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CSLI Calendar, 18 May 1995, vol.10:28
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To: friends
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Subject: CSLI Calendar, 18 May 1995, vol.10:28
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From: Tom Burke <burke>
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Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 15:19:16 -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
______________________________________________________________________________
18 May 1995 Stanford Vol. 10, No. 28
______________________________________________________________________________
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 17 -- 26 MAY 1995
WEDNESDAY, 17 MAY
1:15 - Intensional Logic Lecture
Building 90, Room 92-Q
Object Theory II
Ed Zalta, CSLI <zalta@mally.stanford.edu>
3:15 - The 1995 Tanner Lectures in Human Values
Building 200, Room 217
Discussion Seminar
Amy Gutmann, Princeton Politics and Center for Human Values
Schedule below
4:00 - Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Bayesian Model Merging for Probabilistic Grammar Induction
Andreas Stolcke, SRI International
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 18 MAY
10:00 - STASS Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Discourse Structure and the Flow of Time in Narrative
Livia Polanyi, CSLI
Abstract below
12:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Intelligent Agents
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Learning to Surf: Adaptive Agents on the World-Wide Web
Marko Balabanovic, Stanford Computer Science
Abstract below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Cordura Hall, Room 100
If Consciousness is Back, How Can We Approach It?
Bernard J. Baars, Wright Institute
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
Building 60, Room 61-F
Action-Based (versus Program-Based) Dynamic Logic
Tom Burke, CSLI
Abstract below
8:00pm - The 1995 Tanner Lectures in Human Values
Annenberg Auditorium, Cummings Art Building
Responding to Racial Injustice: What's Right About
Race Consciousness?
Amy Gutmann, Princeton Politics and Center for Human Values
Schedule below
FRIDAY, 19 MAY
12:00 - Logic Lunch
Building 380, Room 383-N
Natural Deduction in the Intuitionistic Linear Logic
Grigori Mints, Stanford Philosophy
Abstract below
12:15 - The 1995 Tanner Lectures in Human Values
Building 90, Room 91-A
Discussion Seminar
Amy Gutmann, Princeton Politics and Center for Human Values
Schedule below
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
KidSim: End-user Programming of Simulations
Allen Cypher and David C. Smith, Apple Computer
Abstract below
3:15 - Philosophy and Comparative Literature Colloquium
Building 90, Room 91-A
Goethe's Fichte Reception with an Outlook on Faust
Geza von Molnar, Northwestern University German Studies
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Negation in Korean and English: A Lexicalist,
Constraint-Based Perspective
Jong-Bok Kim, Stanford Linguistics
Abstract below
MONDAY, 22 MAY
1:15 - Intensional Logic Lecture
Building 90, Room 92-Q
Processes and Bisimulation
Rob van Glabbeek, Stanford CS
WEDNESDAY, 24 MAY
1:15 - Intensional Logic Lecture
Building 90, Room 92-Q
Modal Theories of Context
Sasa Buvac, Stanford CS
THURSDAY, 25 MAY
12:15 - CSLI Seminar
Series on Intelligent Agents
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Actively Instructable Agents
Scott Huffman, Price Waterhouse
Abstract below
2:15 - CSLI Seminar
Movement of Technology from University to Industry
Cordura Hall, Room 100
SAIL Spinoffs
Les Earnest and Marty Frost, Stanford Computer Science
Abstract below
4:15 - SSP Forum
The Knoll Building, Ballroom
CCRMA Demonstration and Research Overview
Chris Chafe, Stanford Music and CCRMA
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 26 MAY
12:30 - HCI Seminar
Skilling Auditorium
Transforming Graphical User Interfaces into
Auditory User Interfaces
Beth Mynatt, Georgia Tech Computer Science
Abstract below
2:00 - Philosophy Conference
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Conference on Early Modern Philosophy
Contact: Alan Nelson (UC Irvine), Marleen Rozemond (Stanford)
Schedule below
3:30 - Linguistics Colloquium
Building 460, Room 146
On the "Landing Site" of "Scrambling"
Hajime Hoji, USC Linguistics
Abstract below
SATURDAY, 27 MAY
10:00 - Philosophy Conference
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Conference on Early Modern Philosophy
Contact: Alan Nelson (UC Irvine), Marleen Rozemond (Stanford)
Schedule 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 at URL
<http://www-csli.stanford.edu/>. The Calendar, with available abstracts, is
also posted each week to the csli.bboard newsgroup.
____________
INTENSIONAL LOGIC LECTURE
on Wednesday, 17 May
1:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 92-Q
Object Theory II
Ed Zalta
CSLI
<zalta@mally.stanford.edu>
This is the fourth in a series of talks on recent developments in and around
modal logic by some guest speakers, illustrating connections with linguistics,
philosophy, computer science, and AI. The first part of this quarter has been
devoted to basic techniques: models and bisimulation, frame correspondences,
modal deduction, completeness arguments, filtration and finite model property.
All interested persons are welcome! All sessions will be in 90-92Q (upstairs
colloquium room, Philosophy Department), Mondays & Wednesdays 1:15--2:30 p.m.
May 8 Modal Phrase Structure Grammar Johan van Benthem
10 Relevant Logic Phil Kremer
15,17 Two Lectures on Object Theory Ed Zalta
22 Processes and Bisimulation Rob van Glabbeek
24 Modal theories of Context Sasa Buvac
31 Modal Theorem Proving Grisha Mints
June 5 Dynamic Modal Logic Jan Jaspars
____________
THE 1995 TANNER LECTURES IN HUMAN VALUES
on Tuesday/Thursday, 16 and 18 May
8:00 p.m., Annenberg Auditorium
Responding to Racial Injustice
Amy Gutmann
Department of Politics
Director, Center for Human Values
Princeton University
Schedule: "What's Wrong with Color Blindness?"
Tuesday, 16 May, 8:00 p.m.
Annenberg Auditorium, Cummings Art Building
Discussion Seminar
Wednesday, 17 May, 3:15 p.m.
Building 200, Room 217
"What's Right about Race Consciousness?"
Thursday, 18 May, 8:00 p.m.
Annenberg Auditorium, Cummings Art Building
Discussion Seminar
Friday, 19 May, 12:15 noon
Building 90, Room 91-A
Commentators: Kwame Anthony Appiah of Harvard and David Wilkins of Princeton.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Wednesday, 17 May
4:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Bayesian Model Merging for Probabilistic Grammar Induction
Andreas Stolcke
Speech Technology and Research Lab, SRI International
<stolcke@speech.sri.com>
I will discuss a framework for inducing probabilistic grammars (language
models) from corpora of positive samples, termed "Bayesian model merging." In
this approach, samples are first incorporated by adding ad-hoc rules to a
working grammar; subsequently, elements of the model (such as states or
nonterminals) are merged to achieve generalization and a more compact
representation. The choice of what to merge and when to stop is governed by
the Bayesian posterior probability of the grammar given the data, which
formalizes a trade-off between a close fit to the data and a default
preference for simpler models ("Occham's Razor"). A localized search
strategy, such as best-first or beam search, is used to locate models that
have high posterior probability. Although this framework is quite general,
the talk will focus on variants and applications for learning hidden Markov
models and stochastic context-free grammars.
This talk describes joint work with Steve Omohundro.
____________
STASS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 18 May
10:00 a.m., Building 90, Room 92-Q
Discourse Structure and the Flow of Time in Narrative
Livia Polanyi
CSLI
<livia@csli.stanford.edu>
In their recent study of stylized documents, Devlin and Rosenberg (1994)
appreciatively quote from an early discussion of sociolinguistics in which
Gumperz and Hymes (1972) celebrate the view that "for socio-linguistic
analysis, social phenomena are of the same order as linguistic phenomena".
For my part, twenty years after Gumperz and Hymes, I find it regrettable that,
for discourse analysts, concern with social phenomena has so overshadowed
concern with linguistic phenomena that the linguistic structure of written and
spoken discourse has largely escaped the systematic, rigorous analysis which
has characterized work on other components of the grammar.
In order to demonstrate the utility of adopting a principled treatment of
discourse level phenomena, in this talk, I will revisit some of the issues of
genre and narrative structure raised in Devlin and Rosenberg and Polanyi 1989.
Specifically, I will show how the notions and mechanisms of the Linguistic
Discourse Model (Polanyi and Scha 1984; Scha and Polanyi 1988; Polanyi 1988;
Prust Scha and v.d. Berg 1995) can provide an account of the development of
narrative time which preserves the Strong Narrative Hypothesis which holds
that the order of event clauses in a narrative is isomorphic with the order of
events in the semantic model of the text (Labov and Waletzsky 1965; Labov
1972; Kamp and Rohrer 1983; Hinrichs 1986; Dowty 1986) while, simultaneously
accounting for apparent disturbances in that ordering arising from flash
sequences, repairs, interruptions, and other putative counter-examples which
have been put forward in the literature.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS
on Thursday, 18 May
12:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Learning to Surf
Marko Balabanovic
Stanford Computer Science
<marko@flamingo.stanford.edu>
One of the big problems facing users of the "information superhighway" even
today is the vast and rapidly increasing amount of information. One approach
to this problem has been to build indexes and retrieval systems which collate
information relevant to some query, thus automating the searching process. I
will describe a complementary system which automates the browsing process,
taking as its domain the world-wide web. In the "LIRA" system the user never
specifies a query but merely gives scores to pages seen. Simple machine
learning and information retrieval techniques are used to improve the system's
performance over time.
This is joint work with Yoav Shoham and Yeogirl Yun, and started out as a
class project for CS227 (AI Programming in Prolog).
MARKO BALABANOVIC is a graduate student in the CS department at Stanford. He
works in Professor Yoav Shoham's Nobotics group and is also associated with
the Digital Library project. For more information see
http://robotics.stanford.edu/people/marko/marko.html
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
on Thursday, 18 May
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 10
If Consciousness is Back, How Can We Approach It?
Bernard J. Baars
Wright Institute, Berkeley
<baars@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
Conscious experience is widely considered to be one of the thorniest subjects
in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, partly
because it was thought to be conceptually incoherent and partly because the
relevant evidence was believed to be poor. That situation is now changing
rapidly. The conventional history of psychology that laid the grounds for the
rejection of consciousness has now been challenged on many grounds. The
expulsion of consciousness now appears to be part of a general triumph of
physicalism in philosophy, biology, and psychology about 1900, associated with
names like Pavlov, John B. Watson, Mach, Russell, Wittgenstein, B. F. Skinner,
and many others.
It now seems that the issues motivating physicalistic scientism were not
mainly empirical. We need only read William James's Principles, published in
1890, to recognized how much cognitive science and even brain science was
already well-known before 1900. Many aspects of consciousness are not
untestable at all, witness the solid research traditions on selective
attention, perception, psychophysics, protocol analysis, spontaneous thought
monitoring, imagery, neuropathology and the like, which survived behaviorism
intact. All of these research enterprises meet the most widely used
operational criterion of conscious experience, namely verifiable voluntary
report of some event as conscious: "I see the airplane," "She smelled a rat,"
or "My stomach hurts." In many cases only the word "consciousness" was
avoided; the reality could not be banished.
The approach I have developed over the last fifteen years suggests we follow
William James's suggestion to study "the distribution of consciousness." The
key is to find well-matched conscious and unconscious mental processes, so
that we can keep content constant while treating consciousness as a variable.
There are natural contrasts between well-established conscious phenomena --
such as mental events known to be attended, perceptual and informative -- and
closely comparable unconscious ones -- like those that are pre-perceptual,
unattended, or habituated. By focusing on very clear, uncontroversial
findings, we can outline a solid foundation of evidence.
Many sources of evidence converge to show that consciousness reflects a basic
architectural aspect of the nervous system -- a "global workspace" capacity in
an otherwise mainly parallel and distributed set of neural functions. This
architectural view helps clarify many difficult questions, and allows us to
easily incorporate other current hypotheses. It is really a modern version of
the "theater hypothesis" of consciousness, which goes back to Plato's Allegory
of the Cave. Proposals by Daniel Schacter, Francis Crick, Rodolfo Llinas,
Philip Johnson-Laird, Anthony Damasio, Tim Shallice, George Mandler and others
can be readily incorporated in this framework. The Global Workspace (GW)
model allows us to update the traditional theater metaphor, providing both
testability and formal implementability. As Allan Newell has pointed out, the
GW architecture is equivalent at a certain grain size to other unified
theories of cognition, such as Newell's SOAR and John Anderson's ACT*.
Barbara Hayes-Roth and others have proposed the GW architecture as a general
problem-solving framework, and some neural net modelers have attempted to
design connectionist versions.
The result is a surprising simplification of a great deal of evidence.
Consciousness emerges as an essential adaptive aspect of the nervous system, a
major biological fact, playing a number of indispensible roles in all
psychological tasks.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 18 May
4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
Action-Based (versus Program-Based) Dynamic Logic
Tom Burke
CSLI
<burke@csli.stanford.edu>
How does logic accommodate the dynamic character of information processing?
What kinds of developments beyond traditional truth-functional,
quantificational, and modal formalisms are called for? Dynamic logic is an
important development in this regard. Developments in other directions are
also needed: (1) We need an action-based theory of variables and the objects
they range over. And (2) we should step back and look at how these formal
developments relate to a study of the formulation and use of information in,
e.g., interactive problem-solving tasks. In this talk I will discuss claim
(1). My aim will be to explain in intuitive and nontechnical terms what an
action-based logic is. I will start with a short overview of elementary
logic, and then explain what action-based logic is primarily in terms of a
couple of examples.
An "action", as I will use the term, denotes a kind of change different from
that of a change of state. Actions are not programs. Actions are instead the
means by which state changes are accomplished. Formally, actions are to
programs what terms are to formulas. The upshot of this talk is that programs
and the changes of state which programs effect make up only a partial account
of the dynamic character of information processing. The mechanics of actions
constitute another essential part of the story.
____________
LOGIC LUNCH
on Friday, 19 May
12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
Natural Deduction in the Intuitionistic Linear Logic
Grigori Mints
Stanford Philosophy
<mints@csli.stanford.edu>
A system NDIL described here has tensor product, multiplicative implication,
direct sum, multiplicative and additive conjunction, modality !, first and
second order quantifiers, and the constant 1. It is the first natural
deduction system with these connectives that admits normalization and has the
subformula property. The main new feature is the treatment of the modality !
using an apparatus developed earlier for S4.
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 19 May
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
KidSim: End-user Programming of Simulations
Allen Cypher and David C. Smith
Apple Computer
<cypher@apple.com>
KidSim is an environment that allows children to create their own simulations
and video games. They create their own characters, and they create rules that
specify how the characters are to behave and interact. KidSim is programmed
by demonstration, so that users do not need to learn a conventional
programming language or scripting language. Informal user studies have shown
that children are able to create simulations in KidSim with a minimum of
instruction, and that KidSim stimulates their imagination. We will
demonstrate the system, discuss its design, and show some worlds that children
have built.
ALLEN CYPHER is a Research Scientist at Apple Computer, Inc. His main
interest is in end-user programming -- giving all computer users capabilities
that have traditionally belonged to programmers. Allen is a co-inventor of
KidSim. He also created the Eager system, which observes a users' actions and
creates programs to automate repetitive activities. He edited the book "Watch
What I Do: Programming by Demonstration", published in 1993 by MIT Press.
DAVID CANFIELD SMITH, while on the Xerox "Star" project, invented icons and
the desktop metaphor for computer interfaces, today used by 100 million
people. For the past several years at Apple, Dave has worked on educational
software, particularly on finding a way for children to program computers.
KidSim(tm) is the culmination of that work. Dave's research interests include
human-computer interaction, educational software, programming language design,
programming environments, end-user programming, and getting rid of the
"priests" of computing. The unifying theme behind his work for the past
twenty years has been the attempt to make computers more accessible to
ordinary people.
____________
PHILOSOPHY AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 19 May
3:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Goethe's Fichte Reception with an Outlook on Faust
Geza von Molnar
Northwestern University German Studies
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 19 May
3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Negation in Korean and English: A Lexicalist,
Constraint-Based Perspective
Jong-Bok Kim
Stanford Linguistics
<jongbok@csli.stanford.edu>
In a typological study of sentence negation, Dahl (1979) has identified three
major ways of expressing negation in natural languages: as a morphological
category on verbs, an auxiliary verb, and an adverb-like particle. Many
current syntactic treatments of these three types of negation have been
couched in terms of transformational operations and a proliferation of
functional projections including NegP, AgrOP, AgrSP, and TP (Pollock 1989,
Ouhalla 1990, Laka 1990, Zanuttini 1991, Chomsky 1991, among others). This
derivational view claims that the interaction of NegP with syntactic movement
and other hierarchically fixed functional projections can account for their
identical semantic scope as well as all the surface possibilities exhibited by
these three types of negation. However, research on the negation of several
languages including Korean, English, and French shows that the evidence for
the existence of the uniform syntactic category, Neg, and its maximal
projection, NegP, is neither empirically nor theoretically well-grounded. The
research proposed in this talk will challenge this nonlexicalist, derivational
view, and develop an alternative theory of negation within the strictly
lexicalist and nonderivational framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure
Grammar (HPSG).
The talk begins with Korean which has both morphological negation and a
negative auxiliary. After reviewing the existing arguments for the existence
of NegP in Korean, I will show how an alternative approach, maintaining the
lexical integrity principle (Bresnan and Mchombo in press), makes it
unnecessary to introduce the functional projection NegP. I will then turn to
English which employs the third type, adverbial negation. I will present some
basic properties of English negation, and then sketch a nonderivational
analysis where the English negator not is treated either as an adverbial
modifier or as the complement of a "type-shifted" finite verb. Also I will
briefly show how this lexicalist view can be incorporated into French, and can
capture the parametric variation between French and English negation.
____________
INTENSIONAL LOGIC LECTURE
on Monday, 22 May
1:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 92-Q
Processes and Bisimulation
Rob van Glabbeek
Stanford Computer Science
<rvg@sail.stanford.edu>
____________
INTENSIONAL LOGIC LECTURE
on Wednesday, 24 May
1:15 p.m., Building 90, Room 92-Q
Modal Theories of Context
Sasa Buvac
Stanford Computer Science
<buvac@sail.stanford.edu>
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
SERIES ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS
on Thursday, 25 May
12:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Actively Instructable Agents
Scott Huffman
Price Waterhouse
<scott_huffman@notes.pw.com>
Broadly intelligent agents can't be pre-programmed with all the knowledge they
might need; rather, they must be able to learn new knowledge during their
lifetimes. Since agents act in service of users, one of the most powerful
sources of new knowledge is user-provided instruction. In this talk, I will
describe (and demo via video) an instructable agent called Instructo-Soar that
can be taught new tasks and other domain knowledge using interactive natural
language instructions. This active form of instruction, in which the agent
deliberately seeks out assistance, contrasts with (and complements) passive
approaches in which an agent tries to learn by silently observing its user.
Instructo-Soar uses an approach called situated explanation to learn general
knowledge from instructions. Situated explanation combines analytic and
inductive learning techniques, and makes use of constraints inherent in
different instructional contexts to guide the learning process. This allows
the agent to learn a wider variety of types of knowledge (new tasks, control
knowledge, operators' effects, objects' properties, etc.) from a wider variety
of natural language instructions (commands, statements, conditionals, etc.).
SCOTT HUFFMAN is a Research Scientist at Price Waterhouse Technology Centre in
Menlo Park. He received his B.S. from CMU, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the
University of Michigan, where he was a student of John Laird's. This talk
describes his thesis research on instructable agents. Scott's current
research involves building agents and systems that can extract and integrate
information from heterogeneous and unstructured information sources, and that
can learn to extract information based on user-provided examples.
____________
CSLI SEMINAR
MOVEMENT OF TECHNOLOGY FROM UNIVERSITY TO INDUSTRY
on Thursday, 25 May
2:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
SAIL Spinoffs
Les Earnest and Marty Frost
Stanford Computer Science
<{les,me}@cs.stanford.edu>
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was organized to do long range
research in A.I. but also initiated the development of interactive computing
with full graphics displays, including a precursor to "windows." Other
contributions were the first spelling checker, the internet FINGER program,
the Unix MAKE command, CAD/CAM for electronic devices, the TeX document
formatter, desktop publishing using laser printers, high performance robotics,
an advanced music synthesizer (licensed to Yamaha), computer games and public
key cryptography. Corporate spinoffs include Vicarm, Xidex, Foonly, Imagen,
Valid Logic, Lucid, Sun Microsystems and, in a rather odd way, Cisco Systems.
NOTE: This is the first in a series of informal talks and discussions which
highlight the value of open-ended basic research within universities, here and
elsewhere, particularly with regard to the payoff it has for private industry.
Government support for academic research is getting harder to obtain these
days, and it is only reasonable to turn to private industry to try to make up
the difference. Industrial Affiliate programs are not new, but they are
becoming increasingly important in this regard. To illustrate the mutual
benefit of these programs, this series of talks will present numerous ways
that new technologies move from academia to industry. We would like to
illustrate, discuss, and maybe suggest improvements on some of the ways this
happens.
____________
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 25 May
4:15 p.m., The Knoll Building, Ballroom
CCRMA Demonstration and Research Overview
Chris Chafe
Stanford Music and CCRMA
<cc@ccrma.stanford.edu>
The forum meeting will present a tour of recent projects and productions in
computer music at Stanford. Both commonly available and more specialized,
research-oriented computing environments will be demonstrated as well as their
use in a range of styles from pop to art music.
>From the intersection of Campus Drive and Mayfield Drive: Follow Mayfield past
Tressider parking lot until it ends at an intersection with Lomita Drive.
Turn left and go up the hill to the "villa" on the top. That's the Knoll
Building. You'll find CCRMA's entrance on the back side. Parking is in back
(a C lot).
____________
SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
on Friday, 26 May
12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
Transforming Graphical User Interfaces into Auditory User Interfaces
Beth Mynatt
Georgia Tech Computer Science
<beth@cc.gatech.edu>
Computers in non-desktop environments have become ubiquitous over the past
five years. But now we are faced with the chore of learning three
applications just to read electronic mail at our desk, on the phone, and with
a pager. One vision for the future is that a set of applications would follow
the user from the desk, to the car, to the warehouse, and to the board room.
The application interfaces would be transformed to suit each new environment
while remaining familiar to the user. One piece of this vision is
transforming graphical interfaces into auditory interfaces.
In this talk, I will describe a methodology for automatically transforming
graphical interfaces into auditory interfaces. This methodology addresses
analyzing and modeling the existing graphical interface, as well as designing
auditory interfaces to represent the interface model. In this transformation,
the salient characteristics of the graphical interface are conveyed using
combinations of speech and nonspeech auditory output. The underlying model of
the graphical interface, an annotated tree structure, forms the basis for
navigating the auditory interface. I have investigated these ideas by
designing an interface for blind users accessing graphical applications. With
my system, Mercator, blind users can work with auditory versions of the
graphical applications used by their sighted colleagues.
ELIZABETH MYNATT is a Research Scientist in the Graphics, Visualization, and
Usability Center at Georgia Tech. She directs the Multimedia Computing Group
which focuses on research in auditory and collaborative interfaces. Elizabeth
is the designer of the Mercator interface which transforms graphical
interfaces into auditory interfaces that are accessible for blind computer
users. Her main interest is in integrating computers into the physical
environment. To that end, she will be continuing to investigate transforming
user interfaces to meet user and environmental constraints, as well as
designing peripheral interfaces for collaborative systems.
____________
PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE
on Friday / Saturday, 26--27 May
Starting 2:00 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
Conference on Early Modern Philosophy
Contact: Alan Nelson, UC Irvine <anelson@uci.edu> or
Marleen Rozemond, Stanford <rozemond@csli.stanford.edu>
This conference is made possible by a gift to the Stanford University
Philosophy Department from John and Claire Radway, and by additional funding
from the School of Humanities and Sciences. Each presentation will take
approximately 30--40 minutes. The remaining time will be devoted to general
discussion.
Session 1
Friday May 26: 2:00--5:15 Chair: David Owen (Arizona)
Topic: LEIBNIZ, by R.M. Adams
Marleen Rozemond (Stanford)
R.C. Sleigh, Jr. (Massachusetts)
Robert M. Adams (Yale)
Session 2
Saturday May 27: 10:00--12:15 Chair: John Carriero (UCLA)
Calvin Normore (Toronto) Topic: Continuity
Lawrence Nolan and Alan Nelson (UC, Irvine) Topic: Descartes on
Essence and Existence
Session 3
Saturday May 27: 2:15--5:30 Chair: Hannah Ginsborg (UC Berkeley)
Rachel Cohon (Stanford) Topic: Hume's Moral Philosophy
Edwin McCann (USC) Topic: Locke
Houston Smit (Stanford) Topic: Kant on Cognition and the
Unity of Apperception
____________
LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 26 May
3:30 p.m., Building 460, Room 146
On the "Landing Site" of "Scrambling"
Hajime Hoji
USC Linguistics
<hoji@usc.edu>
It is widely believed that the "scrambled site" in the case of clause-internal
"scrambling" in Japanese exhibits properties of a so-called A-position (as
well as those of a so-called A'-position), on the empirical bases that have to
do with the absence of Weak Crossover (WCO) effects and the "binding" of
_otagai_, the so-called reciprocal anaphor in Japanese. I.e., the "scrambled"
phrase, as the result of "scrambling," can be an antecedent of (what appears
to be)a bound pronoun and of _otagai_.
In this paper, I will first argue that WCO effects do show up in the relevant
scrambled sentences, if we choose certain binder-bindee pairs so as to force
Arg-binding, disallowing the possibility of Dem-binding, in the sense of Hoji
( 1995 ), in sharp contrast to the _niyotte_ passives; cf. Kuroda (1979) . I
will then turn to _otagai_ and demonstrate that it should not be treated as a
local reciprocal anaphor. The relevant empirical observations include (i) it
need not have its "antecedent" in its local domain, (ii) it need not have a
reciprocal interpretation of the sort typically associated with English _each
other_, even when it occurs in an argument position, (iii) it need not be
c-commanded by its "antecedent." (independently pointed out in Kuno and Kim (
1994 ), (iv) it allows "split antecedence." I propose that the internal
structure of _otagai_ is very much like _sorezore_ 'each, respective', i.e.
roughly, [pro otagai] and [pro sorezore]. The conclusion at this point is
that the empirical bases adduced in the literature for the A-positionhood of
the "landing site" of clause-internal "scrambling" are not as solid as one
might think.
I will then discuss the nature of the contrasts reported in the literature
regarding the absence of WCO and the "binding" of _otagai_. As to the absence
of WCO effects, I will argue that the prototypical instances of it involve
Dem-binding in the sense of Hoji (1995). Since a similar absence of WCO is
observed in WH-interrogative sentences in English as well, it should not
constitute evidence for the A-positionhood of the "landing site" of
"scrambling." The apparent (un)availability of the "binding" of _otagai_ will
be argued to be due to restrictions on backward "zero pronominalization." I
will demonstrate that backward "zero pronominalization" is possible, depending
upon lexical selections (and given certain pragmatic contexts), e.g. [pro(i)
otagai]'s lover(s) seduced [John and Bill](i). In examples like this, what is
at stake is coreference between pro and [John and Bill]. Hence we expect WCO
effects if the matrix object is changed into a quantified NP or if we consider
the sloppy identity context with _otagai_. I will show that the prediction is
indeed borne out.
Finally, I will turn to the question of why some speakers detect improvement
of the Arg-binding possibility, to varying degrees, as the result of
"Scrambling." I suggest, in part based on Kuroda's (1992, Ch. 1) theory of
judgment forms and sentence forms, that what appears to be scrambled sentences
can be represented in the form of what we might call syntactic predication and
explore some of its consequences.
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