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CSLI Calendar, 13 October 1994, vol.10:3
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To: friends
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 13 October 1994, vol.10:3
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From: Tom Burke <burke>
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Date: Wed, 12 Oct 1994 14:46:34 -0700
C S L I C A L E N D A R O F P U B L I C E V E N T S
______________________________________________________________________________
13 October 1994 Stanford Vol. 10, No. 3
______________________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the Center for the Study of Language and
Information (CSLI), Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
____________
CSLI ACTIVITIES DURING 13 -- 21 OCTOBER 1994
THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Concepts and Logics of Action
David Israel, SRI International
Abstract below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
The Ontology of Language and the Semantics of Quotation
Herman Cappelen, UC Berkeley Philosophy
Abstract below
4:15 - Symbolic Systems Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Some Lessons and Observations from a Lengthy Student Career
Todd Davies, Stanford Psychology
Abstract below
6:00 - CSGSS Open House
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Cognitive Science Graduate Student Society
Announcement below
FRIDAY, 14 OCTOBER
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
Indexed Systems of Sequents and Cut-Elimination
Grigori Mints, Stanford Philosophy
Abstract below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
McCullough Building, Room 134
The Interface Paradox
Jef Raskin
Abstract below
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Mental Spaces and the Grammar of Conditionals
Eve Sweetser, UC Berkeley Linguistics
Abstract below
WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER
4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Agents You Can Teach
Scott Huffman, Price Waterhouse Technology Center
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
An Introduction to Situation Theory
Keith Devlin, Saint Mary's College Mathematics
Abstract below
12:00 - Sociolinguistics Conference (NWAV23)
Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS)
23rd Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation
Thursday 20 October thru Sunday 23 October
Partial schedule below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Cognitive Development and Infinity's Missing Link:
Searching Beyond Smallness
Rafael Nunez, University of Fribourg
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Symbolic Systems Program Summer Interns Presentations
7:30 - Phonology Workshop
Building 460, Room 146
Anchors Away: A Unified Treatment of Ghost Segments
and Floating Features
Cheryl Zoll, UC Berkeley Linguistics
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 21 OCTOBER
9:00 - Sociolinguistics Conference (NWAV23)
Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS)
23rd Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation
Thursday 20 October thru Sunday 23 October
Partial schedule below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
McCullough Building, Room 134
High Resolution Virtual Reality
Michael Deering, SUN Microsystems
Abstract below
2:15 - Logic Seminar
Building 460, Room 301
Higher-Order Concurrent Linear Logic Programming
Noaki Kobayashi, University of Tokyo
Abstract below
____________
The CSLI Calendar appears on Thursday of each week throughout the academic
year. Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in the
Calendar on a given Thursday should be submitted by e-mail to
incalendar@csli.stanford.edu by 5:00 p.m. on the previous Tuesday.
Past issues of the CSLI Calendar, a quarterly schedule of upcoming CSLI
events, and other information about CSLI are available on the World Wide Web:
<http://csli-www.stanford.edu/>. The Calendar, with available abstracts, is
also posted each week to the csli.bboard newsgroup.
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 13 October
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Concepts and Logics of Action
David Israel
SRI International
<israel@ai.sri.com>
We present an extension to logics of action based on Propositional Dynamic
Logic. In particular, we include two kinds of modal operators, one based on
program terms, as in standard PDL, and one based on what Israel, Perry &
Tutiya called "accomplishment terms". (See also Segerberg's "Logic of
Bringing It About".) Following work of Pratt, Parikh, Kozen, and Harel we
extend the PDL framework in a different direction as well, so as to include
operators from branching-time temporal logic. We even try to motivate all
this machinery.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
on Thursday, 13 October
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
The Ontology of Language and the Semantics of Quotation
Herman Cappelen
UC Berkeley Philosophy
<hwcap@uclink2.berkeley.edu>
I argue that much work in philosophy of language and linguistics is based on
fundamentally mistaken assumptions about the relation between types and tokens
and about what we are talking about when we use quotation. The standard view
is that a type is some sort of abstract object, a class or a pattern, and that
quotations are singular noun phrases that denote these abstract objects. I
first show that the standard view is wrong. I then present a new theory of
what it is for entities/events to be occurrences of the same word. I use this
theory to develop a new analysis of quotation. On my view they are not
singular noun phrases. They are expressions that quantify over
entities/events that stand in a certain relation to each other.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 13 October
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Some Lessons and Observations from a Lengthy Student Career
Todd Davies
Stanford Psychology
<tdavies@csli.stanford.edu>
I've planned this session of the forum in order to introduce myself to
Symbolic Systems Program students. As such, this talk is intended for
undergraduates, but others are welcome to attend. I will discuss three pieces
of research I have done since my undergraduate days, emphasizing what led to
or motivated each project at the time. The three topics I will cover are (1)
a theory about the relationship between analogical reasoning and logical
deduction, work that was supervised by John Perry when I was an undergraduate
at Stanford, (2) a result about the conditions required for representing
propositions in neural networks, arrived at while I was working in the
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at SRI, and (3) experiments on the effect
of forced-choice procedures on human judgments of probability, the topic of my
forthcoming dissertation under Amos Tversky.
Each of these projects has taught me something different about how research
questions can arise. The first arose from introspective confusion, the second
from a desire to solidify an intuitive response to questions posed by others,
and the third from testing a longstanding empirical assumption and later from
a surprise in the results of that test. Each of the projects falls within
"cognitive science," but each was done in a different setting and within a
different academic discipline. I have had varying degrees of success and
failure in adapting to each of these settings, and as I marvel at the insights
achieved by my fellow researchers, many of whom employ strategies distinct
from the three above, I realize that my own experience as a thinker is still
quite limited and always will be. A general conclusion is that different
groups of researchers tend to emphasize and value different styles of inquiry,
and that it is worth observing one's own habits of mind and work in relation
to those of others.
As usual, the Forum is open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
____________
CSGSS OPEN HOUSE
on Thursday, 13 October
6:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Cognitive Science Graduate Student Society
Pizza and drinks provided by courtesy of the Symbolic Systems Program. This
is open to all interested members of the Stanford community.
* Meet students interested in Cognitive Science in other departments.
* Find out what we already have planned for the Fall.
* Suggest cool activities for the rest of the year.
* Volunteer to help out.
* Elect officers for 94-95 (president, treasurer, membership coordinator).
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 14 October
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
Indexed Systems of Sequents and Cut-Elimination
Grigori Mints
Stanford Philosophy
<mints@csli.stanford.edu>
Standard cut reductions are proved to be sufficient for cut elimination in a
Kripke-style formulation of modal logic in terms of indexed systems of
sequents. The proof is uniform for the propositional systems with all
combinations of reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity which may be taken for
the accessibility relation. Some new transformations of derivations (compared
to standard sequent formulations) are needed to carry out the proof.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 14 October
12:30 p.m., McCullough Building, Room 134
The Interface Paradox
Jef Raskin
<RaskinJef@aol.com>
In 1979 I proposed a commercial computer project that would be based on an
improved user interface, rather than having its genesis in the latest
processor or operating system. I called it "Macintosh." At the time, being a
specialist in interface design was to be in professional limbo, unless you
were lucky enough to be at Xerox PARC or a handful of other places. Now HCI is
a widely recognized discipline, with thousands of us flocking together
annually, it has spawned formal curricula for higher education, and we have
over a dozen periodicals in which to immortalize our thoughts.
The paradox is this: in spite of all this churning, interfaces have not gotten
better. The best that can be said is that we now tackle much more difficult
tasks with only slightly greater levels of frustration and annoyance than we
did a decade ago. But credit here is better assigned to application
development than to interface improvement.
I will argue that most of what practitioners in the HCI field do is more akin
to interior decorating than to architecture, and I ask (and try to partially
answer) what the HCI analog of structural engineering might be.
JEF RASKIN is an independent consultant on interface design, best known for
having created the Macintosh computer project at Apple, the one button mouse
and the click-and-drag paradigm for using it, the "Apple Style" of manuals,
the Canon Cat, and other interface-based products. He was CEO of Information
Appliance Inc. Prior to joining Apple he was a professor and computer center
director at the University of California at San Diego. He has also taught at
the University of Kansas, Notre Dame, and Penn State and was a visiting
scholar at Stanford.
Raskin holds many patents and is a prolific writer, with articles appearing in
dozens of journals and magazines, including Interactions, the Communications
of the ACM, Byte, Nature, Quantum, IEEE Spectrum, Computer, Wired, the SIGCHI
Bulletin, American Scientist, California Business, and others. Raskin has been
a keynote speaker, speaker, or session chair at a number of conferences.
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 14 October
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Mental Spaces and the Grammar of Conditionals
Eve Sweetser
UC Berkeley Linguistics
<sweetser@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
Fauconnier (1985) has proposed that if-clauses be viewed as setting up a
mental space, within which the content of the main clause applies. Sweetser
(in press) argues that such a framework will allow us to predict the ways in
which so-called counterfactual verb forms extend to further subordinate
clauses (embedded conditionals, relative clauses). In this presentation, I
will present a mental-space analysis of the semantics of a broader spectrum of
conditional constructions, including speech-act conditionals such as (1),
epistemic conditionals such as (2), and metalinguistic conditionals such as
(3)--(4).
(1) If you're so smart, when was George Washington born?
(2) If he typed her thesis, then he loves her.
(3) My ex-husband, if that's the right word for him, was seen in
Vegas last week. (The divorce won't be final till next month,
so maybe "ex-husband" isn't a correct usage here.)
(4) If we were in Louisiana, you'd be eating a green trout.
(Louisianans call the kind of bass you're eating "green trout.")
The advantage of such an analysis is that formal similarities and differences
between various classes of conditionals (in particular, whether they show
so-called "backshifting" of futures to present in main clauses, and/or
tolerate "distanced" -- aka counterfactual -- verb forms) can be shown to
correlate with the parameters of mental space structure and space-building
function. Traditionally central conditional constructions ("If she arrives in
time, we'll go out to dinner") remain central, but are seen to be part of a
broad range of related constructions, which show relatively compositional
relationships between form and meaning.
The work presented here is being done in collaboration with Dr. Barbara
Dancygier.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 19 October
4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Agents You Can Teach
Scott Huffman
Price Waterhouse Technology Center, Menlo Park
<Scott_Huffman@notes.pw.com>
This talk examines instructable agents, which can be taught new tasks and
other domain knowledge through tutorial instruction. This interactive,
situated form of instruction is powerful because of its communicative
flexibility: it allows an instructor to communicate whatever type of knowledge
a student needs in whatever situation. The challenge in designing an
instructable agent is to support the breadth of learning and interaction
required for flexible instruction. I will describe an approach called
situated explanation that combines analytic and inductive techniques to
produce general learning from instructions. It achieves flexibility by taking
advantage of constraints in different instructional contexts to guide the
learning process. The approach is implemented in an agent called
Instructo-Soar that learns to perform new tasks, as well as knowledge about
search control, objects' properties, and the effects of actions, from a
variety of types of natural language instructions, including commands,
statements, and conditionals.
The goal of this seminar is to increase communication among local researchers
with interests in computational approaches to learning and adaptation. If you
would like to be added to (or removed from) the mailing list, or if you are
interested in giving a talk in the seminar, please send email to
<langley@cs.stanford.edu>.
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 20 October
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
An Introduction to Situation Theory
Keith Devlin
Saint Mary's College Mathematics
<devlin@stmarys-ca.edu>
This is the third in a series of introductory lectures on situation theory,
concentrating on applications rather than the underlying mathematics. The
lectures will cover material included in my book _Logic and Information_
(Cambridge University Press, 1991), so people will be able to join the course
after it gets underway. However, the order of presentation will not be
exactly as in the book, and I plan to provide alternative motivations and
insights gained since the book was published. Later lectures will cover
material not in the book. Motivational applications will include situation
semantics, the analysis of problems in sociolinguistics, and the design of
information systems.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
on Thursday, 20 October
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Cognitive Development and Infinity's
Missing Link: Searching Beyond Smallness
Rafael Nunez
University of Fribourg
<nunez@csli.stanford.edu>
Since the dawn of civilizations the idea of infinity has played an important
role in the development of almost every branch of human knowledge. In spite
of this fact, the study of this idea has always been very controversial. In
mathematics, infinity has presented countless difficulties and disputes
throughout its history, suggesting that infinity might offer a good arena from
where to challenge the dogma which presents mathematics as an objective body
of knowledge. A controversial, elusive, and important concept of human mental
activity, such as infinity, should represent an interesting subject matter for
cognitive science. Paradoxically, very little effort has been made by the
various disciplines and theoretical schools in cognitive science to study this
fascinating aspect of human mental activity. Some issues related to the idea
of subdivision, as well as paradoxes related to it (e.g., Zeno's) will be
presented in order to address the question of how the idea of infinity in the
small emerge in our minds. Research data obtained in a developmental study
performed in Switzerland, as well as preliminary results obtained in Ivory
Coast, will be discussed.
RAFAEL NUNEZ is currently a visiting scholar at CSLI under a fellowship
awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He studied mathematics in
Chile and received his M.A. in Psychology from Universidad Catolica. He worked
as a consultant on Human Resources for Coopers & Lybrand International in
Santiago. Afterwards he studied in Japan and later obtained his Ph.D. in
Cognitive Science from University of Fribourg in Switzerland. After have done
research on mental health in early adolescence at the University of Lausanne,
he joined research teams in Geneva and Fribourg working on induction and
mathematical thinking. As a researcher, his interest is centered on looking
for evidence to support non-representational explanations of mathematical
thinking by means of developmental and cross-cultural studies. He is also
working on foundations of cognitive science, from the perspective of
embodied/enactive cognition, and is currently studying the relation between
the different disciplines of cognitive science in so far as non-objectivist
oriented approaches are concerned. Before coming to Stanford, he spent one
year as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 20 October
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
SSP/CSLI Summer Interns Presentations
The Symbolic Systems Program's summer interns will discuss the research
projects they worked on this past summer. Summer interns include Erica Don,
Clay Kunk, Jon Lindsay, Brian Walter, Kevin Henry, Kulin Tantod, and Jonas
Celebiler.
____________
PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
7:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
Anchors Away: A Unified Treatment of Ghost Segments
and Floating Features
Cheryl Zoll
UC Berkeley Linguistics
<zoll@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Floating features, which link to existing segments, and ghost or latent
segments, such as the Slavic yers, which manifest themselves as independent
segments when they appear (Clements & Keyser 1983, Hyman 1985, Kenstowicz &
Rubach 1987, Archangeli 1991, Szpyra 1992, Rubach 1993), are considered to be
distinct entities whose differences correlate with the presence or absence of
a root node (Rubach 1993). The floating feature's lack of a root node allows
it to escape being parsed in contexts where full segments must surface. Latent
segments likewise have a special immunity from regular parsing constraints,
but are thought to require root nodes primarily because of two other traits
which distinguish them from floating features:
(a) Floating features can move around to find a place to dock while latent
segments are restricted to a single position (Swingle 1992); and
(b) Floating features attach to existing segments while latent segments
always surface independently.
This paper demonstrates that, on the contrary, the potential mobility and
independence of a phonological entity are not correlated either with each
other or with the presence or absence of a root node, and thus these cannot be
used to motivate a structural distinction between latent segments and floating
features. By positing a unified underlying representation for all instances
of latent segments and floating features, this analysis yields a
cross-linguistic typology of the entire range of behavior associated with
subminimal phonological units, while allowing a unique characterization of the
immunity of both latent segments and floating features from the demands of
regular parsing.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 21 October
12:30 p.m., McCullough Building, Room 134
High Resolution Virtual Reality
Michael Deering
SUN Microsystems
<Michael.Deering@eng.sun.com>
I define the lower layers of Virtual Reality to be: the highly-accurate,
real-time simulation by computer of the interaction of the physical world with
human senses. My focus is on the visual system, the talk will desceribe the
techniques used to perform this simulation in several running systems at Sun
microsystems. These include: correct perspective viewing equations,
correcting for the optics of both human eyeballs and glass CRT's, predictive
head trackers and other hardware nasties. This talk is an expansion of my
SIGGRAPH '92 talk to include details of the Virtual Portal, a 1K x 2K walk-in
virtual display device.
MICHAEL DEERING recieved his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from
UC Berkeley. During the eighties he worked at Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Labatories in the areas of AI Computer Vision, VLSI design, 3D graphics
hardware/software and Virtual Reality. In the ninties he's be hanging out at
Sun Microsystems, building 3D computer graphics hardware and Virtual Reality
software and systems. Due to advanced in computerized spelling correctors, he
has still avoided ever learning how to spel.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
2:15 p.m., Building 460, Room 301
Higher-Order Concurrent Linear Logic Programming
Noaki Kobayashi
University of Tokyo
We propose a typed, higher-order, concurrent linear logic programming called
Higher-order ACL, which uniformly integrates a variety of mechanisms for
concurrent computation based on asynchronous message passing. Higher-order
ACL is based on a proof search paradigm according to the principle, "proofs as
computations," "formulas as processes" in linear logic. In higher-order ACL,
processes as well as functions, and other values can be communicated via
messages, which provides high modularity of concurrent programs. Higher-order
ACL can be viewed as an asynchronous counterpart of Milner's higher-order,
polyadic (pi)-calculus. Moreover, higher-order ACL is equipped with an
elegant ML-style type system. We demonstrate a power of Higher-order ACL by
showing several examples of "higher-order concurrent programming." We also
show that a statically-typed concurrent object-oriented programming language
can be constructed on top of HACL extended with records. (This is joint work
with Akinori Yonezawa.)
____________
SOCIOLINGUISTICS CONFERENCE
Thursday 20 October through Sunday 23 October
Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS)
23rd Annual Conference on New Ways
of Analyzing Variation
<nwav23@csli.stanford.edu>
The 23rd Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation in language
(NWAV23) will take place at Stanford University, 20--23 October 1994. A
partial schedule of workshops and talks is given below:
------------------------------
THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER
Mainframe VARBRUL: 12:00 to 1:20 PM
This workshop will review the mechanics of using the variable rule program on
a mainframe computer. The advantages, relative to VARBRUL on a personal
computer, include faster processing time, and increased editing, searching and
data-handling capabilities. By the end of the workshop, participants should be
able to use VARBRUL on the mainframe and interpret its results. They will also
receive a partial annotated bibliography.
Code-Switching: 1:30 to 2:50 PM
This workshop will survey current approaches to both the socio-pragmatic
functions of code switching (CS) and the nature of structural constraints on
intrasentential code switching. These approaches will include Myers-Scotton's
own "markedness model" (applying to social motivations for CS) and her "matrix
language frame model" (providing a production model for intrasentential CS).
Participants will examine CS data from several corpora to see how they are
analyzed/explained under various approaches.
Statistical Analysis with Mystat: 3:00 tp 4:20 PM
This workshop will demonstrate how to perform basic statistical tests,
(including chi square and t-tests) on published data which should have had
such tests done but didn't. There will also be some discussion of the
rationale for significance testing. Mystat is a simplified version of Systat.
Grammaticalization: 4:30 to 5:50 PM
This workshop will survey some of the main issues in the field of
grammaticalization. We will relate grammaticalization to some of the current
issues in sociolinguistics/variation theory, with special reference to
gradience, variation, and social networks. Possibilities for integrating the
two fields will be explored. Workshop participants will analyze both
diachronic and synchronic data that will illustrate the semantic-pragmatic and
formal changes that occur during the grammaticalization process, with
particular reference to evidence for unidirectionality and subjectification.
Evening Panel Discussion: 8:00 PM.
Analyzing Variation above the Level of Phonology
------------------------------
FRIDAY, 21 OCTOBER
Talks will be held in three parallel sessions in the same building, the Center
for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS). The sessions are labeled
session A, B, and C. Each paper will be twenty minutes long with a ten minute
discussion period. There will be three or four talks per session, depending
on the time allotted.
Morning Sessions: 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Session A: Optimality Theory and Connectionist Approaches to Variation
Session B: Discourse Markers
Session C: Languages and Dialects in Contact
Mid-morning Sessions: 11:15 AM to 12:45 PM
Session A: Optimality Theory Approaches to Variation
Session B: Syntactic Variation in AAVE.
Session C: Register and Interaction Constraints
Early Afternoon Sessions: 2:15 PM to 4:15 PM
Session A: North American Vowels
Session B: Code-Switching 1
Session C: Discourse and Identity.
Late Afternoon Sessions: 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM
Session A: Pidgins and Creoles
Session B: Syntactic Variation 1
Session C: General Discourse
Keynote Address: 8:00 PM.
Gender, Speaker Agency, and Context in Sociolinguistic Analysis.
Marciliena Morgan, UCLA
------------------------------
SATURDAY, 22 OCTOBER
Morning Sessions: 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Session A: Morphological Variation and Change
Session B: Phonological Variation
Session C: Attitudes and Ideology
Mid-morning Sessions: 11:15 AM to 12:45 PM
Session A: Social Constraints 1
Session B: Attitudes and Perception
Session C: Syntactic Variation 2
Early Afternoon Sessions: 2:15 PM to 4:15 PM
Session A: Social Constraints 2
Session B: Discourse Strategy
Session C: Issues in Collecting Visual Data: Links between Signed and
Spoken Languages
Poster Session: 4:30 to 6:00 PM.
Evening Panel Discussion: 8:00 PM.
What Can Sociolinguistics Offer the Schools?
------------------------------
SUNDAY, 23 OCTOBER
Morning Sessions: 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Session A: Change in Real and Apparent Time
Session B: Preadolescent and Child Language
Session C: Methodology
Mid-morning Sessions: 11:15 AM to 12:15 PM
Session A: Instrumental Phonetics
Session B: Phonemic Change
Session C: Code-Switching 2
____________