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CSLI Calendar, 27 October 1994, vol.10:5
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To: friends
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 27 October 1994, vol.10:5
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From: Tom Burke <burke>
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Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 13:27:13 -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
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27 October 1994 Stanford Vol. 10, No. 5
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A weekly publication of the Center for the Study of Language and
Information (CSLI), Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
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CSLI ACTIVITIES DURING 27 OCTOBER -- 4 NOVEMBER 1994
THURSDAY, 27 OCTOBER
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Indexicality and Reflexivity
John Perry, Stanford Philosophy
4:15 - Symbolic Systems Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Visual Language and Information Mapping
Bob Horn, CSLI
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 28 OCTOBER
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
Finitely Monotone Properties
Alexei P. Stolboushkin, UCLA
Abstract below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
McCullough Building, Room 134
Audio System for Technical Readings
T. V. Raman, DEC Cambridge Research Labs
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 91-A
The Role of Reflection in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Houston Smit, Stanford Philosophy Mellon Fellow
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 29 OCTOBER
10:00 - Phonology Workshop (1st Day)
182 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Berkeley-Santa Cruz-Stanford Trilateral Phonology
Weekend (TREND) III
Schedule below
SUNDAY, 30 OCTOBER
9:30 - Phonology Workshop (2nd Day)
Seminar room, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University
Berkeley-Santa Cruz-Stanford Trilateral Phonology
Weekend (TREND) III
Schedule below
TUESDAY, 1 NOVEMBER
4:15 - Philosophy and Religious Studies Talk
Building 90, Room 92-Q
Leibniz: The China Connection
Henry Rosemont, Jr., St. Mary's College of Maryland
WEDNESDAY, 2 NOVEMBER
4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Simplicity and the Design of Learning Problem Solvers
Steve Minton, NASA Ames Research Center
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 3 NOVEMBER
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
An Introduction to Situation Theory
Keith Devlin, Saint Mary's College Mathematics
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Spatial Thinking
Barbara Tversky, Stanford Psychology
Abstract below
7:30 - Berkeley/Stanford Phonology Workshop
2111 California Street, Berkeley
Nasal Consonant Harmony at a Distance: The Case of Kiyaka
Larry M. Hyman, UC Berkeley Linguistics
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER
12:30 - HCI Seminar
McCullough Building, Room 134
Building Virtual Libraries on the Internet
Nick Arnett, Verity
____________
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, 27 October
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Indexicality and Reflexivity
John Perry
Stanford Philosophy
<john@csli.stanford.edu>
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 27 October
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Visual Language and Information Mapping
Bob Horn
CSLI Visiting Scholar
<bobhorn@well.sf.ca.us>
Twenty seven years ago, while at the Institute for Educational Technology at
Columbia University, I invented a method of analyzing, organizing, and
sequencing training materials, documentation, and reports. The generic field
has come to be called structured writing and the company I founded,
Information Mapping Inc., now teaches approximately 20,000 people in industry
world-wide this methodology each year. The approach is based on the idea
that there are underlying semantics with which we approach any subject matter.
I will begin with a brief introduction to this methodology.
One of my current research projects is focused on visual language, which can
be defined as the tight integration of words, images, and shapes to produce
more effective communication. This project is currently working on improving
diagraming methodology as well as on producing a book on the field. I will
talk about the goals of this project and some of our results thus far.
ROBERT E. HORN is a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Center for the
Study of Language and Information where he is associated with the Program on
People, Computers, and Design. Horn is currently chairman (and formerly
founder and CEO) of Information Mapping, Inc., a management consulting
company. He has also taught on the graduate level at Harvard and Columbia and
Sheffield (U.K.) Universities. He is the author of several books, the most
recent of which is "Mapping Hypertext". He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a
Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 28 October
12:00 noon, Building 90, Room 91-A
Finitely Monotone Properties
Alexei P. Stolboushkin
UCLA
A characterization of definability by positive first order formulas in terms
of Fra"iss'e-Ehrenfeucht-like games is developed. Using this
characterization, an elementary, purely combinatorial, proof of the failure of
Lyndon's Lemma (that every monotone first order property is expressible
positively) for finite models is given. The proof implies that first order
logic is a bad candidate to the role of uniform version of positive Boolean
circuits of constant depth and size.
Although Lyndon's Lemma fails for finite models, some similar characterization
may be established for finitely monotone properties, and we formulate a
particular open problem in this direction.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 28 October
12:30 p.m., McCullough Building, Room 134
Audio System for Technical Readings
T. V. Raman
DEC Cambridge Research Labs
<raman@crl.dec.com>
The advent of electronic documents makes information available in more than
its visual form -- electronic information can now be display-independent. We
describe a computing system, AsTeR, that audio formats electronic documents to
produce audio documents. AsTeR can speak both literary texts and highly
technical documents (presently in La)TeX) that contain complex mathematics.
Visual communication is characterized by the eye's ability to actively access
parts of a two-dimensional display. The reader is active, while the display is
passive. This active-passive role is reversed by the temporal nature of oral
communication: information flows actively past a passive listener. This
prohibits multiple views -- it is impossible to first obtain a high-level view
and then "look" at details. These shortcomings become severe when presenting
complex mathematics orally.
Audio formatting, which renders information structure in a manner attuned to
an auditory display, overcomes these problems. AsTeR is interactive, and the
ability to browse information structure and obtain multiple views enables
active listening.
T. V. RAMAN was born and raised in Pune, India. He was partially sighted
(sufficient to be able to read and write) until he was 14. Raman received his
B.A. in Mathematics at Nowrosjee Wadia College in Pune and his Masters in Math
and Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. For his
final-year project, he developed CONGRATS, a program that allowed the user to
visualize curves by listening to them.
Many of the ideas on audio formatting mathematics come from his experiences in
having math read to him, in dictating math exams and having them written by a
writer, and in listening to RFB (Recordings for the Blind) books on tape.
Raman was introduced to computing in 1987 with an introductory course on
programming in Fortran77. He did his computing with someone behind him to read
the display. He joined the PhD program in Applied Math at Cornell in Fall
1989, and did his PhD Research on the topic of this talk. He is now doing
research at DEC CRL on speech-based interfaces.
____________
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 28 October
3:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 91-A
The Role of Reflection in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Houston Smit
Stanford Philosophy Mellon Fellow
<smit@csli.stanford.edu>
My paper concerns the logical and justificatory status of the _Critique of
Pure Reason_'s claims about the nature of our cognitive operations. In the
first part, I defend Kant from P. F. Strawson's charge that these claims
violate the strictures which the _Critique_ itself sets on all our cognition.
In the second part, I examine Kant's positive account of the status of these
claims, on which they are synthetic a priori cognitions. Kant holds that all
our thought consists in reflection, a consciousness which has itself and the
rules governing our thought as its object. After outlining this conception of
reflection, I lay out Kant's account of how, in critiquing pure reason, we
reflect in such a way as to articulate this content.
____________
PHONOLOGY MINI-CONFERENCE
Saturday and Sunday, 29 & 30 October
Berkeley-Santa Cruz-Stanford Trilateral
Phonology Weekend (TREND) III
<inkelas@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
Saturday, October 29
182 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
10:00 Coffee and bagels
10:30 Haruo Kubozono (Osaka U. of Foreign Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
"Syllable and Accent in Japanese"
11:05 Cheryl Zoll (UC Berkeley)
"Beyond Alignment: Licensing at a Strong Edge"
11:40 --break--
11:55 Chris Kennedy (UC Santa Cruz)
"Head Projection and Exceptional Stress in Dakota"
12:30 --lunch--
2:00 Carole Paradis (U. Laval, UC Berkeley)
"Segment Deletions in Borrowings: A Problem for OT?"
2:35 Philip Spaelti (UC Santa Cruz)
"Reduplicant Patterns"
3:10 --break--
3:30 Young-mee Cho (Stanford U.)
"Juncture Rules"
4:05 David Perlmutter (UC San Diego) and David Askins (U. of Rochester)
"Allomorphy Explained through Phonological Representation:
Person and Number Inflection in American Sign Language"
6:00 --dinner*--
Sunday, October 30
Seminar room, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University
9:30 Coffee etc.
10:00 Will Leben (Stanford U.) and Firmin Ahoua (U. Cote d'Ivoire
and UC Berkeley)
"High Tone Sequencing in Baule"
10:35 Susanne Gahl (UC Berkeley)
"Consonant Gradation in Welsh"
11:10 --break--
11:30 Andras Kornai (IBM)
"Morphological Classes are Nonmonotonic"
12:05 Orhan Orgun (UC Berkeley)
"Slave Voicing Alternations: A Monotonic Cyclic Account"
12:40 Jason Merchant (UC Santa Cruz)
"Noncrisp Alignment: German [c,] and [x]"
1:15 --lunch and social event--
*RSVP to inkelas@cogsci.berkeley.edu if you plan to attend the dinner.
____________
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES TALK
on Tuesday, 1 November
4:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 92-Q
Leibniz: The China Connection
Henry Rosemont Jr.
St. Mary's College of Maryland
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 2 November
4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Simplicity and the Design of Learning Problem Solvers
Steve Minton
NASA Ames Research Center
<minton@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov>
It is a myth that real-world problems are *necessarily* complex. In fact,
simple techniques are sufficient for many purposes. However, even if a simple
method exists that will solve a problem, it may not be obvious, even to
experts. For example, an extremely simple iterative repair technique works
quite well for long-term scheduling of the Hubble Space Telescope, but it took
us a long time to find this solution. In other cases, it may seem obvious
that a simple solution exists but, frustratingly, it may not be equally
"apparent" to our AI systems. Even in toy domains like the blocks world, a
problem solver may be easily led astray by the "wrong" problem representation.
In this talk I will discuss methods for designing systems so that simple
solutions, if they exist, can be recognized. For instance, the Multi-TAC
constraint satisfaction system is designed so that "small" search-control
rules are sufficient for many problems; thus, a brute-force, smallest-first
learning method produces good results. In fact, Multi-TAC embodies the idea
of "designing for simplicity" in several respects. I will describe both this
general idea and the variety of ways that it manifests itself in the system.
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, 3 November
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 one 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.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 3 November
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Spatial Thinking
Barbara Tversky
Stanford Psychology
<bt@psych.stanford.edu>
I will briefly review three projects in spatial thinking. The first
demonstrates systematic errors in cognitive maps, and uses those findings to
develop a theory of memory for space. The second explores the efficacy of
language in evoking spatial representations and reveals the way people think
about the space immediately around themselves. The third investigates
cognitive principles underlying external graphic representations, such as
diagrams, graphs, and charts.
____________
BERKELEY/STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 3 November
7:30, p.m., 2111 California Street, Berkeley
Nasal Consonant Harmony at a Distance: The Case of Kiyaka
Larry M. Hyman
UC Berkeley Linguistics
<hyman@garnet.berkeley.edu>
In a number of Bantu languages, certain voiced consonants, e.g., the [d~l] of
the applicative suffix /-id-/, alternate with [n] after a nasal: -kub-il-
versus -tum-in- (van den Eynden 1968). Because these Bantu languages do not
allow nasalized vowels, it is necessary to view such assimilations as
operating "at a distance" (Poser 1983), with the intervening vowel(s) being
transparent. While this phenomenon is known to be widespread within Bantu and
has been known to phonologists for some time (cf. for example the Lamba
problem in Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1979:71-2), there has, to my knowledge,
been no systematic treatment of it. In fact, it seems regularly to be
overlooked. In the most recent and comprehensive statement on consonant
harmony to date, Shaw (1991:137) states: "I am not aware of any nasal harmony
processes that target only consonants". Rather than focusing on the more
restricted Bantu case found in Lamba, Bemba, Luba, Mongo, Suku, etc., in this
phonology workshop I shall carefully document a much more extensive system of
nasal consonant harmony in Yaka (or Kiyaka), a Bantu language spoken in Zaire.
In this language, suffixes such as applicative /-id-/ are realized nasal even
when the nasal is not the immediately preceding consonant, e.g., -mat-in-,
-miituk-in-, etc. As seen in these examples, voiceless consonants are
transparent to nasal harmony. While prenasalized consonants do not condition
nasal consonant harmony (hence, -biimb-il-), they too are somehow transparent
to the process, hence: /-niimb-id-/ --> -niimb-in- because of the initial /n/.
I will begin by showing that the nasal harmony effects are pervasive in the
language (within the stem domain) and then argue that they should be captured
by a phonological rule of [+nasal] spreading (i.e., not by allomorphy or
feature copying). Drawing on the work of Pulleyblank (1989), Piggott (1992)
and others, I will present an analysis which accounts both for the long-
distance properties of the consonant assimilations as well as the transparency
of both voiceless and prenasalized consonants. The paper concludes by
inviting the audience to join in speculations as to why nasal consonant
harmony appears to be so rare.
The materials presented in this talk are based on Ruttenberg's (1969) Lexique
Yaka-Francais/Francais-Yaka, the first part of which has been scanned and
entered into the Comparative Bantu On-Line Dictionary (CBOLD) project at
Berkeley. Part of my goal at the workshop is also to show how wonderful it is
to do this kind of work with an electronic dictionary organized by fields.
The talk will take place at the home of Sharon Inkelas and Orhan Orgun, in
Berkeley. The address: 2111 California Street. Phone: (510) 649-1470.
Directions: from University Avenue (exit from I-80), turn south on California
(which is between Sacramento and MLK Blvd). Cross Addison and park anywhere.
2111 is in the block of condos, upstairs, near the main entrance to the
complex.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 4 November
12:30 p.m., McCullough Building, Room 134
Building Virtual Libraries on the Internet
Nick Arnett
Verity
<narnett@verity.com>
____________