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NL-KR Digest Volume 14 No. 57
NL-KR Digest Mon Sep 25 21:13:00 PDT 1995 Volume 14 No. 57
Today's Topics:
Position: NLP at Canon Research Centre, UK
CFP: Coordination 1996- Concurrent Programming, Apr 96, Cesena
Announcement: Book- Knowledge and Belief, Laux and Wansing ed.
Announcement: AI'95 Postgraduate Student Session, Nov 95, Canberra
Announcement: Metaphor Project, Sep/Oct 95, Los Angeles
* * *
Subcriptions: listserv-style administrative requests to
nl-kr-request@ai.sunnyside.com.
Submissions, policy, questions: nl-kr@ai.sunnyside.com
To speed up processing of your submission write to
listserv@ai.sunnyside.com with the message:
GET nl-kr style
Back issues:
FTP: ai.sunnyside.com:/pub/nl-kr/Vxx/Nyyy
/pub/nl-kr/Vxx/INDEX
Gopher: ai.sunnyside.com, Port 70, in directory /pub/nl-kr
Email: write to LISTSERV@AI.SUNNYSIDE.COM, omit subject, mail command:
GET nl-kr nl-kr_file_list
Web: http://ai.sunnyside.com/pub/nl-kr
Editors:
Al Whaley (al@ai.sunnyside.com) and
Chris Welty (weltyc@sigart.acm.org).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: imlah@canon.co.uk (Bill Imlah)
Subject: Position: NLP at Canon Research Centre, UK
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 17:34:43 GMT
JOB OPPORTUNITIES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Canon Research Centre Europe Ltd 25th September 1995
Guildford, UK
http://www.cre.canon.co.uk
Canon Research Centre Europe is looking for new recruits for its natural
language group. We are looking for people who will fit well into the group
on a permanent basis. Creativity and innovative work is encouraged.
Applicants should have skills in one or more of the following areas:
Computational linguistics
Functional programming
Large-scale corpus analysis
Statistical methods
Our work ranges from long-term basic research to solving specific problems
quickly, and from interactive spoken dialogue systems to large-scale text
translation. We are currently embarking on embedding our natural language
software in realistic hardware platforms. Skills/expertise relevant to this
area would be useful.
Please note that you need to have the right to work in Britain. If you are
not a citizen of one of the member states of the European Union, please
check whether you are eligible before applying.
If you are interested, send us a detailed CV and a one-page cover
letter, quoting reference "nl95-264-3", as plain text by e-mail to:
nljob@cre.canon.co.uk
Alternatively, you can send a paper copy to:
Kazuko Cooper (NL)
Canon Research Centre Europe
20 Alan Turing Road
Surrey Research Park
Guildford GU2 5YF, UK
tel: +44-1483-448844
fax: +44-1483-448845
At the moment we are advertising specific posts in software development,
speech processing and natural language processing, but we are always on the
lookout for people who are excellent, and who have the flexibility, capability
and motivation to learn new skills.
For more information on this and other opportunities at Canon Research Centre
Europe, see our WWW jobs page at http://www.cre.canon.co.uk/jobs.html,
or e-mail the above address.
We doubt that you would be disappointed by salary, equipment or working
environment. Our recruitment policy is one of equal opportunity.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: ciancari@dag.uni-sb.de
Subject: CFP: Coordination 1996- Concurrent Programming, Apr 96, Cesena
To: alroth@pap.com (Al Roth)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 23:13:40 +0200 (MET DST)
Call for Papers
COORDINATION'96
First International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages
Cesena, Italy
April 15-17, 1996.
A new class of models, formalisms and mechanisms for describing
concurrent and distributed computations has emerged over the last
few years. Some significant representatives of this new class
are models and languages based on (generative) communication via
a shared data space: Gamma, Linda, Swarm, Linear Objects, Polis
and Tao are examples.
Coordination models and languages are being investigated by the
ESPRIT Basic Research Project, COORDINATION, which is organising
this event. The objective of this conference is to provide a
forum for the rapidly growing community of researchers
interested in this field.
Topics of interest:
Typical, but not exclusive topics of interest are:
Coordination problems within concurrent, distributed, object
oriented, functional and logic programming
Concurrent computation, constraint programming, computation
models based on the chemical reaction metaphor and related
areas
Software environments for the development of coordinated
applications
Semantics and reasoning about coordination
Case studies with industrial relevance (e.g. Workflow, groupware,
distributed artificial intelligence, distributed software
engineering)
Submissions:
Authors are invited to send full papers (in English, up to 15
pages) to the PC chairman, at the address
mentioned on the left. Simultaneous submission to other
conferences or journals is not allowed.
Electronic submission is
encouraged via e-mail, in the form of uuencoded compressed
PostScript(TM) files.
Each submission should be accompanied by a 100 word summary
and a single postal and e-mail address for communication.
Conference Format and Location:
The conference will be three days long from Monday to Wednesday.
Cesena is a nice town of about 80,000 inhabitants, hosting a
CS programme of the University of Bologna. The town is
close to Rimini (the main Italian
seaside resort, famous for its night-life), Ravenna (the capital
of the western Roman empire) and the S. Marino Republic. Cesena is
about one hour by train from Bologna which is connected by direct
flights to several European cities.
COORDINATION'96
Program Chair:
Chris Hankin (London)
Program Committee:
Gul Agha (Illinois)
Jean-Marc Andreoli (Xerox Research, Grenoble)
Marc Bourgois (ECRC, Munich)
Luca Cardelli (DEC SRC)
Paolo Ciancarini (Bologna)
Laurent Dami (Geneva)
David Garlan (Carnegie Mellon)
David Gelernter (Yale)
Jose Meseguer (Stanford)
Daniel Le Metayer (Inria/Irisa, Rennes)
Oscar Nierstrasz (Berne)
Antonio Porto (Lisbon)
David Sands (Copenhagen)
Akinori Yonezawa (Tokyo)
Local organizers (Bologna):
Roberto Gorrieri (chair), Marco Roccetti,
Mauro Gaspari, Paola Salomoni, Vittorio Maniezzo,
Riccardo Focardi, Nadia Busi, Marco Bernardo.
Deadline for submissions: October 30, 1995
Notification of acceptance: December 15, 1995
Camera-ready version due: January 15, 1996
Springer will publish the proceedings in the LNCS series.
INFORMATION
COORDINATION'96
Chris Hankin
Department of Computing
Imperial College
180 Queen's Gate
LONDON SW7 2BZ, UK
Phone: +44 171 594 8266
Fax: +44 171 581 8024
Email: coord@doc.ic.ac.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Heinrich Wansing <wansing@rz.uni-leipzig.de>
Subject: Announcement: Book- Knowledge and Belief, Laux and Wansing ed.
To: nl-kr@cs.rpi.edu
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 95 9:18:50 MESZ
Book announcement:
Armin Laux and Heinrich Wansing (eds.),
Knowledge and Belief in Philosophy and
Artificial Intelligence,
This book examines the concepts of knowledge and belief
and their formalization in systems of epistemic logic,
concepts which are equally central to philosophy and
artificial intelligence research (AI). The original
contributions compiled in "Knowledge and Belief in
Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence" give an excellent
overview of the current state of research in a field which
has now developed into one of the focal areas of knowledge
representation.
Contents:
- David Pearce:
Epistemic Operators and Knowledge-Based Reasoning.
A Survey and Critical Comparison of some Recent
Approaches in Philosophy and AI
- Andrea Gr"aber, Hans J"urgen B"urckert, and
Armin Laux:
Terminological Reasoning with Knowledge and Belief
- Ullrich Hustadt:
Introducing Epistemic Operators into a Description
Logic
- Harrie de Swart and Cecylia Rauszer:
Different Approaches to Knowledge, Common Knowledge
and Aumann's Theorem
- Bernd van Linder, Wiebe van der Hoek, and
John-Jules Meyer:
Actions That Make You Change Your Mind
- Ulrich Wille:
Indicative Conditionals and Autoepistemic Reasoning
- Gerhard Lakemeyer:
Relevance in a Logic of Only Knowing About and its
Axiomatization
- Wolfgang Lenzen:
On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Epistemic
Attitudes
- Anthony Jameson:
Logic Is Not Enough: Why Reasoning About Another
Person's Belief Is Reasoning Under Uncertainty
The editors:
Armin Laux
e-mail: laux@dfki.uni-sb.de
Heinrich Wansing
e-mail: wansing@rz.uni-leipzig.de
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
To: comp-ai-nlang-know-rep@munnari.oz.au
From: "John O'Neill" <jao@dsto.defence.gov.au>
Subject: Announcement: AI'95 Postgraduate Student Session, Nov 95, Canberra
Date: 22 Sep 1995 01:34:35 GMT
AI'95 POSTGRADUATE STUDENT SESSION
----------------------------------
The Eighth Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI'95
13-17 November 1995
Hosted by
Department of Computer Science
University College, The University of New South Wales
Australian Defence Force Academy
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
AI'95 Postgraduate Student Session
----------------------------------
AI'95 is offering research students the opportunity to present and discuss
their research with luminaries in the AI field including: Kenneth De Jong,
William Clancey, Susan Garavaglia, Usama Fayyard, and James Bezdek.
Session Format
--------------
Students will be allocated to a particular "luminary" based on their research
interests identified in their submitted paper. It is anticipated that a maximum
of 6 students will be allocated to each "luminary", providing a 10 minute
discussion of each students work.
The Postgraduate Student Session is scheduled for Tuesday 14th November, 1995
at 5:30pm. The session is scheduled to run for one hour, and will commence
after the tutorials and workshops have concluded, and prior to the welcome
barbeque (which starts at 6:30pm).
Student Eligibility
-------------------
Students enrolled in PhD's, Masters, and Honours programs in the fields of
Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science are eligible for the AI'95
Postgraduate Student Session.
Abstract Submission
----------------------------
Students are invited to submit a one page abstract containing the following
information:
- Name and institution
- Description of research problem
- Methods used
- Progress to Date
- Specific issues for discussion
Abstracts are to be submitted electronically to John O'Neill (email:
jao@itd.dsto.gov.au) by October 27.
All students will receive copies of all submitted abstracts.
Key Dates
---------
- October 27 - Last date for abstracts to be submitted
- November 6 - Details about Postgraduate Session forwarded to participants
- November 14 - Postgraduate Student Session
NOTE: To participate in the AI'95 Postgraduate Student Session, it is a
requirement that students register for the main conference.
Further Information
-------------------
Further information about the AI'95 Postgraduate Student Session: contact John
O'Neill (email: jao@itd.dsto.gov.au)
Further information about AI'95: check our Web page:
http://www.cs.adfa.oz.au/~secretary/ai95.html
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 04:12:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: NL KR editors
To: nl-kr@ai.sunnyside.com
Subject: Announcement: Metaphor Project, Sep/Oct 95, Los Angeles
and now for something a little different...
Metaphor In Mind And Body
A Lecture / Discussion Series
>From the Metaphors We Live By Project
Saturday Mornings
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
September 9 - October 28
Midnight Special
Bookstore & Cultural Center
1318 Third Street Promenade
Santa Monica, California
(310) 393-2923
email: msbooks@msbooks.com
website: http://msbooks.com/msbooks
INTRODUCTION:
Traditionally, metaphor has been treated as an exotic, fanciful, decorative
device limited to the realm of poetry, and antithetical to accurate
communication. In contrast, this series explores the new understanding of
metaphor as central to human understanding, rooted in everyday life, and
underlying the specialized branches of knowledge that grow out of our common
experience.
For instance, the everyday metaphor ideas are plants underlies expressions
like a fruitful imagination, branches of mathematics, a theory rooted in
solid ground, a barren concept, and planting the seeds of an idea that
would take years to flower.
In 1980, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson planted the seeds of an idea -- that
metaphor is central to human thought -- in their book, Metaphors We Live By.
This series offers the general public a chance to see for themselves just
how this idea has flowered, and to plant some seeds of their own.
*
Session 1, September 9
Mark Johnson: Metaphoric Morality
Research in the cognitive sciences over the last two decades has
revealed
remarkable ways in which human thought is both grounded in our bodily
experience and also thoroughly imaginative. This research has profound
implications for understanding moral reasoning: all our major moral concepts
are metaphorical in nature, as is the reasoning based upon them.
Taking these results seriously forces us to rethink our received
notions
about morality, especially the idea that there are strict moral laws and that
there is a single morally correct action for any given situation.
Johnson describes the metaphor system that underlies our Western
moral
tradition (with such metaphors as moral strength, moral authority, the split
self, and moral accounting) and shows how it influences our moral reasoning.
Instead of seeing morality as the application of moral rules, Johnson
stresses the need to emphasize the cultivation of moral imagination, and to
explore the MORALITY AS ART metaphor as a guide to moral wisdom.
Mark Johnson heads the Department of Philosophy at the University of
Oregon.
He works in the areas of philosophy of language, aesthetics, recent moral
theory, and Kant studies. He is co-author (with George Lakoff) of Metaphors
We Live By (University of Chicago, 1980) and the author of The Body in the
Mind (University of Chicago, 1988) and Moral Imagination (University of
Chicago, 1993). He is currently working on the role of the body and
imagination in human conceptualization and reasoning.
*
Session 2, September 16
George Lakoff: Metaphor in Everyday Life
We conceptualize the world using metaphor, so commonly,
automatically, and
unconsciously that we re not aware of it. As a result, we think
metaphorically a large part of the time, and act in our everyday lives on the
basis of the metaphors through which we understand the world. Over the past
fifteen years, it s been discovered that we share a fixed, conventional
system of conceptual metaphor--a system of thousands of "metaphorical
mappings," each permitting us to understand one domain of experience in terms
of another, typically more concrete, domain. Our brains are built for
metaphorical thought. Since we ve evolved with "high-level" cortical areas
taking input from "lower level" perceptual and motor areas, it should be no
surprise that spatial and motor concepts should form the basis of abstract
reason. Metaphor is the name we give to our capacity to use perceptual and
motor inferential mechanisms as the basis for abstract inferential
mechanisms. Metaphorical language is simply a consequence of this capacity
for metaphorical thinking.
The talk will range over a large part of our system of metaphorical
concepts -- our metaphorical systems for time, events, causation, emotions,
marriage, the self, and morality.
George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of
California at
Berkeley. He previously taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. He
has been a member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and
is past President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association. He
is presently on the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute and a Senior
Fellow of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. He is the
co-author of Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago, 1980) with Mark
Johnson, and More than Cool Reason (University of Chicago, 1989) with Mark
Turner and author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (University of Chicago,
1987).
*
Session 3, September 23
Ray Gibbs: Intentions, Minds & The Meanings of Metaphors
What role do speakers'/authors'/artists/ intentions play in the
interpretation of metaphor? A great deal of the psychological and linguistic
research has shown that recovery of speakers' intentions is fundamental to
interpersonal communication--speaking and listening, reading and writing--as
well as in creating and comprehending works of art.
But there are a variety of different ways that intentions might play
a role.
What s more, there is deep resistance to this concern with the role of
intention among scholars in the humanities and some social sciences. Debates
over intentionalism have raged for many years in the humanities (e.g., claims
about the "death of the author" by poststructuralist philosophers, literary
critics, and legal theorists). How do the issues raised in these debates fit
with what we know from empirical studies in the cognitive sciences?
This talk will put some of these issues into a greater
interdisciplinary
perspective. Gibbs will discuss many examples of the use of metaphor in
speech, writing, and the arts and pay close attention to how our recognition
of a person's intentions may or may not play a role in our interpretation of
metaphor. Examples will include works from Shakespeare, the Beatles, Pablo
Neruda, Joe Bob Briggs, Marcel Duchamp, and conversations between husbands
and wives, aircraft pilots before crashes, as well as various sports-team
logos, and museum exhibitions. Some discussion will also be directed to
metaphor interpretation in cross-linguistic communication.
Ray Gibbs is Professor of Psychology at the University of California
Santa
Cruz. He is the author of Poetics of Mind (Cambridge, 1994).
*
Session 4, September 30
Eve Sweetser:
Collaboration Between Metaphors: In and Out, Up and Down in English
Why is it down and out, not up and out or down and in ? Both
vertical
metaphors and container and center-periphery metaphors are central ways we
view society and the human psyche. Hierarchy and power are among the most
frequent senses of the up-down metaphors in English: UP is power and status.
Higher-ups in the company may look down on their subordinates, and a
roadblock to promotion is a glass ceiling (not a glass floor or a glass
wall). But those with high status in the high school class are the in crowd,
and the highest government authority is vested in central government, and
outlaws are the same folks as the criminal underworld. Although metaphors of
containment and exteriority focus on social acceptance rather than hierarchy,
they cover much the same territory, partly due to folk models which assert
that authority or status and group-membership go together.
Sweetser examines ways in which these two potentially independent
classes of
metaphors are correlated, or coaligned, in English. The result is a
remarkable systematic relationship between the two, a symbiosis or mutual
support relation. She will give other examples of the phenomenon in English
literature and everyday language: it may well be the case that aspects of
our linguistic and cognitive systems which initially appear unrelated are
actually part of a tightly interconnected conceptual structure. She will
further suggest that in this particular case, the correlation is based in
human experience, and in the structure of the human body, which is basic to
our metaphorical modeling of the psyche and society.
Eve Sweetser is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University
of
California, Berkeley, where she also teaches in the Cognitive Science Program
and in the Celtic Studies Program. She is the author of From Etymology to
Pragmatics: Cultural and metaphorical aspects of semantic structure
(Cambridge University Press, 1990), and is currently writing a textbook on
metaphor.
*
Session 5, October 7
Ron Langacker:
Cultural Knowledge and Conventional Imagery: Reflections in Grammar
Langacker is a founder of the field of cognitive linguistics. He has
been
developing the theory now called "cognitive grammar" for over 19 years.
Using examples from languages like Spanish, Samoan, and Uto-Aztecan, he will
discuss and exemplify 3 points:
(1) Languages provide conventional means of conceiving and
portraying
situations ("conventional imagery"). They can use expressions with
substantially different meanings to convey comparable information or describe
the same situation.
(2) Lexicon and grammar form a continuum of symbolic expressions.
The
conventional imagery they embody is a critical facet of their
characterization.
(3) Culture is reflected not just in lexicon, but also in grammar, in
numerous ways both direct and indirect.
Ron Langacker is Professor of Linguistics at the University of
California,
San Diego. He is the author of Concept, Image and Symbol (Mouton de Gruyter,
1991).
*
Sessin 6, October 14
Keith J. Holyoak: Analogical Thinking
This talk is based on Holyoak s recently published book Mental Leaps:
Analogy in Creative Thought (1995, MIT Press), co-authored with Paul Thagard.
The book presents a general theory of analogical thinking that includes an
analysis of how the capacity to use analogy evolved in primates, how it
develops in children, and how it s used to reason in fields such as law,
politics, philosophy and science.
Keith J. Holyoak is a Professor of Psychology at UCLA. He received
his
Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University, and taught at the
University of Michigan for 10 years before coming to UCLA. He has been a
Guggenheim Fellow, and is the Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Psychology.
His research interests lie in the general area of reasoning and problem
solving, including the role of analogy in thinking and how it serves as a
psychological mechanism for learning and transfer of knowledge.
*
Session 7, October 21
Gilles Fauconnier: Cognitive Mappings and Blended Spaces in Language and
Thought
Other speakers in the series explore metaphor and metonymy as they
reflect
deep conceptual connections in our system of thought. Fauconnier will talk
about another cognitive process at work in everyday thought, language,
literature, action and emotion, and the development of science, among other
domains of human experience. This process is conceptual blending. And it has
systematic properties: It sets up a generic space, establishes
correspondences between inputs, and creates a blended mental space. This
space has emergent structure that can be used creatively.
This talk will illustrate this operation of the mind using examples
from
everyday life, science, literature, cartoons, and such children's classics as
The Runaway Bunny.
Gilles Fauconnier is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University
of
California, San Diego, where he teaches in the Cognitive Science Department.
He is the author of Mental Spaces (Cambridge University Press, 1994), and a
forthcoming book, Cognitive Mappings in Language and Thought (Cambridge
University Press).
*
Session 8, October 28.
Donald C. Freeman: Metaphoric Systems & Literary Interpretation
This talk will explore the analytical and interpretive power of
cognitive
metaphor. The theory of cognitive metaphor argues that we understand such
abstractions as knowledge, careers, and justice by mapping onto them the
entities and structure of schematized bodily or enculturated experience: for
justice, the schema of balance; for careers, the schema of the path; for
knowledge, the schema of vision.
In a case study of Shakespeare s Othello, Freeman will demonstrate
how the
potent metaphorical projection SEEING IS KNOWING characterizes patterns of
the play s language, structural aspects of its character relationships, and
the sequence of events that constitutes its plots. It is not accidental that
the same Othello who demands of Iago, Give me the ocular proof, says as he
prepares to murder a Desdemona traduced by Iago s false ocular proofs, Put
out the light, and then put out the light. The theory of cognitive metaphor
offers a coherent, systematic accounting for these seemingly disparate
elements of plot, language, and character.
Donald C. Freeman is Professor of English and Law at the University
of
Southern California. He has also taught at the University of California,
Santa Barbara; Temple University; and the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, where he founded the department of linguistics. He has also held
visiting professorships at universities in Canada, Great Britain, Germany,
and Austria.
Freeman has published more than fifty scholarly articles and reviews
on
various aspects of literary and legal language, and edited Linguistics and
Literary Style (Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1970) and Essays in Modern
Stylistics (Methuen, 1981). At present he is completing Shakespeare Metaphor:
Cognitive Linguistics and Literary Interpretation.
*** YOU'RE INVITED! ***
We especially invite participation by the many people in LA who speak
languages other than English. Your questions and examples from your
language
and cultural background are especially desired.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This series is made possible by a grant from the California Council
for the
Humanities under the sponsorship of Beyond Baroque Foundation and by the
continued support of Midnight Special Bookstore, which carries books by
series presenters.
*** Recommended Introduction for this series: Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff
and Johnson (University of Chicago, 1980).
End of NL-KR Digest
*******************
