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Newsletter October 31, No. 52
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Subject: Newsletter October 31, No. 52
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From: csli@csli.stanford.edu
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Date: Wed 30 Oct 1985 16:47:32-PST
C S L I N E W S L E T T E R
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October 31, 1985 Stanford Vol. 2, No. 52
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A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, October 31, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall The Formation of Adjectival Passives
Conference Room by B. Levin and M. Rappaport
Discussion led by Mark Gawron
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Redwood Hall Foundations of Document Preparation
Room G-19 David Levy, CSLI and Xerox PARC
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium
Redwood Hall The Structure of Social Facts
Room G-19 Prof. John Searle, Dept. of Philosophy, UC Berkeley
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CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, November 7, 1985
12 noon TINLunch
Ventura Hall James Gibson's Ecological Revolution in Psychology
Conference Room by E. S. Reed and R. K. Jones
Discussion led by Ivan Blair, CSLI
(Abstract on page 2)
2:15 p.m. CSLI Seminar
Redwood Hall Phonology/Phonetics Seminar
Room G-19 Bill Poser and Paul Kiparsky
(Abstract on page 2)
3:30 p.m. Tea
Ventura Hall
4:15 p.m. CSLI Colloquium
Redwood Hall Meaning, Information and Possibility
Room G-19 Lofti A. Zadeh, Computer Science Division
University of California at Berkeley
(Abstract on page 2)
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Page 2 CSLI Newsletter October 31, 1985
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ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
James Gibson's Ecological Revolution in Psychology
E. S. Reed and R. K. Jones
From about 1950 until his death, James Gibson constantly argued for
a view of and a research program for cognitive psychology that
differed radically from the mainstream position. Today the dominant
view in cognitive psychology is of cognitive agents as information
processors, a view to which the advent of the modern digital computer
has given a considerable boost. In the paper for this week's
Tinlunch, Reed and Jones characterize and contrast the Gibsonian (or
ecological) and information processing approaches.
My intention is to use this article to lay out for discussion the
basic principles of the ecological approach. The issues to be
considered include: the need for cognitive psychology to study the
organism in a real environment; the ecological program of studying
the environmental sources of information; and the rejection of any
appeal to mental representations in psychological explanation.
--Ivan Blair
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NEXT WEEK'S CSLI SEMINAR
Abstract of Phonology/Phonetics seminar
Post-lexical phonological rules are associated with a hierarchy of
nested domains, which are systematically related to phrase structure.
There is growing evidence in favor of recent proposals that this
hierarchy is universal. In this talk, we show that Japanese has tonal
rules associated with each of the postulated post-lexical domains, and
propose a cross-linguistic account for one of the prosodic domains,
the phonological phrase. --Bill Poser, Paul Kiparsky
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NEXT WEEK'S CSLI COLLOQUIUM
Meaning, Information and Possibility
L.A. Zadeh, Computer Science Division, University of
California, Berkeley, CA 94720}
Our approach to the connection between meaning and information is in
the spirit of the Carnap-Bar-Hillel theory of state descriptions.
However, our point of departure is the assumption that any proposition,
p, may be expressed as a generalized assignment statement of the form
X `isr' C, where X is a variable which is usually implicit in p, C is
an elastic constraint on the values which X can take in a universe of
discourse U, and the suffix r in the copula `isr' is a variable whose
values define the role of C in relation to X. The principal roles are
those in which r is d, in which case C is a disjunctive constraint; and
r is c, p and g, in which cases C is conjunctive, probabilistic, and
granular, respectively. In the case of a disjunctive constraint, `isd'
is written for short as `is', and C plays the role of a graded possibility
distribution which associates with each point (or, equivalently,
state-description) the degree to which it can be assigned as a value to X.
This possibility distribution, then, is interpreted as the information
conveyed by p. Based on this interpretation, we can construct a set of
rules of inference which allow the possibility distribution of a
conclusion to be deduced from the possibility distributions of the
premises. In general, the process of inference reduces to the solution
of a nonlinear program and the traditional methods of deduction in
first-order logic are explained and illustrated by examples.
Page 3 CSLI Newsletter October 31, 1985
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ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
NoteCards: An Environment for Authoring and Idea Structuring
Randy Trigg, Xerox PARC
Monday, November 4, noon, Ventura Seminar Room
NoteCards is part of an ongoing research project in the Intelligent
Systems Lab at Xerox PARC investigating "idea processing" tasks, such
as interpreting textual information, structuring ideas, formulating
arguments, and authoring complex documents. NoteCards is intended
primarily as an idea structuring tool, but it can also be used as a
fairly general database system for loosely structured information.
The basic object in NoteCards is an electronic note card containing
an idea-sized unit of text, graphics, images, or whatever. Different
kinds of note cards are defined in an inheritance hierarchy of note
card types (e.g., text cards, sketch cards, query cards, etc.). On
the screen, multiple cards can be simultaneously displayed, each one
in a separate window having an underlying editor appropriate to the
card type.
Individual note cards can be connected to other note cards by
arbitrarily typed links, forming networks of related cards. At
present, link types are simply labels attached to each link. It is up
to each user to utilize the link types to organize the note card
network.
NoteCards also includes a filing mechanism for building
hierarchical structures using system-defined card and link types.
There are also browser cards containing node-link diagrams (i.e.,
maps) of arbitrary pieces of the note card network and Sketch cards
for organizing information in the form of drawings, text and links
spatially.
All of the functionality in NoteCards is accessible through a set
of well-documented Lisp functions, allowing the user to create new
types of note cards, develop programs that monitor or process the note
card network, and/or integrate other programs into the NoteCards
environment.
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PIXELS AND PREDICATES
The Caricature Generator
Susan Brennan
CSLI trailers, 1:00 p.m., Wednesday, November 6, 1985
In an investigation of primitives for image generation,
manipulation and perception, a face is an interesting example of an
image. I will briefly survey psychological literature on face
perception which treats such issues as piecemeal vs. configurational
recognition strategies. I'll describe an application where a
caricature of a face serves as a form of semantic bandwidth
compression. Then, with additional inspiration from art, computer
graphics and machine vision, I'll develop a theory of caricature.
Conditions permitting, there will be a demonstration of a program
which generates caricatures of faces from line drawings and provides
the user with a single exaggeration control with which the distortion
in the image (relative to a norm) can be turned up or down. I will
also show a videotape and refer to the work that Gill Rhodes and I
have been doing recently on perception of these caricatures.
Page 4 CSLI Newsletter October 31, 1985
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INTERACTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX
Case-Assignment by Nominals in Japanese
Masayo Iida
Thursday, October 31, 10:00 a.m., Ventura Conference Room
In this paper I will discuss certain peculiar properties of a class
of Japanese deverbal nominals, which show verb-like properties in
certain environments: specifically, they assign verbal case and can be
modified by adverbs (`verbal case' includes nominative, accusative and
dative, i.e., cases normally assigned by a verb). These
case-assignment phenomena pose a problem for current syntactic
theories, which assume that verbs alone assign such cases, while nouns
do not. Now I have observed that a deverbal nominal assigns verbal
case only when it is concatenated with a suffix bearing temporal
information, which might be encoded with the feature [+aspect]. The
nominal assigns case when the following two conditions are satisfied:
(i) the nominal has a predicate-argument structure, and (ii) it is
concatenated with a suffix which bears an aspectual feature. I will
propose that (syntactic) category membership is not sufficient for
determining properties of case-assignment, adverb distribution, etc.,
and suggest that the factors (i) and (ii) are perhaps more relevant.
--Masayo Iida
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LOGIC SEMINAR
``Truth, the Liar, and Circular Propositions''
John Etchemendy and Jon Barwise, Philosophy Dept. Stanford
Friday, Nov. 1, noon, 383N (Math. Dept. Faculty Lounge)
Unlike standard treatments of the Liar, we take seriously the
intuition that truth is, first and foremost, a property of
propositions (not of sentences), and the intuition that propositions
(unlike sentences) can be genuinely circular or nonwellfounded. To
model the various semantic mechanisms that give rise to the paradox,
we work within Peter Aczel's set theory, ZFC/AFA, a theory
equiconsistent with ZFC but with Foundation replaced by a strong
anti-foundation axiom. We give two separate models; one based on an
Austinian conception of propositions (according to which a proposition
claims that an actual or ``historical'' situation is of a specified
type), and one based on a Russellian conception (according to which
propositions are complexes of objects and relations). The models show
that the moral of the Liar depends in a crucial way on which
conception is adopted.
Page 5 CSLI Newsletter October 31, 1985
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SUMMARY OF ENVIRONMENTS GROUP MEETING
October 28, 1985
Wolfgang Pollak of Kestrel spoke on the ADA programming environment
he helped develop at Rational Systems. By combining dedicated special
hardware (high-level-language oriented) with a monolingual operating
system / command language / environment (written entirely in ADA and
supported with specialized microcode and memory management), it was
possible to design the environment in a unified way using the language
itself as the structure. All storage is handled by making it possible
for arbitrary data objects in the language to be declared
``persistent,'' rather than having a separate concept of files. These
persistent objects are the locus of object management (access control,
versions, etc.). The environment is editor-based, with the commands
extended by using arbitrary function calls in the language. It
incorporates a concept of unitary action, which allows the user to
make a sequence of changes and then either commit (in which case they
all take effect at once) or abandon (in which case the state is as if
none of them ever happened). Wolf described a number of techniques
for making the environment incremental---for keeping the feel that
each small change takes effect as it is made, rather than waiting for
some large-scale redisplay or compile. Discussion emphasized the way
that a number of these issues and techniques could apply to other
environments.
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