species of domestic rodent known as Mus musculus.
Hosiery was meticulously suspended from the forward edge of the wood
burning caloric apparatus, pursuant to our anticipatory pleasure
regarding an immiment visitation from an eccentric philanthropist
among whose folkloric appellations is the honorific title of St.
Nicholas.
The prepubescent siblings, comfortably ensconced in their respective
accommodations of repose, were experiencing subconscious visual
hallucinations of variegated fruit confections moving rhythmically
through their cerebrums. My conjugal partner and I, attired in our
nocturnal head coverings, were about to take slumbrous avantage of
the hibernal darkness when upon the avenaceous exterior portion of
the grounds there ascended such a cacaphony of dissonance that I felt
compelled to arise with alacrity from my place of repose for the
purpose of ascertaining the precise source thereof.
Hastening to the casement, I forthwith opened the barriers sealing
this fenestration, noting thereupon that the lunar brilliance without,
reflected as it was on the surface of a recent crystalline
precipitation, might be said to rival that of the solar meridian
itself-- thus permitting my incredulous optical sensory organs to
behold a miniature airborne runnered conveyance drawn by eight
diminutive specimens of the genus Rangifer, piloted by a minuscule,
aged chauffeur so ebullient and numble that it became instantly
apparent to me that he was indeed our anticipated caller. With his
ungulate motive power travelling at what may possibly have been more
vertiginous velocity than patriotic alar predators, he vociferated
loudly, expelled breath musically through contracted labia, and
addressed each of the octet by his or her respective cognomen - "Now
Dasher, now Dancer..." et al. - guiding them to the uppermost exterior
level of our abode, through which structure I could readily
distinguish the concatenations of each of the 32 cloven pedal
extremities.
As I retracted my cranium from its erstwhile location, and was
performing a 180-degree pivot, our distinguished visitant achieved -
with utmost celerity and via a downward leap - entry by way of the
smoke passage. He was clad entirely in animal pelts soiled by the
ebon residue from oxidations of carboniferous fuels which had
accumulated on the walls thereof. His resemblance to a street vendor
I attributed largely to the plethora of assorted playthings which he
bore dorsally in a commodious cloth receptacle.
His orbs were scintillant with reflected luminosity, while his
submaxillary dermal indentations gave every evidence of engaging
amiability. The capillaries of his malar regions and nasal
appurtenance were engorged with blood which suffused the subcutaneous
layers, the former approximating the coloration of Albion's floral
emblem, the latter that of the Prunus avium, or sweet cherry. His
amusing sub- and supralabials resembled nothing so much as a common
loop knot, and their ambient hirsute facial adornment appeared like
small, tabular and columnar crystals of frozen water.
Clenched firmly between his incisors was a smoking piece whose gray
fumes, forming a tenuous ellipse about his occiput, were suggestive of
a decorative seasonal circlet of holly. His visage was wider than it
was high, and when he waxed audibly mirthful, his corpulent abdominal
region undulated in the manner of impectinated fruit syrup in a
hemispherical container. He was, in short, neither more nor less than
an obese, jocun, multigenarian gnome, the optical perception of whom
rendered me risibly frolicsome despite every effort to refrain from so
being. By rapidly lowering and then elevating one eyelid and rotating
his head slightly to one side, he indicted that trepidation on my part
was groundless.
Without utterance and with dispatch, he commenced filling the
aforementioned appended hosiery with various of the aforementioned
articles of merchandise extracted from his aforementioned previously
dorsally transported cloth receptacle. Upon completion of this task,
he executed an abrupt about-face, placed a single manual digit in
lateral juxtaposition to his olfactory organ, inclined his cranium
forward in a gesture of leave-taking, and forthwith effected his egress
by renegotiating (in reverse) the smoke passage. He then propelled
himself in a short vector onto his conveyance, directed a musical
expulsion of air through his contracted oral sphincter to the antlered
quadrupeds of burden, and proceeded to soar aloft in a movement
hitherto observable chiefly among the seed-bearing portions of a
common weed. But I overheard his parting exclamation, audible
immediately prior to his vehiculation beyond the limits of
visibility: "Ecstatic yuletide to the planetary constituency, and to
that selfsame assemblage, my sincerest wishes for a salubriously
beneficial and gratifyingly pleasurable period between sunset and
dawn."
-- From Eleonore Johnson at Teknowledge
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 00:06 EST
From: Sergei Nirenburg <nirenburg%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Conference - Machine Translation
CALL FOR PAPERS
CONFERENCE ON THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
IN MACHINE TRANSLATION OF NATURAL LANGUAGES
Colgate University
Hamilton NY 13346
August 14-16, 1985
The program of the conference will be biased toward invited lectures and
panel discussions. However, a restricted number of excellent submitted
papers will be also included.
The major topics of the conference are as follows :
-- Machine Translation (MT) as an application area for Theoretical
Linguistics (including stylistics and discourse analysis)
-- MT as an application area for Artificial Intelligence (including the
choice of the representation schemata for MT)
-- Theory and methodology of translation and machine translation
-- Sublanguages, restricted domains and MT
-- MT as a case study in software system development
-- Computational tools for MT, human engineering aspects,
management and evaluation of MT projects.
The papers should not exceed 3,000 words, should contain a 250-word abstract
and a list of index terms. Send them (and address all inquiries) to
Sergei Nirenburg
MT Conference Program Chair
Department of COmputer Science
Colgate University
Hamilton NY 13346
(315) 824-1000 x586
Every paper will be read by two members of the program committee whose
members are:
Christian Boitet, University of Grenoble
Jaime Carbonell, Carnegie-Mellon University
David MacDonald, University of Massachusetts
James Pustejovsky, University of Massachusetts
Allen Tucker, Colgate University
Don Walker, AT&T Laboratories
The emphasis of the conference is on the theoretical and methodological
issues. Therefore, the papers that do not address such issues will not
be considered.
Dates: Submission deadline -- March 11, 1985
Notification of acceptance -- May 15, 1985
Final version due -- June 17, 1985
>>>>> the above will provide a good opportunity to conduct more lively
>>>>> discussions of Aymara, Sastric Sanskrit, Esperanto, etc., the
>>>>> problem of translatability, theory of translation (even not
>>>>> necessarily automatic), interlinguae and their structure...
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 84 11:20:41 cst
From: Don Kraft <kraft%lsu.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: JASIS Call for Papers
As the new editor of the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR
INFORMATION SCIENCE (JASIS), I am sending out a call for
papers. We are a refereed professional journal seeking
scholarly, relevant articles in the area of information sci-
ence. To submit an article, please send three copies of the
manuscript to me at
Donald H. Kraft
Department of Computer Science
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803.
If you have any questions, I can also be reached at
(504) 388-1495 or
kraft%lsu@csnet-relay .
I have attached below a list of topics considered relevant.
Please note the presence of artificial intelligence, which
has become of interest, especially in the area of informa-
tion retrieval (intelligent front ends, expert systems, and
the use of natural language processing seem especially
relevant to my readers at the moment). You may wish to
check out the September, 1984 (v. 35, n. 5) issue, which
featured a series of articles on AI.
CALL FOR PAPERS -- JASIS
1. Theory of Information Science 4. Applied Information Science
Foundations of Information Science Informations systems design --
Information theory tools, principles, applications
Bibliometrics Case histories
Information retrieval -- Information system operations
models and principles Standards
Evaluation and measurement Information technology -- hardware
Representation, organization, and and software
classification of information Automation of information systems
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and natural Online retrieval systems
language processing Office automation and records
management
2. Communication 5. Social and Legal Aspects of
Information
Theory of communication
Non-print media Impact of information systems and
Man-machine interaction technology upon society
Network design, operation, and Ethics and information
management Legislative and regulatory aspects
Models and empirical findings about History of information science
information transfer Information science education
User and usage studies International issues
3. Management, Economics, and Marketing
Economics of information
Management of information systems
Models of information management decisions
Marketing and market research studies
Special clientele -- arts and humanities,
behavioral and social sciences, biological
and chemical sciences, energy and environment,
legal, medical, and education.
Authors may also send in brief communications, scholarly
opinion pieces, and even letters to the editor. In addition,
we also have a fine book review section.
Thank you in advance for your consideration of JASIS.
Don Kraft
kraft%lsu@csnet-relay
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End of AIList Digest
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