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NL-KR Digest Volume 03 No. 33
NL-KR Digest (10/15/87 20:20:09) Volume 3 Number 33
Today's Topics:
Generating natural language
Planning Knowledge & Representation Survey
Fire, Women, and Dangerous Things
help! (ai-workstations)
snow
Aymara
Pitch in speech
Re: Infinite Alphabets
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Date: Wed, 7 Oct 87 09:42 EDT
From: Nils Hagner <kuling!nilsh@uunet.UU.NET>
Subject: Generating natural language
I am looking for papers concerning generation of
natual language. Is there anyone who can give me
some pointers?
Nils Hagner (nilsh@kuling.UUCP)
Uppsala University
Dept. of Computing Science
P.O. Box 520
751 20 Uppsala
SWEDEN
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 87 22:30 EDT
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 87 22:30 EDT
From: Dickson Lukose <lukose@aragorn.cm.deakin.OZ>
Subject: Planning Knowledge & Representation Survey
G'Day Colleagues,
I'm a newcomer to the planning paradigm and AI in general. My
research interest is in planning heuristics. I'm currently doing
a survey on:-
(1) "planning knowledge",
(2) "knowledge representation for planning" and
(3) "process of planning"
used by various types (eg. nonhierarchical, hierarchical, script-based
and opportunistic) of planning systems.
(1) Is there anyone who have done the above survey or knows someone who
have done so?
(2) Is anyone aware of any survey publications related to the above
mentioned areas?
(3) Has anyone got any bibliography related to the above subject areas?
I'm most interested in communicating with researchers currently
involved in R&D of "planning systems".
Any suggestions or pointers to the above request will be much
appreciated.
If enough interest shown, I will transmit(e-mail) the results of survey.
Dickson Lukose | UUCP: ...!seismo!munnari!aragorn.oz!lukose
Div. Comp. & Maths | ....!decvax!mulga!aragorn.oz!lukose
Deakin University |
Victoria, 3217 | ARPA: munnari!aragorn.oz!lukose@SEISMO.ARPA
Australia | ACSNET: lukose@aragorn
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 87 04:27 EDT
From: cunyvm!unknown%psuvm.bitnet@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
Subject: Fire, Women, and Dangerous Things
I finally located a copy of George Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind" and
a quick look through the chapters seems to indicate that it
is an interesting synthesis.
Anyone out there read it already? I am interested in what
those with more experience in AI than I have think of Lakoff's
approach to categorization.
________________________________________________________________
John M. Ford fordjm@byuvax
"The thing I hate about psychologists is that they are always
*classifying* everyone..."
________________________________________________________________
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 87 21:25 EDT
From: KOLB%HTIKUB5.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu
Subject: help! (ai-workstations)
hi out there,
we are a (for Holland) pretty old and matured AI&NLP research group ("TENDUM"),
but so is our hardware equipment, which we have to share with the rest
of the university. Now we seem to have the possibility to get some stuff
such as AI-workstations on our own.
What we're looking for is an integrated programming environment with
good PROLOG and LISP - and some object oriented - facilities, but also
capable of handling old-fashioned languages such as pascal and C.
Good graphics wouldn't hurt. Good networking facilities are essential.
Any recommendations or - even more useful - warnings?
Please answer directly to me. I'll summarize the results to the net if wanted.
Thanx, hap kolb
address: EMAIL: kolb@htikub5.bitnet
SNAILMAIL: hap kolb
Tilburg University - SLE
Postbus 90153
NL-5000 LE Tilburg
The Netherlands
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 87 09:24 EDT
From: Fred Baube <fbaube@note.nsf.gov>
Subject: snow
> Briefly: Eskimo languages
> have a lot of different words for snow because there is a lot of snow
> up there. Here in America, especially as you go further south, we use
> phrases like "powdery snow", "sticky snow that's good for making
> snowballs and snowpeople", etc.
I recall reading something to the effect that the US Navy, which
would like to describe snowpack as accurately as possible, dis-
tinguishes among around 12 types of snow, while Eskimos have
around 20 types.
I'm from Buffalo, and wonder if anyone has studied the range of
terminology among residents of that area (including Rochester).
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 87 10:28 EDT
From: New Directions in Machine Translation - Budapest <mcvax!dlt1!mtconf@uunet.UU.NET>
Subject: Aymara
Here is some information about Aymara.
Guzm'an de Rojas has not been publishing much about his system,
called ATAMIRI, because, as he has told me, he wants to exploit
it commercially. But there are some publications by himself which
might be interesting:
Iv'an Guzm'an de Rojas (1984): La informatica en la investigacion
cultural: el modelo de automata traductor "Atamiri".
In: Bolet'in de informatica 2 [2], pp. 18-25
Iv'an Guzm'an de Rojas (1985): Hacia una ingenieria del lenguaje.
In: Bolet'in de informatica 3 [1], pp. 1-10
Iv'an Guzm'an de Rojas (1985): Hacia una ingenieria del lenguaje
(parte II).
In: Bolet'in de informatica 3 [2], pp. 18-25
Iv'an Guzm'an de Rojas (1985): Sobre la escritura en espa~nol de
las palabras de origen "aymara".
In: Bolet'in de informatica 3 [2], pp. 14-16
Iv'an Guzm'an de Rojas (1985): Logical and linguistic problems of
social communication with the Aymara people.
(= International Development Research Centre, Manuscript
Reports 66e)
Ottawa: IDRC, 205 pp.
Bolet'in is published by the UNESCO office in Montevideo.
I happened to find one publication on Aymara, which is not
related to Guzm'an's system:
Joseph Orville Davidson (1977): A contrastive study of the
grammatical structures of Aymara and Cuzco Kechua.
Doct. diss. Berkeley
There is certainly much more. If you have no better bibliograhpy,
use Davidson's.
As far as plans have been made up by now, Guzm'an will give a
talk on his system at BSO's conference on
NEW DIRECTIONS IN MACHINE TRANSLATION
on 18 and 19 August 1988 in Budapest. I have been advertising the
conference on this network some time ago. If you are interested
in being regularly informed about the conference, let me know. E-
mail is welcome to this electronic address:
mtconf@dlt1.uucp
But please include your ordinary-mail address, since all
arrangements are taken care of by the Hungarian Von Neumann
Society who are not linked to the computer networks.
Regards,
Klaus Schubert
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 87 16:49 EDT
From: Leo Marcus <marcus@aero.ARPA>
Subject: Pitch in speech
The use of relative pitch in turning a declarative sentence into a question
is well known, and easily attributable to custom (e.g., presumably not common
to all natural languages...?)
How does one explain the difference in interpretation of the following sentence
depending on whether the "Char" is of higher or lower pitch than the "lie"?
"It's really me, Charlie."
Or similarly, the two meanings of the following sentence depending on whether
"no" is higher or lower than "is":
"No news is good news."
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 87 06:18 EDT
From: Greg Lee <lee@uhccux.UUCP>
Subject: Re: Pitch in speech
As William Cantrall discovered, the pitch countours of coreferents
tend to agree. Thus, in "It's really me, Charlie.", if Charl-
has high pitch as does me, then Charlie is me. --Greg Lee
U.S.mail: 562 Moore Hall, Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii, HONO, HI 96822
INTERNET: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu
UUCP: {ihnp4,dcdwest,ucbvax}!sdcsvax!nosc!uhccux!lee
BITNET: lee%uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu@rutgers.edu
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 87 08:37 EDT
From: jc <jc@minya.UUCP>
Subject: Re: Pitch in speech
In article <17905@aero.ARPA>, marcus@aero.ARPA (Leo Marcus) writes:
> The use of relative pitch in turning a declarative sentence into a question
> is well known, and easily attributable to custom (e.g., presumably not common
> to all natural languages...?)
It's fairly well understood among linguists that spoken English is one of
the languages that makes very heavy use of pitch; roughly half the syntax
is in the pitch contours of utterances. Some years back, I read a rather
good exposition of the subject, but unfortunately (for you:-) I don't have
the reference around any more. The basic idea was that it was shown that
English uses (in most dialects) four distinct pitch phonemes. There is a
long list of syntactic pitch constructs.
This is one of the things that make spoken English so different from the
written form, since the writing system lacks effective ways of indicating
more than the rudiments of pitch. It's sort of like if you were to try
to write English using only two letters, 'c' for consonants and 'v' for
vowels. Vc cvvcc cv cvcc cv cvvc. (It would be hard to read). Pity
the poor furriners trying to learn our language from texts that never
say much of anything about the pitch system.
One way of indicating the pitch is by putting a digit above vowels, with
'1' for low and '4' for high. Try it with some sample sentences.
> How does one explain the difference in interpretation of the following sentence
> depending on whether the "Char" is of higher or lower pitch than the "lie"?
> "It's really me, Charlie."
1 2 1 4 3 2
"It's really me, Charlie."
1 2 1 3 4 2
"It's really me, Charlie."
1 4 1 2 3 2
"It's really me, Charlie."
>
>
> Or similarly, the two meanings of the following sentence depending on whether
> "no" is higher or lower than "is":
> "No news is good news."
Try this one yourself. One of my favorite examples, because there are a lot
of ways to pronounce it, and people seem to really get into varying it, is
a sentence like "He's here." For this one, you need 2-pitch glides on some
of the vowels.
2 4
He's here.
4 1
He's here.
2 42
He's here.
2 34
He's here?
4 23
He's here?
32 2
He's here.
3 2
He's here.
To a native speaker of English, this doesn't nearly exhaust the possibilities.
This feature of English really throws cold water on the prospects of ever
having a decent writing system. Could you imagine the fireworks if there
were an attempt to teach a phonetic system with pitch in our schools?
--
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 87 07:37 EDT
From: "J. A. \"Biep\" Durieux" <biep@cs.vu.nl>
Subject: Re: Pitch in speech
In article <893@uhccux.UUCP> lee@uhccux.UUCP (Greg Lee) writes:
>As William Cantrall discovered, the pitch countours of coreferents
>tend to agree. Thus, in "It's really me, Charlie.", if Charl-
>has high pitch as does me, then Charlie is me. --Greg Lee
"Mary, the bakers wife, is ill" Or am I missing something?
..
..
..
..
--
Biep. (biep@cs.vu.nl via mcvax)
Nous aurions souvent honte de nos plus belles actions
si le monde voyait tous les motifs qui les produisent
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 87 10:49 EDT
From: Robert Amsler <amsler@flash.bellcore.com>
Subject: Re: Infinite Alphabets
Infinite number of letters would seem to require something more than
proving that there are a very large number of letters, i.e. it would
require a method for pairing the alphabet with the integers, proving
that for every integer there is a corresponding letter in the alphabet.
Re: Sapir-Whorf, a chapter from my old cognitive anthropology book,
by Jane O. Bright and William Bright, ``Semantic Structures in
Northwestern California and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'' (in ``Cognitive
Anthropology, 1969, ed. by Stephen A. Tyler, Holt,Reinhart&Winston, Inc)
cites no definitive proof or disproof and itself can't resolve the
issue. Does anyone have more recent literature re: experimental tests?
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End of NL-KR Digest
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