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Newsletter June 27, No. 35



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
June 27, 1985                   Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 35
_____________________________________________________________________________
                                
     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, June 27, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``The Algebra of Events''
     Conference Room    by Emmon Bach
			Discussion led by Edit Doron
		
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``An Organism and Its Internal Model of the World''
     Room G-19          Pentti Kanerva, CSLI
			Discussion led by Alex Pentland

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Qualitative Process Theory''
     Room G-19		Ken Forbus, University of Illinois, Computer Science
                               ___________
                              ANNOUNCEMENT

   Next Thursday, July 4, is a National Holiday and no activities will
   take place.


Page 2                     CSLI Newsletter                      June 27, 1985
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                 AREA P1 MEETING: PIXELS AND PREDICATES
         ``Visual Communication for Severely Impaired Aphasics''
       Richard D. Steele, Rehab R&D Center, Palo Alto VA Hospital
               Wednesday, July 3, 11:00 a.m., Ventura Hall

      The study to be presented concerns the progress of a single,
   globally aphasic individual who has been trained on a computerized,
   extended version of the visual communication system ``VIC'' originally
   developed and tested by Baker (1975), Gardner (1976), and their
   colleagues. The VIC system is currently implemented on a Mactinosh XL
   computer. The goal has been to produce a device that combines lexical
   and grammatical richness with ease of use and practical utility. After
   one year of work, results show that:
      a) Errors favor telegraphic communications,
      b) Prepositions and word order present the greatest difficulty,
      c) The patient has learned to comprehend and construct both simple
   phrases and complex communications including possessives and conjoined
   constructions,
      d) Performance is better for reception than for production
   performance,
      e) The patient readily activates the translation device and
   initiates communications in situationally appropriate contexts.  
      A video tape will be shown of the patient using the computerized VIC
   system.
                              _____________
                                CSLI TALK
                   ``A Situational Theory of Analogy''
                 Todd Davies, Stanford Philosophy Dept.
                         Ventura Conference Room
                     Monday, July 1, 1985, 1:15 p.m.

     Analogy in logic is generally given the form:
   		 P(A)&Q(A)
   	 and	 P(B) are premises
   		 ---------
       therefore Q(B) 
   can be concluded, where P is a property or set of properties held by
   the analogous situation A in common with the present situation B, and
   where Q is a property which is initially held to be true of A.  The
   question is: What justifies the conclusion?  Sometimes the conclusion
   is clearly bogus, but for other pairs of situations and properties it
   seems quite plausible. I will give examples of both intuitively good
   and intuitively bad analogies as a way to argue that theories of
   analogy hitherto proposed have yet to answer this question, and that
   the rationale for analogy which has been assumed for most early work
   on analogy in AI -- namely, that the inference is good if and only if
   the situations being compared are similar enough -- is inadequate.  I
   will also point to traditional logic's inadequacies as a formal
   language for analogy and develop a theory which incorporates ideas
   from (and finds its easiest expression in) the theory of situations of
   Barwise and Perry.  The theory suggests a general means by which
   computers can infer conclusions about problems which have analogues
   for which the solution is known, when failing to inspect the analogue
   would make such an inference impossible.
      The discussion following will be led by David H. Helman, Case
   Western Reserve University and CSLI

Page 3                     CSLI Newsletter                      June 27, 1985
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                         CSLI VISITING SCHOLARS

      This is a brief summary of the Visiting Scholars who have already
   arrived at the Center for the summer.

   1) Kimmo Koskenniemi has been here since the first of June and will be
   with us until the first of August.  He is currently with the
   University of Helsinki and is working on morphological analysis with
   Martin Kay, Ron Kaplan, and Lauri Karttunen.

   2) Dorit Abusch arrived two weeks ago and will stay until the middle
   of October.  She will then return to Israel to teach at the University
   of Tel Aviv.  John Perry is her sponsor.

   3) Yves Lesperance has been at the Center since June 10 and will leave
   at the end of August.  He is from the University of Toronto Computer
   Science Department, and his sponsor is David Israel.  Among other
   things he will participate in the CSLI Summer School.

   4) David Helman, who is from the Center for Automation and Intelligent
   Systems at Case Western Reserve University, came in late May and will
   be here through the first week in August.

   5) Manfred Pinkal has been here since the first of the month and will
   be here through the end of August.  He is from the University of
   Duesseldorf, and his sponsor is Hans Uszkoreit.

   Thus far, we know of at least four more visitors who will be with us
   in the next month.

   1) Irene Guessarian arrives on June 30 and will stay for approximately
   four weeks.  She will collaborate on a paper with Jose Meseguer.
   Professor Guessarian is from the National Center for Scientific
   Research in France.

   2) Peter Mosses will arrive during the second week in July and will be
   here for a month.  Dr. Mosses is currently at Aarhus University in the
   Computer Science Department.  His sponsor is Joseph Goguen, and his
   specialty is denotational semantics.

   3) Luis Monteiro will come on the first of July and will be here for
   two months.  He is from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and his
   sponsor is Fernando Pereira.

   4) Harald Ganzinger of Dortmund University will be here starting July
   19 and will stay until the third of August.  Professor Ganzinger's
   sponsor is Jose Meseguer.				--Dave Brown

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