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Newsletter May 16, No. 29



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
May 16, 1985                    Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 29
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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, May 16, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Combinators, Categorial Grammars, and Parasitic
     Conference Room    Gaps'' by Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
			Discussion led by Hans Uszkoreit, CSLI and SRI
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Action Theory for Dialogue Games''
     Room G-19          Lauri Carlson, CSLI
			Discussion led by Phil Cohen			

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Tracking Dogs and the Traces of Speech''
     Room G-19		Vicki Hearne, Yale University
			(Abstract on page 2)
			
                               ___________

            CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, May 23, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``A Procedural Logic''
     Conference Room    Michael Georgeff (SRI and CSLI), Amy Lansky (SRI),
			and Pierre Bessiere (SRI)	
			(Abstract on page 2)

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Representations, Information, and the 
     Room G-19          Physical World'' by Ivan Blair
			Discussion led by Meg Withgott
			(Abstract on page 2)

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Lexical Structure Constraints and Morphological
     Room G-19		Parsing''
			John McCarthy, AT&T Bell Laboratories
			(Abstract on page 3)			

Page 2  		     CSLI Newsletter   	                  May 16, 1985
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                   ABSTRACT OF THIS WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
               ``Tracking Dogs and the Traces of Speech''

      Extended examination of the language by means of which tracking dog
   handlers think about their work and actually do work their dogs. What's
   at stake is an initial question about whether there is any knowledge
   that language can provide that can go outside of the exchanges that
   are our performance of knowledge. I use the case of tracking dogs to
   challenge the skeptic's sense that the problem of the other is the
   problem of knowing the other, not in order foolishly to attempt to
   bring skepticism to an end but rather to suggest a new turn skepticism
   might take. But skepticism must admit that dogs exist in order to find
   itself again.					--Vicki Hearne
                              ____________
                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                         ``A Procedural Logic''

      Much of our commonsense knowledge about the real world is concerned
   with the way things are done.  This knowledge is often in the form of
   `procedures' or `sequences' of actions for achieving particular goals.
   In this paper, a formalism is presented for representing such
   knowledge based on the notion of `process'.  A declarative semantics
   for the representation is given, which allows a user to state `facts'
   about the effects of doing things in the problem domain of interest.
   An operational semantics is also provided, which shows `how' this
   knowledge can be used to achieve given goals or to form intentions
   regarding their achievement.  The formalism also serves as an
   executable program specification language suitable for constructing
   complex systems.			--Michael Georgeff and Amy Lansky
                              ____________
                     ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
        ``Representations, Information, and the Physical World''

      The notions of representation and information have been much used
   in recent cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, yet much
   remains to be done to determine more precisely what is meant by these
   notions, particularly in elucidating the basis of their
   intentionality.  I think that the place to start with an investigation
   of these matters is the analysis proposed by Howard Pattee.  Pattee
   has for a long time wrestled with the question of how symbols are
   related to their referents, and has tried to establish some general
   principles of the symbol-referent or symbol-matter relation.
      I shall attempt to do two things in this presentation.  Firstly, I
   want to explain as briefly as possible Pattee's view of symbolic
   information (information carried by a symbol or string of symbols) and
   the relation of symbolic information to the physical world.  Secondly,
   I shall consider a prominent theory of information -- Dretske's, as
   presented in his book, ``Knowledge and the Flow of Information''
   (1981), -- in the light of various results about the nature of symbols
   and information that emerge from Pattee's analysis.		--Ivan Blair


Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                     May 16, 1985
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                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
       ``Lexical Structure Constraints and Morphological Parsing''

      A number of formal constraints on lexical structure developed on
   the basis of investigations in linguistic theory can be shown to
   contribute directly to the design of a morphological parser.  These
   constraints include both exceptionless principles and well-established
   tendencies of lexical entries, drawn from Semitic languages and other
   nonconcatenative morphological systems.  A constraint like the
   Obligatory Contour Principle, which in the instance prohibits Arabic
   roots with adjacent identical elements, has a straightforward analogue
   in the parser: modulo affixation, identical surface consonants must
   derive from the same root consonant.  A tendency for Arabic roots to
   avoid containing `t' or `y' in initial position can permit parsing
   without regard to at least some of the affixational possibilities of
   Arabic verbs as well.  The observation that reduplicative affixes
   constitute well-formed phonological constituents (McCarthy and Prince
   1985) suggests ways of bringing reduplication under the purview of
   recent results in finite-state parsing.  In addition to these, several
   other such observations will be discussed.		--John McCarthy
                              ____________
                       LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT TALK
                  ``How Panini's Grammar is Composed''
                    S. D. Joshi, University of Poona
       Monday, May 20, 3:15, Bldg. 200, Room 303 (History Corner)

     The composition of a grammar consisting of `sutras' which are to
   be committed to memory and orally transmitted in recitation poses
   peculiar problems for the author: how to achieve the necessary
   brevity, how to indicate the connection between the rules, how to mark
   off individual rules in the continuous text.  We discuss, in a way
   intended to be accessible to non-Sanskritists, the formal techniques
   by which these problems are dealt with in the ``Astadhyayi'': a
   procedure for condensing sequences of partially similar rules,
   disjunctivity between general and particular rules, and special
   conventions for the use of the conjunction `ca'.  Their precise
   formulation yields criteria for resolving ambiguities of the `sutra'
   text and adds support for the hypothesis of multiple authorship.
                              ____________
                     SUMMARY OF PARSER DEMONSTRATION

      On Monday, May 14, Roland Hausser gave a talk and demonstration of
   a system of grammar and parsing he has been working on during his stay
   at CSLI.  He illustrated his system by applying it to German.  The
   grammar contains 32 linguistic rules covering declarative and
   interrogative main clauses, relative clauses embedded to arbitrary
   depth or extraposed, variant word-orders, adverbs and adverbial
   clauses, discontinuous constituents, coordinate structures, and other
   phenomena.  The parser employs a bottom-up, left-associative,
   data-driven algorithm and is implemented in Interlisp-D on the
   Dandelion.
                              ____________
                            AREA NL-2 MEETING
               Monday, May 20, 4:30, Ventura Seminar Room

      The discussion of Noam Chomsky's manuscript, ``Knowledge of
   Language: Its Nature, Origins, and Use,'' will continue.
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