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NL-KR Digest Volume 06 No. 13
NL-KR Digest (Tue Mar 28 11:51:14 1989) Volume 6 No. 13
Today's Topics:
Work on esperanto used as interlingual form
LOOPS
Guaranteeing Serializable Results in Parallel ... (Unisys AI Seminar)
Conference on AI and Communicating Processes
Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox (Long)
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---------------------------------------------------------
To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
To: comp-ai-nlang-know-rep@ohio-state.edu
From: vdasigi@silver.wright.edu (Venu Dasigi)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.nlang-know-rep
Subject: Work on esperanto used as interlingual form
Keywords: machine translation, dutch project, logical form, esperanto
Date: 17 Mar 89 23:15:53 GMT
In the past couple of years, I remember some postings in this or some
related newsgroup about Esperanto used in the conceptual representation
of text during machine translation. I also remember that it was a project
in the Netherlands. I would like to find out more information about
that project and its current status. Either post the information, since
I think it is of interest to this newsgroup, or send me the information
by electronic mail (vdasigi@cs.wright.edu). If all fails, it will be
greatly appreciated if the information is sent by regular mail (address
below).
- -- Venu Dasigi
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Wright State University Research Center
3171 Research Blvd
Dayton, OH 45420
USA
vdasigi@cs.wright.edu
Venugopala Rao Dasigi
CSNet: vdasigi@cs.wright.edu
US Mail: Dept. of CS&Eng, Wright State U, 3171 Research Blvd, Dayton, OH 45420
------------------------------
To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
From: mcvax!crin.crin.fr!napoli@uunet.UU.NET (Amedeo NAPOLI)
Date: 14 Mar 89 19:10:07 GMT
Subject: LOOPS
Here is a sentence in the beginning of the LOOPS Manual (1983) :
LOOPS grew out of our research in a knowledge representation language
(called Lore) for use in a project to create an "expert assistant" for
designers of integrated digital systems.
Could somebody tell me if "integrated digital systems" means
"integrated circuits" ?
I am not sure, but the LOOPS Manual was referenced as a VLSI Group Memo.
Many thanks for your help.
"Au revoir"
Napoli Amedeo
- -
- -- Amedeo Napoli @ CRIN / Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy
EMAIL : napoli@crin.crin.fr - POST : BP 239, 54506 VANDOEUVRE CEDEX, France
------------------------------
To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 89 11:09:08 -0500
From: finin@PRC.Unisys.COM
Subject: Guaranteeing Serializable Results in Parallel ... (Unisys AI Seminar)
AI SEMINAR
UNISYS PAOLI RESEARCH CENTER
Guaranteeing Serializable Results in Parallel Production Systems
Jim Schmolze
Computer Science
Tufts University
schmolze@cs.tufts.edu
To speed up production systems, researchers have studied how to execute many
rules simultaneously. Unfortunately, such systems can yield results that are
impossible for a serial system to produce, leading to erroneous behaviors. We
present algorithms that prevent all non-serializable effects for parallel
production systems that execute many rules simultaneously. Our framework is
taken from [1] and improves upon their solution. The practical advantages of
these strategies is demonstrated using estimates from a large production
system, the Manhattan Mapper [2].
[1] T. Ishida and S.J. Stolfo. "Towards the parallel execution of
rules in production system programs." In Proceedings of the
International Conference on Parallel Processing, 1985.
[2] L. Lerner and J. Cheng. "The Manhattan Mapper expert production
system." Tech. Report, Computer Science, Columbia , May 1983.
11:00 am, Monday April 3, 1989
BIC Conference Room
Unisys Paoli Research Center
Route 252 and Central Ave.
Paoli PA 19311
-- non-Unisys visitors who are interested in attending should --
-- send email to finin@prc.unisys.com or call 215-648-7446 --
------------------------------
To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
From: Steven Zenith <zenith%inmos.co.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 89 20:56:07 GMT
Subject: Conference on AI and Communicating Processes
International conference
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND COMMUNICATING PROCESS ARCHITECTURE
17th/18th of July 1989, at Imperial College, London UK.
Keynote speaker
Prof. Iann Barron
Invited speakers
Prof. Igor Aleksander Neural Computing Architectures.
Prof. Colin Besant Programming of Robots.
Prof. David Gelernter Information Management in Linda.
Dr. Atsuhiro Goto The Parallel Inference Machine.
Prof. Tosiyasu Kunii Primitive Image Understanding.
Dr. Rajiv Trehan Parallel AI Systems.
Prof. Alan Robinson Functional and Relational reasoning.
Prof. Les Valiant] Bulk-synchronous Parallel Computing.
* Parallel Processing and AI *
Parallel Processing and Artificial Intelligence are two key themes
which have risen to the fore of technology in the past decade. This
international conference brings together the two communities.
Communicating Process Architecture is one of the most successful
models for exploiting the potential power of parallel processing machines.
Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most challenging applications for
such machines. This conference explores the interaction between these two
technologies.
The carefully selected programme of invited talks and submitted papers
brings together the very best researchers currently working in the field.
* Topics include *
Robotics Neural Networks Image Understanding
Speech Recognition Implementation of Logic Programming Languages
Information management The Japanese Fifth Generation Project
Transputers and Occam
* Conference programme *
Keynote speaker
Prof. Iann Barron ; "Transputer Technology and AI."
Iann Barron is co-founder of INMOS, is Corporate Development Director,
currently leading the design of next generation transputers.
Iann Barron is visiting professor at the University of Bristol, and is
a Fellow of the British Computer Society. He was previously a visiting
Professor at the University of London. In addition to writing various
technical papers on computing and the consequences of information
technology, he has published two books - ``The future of Real Time
Technology'' and jointly with R.C Curnow, ``The Future of Information
Technology''.
Invited speakers
Prof. Igor Aleksander ;
"Myths and Realities about Neural Computing Architectures."
Professor Igor Aleksander is Head of the Electrical Engineering
Department at Imperial College, where he is also Professor of Neural
Systems Engineering. He is one of the worlds leading researchers in Neural
Computing Architectures and has been developing usable systems since 1965.
He was responsible for the design and transfer into industry of WISARD; the
worlds first general purpose neural system directed at vision problems.
Prof. Colin Besant ;
"Application of Artificial Intelligence to the Programming of Robots."
Colin Besant is Professor of Computer-Aided Manufacture in the
Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College. His interests are
predominantly in the field of flexible Manufacturing Systems including
Robotics. His research concentrates on the programming of manufacturing
systems in order to achieve a high degree of flexibility in terms of
manufacturing batch size and past variety. Artificial Intelligence plays an
increasing role in this research in the scheduling of manufacturing systems
and in robotics, where problems of collision avoidance, path planning and
grasping require a solution.
John S. Bridle ;
"Automatic Speech Recognition and Parallel Processing"
John Bridle is a Principle Scientific Officer at RSRE where he is co-
director of the Speech Research Unit and leads the Machine Intelligence
Theory section of his division. His current research interests include
fundamental studies of artificial neural systems and stochastic model-based
pattern processing, and applications of advanced pattern processing
principles to speech, image and other domains.
Prof. David Gelernter ; "Information Management in Linda."
David Gelernter is an associate professor of Computer Science at Yale
University. He works on parallelism, on heuristic programming (particularly
medical applications) and on the overlap between the two. As a graduate
student at SUNY Stony Brook he designed a parallel programming system
called `Linda'; several years ago he and his colleagues built the first
working version at Yale. The system is now seeing increasingly widespread
use, and has been advertised by the heads of two independent parallel
machine startups as an `emerging industry standard' (which it isn't - yet).
David Gelernter continues to develop Linda, and working also on
`symmetric languages', a class of languages which make no distinction
between program structures and data objects. His work in heuristic
programming centres on intelligent monitoring systems and on expert
inferencing from databases.
Dr. Atsuhiro Goto ;
"Research and Development of the Parallel Inference Machine in the FGCS
Project."
Dr Goto is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for New Computer
Technology (ICOT) Tokyo, which he joined in August 1985. He is conducting
research and development of parallel inference machine architecture. His
current research interests include parallel architectures for parallel
logic programming languages, garbage collection, memory architectures and
parallel programming.
Prof. Tosiyasu Kunii ;
"A Communicating Process Architecture Model of Primitive Image
Understanding - A Case Study."
Tosiyasu L. Kunii is currently Professor of Information and Computer
Science, at the University of Tokyo. He began his work in raster computer
graphics at the University in 1968, which led to the Tokyo Raster
Technology Project. His particular research interest is in the elements of
artificial intelligence to recognize and create images. He has authored and
edited more than 25 computer science books, and published more than 100
refereed papers and articles in computer science and applications.
Professor Kunii is also chairman of the Occam User Group in Japan.
Dr. Rajiv Trehan ;
"Concurrent Logic Languages for the design and implementation of Parallel
AI Systems."
Rajiv Trehan has been working for the last four year in the area of
parallel declarative systems within the Department of Artificial
Intelligence, Edinburgh. His research activities include: hardware support
for large knowledge bases; concurrent logic languages, like PARLOG, GHC and
Concurrent Prolog; distributed Artificial Intelligence and parallel
architectures. This work has formed the basis of his PhD, which is an
investigation of the concurrent logic languages and how they support
Artificial Intelligence programming techniques and applications. Much of
his work has been adopted by the Parallel Architectures Laboratory,
Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI), Edinburgh.
Prof. J.A.Robinson ;
"Functional and Relational reasoning with a fine-grain parallel reduction
system."
Since 1967 J.A.Robinson has been a Professor at Syracuse University.
From 1967 to 1984 he was Distinguished Professor of Logic and Computer
Science, in 1984 he was appointed University Professor. His research
interests center around exploiting logical methods on the computer. In 1963
he devised the ``resolution principle'', an automatic deduction technique
based on the ``unification'' pattern-matching algorithm. resolution has
been applied by Colmerauer and Kowalski to develop what is now known as
``logic programming''. His current research interest is in designing
massively-parallel symbolic computation systems in which the underlying
logics of LISP-like and PROLOG-like programming languages are completely
intergrated.
Prof. Les Valiant ; "Bulk-synchronous Parallel Computing."
Professor Leslie G. Valiant is currently Gordon McKay Professor of
Computer Science and Applied Mathemmatics at Harvard University. His
current research interests are computational complexity, machine learning
and the theory of parallel algorithms and architectures. In 1986 he
received the Navanlinna prize for theory of information processing from the
International Mathematical Union.
* Proceedings *
The edited proceedings includes invited and submitted papers and is
intended for publication in a new book series on Communicating Process
Architecture published by John Wiley and Sons.
* The conference organising committee *
Organising committee, programme editors and conference chairmen:
Dr. Mike Reeve Imperial College, London, UK.
Steven Ericsson Zenith INMOS Limited, Bristol, UK.
The programme and organising committee:
J.T Amenyo Ctr. Telecoms Research, Columbia University.
Jean-Jacques Codani INRIA, France.
Dr. Atsuhiro Goto Institute for New Generation Computer Technology
(ICOT), Japan.
Dr.med.Ulrich Jobst Ostertal - Klinik fur Neurologie und Klinische
Neurophysiologie
Dr. Peter Kacsuk Multilogic Computing, Budapest, Hungary.
Pasi Koikkalainen Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland.
Prof. T. L. Kunii The University of Tokyo, Japan.
Dr. Heather Liddell Queen Mary College, London.
Prof. Y. Paker Polytechnic of Central London
Prof. L. F. Pau Technical University of Denmark.
Prof. Bernd Radig Institut Fur Informatik, Munchen.
Prof. Alan Robinson Syracuse University, USA.
Kai Ming Shea University of Hong Kong.
Prof. David Warren Bristol University, UK.
Chung Zhang Brighton Polytechnic. UK.
* Programme timetable *
The timetable is as follows:
Sunday
16:00pm to 18:00pm Registration
Monday Tuesday
8:30am to 10:00pm Registration 09:00am Submitted paper
10:00am Introduction 09:30am Submitted paper
10:15am Keynote speach 10:00am Invited speaker
- Professor Iann Barron 10:45am Coffee
11:00am Coffee 11:15am Invited speaker
11:30am Invited speaker 12:00pm Invited speaker
12:15pm Invited speaker 12:45pm Lunch
13:00pm Lunch 14:00pm Invited speaker
14:30pm Submitted paper 14:45pm Invited speaker
15:00pm Submitted paper 15:30pm Coffee
15:30pm Submitted paper 16:00pm Submitted paper
16:00pm Coffee 16:30pm Submitted paper
16:30pm Invited speaker 17:00pm Submitted paper
17:15pm Invited speaker 17:30pm End
18:00pm Break
19:00pm Transport to Dinner
Before Dinner Sherry
20:00pm Conference Dinner
* Conference dinner *
The conference dinner will be held at London Zoo, with before dinner
sherry in the Aquarium. Coaches will transport delegates.
* Accommodation *
Accommodation is available on the Campus of Imperial College. Campus
accommodation is available for Sunday and/or Monday night. Hotel
accommodation can be arranged separately by writing to the conference
secretary.
* Car parking *
Available at a number of local NCP sites.
* Payment *
Cheques or bankers drafts in pounds sterling should be made payable
to: OUG AI Conferences
Full name___________________________________________
Institute/Company___________________________________
Address_____________________________________________
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
Country_____________________________________________
email :_____________________________________________
Non-residential 200 pounds sterling []
Residential (1 night) 225 pounds sterling []
Residential (2 nights) 250 pounds sterling []
Conference dinner 42 pounds sterling []
Total Payable________________________
Some student subsidy is available, for details contact the conference
secretary.
Special dietary requirements:
Vegan [] Vegetarian [] Other (Please specify)
Date____________
Signed_______________________________ Dated_____________________
* Registration *
Registration should be received by June 16th. Late registration will
incur a 20 pound surcharge. All enquiries should be addressed to the
conference secretary:
The Conference Secretary,
OUG AI Conferences,
INMOS Limited,
1000 Aztec West,
Almondsbury,
Bristol BS12 4SQ,
UNITED KINGDOM.
Tel. 0454 616616 x503
email: zenith@inmos.co.uk
occam user group
* artificial intelligence *
special interest group
1st technical meeting of the OUG AISIG
This conference is underwritten by INMOS Limited, to whom the organising
committee wish to extend their thanks.
------------------------------
To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
From: Aaron Sloman <mcvax!cvaxa.sussex.ac.uk!aarons@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: 2 Mar 89 10:56:44 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.nlang-know-rep
Subject: Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox (Long)
Keywords: paradox,semantics,Frege
There's been a lot of discussion of logical and semantic paradoxes
in comp.ai. As my comments are also relevant to comp.ai.nlang-know-rep
I am cross posting.
Here's and exaple of a type that has not yet appeared in comp.ai:
The father of the subject of this sentence is bald
This is a case of infinite recursion in the semantics of the referring
expression
"The father of the subject of this sentence"
Take any function symbol f (e.g 'the father of'), and an expression s
such that s refers to the thing denoted by 'f(s)' (in my example s
is 'the subject of this sentence'). Then if P is any predicate, the
sentence
P(f(s))
will have this property of infinite recursion (or infinite iteration
if you prefer) in the natural semantic interpretation of the argument
of the predicate.
This, like all the old philosophical examples ('This statement is
false', 'The present king of france is bald' and the like), are
illustrations of the very same general principle:
In a natural language (or a sufficiently rich formal language) it is
impossible to guarantee that syntactically well formed expressions
(whether referring expressions, predicate expressions, or whole
sentences) are semantically well formed in the sense of identifying some
entity (an object, a function, a truth value) of the type normally
identified by expressions of that syntactic category.
I.e. you cannot use syntactic well formedness to guarantee extension (or
reference, or denotation.)
This is not to say that the resulting complex expressions are
meaningless.
I think Gottlob Frege had all the essential insights required to
understand these phenomena (see the collection of translations of his
papers edited by P.Geach and M. Black Oxford: Blackwell 1960, especially
the paper on 'Sense and Reference' German version 'Sinn und Bedeutung').
(Incidentally, all the main ideas of lambda calculus come from Frege.)
Frege's key idea, which I think disposes of the paradoxes, is a
distinction between what we might call extensional meaning (= reference,
denotation, extension, and includes objects, sets, truth-values etc) and
intensional meaning (= sense, connotation, intension).
Roughly, but only VERY roughly (remember that qualification), the latter
is closer to what gets preserved when you translate from one language to
another. Two referring expressions that have different senses can refer
to the same object, i.e. have the same extension (Frege's example was
'the evening star is the morning star' i.e. both expressions refer to
the planet Venus, but in different ways. I.e. different procedures are
relevant to checking whether an object is the one referred to. I am
not saying, however, that the procedures are well defined in this case).
Similarly two predicate expressions or function expressions may
correspond to the same mathematical function in the sense of the same
set of argument/value pairs, yet identify that function in different
ways, simple examples being the functions
f(x) = x*x - 16
f(x) = (x - 4)*(x + 4)
or the predicates
x has a heart
x has kidneys (I think these are co-extensive)
Frege showed that a great deal of linguistic complexity can be accounted
for as resulting from the application of functions to arguments,
including higher order functions, which is how he (with great
originality) analysed quantifiers ("all", "some", "every" etc.)
Some of the functions (and here he generalized the work of Boole),
including not only things like "and", "not" etc, but also predicates and
quantifiers, were analyzed as having truth values for their values (i.e.
some arbitrary pair of objects T and F, treated in an asymmetrical way
pragmatically, but otherwise TOTALLY symmetrical).
He then suggested that just as the denotation (reference, extension,
value or whatever you want to call it) of a complex expression was
determined by the way in which it was composed of sub-expressions (e.g.
'(3 * 5) + (6 - 99)') similarly the SENSE (intension, connotation, Sinn,
or whatever you want to call it) is determined by the senses of the
sub-expressions and they ways they are combined.
Although he did not use a computational explanation of all this, I think
a very natural interpretation is that the SENSE of an expression
corresponds to what we would now call a PROCEDURE that can be executed
to compute the value, and the DENOTATION is the result you get.
The notion of a procedure here is actually very difficult to define with
sufficient generality, and there are problems defining criteria for
identify of procedures, especially when they are expressed in totally
different formalisms -- discussing that would lead into a discussion of
layers of procedures involving different virtual machines. It is
particularly difficult to make precise the notion of a procedure that is
not applied to internal datastructures, but to objects in the real world
to compute a value. Worse, we have many expressions that allude to an
ill defined assumed equivalent family of procedures, without selecting
one unambiguously as THE sense of the expression. (Bill Woods has been
trying to clarify these notions for years.)
Anyhow, once you have gone down this route, the paradoxes are relatively
easy to dispose of, because, assuming that semantic complexity does
derive from the application of procedures to arguments which themselves
may have to be identified by procedures applied to arguments, it
follows that there are various ways in which a simple or complex
expresion that is well formed may fail to determine a denotation, just
as every programming language rich enough to be general purpose allows
syntactically legal programs to be constructed that generate run time
errors or loop forever.
Examples of ways in which reference of an expression can fail are:
a. It's a totally undefined expression - e.g. the subject expression in
Zappwiddle is bald.
b. The execution of the corresponding procedure fails to identify any
object because that's how the reality referred to happens to be
The present king of france
The largest prime number between 24 and 28
(The sense is pretty clear - if there were such an object we'd
know what the epression referred to.)
c. There is not a unique object
The person in the next room
(There may be five persons in the next room)
d. The procedure cannot be executed because the arguments to which it is
applied are of the wrong type
Thursday + 17.3
The king of space
Thursday is bald
e. The procedure can be executed but it fails to terminate because of
some aspect of the reality it is applied to
Start with 0 and keep adding 1 and stop when you get to the
largest number (or some number x such that x + 1 = x, or ...)
The original male ancestor of Fred
(in a world with an infinite past)
f. The procedure has an internal loop
f(10), where f(x) = x * f(x-1)
or
f(f), where f(x) = not(x(x))
(Note that this "Russell" function is easy to define in
languages like Lisp and Pop-11.
What this sentence says is false
(You first have to identify what it says, then check its truth
value, but to do that you have to identify what it says and
check its truth value, ... etc.)
What this sentence says is true
(It has EXACTLY the same problems)
The father of the subject of this sentence is bald
(You have to find the subject, then get his father, then that
is the subject, but then you have to get his father, then that
is the subject ... etc.)
The set of all sets that do not contain themselves
The set of all sets that do contain themselves
In all these cases except the use of undefined symbols, we have a
syntactically well formed expression with a well defined SENSE (i.e.
complex procedure defined in terms of the application of simpler
procedures to their arguments), and in some cases we can even begin to
execute the procedure though not all, (e.g. where a primitive argument
expression totally fails to refer). But there is no DENOTATION
(reference, extension, value) though for different reasons.
Frege's definition of "sense" was not expressed in terms of procedures.
He used a host of unsatisfactory metaphors (including comparing the
sense with the image in a telescope). Neither is it clear that it can be
used in connection with all referring expressions (e.g. personal
pronouns and other indexicals), as he found when he tried.
He also at once stage abandoned one of his main insights when he
proposed that if an expression in his formal language failed to denote
anything then it should be taken to denote "the false" (removing the
symmetry of truth values).
By assuming the law of the excluded middle ( 'P or not P' must be true,
no matter what P is) without allowing for cases where there is no value,
you can, of course, get contradictions out of these examples. That was
the source of Bertrand Russell's misery. He did not wish to give up the
law. This forced him into a totally unnatural interpretation of
(1a) The present king of france is bald
as equivalent to something of the form:
(1b) There is at least one thing which is a KofF &
There is at most one thing which is a KofF
and for all x if x is a KofF then X is bald
NB this is not a circular analysis because "KofF" is treated as
a predicate in (1b), not a referring expression.
(1b) is false because of the first conjunct, whereas on the above,
Fregean, analysis (1a) would simply fail to denote any truth value
because the function 'x is bald' is not supplied with an argument since
the subject fails to refer, because that's how the world is.
Frege also pointed out that there are some contexts in which we
manage to refer to the SENSE normally expressed by an expression
(as I have done several times above). The expression whose reference is
a sense then has a higher order sense. Defining the semantics of such
higher order expressions is tricky, e.g. in contexts like
Fred wants to meet the King of France
Joe is trying to find the largest prime number
There are many loose ends in the above theory especially when you try to
apply it to something as rich, messy and ill defined as a natural
language.
However, the main point of this posting is that you can't hope to
understand the problems generated by the paradoxes (or most other deep
philosophical problems) without exploring a lot of the existing
literature. Unfortunately, my own explorations are probably now out of
date (the above analysis was done long ago). In particular, it is
possible that recent work on the semantics of programming languages is
very relevant, and perhaps a suitably informed reader will comment. But
I suspect that even that work has not addressed all these issues
properly, since programming languages are not YET rich enough to
generate the problems. Just wait will we program computers in English!
Aaron Sloman,
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences,
Univ of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QN, England
ARPANET : aarons%uk.ac.sussex.cogs@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
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------------------------------
End of NL-KR Digest
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