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Newsletter Nov. 15, No. 5



                       C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
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November 15, 1984               Stanford                      Vol. 2, No. 5
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         A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and 
	 Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                           ____________ 

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1984

12 noon                 TINLunch
  Ventura Hall          ``CSLI and Industry: Where do we go from here?''
  Conference Room       Discussion led by Susan Stucky
				
2:30 p.m.               CSLI Seminar
  Redwood Hall          ``Natural Language from the Standpoint of
  Room G-19             Artificial Intelligence'' by John McCarthy
                        Discussant will be Bob Moore. (Please NOTE that
                        today's seminar will be held at 2:30.)
                        (Abstract on page 2)

3:45 p.m.               Tea
  Ventura Hall          Because of today's delayed Seminar schedule, teatime
                        will be at 3:45.

4:15 p.m.               CSLI Colloquium
  Redwood Hall          No colloquium today.
  Room G-19
****************************************************************************
        The Newsletter will not appear on Thanksgiving Thursday,
        November 22. Publication resumes on Thursday, November 29.
        Have a nice Thanksgiving.
****************************************************************************

                SCHEDULE FOR ***THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29,*** 1984

12 noon                 TINLunch
  Ventura Hall          Title to be announced
  Conference Room       Discussion led by Lauri Carlson
				
2:15 p.m.               CSLI Seminar
  Redwood Hall          ``Parsing Acoustic Events''
  Room G-19             by Meg Withgott

3:30 p.m.               Tea
  Ventura Hall		

4:15 p.m.               CSLI Colloquium
  Redwood Hall          No colloquium today. The following Thursday,
  Room G-19             December 6, there will be a discussion of DOD
                        funding by Donald Kennedy, President, Stanford,
                        and Sydney Drell, Dep. Dir., SLAC.
                        John Etchemendy, Host
Page 2                   CSLI Newsletter                  November 15, 1984
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                 PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM

Speaker:  Barry Smith (Manchester)
Title:    ``On the Ontology of Cognition:  Husserlian Reflections''
Time:     Friday, November 16, 3:15
Place:    Philosophy Seminar Room 90-92Q

ABSTRACT: My talk will be an application of the ideas in logic and formal
ontology put forward by Husserl, particularly in his 3rd Logical
Investigation (``On the Theory of Wholes and Parts''), to the understanding
of the structures of cognitive acts.  I want to deal especially with the
relations between cognitive acts and their objects in cases which involve
indexical uses of language (the relation between language and perception).
                           ____________

                ABSTRACT OF TODAY'S SEMINAR
  ``Natural language from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence''

An intelligent individual, human or computer program, must act on the basis
of what it believes in advance modified by what it observes and what it
learns from linguistic communication.  Thinking about how the achievement
of goals is helped by communication leads to a somewhat different point of
view from one derived mainly from study of the corpus of spoken and written
language.  Namely,
  1. Communication should be regarded as a modifier of state of mind.
  2. The most basic form of communication is the single word sentence
        uttered under conditions in which the speaker and hearer share enough
        knowledge so that the single word suffices.  The complete sentence
        develops under conditions in which the speaker and the hearers share
        less context.
  3. Many of the characteristics of language are determined by so far
        unrecognized requirements of the communication situation.  They will
        apply to machines as well as people.
  4. An effort to make a Common Business Communication Languages for
        commercial communication among machines belonging to different
        organizations exhibits interesting problems of the semantics of
        language.
                                                ---John McCarthy
                           ____________ 

                        DISSERTATION PROPOSAL

William Croft will present his dissertation proposal ``Categories and
Relations in Syntax: The organization of information at the clause level''
on Tuesday, November 20, at 3:15 p.m. in bldg 200 room 217.
                           ____________ 

                        NEW CSLI REPORT

A final edition of Report No. CSLI-9-84, ``The Implementation of Procedurally
Reflective Languages'' by Jim des Rivieres and Brian Cantwell Smith, has just
been published. Copies may be obtained by writing to Dikran Karagueuzian
at the Center (Dikran at SU-CSLI).
Page 3                   CSLI Newsletter                  November 15, 1984
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            CSLI WORKSHOP ON THE SEMANTICS OF PROGRAMS

Tuesday, December 4, 1984
Location: The Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, Princeton CA
          (a suburb of Half-Moon Bay)

One of the central concerns within CSLI is semantics--how forms in a
language can be characterized as conveying meaning in relation to some world
of concern.  There are long-standing traditions for the study of natural
language semantics, and CSLI projects have been extending and reinterpreting
them. There is a briefer, but substantial, tradition for the study of the
semantics of programming languages.  Over the past few months, there have
been a series of presentations and discussions about similarities and
differences between the semantic accounts of natural and computational
languages. Theories of natural language semantics have raised a number of
issues, of which only some have received adequate attention in the semantics
of programming languages. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss how some
of these theories can give rise to better accounts of the relation between
programs/program executions and the world.  Participation in the workshop
is by invitation only.  If you are interested in being invited to the
workshop, contact Ole Lehrmann Madsen (Madsen at SU-CSLI). If you have any
questions regarding the workshop you may contact Terry Winograd
(TW at SU-SAIL) or Ole Lehrmann Madsen.
                           ____________ 

                           AREA F--3 MEETING

Time:   Wednesday, November 21, noon.
Place:  Ventura Seminar Room

The F-3 group will meet on November 21, at noon, to discuss Turing's ``On
Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entsheidungsproblem.'' Copies
of the paper may be obtained from Ingrid Deiwiks in Ventura, Room 20 (Ingrid
at SU-CSLI).  (The discussion will concentrate on sections 1,2,3,8, and 9.)
This is the first of a number of meetings devoted to issues in the foun-
dations of computation.  Those who would like to attend these meetings can
ask Emma Pease (Emma at SU-CSLI) to put their names on the F-3 mailing list.
                           ____________

                        AREA P--1 MEETING

This week's CSLI perception (P--1) meeting will join with NASA's perception
and cognition seminar:

    Who:    Susan Brennan
    From:   HP Labs
    When:   12 noon, Wednesday, November 14, 1984.
    Where:  Room 177, Building 239, NASA Ames Research Center
    What:   Charicatures From Images

A fascinating talk and videotape about representing human faces and
automatic charicaturing of them. For information on how to get to Ames,
call 415-694-6584.

Page 4                   CSLI Newsletter                  November 15, 1984
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                SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK'S SEMINAR

Phil Cohen of SRI gave a seminar in which he claimed that illocutionary act
recognition is not necessary for engaging in communicative interaction.
Rather, engaging in such interaction requires intent/plan recognition.  In
support of this claim, he presented a formalism, being developed with Hector
Levesque (Univ.  of Toronto), that showed how illocutionary acts could be
defined in terms of plans --- i.e., as beliefs about the conversants' shared
knowledge of the speaker's and hearer's goals and the causal consequences
of achieving those goals.  In this formalism, illocutionary acts are no
longer conceptually primitive, but rather amount to theorems that can be
proven about a state-of-affairs.  As an illustration, the definition of a
direct request was derived from an independently-motivated theory of action,
rather than stipulated.  Just as one need not determine if a proof
corresponds to a prior lemma, a hearer need not actually characterize the
consequences of each utterance in terms of the IA theorems, but can simply
infer and respond to the speaker's goals.  However, the hearer could
retrospectively summarize a complex of utterances as satisfying an
illocutionary act.  Moreover, it was claimed that the framework can
characterize a range of indirect speech acts as lemmas, which can be derived
from and integrated with plan-based reasoning.  The discussant, Ivan Sag,
related the theory to Gricean maxims of conversation, and to the ``standard''
view of how pragmatics fits into a theory of linguistic communication.

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