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NL-KR Digest Volume 04 No. 10
NL-KR Digest (1/26/88 03:22:09) Volume 4 Number 10
Today's Topics:
From CSLI Calendar, January 21, 3:14
BBN AI Seminar: Vineet Singh
Seminar - Towards a many-valued logic of belief (Rochester)
Don Norman colloquium
Lang. & Cog. Seminar
Submissions: NL-KR@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU
Requests, policy: NL-KR-REQUEST@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU
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Date: Wed, 20 Jan 88 20:35 EST
From: Emma Pease <emma@alan.stanford.edu>
Subject: From CSLI Calendar, January 21, 3:14
[Excerpted from CSLI Calendar]
Reading: "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works"
by Daniel Dennett
In D. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, chapter 2,
Bradford Books, 1987. Also in A. F. Heath, ed., Scientific
Explanation, Oxford University Press, 1981.
Discussion led by Adrian Cussins
(cussins.pa@xerox.com)
January 28
Dennett's article "True Believers" is, as he says, the flagship
expression of his theory of the intentional stance replacing his 1971
article "Intentional Systems." It seems to me that the theory should
be discussed around CSLI since there appear to be many commonalities
between his position and the Barwise/Perry/Israel attitude to
psychology. For example (and a little flippantly): there is no
qualitative difference between people and frogs; there is no such
thing as intrinsic intentionality; the language of thought is false;
the notion of representation is not primary in psychological theory;
psychological properties are not natural kinds. I will briefly
introduce Dennett's theory for those not familiar with it, and raise
one or two objections. I think that what Dennett is really saying is
that there can be no such thing as The Science of the Mind, or, in
other words, that the best a psychologist can hope for is to be a
hacker. Now, if CSLI shares this view it might explain a lot ...
--------------
NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
Modal Subordination, Situations, and Reference Time
Craige Roberts
(croberts@csli.stanford.edu)
January 28
The phenomenon of modal subordination involves the apparent extension
of the scope of modal operators intersententially across segments of a
discourse. This presents problems both for the analysis of the
logical entailments of individual sentences in such contexts, and for
theories of anaphora in discourse. In earlier work, I proposed an
account of modal subordination which involved extending discourse
representation theory to include modal operators. In this talk I will
briefly review that proposal and present recent work that attempts to
address two unresolved problems: the existence of similar examples,
which involve non-modal operators, such as temporal operators and
adverbs of quantification, and a restriction on the interpretation of
tenses in modal subordination contexts. I will suggest that these
problems may be resolved by taking modal operators to range over
situations (whether the situations of situation semantics, or the
partial worlds situations recently proposed by Angelika Kratzer), and
by taking temporal units to be defined in terms of primitively ordered
events (themselves a type of situation). I will present a theory of
the interpretation of discourse representations, which implements
these ideas in a possible-worlds semantics.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 88 10:16 EST
From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN@G.BBN.COM>
Subject: BBN AI Seminar: Vineet Singh
BBN Science Development Program
AI Seminar Series Lecture
DISTRIBUTING BACKWARD-CHAINING DEDUCTIONS TO MULTIPLE PROCESSORS
Vineet Singh
Stanford University, and SPAR
(VSINGH@SPAR-20.SPAR.SLB.COM)
BBN Labs
10 Moulton Street
2nd floor large conference room
10:30 am, Friday January 29th
The talk presents PM, a parallel execution model for backward-chaining
deductions. PM exploits more parallelism than other execution models
that use data-driven control and non-shared memory architectures. The
talk also presents an application-independent, compile-time allocation
strategy for PM that is both fast and effective. Effectiveness is
demonstrated by comparing speedups obtained from an implementation of
the allocator to an unreachable upper bound and speedups obtained from
random allocations. The resource allocator uses probabilistic
techniques to predict the amount of communication and the parallelism
profile; this should be useful for other allocation strategies as well.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 88 10:37 EST
From: patricia
Subject: Seminar - Towards a many-valued logic of belief (Rochester)
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT SEMINAR
Thursday, January 21, 1988
Computer Studies Building, Room 601
3:00 p.m.
Speaker
Dimiter Driankov
University of LinkHoping
Department of Computer Science
LinkHoping, Sweden
Topic
*Towards a many-valued logic of belief:
A representation of uncertainty which takes into account two reports
about the validity of a proposition is considered:
1) a report on how strongly the validity of A is believed, and
2) a report on how strongly it9s validity is disbelieved.
This type of representation is studied in terms of two different lattice
structures: the so-called logical and information lattices.
It is shown that the first one provides a many-valued variant of
*relevance: logic, while the other one helps in dealing with non
truth-functional aspects of knowledge about belief and/or disbelief in the
validity of formulas, i.e., representing belief and/or disbelief in the
validity of complex formulas having only partial information about their
atomic constituents.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 08:53 EST
From: William J. Rapaport <rapaport@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Subject: Don Norman colloquium
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO
The Steering Committee of the
GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN
COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC SCIENCES
PRESENTS
DONALD A. NORMAN
Institute for Cognitive Science
University of California, San Diego
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY THINGS
How do we manage the tasks of everyday life? The traditional answer is
that we engage in problem solving, planning, and thought. How do we
know what to do? Again, the traditional answer is that we learn, in
part through experience, in part through instruction. I suggest that
this view is misleading. Less planning and problem solving is required
than is commonly supposed. Many tasks need never be learned: the
proper behavior is obvious from the start. The problem space for most
everyday tasks is shallow or narrow, not wide and deep as the tradi-
tional approach suggests. The minimization of the problem space occurs
because natural and contrived properties of the environment combine to
constrain the set of possible actions. The effect is as if one had put
the knowledge required to do a thing on the thing itself: the knowledge
is in the world.
I show that seven stages are relevant to the performance of an action,
including three stages for execution of an act, three for evaluation,
and a goal stage. Consideration of the rule of each stage, along with
the principles of natural mappings and natural constraints, leads to a
set of psychological principles for design. Couple these principles
with the suggestion that most real tasks are shallow or narrow, and we
start to have a psychology of everyday things and everyday actions.
The talk itself is meant to be light and enjoyable. However, there are
profound implications for the type of theory one develops for simulating
cognitive computation. There are serious implications for massively
parallel structures (what we call Parallel Distributed Processing or
connectionist approaches), for memory storage and retrieval via descrip-
tions or coarse coding, and, in general, for a central role for pattern
matching, constraint satisficing, and nonsymbolic processing mechanisms
in human cognition. But the main implications of the work are for the
design of understandable and usable objects.
Monday, February 1, 1988
4:00 P.M.
Park 280, Amherst Campus
There will also be an informal evening discussion that evening at David
Zubin's house, 157 Highland St., at 8:00 P.M. Call Bill Rapaport (Com-
puter Science, (716) 636-3193, 3180) for further information.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 15:52 EST
From: Dori Wells <DWELLS@G.BBN.COM>
Subject: Lang. & Cog. Seminar
BBN Science Development Program
Language and Cognition Seminar
THE ROLE OF THE CONSTRUCT "POSSIBLE WORD MEANING" IN
VOCABULARY ACQUISITION
Bill Nagy
Center for Study of Reading
University of Illinois
Urbana, Illinois
BBN Laboratories Inc.
10 Moulton Street
Large Conference Room, 2nd Floor
10:30 a.m., Monday, February 1, 1988
Abstract: It has been argued that in vocabulary acquisition, as in
other aspects of language acquisition, learning is possible only if
there are severe constraints on the hypotheses entertained by the
learner. In the recent psycholinguistic literature, there are a few
experiments suggesting that there are some general constraints on the
types of word meanings acquired by young children. In this talk,
experiments with adults will be described which attempts to provide
evidence that language specific constraints on what constitutes a
possible word meaning play a role in the generation and testing of
hypotheses about the meanings of unfamiliar words.
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End of NL-KR Digest
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