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CSLI Calendar, 19 January 1995, vol.10:12
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To: friends
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 19 January 1995, vol.10:12
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From: Tom Burke <burke>
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Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 13:45:11 -0800
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
______________________________________________________________________________
19 January 1995 Stanford Vol. 10, No. 12
______________________________________________________________________________
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 19 -- 27 JANUARY 1995
THURSDAY, 19 JANUARY
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Interfacing Situations
John Perry and Betsy Macken, CSLI
Abstract below
12:00 - CSLI TINLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"Minding Consciousness": Discussion of John Searle's _The
Rediscovery of the Mind_
Guven Guzeldere, Stanford Philosophy and Symbolic Systems
Abstract below
4:15 - Mathematics Colloquium
Building 380, Room 383-N
Why a Little Bit Goes a Long Way: Logical Foundations of
Scientifically Applicable Mathematics
Solomon Feferman, Stanford Mathematics
Abstract below
4:15 - Symbolic Systems Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
The Formation and Use of Probabilistic Concepts
Pat Langley, Stanford Computer Science
Abstract below
7:30 - Phonology Workshop
Building 460, Seminar Room 146
Statistical Phonotactics of English CVC Monosyllables
Brett Kessler, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 20 JANUARY
12:00 - Logic Seminar
Building 380, Room 383-N
The Work of Thomas Strahm on Systems of Partial Lambda
Calculus with Explicit Substitution Operators
Elena Pezzoli, Stanford Mathematics
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Terman Auditorium
Context and Structure in Full-Text Information Access
Marti Hearst, Xerox PARC
Abstract below
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Negation and `Mode of Judgment'
Bill Ladusaw, UC Santa Cruz
Abstract below
MONDAY, 23 JANUARY
2:15 - Syntax Seminar
Cubberley Hall, Room 229
Syntax-Semantics Interface Issues in Molly Diesing's
_Indefinites_
Peter Sells, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy Colloquium
Building 90, Room 91-A
Title and speaker to be announced
TUESDAY, 24 JANUARY
7:00 - Discourse Markers Workshop
Building 460, Room 146
Current Research on Discourse Markers
Elizabeth Traugott, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 26 JANUARY
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Information in its Time
Geoff Nunberg, Xerox PARC
Abstract below
12:00 - CSLI TINLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Using Situation Theory to Analyze Document Structure
Keith Devlin, CSLI and Saint Mary's College, and
Duska Rosenberg, Brunel University Computer Science
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Distinguished Speaker Series
Building 420, Room 041
Non-Symbolic Aproaches to Intelligence
Rodney A. Brooks, MIT AI Laboratory
Abstract below
7:30 - Phonology Workshop
Building 460, Seminar Room 146
Foot and Syllable: Constraint Interaction in Japanese
Accentuation
Haruo Kubozono, Osaka University / UC Santa Cruz
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 27 JANUARY
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
Title and speaker to be announced
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Terman Auditorium
Title and speaker to be announced
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Conditions in Conflict
Arnold Zwicky, Ohio State and Stanford Linguistics
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, 19 January
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Interfacing Situations
John Perry and Betsy Macken
CSLI
<{john,betsy}@csli.stanford.edu>
This talk is based on a two part paper, "Interfacing Situations." In the
paper (i) we explore some aspects of "heterogeneous" systems of representation
and communication (in particular, we isolate various factors that make
representations more or less diagram-like or picture-like); (ii) we show how
American Sign Language (ASL) exhibits some of those features; and (iii) we
draw some morals for the design of interfaces. We expect this talk will focus
on (i) and (ii).
____________
CSLI TINLUNCH
on Thursday, 19 January
12:00 noon, Cordura Hall, Room 100
"Minding Consciousness": Discussion of John Searle's
_The Rediscovery of the Mind_
Guven Guzeldere
Stanford Philosophy and Symbolic Systems
<guven@csli.stanford.edu>
Searle's latest book (RM) is full of challenges for contemporary philosophy of
mind, psychology, and cognitive science. It is based on a critical
examination of the nature of three important phenomena -- consciousness,
intentionality, and computation -- and the relations among them. In RM,
Searle makes such (prima facie, puzzling) statements as:
Consciousness qua consciousness, qua mental, qua subjective,
qua qualitative, ... is physical, and physical, because mental.
and wonders about:
How is it that so many philosophers and cognitive scientists
can say so many things that seem obviously false?
and proposes that:
The famous mind-body problem, the source of so much
controversy over the past two millennia, has a simple
solution. Here it is: ...
I will save the formulation and discussion of Searle's solution, among
other things, for the talk. John Searle will also be present to fill
in the details.
____________
MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM
on Thursday, 19 January
4:15 p.m., Building 380, Room 383-N
Why a Little Bit Goes a Long Way: Logical Foundations of
Scientifically Applicable Mathematics
Solomon Feferman
Stanford Mathematics
<sf@csli.stanford.edu>
An axiomatic theory W of functions and classes will be described which has
been proved (in joint work with G. Jaeger) to be a conservative extension of
the system PA of Peano Arithmetic. I will sketch how considerable portions of
modern analysis can be carried out in W. It is conjectured that W comprehends
all (or almost all) of scientifically applicable mathematics. This work is a
modern extension of the program set out by Hermann Weyl in his 1918 monograph
"Das Kontinuum"; hence the choice of `W' for the system in question.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 19 January
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
The Formation and Use of Probabilistic Concepts
Pat Langley
Robotics Laboratory, Stanford Computer Science
<langley@cs.stanford.edu>
Concept formation involves the incremental and unsupervised acquisition of
knowledge from experience. In this talk I review Cobweb, a machine learning
system that forms probabilistic concepts, organizes them in memory, and uses
them to predict features of novel instances. I also describe recent systems
that build on the Cobweb framework, giving the ability to improve motor skills
through practice and to acquire search-control knowledge for planning. In
each case, I consider both the psychological phenomena explained by the models
and the models' limitations. The formation of probabilistic concepts has
proved to a fertile theoretical framework with implications for many types of
behavior, but many open issues remain for future research.
PAT LANGLEY received his PhD in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon
University in 1979 for his development of Bacon, a computational model of
scientific discovery. He was the founding editor of the journal Machine
Learning, and he has authored over 100 papers and a number of books on this
topic. He has held positions in academia, government, and industry, and his
research on learning has included experimental, theoretical, and psychological
studies of this complex phenomenon.
____________
PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 19 January
7:30 p.m., Building 460, Seminar Room 146
Statistical Phonotactics of English CVC Monosyllables
Brett Kessler
Stanford Linguistics
<kessler@csli.stanford.edu>
Phonologists have often called attention to absolute co-occurrence
restrictions between the various parts of the syllable. In English, for
example, only lax vowels can occur before agma: `sing', *`seeng'. Most such
restrictions cited between vowel and consonant affect VC pairs rather than CV
pairs, which is explained by the theory that the VC group into a rime
structure -- the most unmarked hence most frequent restrictions are the most
local ones (Booij 1983).
But attention has focussed almost exclusively on restrictions that are
inviolable in the core grammar. In this talk I show that the syllable also
has phonotactic *tendencies*, where sequences of segments or features, while
perfectly legal, occur far less often than one would expect by chance. I
shall present in excruciating detail statistics about the internal
phonotactics of CVC monosyllables in English, and show that tendencies too are
much more prevalent for VC pairs than for CV pairs. In a traditional
generative framework, such patterns would be considered historical accidents;
in a connectionist framework, they are a primary fact about language.
Workshop participants will be encouraged to share their opinions about the
status of such data in their favorite theoretical framework.
____________
LOGIC SEMINAR
on Friday, 20 January
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
The Work of Thomas Strahm on Systems of Partial Lambda
Calculus with Explicit Substitution Operators
Elena Pezzoli
Stanford Mathematics
<pezzoli@gauss.stanford.edu>
[NB. The Logic Seminar will normally meet Tuesdays at 4:15 in Room 381T; the
shift this week is due to a conflict on the 17th. The Logic Lunch, which
normally meets on Fridays at noon will resume on the 27th.]
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 20 January
12:30 p.m., Terman Auditorium
Context and Structure in Full-Text Information Access
Marti Hearst
Xerox PARC
<hearst@parc.xerox.com>
Until recently there has been little research on information access from
full-length texts (as opposed to titles, abstracts and newswire articles). I
suggest that full-text documents be characterized according to the structure
of their content, that is, as a set of main topics that occur throughout the
length of the text, and a sequence of local subtopical discussions. I have
developed an algorithm, called TextTiling, that uses lexical frequency
information to partition expository texts according to subtopic structure, and
whose results correspond well to human judgments.
An important aspect of information access is the display of retrieval results.
Most systems use inter-document similarity as a criterion for display, via
clustering or some version of the vector space similarity measure. However,
inter-document similarity measures that work well for short texts and
abstracts are often inappropriate for long texts. As an alternative, I
present a new graphical search tool, called TileBars, which uses term
distribution information to show the relationship between the subtopic
structure of the retrieved texts and the terms of the query. TileBars use
TextTiles to simultaneously and compactly display query term frequency, query
term distribution and relative document length, providing an informative
alternative to ranking long texts according to their overall similarity to a
query.
I have recently completed a set of experiments on a large full-text collection
that show that term distribution and overlap constraints, such as those used
in the TileBar search interface, can significantly improve retrieval results
using standard measurement criteria.
MARTI HEARST completed her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley in April
1994 and is now a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC. Her research
interests include intelligent information access, corpus-based computational
linguistics, user interfaces, and psycholinguistics.
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 20 January
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Negation and "Mode of Judgment"
Bill Ladusaw
UC Santa Cruz
<ladusaw@ling.ucsc.edu>
In this paper I advocate the adoption of what could be termed a "semantically
exocentric" interpretation of natural language (descriptive) negation. This
entails adopting what Horn terms a "symmetrist" position with respect to
negation and affirmation as modes of predication (or "judgment"). I justify
the adoption of the well-known typological generalization that the morphology
of clausal negation does not routinely iterate and by its utility in
accounting for why there is no "semantic pressure" against negative concord
interpretations of clauses with multiple occurrences of negative morphology.
The postulation of a class of modes of judgment, which map the basis for a
proposition into a propositional meaning focuses our attention on the
question of what the possible bases for propositions are. In the spirit of a
"structured meaning" approach, I propose that the distinction between unary
bases consisting of Davidsonian event descriptions and binary bases consisting
of an individual and a (possibly derived) property corresponds to the
traditional distinction between thetic and categorical "judgments". This
views the etiology of the contrast (and related "Milsark" effects) as a matter
of semantics rather than as only an "information packaging" issue.
____________
SYNTAX SEMINAR
on Monday, 23 January
2:15 p.m., Cubberley Hall, Room 229
Syntax-Semantics Interface Issues
in Molly Diesing's _Indefinites_
Peter Sells
Stanford Linguistics
<sells@csli.stanford.edu>
Last year the "syntax faculty" decided that it would be useful to offer joint
seminars in which as many faculty and students as possible could participate.
Instead of offering seminars led by individual faculty, we will primarily be
offering such group seminars in the future, under the title "Syntax Seminar".
One faculty member will be the organizer each quarter, but all will
participate and present ideas and material, as will (all) other participants
(we hope).
In the winter seminar (Linguistics 228A) we will be looking at the issues of
syntax-semantics interface raised by Molly Diesing's book "Indefinites" and
articles related to the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis and the idea different
semantic types of NPs are related to specific phrase structure positions.
The seminar will meet on Mondays from 2.15-5.05 in Cubberley 229 (e229). The
first meeting will be on Jan. 23rd, when we will discuss the first two
chapters of Diesing's book, which everyone intending to participate should
have read.
In spring (228B), we plan to focus on weak crossover, looking especially at
typological variation in the phenomenon.
____________
PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 23 January
3:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 91-A
Title and speaker TBA
____________
DISCOURSE MARKERS WORKSHOP
on Tuesday, 24 January
7:00 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
Current Research on Discourse Markers
Elizabeth Traugott
Stanford Linguistics
<traugott@csli.stanford.edu>
Several people have expressed interest in starting a workshop on discourse
markers. The prime objective would be to discuss current research informally;
we are particularly interested in getting to know what is being done in
languages other than English.
There will be an initial meeting on Tuesday January 24th starting at 7:00 p.m.
in 460-146 (Margaret Jacks Hall Conference Room). Pizza and soft drinks will
be provided at this first meeting, so I (traugott@csli.stanford.edu) would
appreciate hearing from you if you intend to come so that we can be sure to
have enough pizza.
I propose that at this initial meeting we each spend five minutes outlining
our current research on discourse markers, and then spend some time defining
the term, so that we can communicate productively with each other on the
topic.
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 26 January
10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Information in its Time
Geoff Nunberg
Xerox PARC
<nunberg@parc.xerox.com>
This will be a report on work in progress. I want to talk about the notion of
"information" -- not in the various semantic and syntactic reconstructions
that philosophers and information theorists trade in, but in the vaguer sense
that people have in mind when they use "information" a modifier before words
like "economy," "explosion," or "age." In this sense information is invested
with a number of properties that it may or not share with its technical
cousins. It is a natural category that gives us the world in a way that is
perspective-free and publicly available; it can be transferred from one agent
to another with no loss of content. It tends to be correct (but there is no
contradiction in saying that it is false). It is divisible into intentional
atoms -- bits, infons, morceaux -- and comes in measurable volumes (and there
is a lot more of it around than there used to be). It has a geography but no
inherent structure.
I'll suggest that in this sense information is not an eternal category but a
historical construction, and was shaped by a set of institutions and print
genres that emerged around the middle of the 19th century -- the mass
newspaper, the popular dictionary, the catalogue, the travel guide, the
railroad schedule; the museum, the department store, fiat money. I want to
consider how the abstract properties that people ascribe to information arise
out of the material properties and social contexts of the documents that
convey it, and ask whether the print-mediated conception of information may
have led us to form unwarranted expectations about how documents will function
in a digital world.
____________
CSLI TINLUNCH
on Thursday, 26 January
12:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Using Situation Theory to Analyze Document Structure
Keith Devlin, CSLI and Saint Mary's College, and
Duska Rosenberg, Brunel University, UK
<devlin@csli.stanford.edu, duska.rosenberg@brunel.ac.uk>
In two recent CSLI Reports (94-187 and 94-189), we used situation theory in a
methodological way to analyze the role played by a particular kind of stylized
document (a "problem report form" from the computer industry). The idea was
to find a level of analysis that has some of the precision that can be
obtained using mathematical formalisms and yet takes account of the insights
of, in particular, ethnomethodologists such as Harvey Sacks. (A precursor of
this work was our joint paper on Sacks' "baby and mommy" analysis, which we
published in the third "Situation Theory and Its Applications" volume.) We
call our analytic method "layered formalism and zooming" (LFZ). We do not
claim it is better than other analytic techniques. But it does appear to be
different, leading to insights that might otherwise not be obtained. The talk
will be structured to avoid dependence on any detailed knowledge of situation
theory. We hope to have Geoff Nunberg and Herb Clark present (among others) to
comment on this work, which is ongoing.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER SERIES
on Thursday, 26 January
4:15 p.m., Building 420, Room 041
Non-Symbolic Approaches to Intelligence
Rodney A. Brooks
MIT AI Laboratory
Over the past ten years we have built a large number of robots at the MIT AI
Lab which do not use conventional symbol systems, conventional representation,
nor conventional reasoning, but nevertheless they are able to carry out long
term tasks, have expectations about the world, have goals, and act like they
are making and following "plans." Now we are pushing beyond the creature
metaphor trying to get at much more human like capabilities, but still without
conventional symbol systems. We argue that physical embodiment is key to this
approach.
____________
PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
on Thursday, 26 January
7:30 p.m., Building 460, Seminar Room 146
Foot and Syllable: Constraint Interaction
in Japanese Accentuation
Haruo Kubozono
Osaka University and UC Santa Cruz
<kubozono@ling.ucsc.edu>
In this talk I discuss the prosodic structure of Japanese compound nouns and
its implications for phonological theory. In empirical terms, I will report
the following three findings about the nature of compound accentuation in
Tokyo Japanese. First of all, a foot-based analysis leads to a significant
generalization of the seemingly complicated accent patterns behind Japanese
compounds. Specifically, by constructing maximally bimoraic foot structure
with the degenerate (monomoraic) feet as a last resort, compound accentuation
in Japanese can be reduced to a highly general rule, a rule that places the
accent on the penultimate foot (Kubozono and Mester 1995). Second, I will
present evidence against Poser's (1990) idea of foot extrametricality (or
invisibility), demonstrating instead that it is the final syllable, not the
final foot, that is invisible to the compound accent rule. Thirdly, several
cases are presented where syllable extrametricality is violated or "revocated"
(Hayes 1991).
In the second half of the talk, I will discuss the theoretical implications of
these empirical generalizations for the nature of Japanese accentuation and
its foot structure. It will be shown, first of all, that the generalization
based on the notion of "extrametricality" can be fully expressed by the
interaction of several constraints on the well-formedness of foot/accent
structure, notably Non-Finality(syll) and Non-Finality(foot). Second, the
cases of extrametricality revocation can also be explained as a consequence of
constraint interaction, this time between Non-Finality and Weight-to-Stress.
Lastly, I will show that the above analysis does not support Poser's argument
against "syllable integrity," suggesting instead that foot structure can be
constructed in harmony with syllable structure in Japanese.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 27 January
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
Title and speaker TBA
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 27 January
12:30 p.m., Terman Auditorium
Title and speaker TBA
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 27 January
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Conditions in Conflict
Arnold Zwicky
Ohio State and Stanford Linguistics
<zwicky@csli.stanford.edu>
What happens when two different conditions in a grammar impose incompatible
properties on expressions? It seems only common sense that ungrammaticality
would result, but instead it appears that conflicts are always resolved in
favor of one condition, with the other suppressed. Expressibility holds sway,
even at the cost of surface violations.
In phonology, there are numerous instances of suppression -- in particular, of
the general by the more specific, and in counterfeeding interactions. Indeed,
the idea that such conflicts -- between conditions from universal grammar, but
interacting in parochial ways -- are common is a cornerstone of Optimality
Theory (and of Natural Phonology).
In morphology and syntax there is one common class of cases where conflicts
never result in ungrammaticality and one common class where they always do.
The first class (of a sort by definition not possible in phonology) involves
formally incompatible realizations for the same semantics; here the conflict
is resolved in favor of one realization in some contexts, the other in others,
and sometimes both as alternatives (BEEPED/*BEPT, *SLEEPED/SLEPT,
CREEPED/CREPT). Expressibility is essential here; otherwise, the existence of
alternative expression for the same content would always make that content
inexpressible.
Examples in the second class turn out to involve at least one condition that
merely presupposes (rather than imposes) a particular property, so that there
is no conflict, merely a violation of the presupposed condition. For
instance, the nominal gerunds in (1a) and (2a) are ungrammatical because each
violates a presupposed condition on this construction -- in (1a), the
condition that the "subjectoid" be licensed in a possessive form; in (2a), the
condition that it be licensed by some rule as a subject for the VP in this
construction.
(1) a. *there's being snow on the street
b. There was snow on the street.
(2) a. *under the rug's being snow on the street
b. under the rug's being a bad place to hide a gun
In morphology, conflicts between two imposed properties are not easy to find,
though they are attested (and they involve clearly parochial conditions). One
well-known example is from Georgian transitive verb conjugation, in which
phonological material realizing two different, but semantically compatible,
grammatical categories nevertheless fills a single slot; only one affix
occurs, but it serves as an exponent of both categories.
The focus of this paper is such conflicts in syntax. There are at least three
types: (a) two conditions require that some word have incompatible values for
a syntactic feature; (b) two conditions require incompatible orderings of two
expressions; (c) two conditions require each of two different expressions to
be immediately adjacent to, and on the same side of, some third expression.
Examples of each type from English:
(3) It is flying pigs that I'm afraid of.
[person/number of BE, vis-a-vis these values for the
subject IT and for the predicative FLYING PIGS ...
subject agreement wins]
(4) Who will go first?
[ordering of WH subject WHO and auxiliary verb WILL ...
front position for WH wins]
(5) Who the hell else did you see?
[adjacency to WH word WHO of both ELSE and emphatic
THE HELL ... the emphatic wins the position]
____________