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CSLI Calendar, 02 May 1996, vol.11:25



   
         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
______________________________________________________________________________

2 May 1996                      Stanford                       Vol. 11, No. 25
______________________________________________________________________________

      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 2 MAY -- 10 MAY 1996


  THURSDAY, 2 MAY
        10:00 - STASS Seminar
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Second-order Logic and Plural Noun Phrases (Part 1)
                Jan Tore Loenning, University of Oslo Linguistics
                Abstract below

        12:00 - CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Who's on Third?  The Physical Bases of Consciousness
                Brian Smith, Xerox PARC & Stanford Philosophy
                Abstract below

         4:15 - SSP Forum
                Building 60, Room 61-F
                End-Weight from the Speaker's Perspective
                Thomas Wasow, Stanford Linguistics & Philosophy
                Abstract below

         7:30   Stanford Phonology Workshop
                Margaret Jacks Hall, Seminar Room 146
                CV Alternations in Finnish: An Underspecification
                Approach
                Andrew Dolbey and Ronald Sprouse, UC Berkeley
                Abstract below

         8:00 - Tanner Lectures (2)
                Building 200, Room 2
                Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Toward an
                Integrated Conception of Justice
                Nancy Fraser, New School of Social Research

  FRIDAY, 3 MAY
        12:00   Logic Lunch
                Building 380, Room 383-N
                Propositional Quantification in the Topological
                Semantics for Modal and Intuitionistic Logic
                Philip Kremer, Stanford Philosophy
                Abstract below

        12:30   HCI Seminar
                Skilling Auditorium
                Play and Learning with Technology, Realities of
                the Marketplace  
                Ann McCormick, CAPS Mira Studio

         1:15   Translation Seminar
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Example-Based Machine Translation and Other NLP Studies
                Satoshi Sato, JAIST & CSLI
                Abstract below

         3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
                Cordura Hall, Room 100 (NOTE ROOM CHANGE)
                Semantic Universals in Color Terminology
                Paul Kay, UC Berkeley Linguistics
                Abstract below

  TUESDAY, 7 MAY
         6:30 - SSP Film Series
                Cubberley Education Building, Room 128
                A World of Difference: B.F. Skinner and the Good Life
                (1979) and Keynote Address: B.F. Skinner [Remarks to
                the American Psychological Association Convention] (1990)

  THURSDAY, 9 MAY
        10:00 - STASS Seminar
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Second-Order Logic and Plural Noun Phrases (Part 2)
                Jan Tore Loenning, University of Oslo Linguistics
                Abstract below (May 2)

        12:00 - CSLI CogLunch
                Cordura Hall, Room 100
                Unappraised Affect
                Bob Zajonc, Stanford Psychology 

         3:30 - Linguistics Department Colloquium
                Building 460, Room 146
                Title to be announced.
                Janet Pierrehumbert, Northwestern Linguistics 

         4:15 - SSP Forum
                Building 60, Room 61-F
                Title to be announced
                John Campbell, Oxford University

  FRIDAY, 10 MAY
        12:30 - HCI Seminar
                Skilling Auditorium
                The Design and Long-Term Use of a Personal Electronic Notebook
                Thomas Erickson, Apple Computer 
                Abstract below

         3:15 - Philosophy Department Colloquium
                Encina Hall, Room 423
                Is the Critique of Judgment "Post-Critical"?
                Henry Allison, UCSD Philosophy

                               ____________

The CSLI Calendar appears weekly on Wednesdays throughout the academic year.
Announcements, abstracts, and other information to appear in the Calendar can
be submitted to [mailto:incalendar@csli.stanford.edu].

Information about CSLI's research program and past issues of the CSLI Calendar
are available at [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/].  The CSLI Calendar is
also posted each week to [news://nntp-csli.stanford.edu/csli.bboard].

                               ____________

                       CSLI INTERFACE LAB TUTORIALS
                     on 13--16 May 1996, Cordura Hall
                      Four Days of Tutorials on the
         Internet, Human Interfaces to Communication Technology,
            Automatic Speech Recognition, and Machine Learning
              [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Workshop/]

A full schedule, a list of speakers, and registration information may be found
at the URL given above.  Topics covered on each day are as follows:

 May 13: THE INTERNET
 New Developments in Education, Business, Medicine, Engineering.

The first day's tutorial covers a range of topics centered on the design and
development of effective internet technologies:
 * Internet Agents -- software tools for finding and accessing information on
   the internet;
 * Distance Learning -- delivery of traditional lectures and educational
   material over the internet; new ways of participating in interactive study
   groups; organizing training material so that it can be found on demand;
 * Professional Support Systems -- providing doctors with diagnostic
   information over the internet; professional teamwork on the internet;
 * Digital Libraries -- providing new ways of storing and finding information
   stored in libraries, especially over the Net.

 May 14: HUMAN INTERFACE DESIGN
 Social Responses to Communication Technology

People respond subconsciously to computers, and other devices that convey
information, as if the devices were capable of thoughts and feelings.
Pioneering research being carried out at Stanford shows how social rules can
be exploited to improve Interface design.  Experiments performed by the
creators of this field will be discussed.  Interface designers are strongly
encouraged to attend this seminar.

 May 15: AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION
 New Developments in Spoken Language Computer Interfaces

The third day covers theoretical and practical aspects of Automatic Speech
Recognition. After nearly 30 years of gradual progress, ASR is now showing up
everywhere, over the phone, on PCs, and soon on the internet. The history,
theory, current practice, and future of the ASR field is treated in this
tutorial by several acknowledged authorities in the area who have both
industrial and academic experience.

 May 16: MACHINE LEARNING
 New Developments in Data Mining

The fourth day tutorial reviews computational techniques -- known as machine
learning or data mining -- designed to support this activity, then examines
the main stages of the knowledge discovery process, drawing on illustrative
examples from successful industrial efforts. Applications to be discussed
include mechanical diagnosis, control problems, and financial prediction.

For more information, contact Michele King [mailto:mking@csli.stanford.edu].

                               ____________

                         COGLUNCH SPRING SCHEDULE
                           Theme: Consciousness

The Thursday noon CogLunch series on consciousness will continue
through the Spring Quarter, starting in April.  Here is a tentative
schedule of speakers and titles of the talks:

   April 4: MARLEEN ROZEMOND (Philosophy, Stanford U.)
            "Descartes and Consciousness"
        11: TEED ROCKWELL (Berkeley, CA) 
            "Awareness, Mental Phenomena, and Consciousness:
             A Synthesis of Dennett and Rosenthal"
        18: ROGER SHEPARD (Psychology, Stanford U.)
            "My Experience, Your Experience, and the World We Experience"
        25: JOHN GABRIELI (Psychology, Stanford U.)
            "Consciousness as the Gatekeeper of Memory"
   May   2: BRIAN SMITH (Xerox PARC & Philosophy, Stanford U.)
            "Who's on Third?  The Physical Bases of Consciousness"
         9: BOB ZAJONC (Psychology, Stanford U.)
            "Unappraised Affect"
        16: MICHAEL CORNER (Netherlands Institute for Brain Research)
            "Prolegomena to Any Future Mind-Brain Synthesis, and
             a Theory About the Nature of Self-Consciousness: 
             Phenomenological and Physiological Constraints"
        23: JOHN PERRY [Commentary: G. Guzeldere]
            "Indexicality and the Knowledge Argument"
        30: KEN TAYLOR (Philosophy, Stanford U.)
            "The Hard Problem of Consciousness may not be
             Solvable, but Dualism is Still False"
   June  6: Dead Week
                               ____________
                                     
                              STASS SEMINAR
                            on Thursday, 2 May
                    10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
           Second-Order Logic and Plural Noun Phrases (Part 1)
                            Jan Tore Loenning
                      University of Oslo Linguistics
                       [loenning@csli.stanford.edu]

It is generally assumed that the truth-conditions of plural noun phrases
transcend first-order logic.  Many have further assumed that the
truth-conditions for sentences like

        1) Some students gathered.
        2) Some critics admire only one another,

best can be spelled out as formulas in second-order logic.  But second-order
logic is not on the same firm grounds as first-order logic.  It lacks a
complete axiomatization, and its semantics seems to assume the existence of
certain sets of individuals, hence it has been claimed to be set theory in
disguise.  On the other hand, George Boolos has argued that the ease with
which we understand plural NPs can be taken as a starting point for
understanding second-order logic and has proposed a non-objectual semantics
for monadic second-order logic.

The first talk will consider how large a fragment of second-order logic is
needed to represent the plural noun phrases and to which degree there are
English sentences which distinguish between different possible consequence
relations for second-order logic.  The topic of the second talk will be
whether the use of plural NPs carry any ontological commitments and a
comparison between the objectual and the non-objectual semantics.

                               ____________

                              CSLI COGLUNCH
                            on Thursday, 2 May
                    12:00 noon, Cordura Hall, Room 100
           Who's on Third?  The Physical Bases of Consciousness
                              Brian C. Smith
                     Xerox PARC & Stanford Philosophy
                         [bcsmith@parc.xerox.com]

Some people feel that first-person subjectivity is challenged by third- person
materialism.  That, I will argue, is a simple use/mention error.  What is
third-person is epistemic: science as representation, our know- ledge of the
world.  Whereas what materialism claims is that minds are made of physical
stuff, the subject matter of physical theory.  So the challenge fails.

On the contrary, in fact, because of the local, differential nature of
physical fields, any material representation will inevitably have first-
person, indexical content.  So it is not first-person content that is hard for
materialism to explain; it is third-person content.  How on earth can mere
"creatures of clay" achieve a third-person, even remotely objective, picture
of the world?  Maybe that's what subjectivity is for.

                               ____________

                                SSP FORUM
                            on Thursday, 2 May
                    4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
                End-Weight from the Speaker's Perspective
                               Thomas Wasow
                    Stanford Linguistics & Philosophy
                        [wasow@csli.stanford.edu]

Many languages tend to put long, complex constituents at the ends of
sentences.  This phenomenon (called "end-weight") is best illustrated by the
construction known as "heavy NP shift", in which a prepositional phrase or
adverb may intervene between a verb and its direct object when that direct
object is very long.  The following sentence from Chomsky's "Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax" (with brackets added) is an example:

        The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child
        learning the language, is to determine 
        [from the data of performance] 
        [the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the
         speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance]. 
 
This talk considers the question of why end-weight exists -- that is, why do
people save long phrases for the end.  Previous attempts to answer this
question have taken the listener's perspective, trying to explain end-weight
by how it facilitates parsing.  Yet it might also be explained from the
speaker's perspective -- by how it facilitates the planning and production of
utterances.  Using data from actual language use, I will present arguments
that the speaker's perspective provides a better explanation of end-weight
than the listener's.

                               ____________

                       STANFORD PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP
                            on Thursday, 2 May
                 7:30 p.m., Margaret Jacks Hall, Room 146
        CV Alternations in Finnish: An Underspecification Approach
                     Andrew Dolbey and Ronald Sprouse
                               UC Berkeley

Recent work in phonological theory (Inkelas 1994) has shown that
underspecification of alternating structure and pre-specification of
non-alternating structure can handle exceptionality without invoking rule
features or lexeme-specific constraints. In this paper we show that
cophonologies, i.e. constraint rankings (or rule sets) specific to particular
morphological constructions, are also required.  We examine Finnish
inflectional morphology, which poses two problems: (a) how to encode the
distinction between alternating and non-alternating final Cs; and (b) how to
explain the odd behavior of one inflectional affix, the partitive. The data at
issue involve root-final C~V alternations in nominals, which have been
analyzed in Keyser & Kiparsky (1984). In certain morphological environments,
some root-final segments alternate between C and V: before all inflectional
affixes except the partitive, these segments surface as Vs; in the nominative
and partitive they surface as Cs. We argue that roots which participate in
this alternation have a mora and an underspecified root node in UR, which
surfaces alternatively as a C or a V. Both vowel-lengthening in the essive and
gemination in the partitive are compensatory lengthening effects driven by a
general constraint on mora preservation. The underspecification of the
alternating root-final C differentiates it from the nonalternating one and
solves the problem stated in (a) but not (b).  To explain the exceptional
behavior of the partitive we need cophonologies: that is, the essive and the
partitive participate in separate cophonologies which make different demands
on the realization of the underspecified segment.

We propose that all inflectional suffixes except for the partitive participate
in a 'stem-level' cophonology, which we characterize in the OT framework (P&S
93). NoCoda is ranked above constraints demanding the preservation of the
underspecified root node, which favors deletion of the underspecified segment.
This ranking also favors vowel spreading over gemination. The partitive,
unlike other inflectional morphemes, is striking in that it participates in
the same cophonology as the unaffixed nominative. This cophonology prefers to
incur a NoCoda violation rather than allowing a long vowel to surface or
deleting an underspecified root node.  We need this cophonology for
independent reasons since both words and clitics cause gemination after an
alternating stem.  An important implication of the analysis is that the two
cophonologies provide further evidence of the phenomenon of non-level
ordering, in which morphemes sharing the same cophonology or OlevelF do not
cluster together syntagmatically (Inkelas and Orgun 1995). The partitive can
appear inside a possessive suffix, a morpheme which participates in the 'stem'
cophonology.

We show that underspecification and cophonologies provide all and only the
tools needed to deal with alternations and exceptionality, and that these
tools are sufficient to account for a broad portion of Finnish inflectional
morphology.

                               ____________

                             TANNER LECTURES
                            on Thursday, 2 May
                     8:00 p.m., Building 200, Room 2
              Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics
          Lecture 2: Toward an Integrated Conception of Justice
                               Nancy Fraser
                      New School of Social Research

                               ____________
                
                               LOGIC LUNCH
                             on Friday, 3 May
                   12:00 noon, Building 380, Room 383-N
        Propositional Quantification in the Topological Semantics
                    for Modal and Intuitionistic Logic
                              Philip Kremer
                           Stanford Philosophy
                        [kremer@csli.stanford.edu]
                                
In the 70s, Kit Fine and Saul Kripke extended propositional modal logic to
propositionally quantified systems, interpreted in Kripke semantics: given a
Kripke frame, the quantifiers range over all the sets of possible worlds.
Fine dubbed the resulting systems S5pi+, S4pi+, S4.2pi+, and such.  S5pi+ is
decidable, and most of the others are recursively isomorphic to second order
logic.  In a previous logic lunch, I considered an analogous propositionally
quantified intuitionistic system Hpi+, again starting from Kripke semantics.
I showed that Hpi+ is recursively isomorphic to second order logic.

In this talk I will consider propositionally quantified systems arising from
the *topological* semantics for S4 and H, rather than from the Kripke
semantics.  The resulting topological systems S4pi-t and Hpi-t
("ess-four-pi-tee" and "aitch-pi-tee") are strictly weaker than their Kripkean
counterparts.  I will sketch a proof that second order arithmetic can be
recursively embedded into these systems.  I conjecture that they are
recursively isomorphic to second order logic, but I currently have no proof of
this.

                               ____________

                  SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
                             on Friday, 3 May
                     12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium
               Play and Learning with Technology, Realities 
                            of the Marketplace  
                       Ann McCormick, CAPS Mira Studio           
                           [ann@mirastudio.com]

                               ____________

                           TRANSLATION SEMINAR
                             on Friday, 3 May
                    1:15 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
         Example-Based Machine Translation and Other NLP Studies
                               Satoshi Sato
                               JAIST & CSLI

In this talk, I present our recent studies on natural language processing. The
first is example-based machine translation.  I originally proposed it in 1988,
and the "similarity-based disambiguation" method of EBMT is now widely used in
Japan.  I will give an introduction to EBMT and its methods.  The second topic
is about full-text retrieval, especially for Japanese text. The last is about
automatic digesting, which is a new application of NLP.

NOTE: This is the first talk in a new Translation Seminar which is starting up
at CSLI, with a focus on topics relevant to machine translation.  It will meet
approximately every other week.

                               ____________

                    LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
                             on Friday, 3 May
           3:30 p.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100 (NOTE ROOM CHANGE)
                Semantic Universals in Color Terminology 
                                 Paul Kay
                    University of California, Berkeley
                        [kay@cogsci.berkeley.edu]

The World Color Survey (WCS) was begun in the late seventies to test and
refine the hypotheses proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969) that (1) there are
universal constraints on the patterns of color naming across languages and (2)
there are universal constraints on the temporal development of systems of
basic color terms. The WCS has collected data in 110 non-literate language
communities from (usually) twenty-five speakers per community, insofar as
possible monolingual.  Partial analysis of the resulting data show that (a)
the main lines of the broad hypotheses given as (1) and (2) above are
confirmed, (b) the specifics of the evolutionary sequence proposed in 1969
must be loosened in the light of more recent data, (c) the resulting picture
accords in some detail with known or proposed properties of the visual system,
confirming the further hypothesis that universals in the semantics of color
naming are driven by universals in the visual processing of color (probably
shared with non-speaking species such as the great apes and old world
monkeys).
                               ____________

                             SSP Film Series
                            on Tuesday, May 7
                   6:30 p.m., Cubberley Hall, Room 128
               A World of Difference: B.F. Skinner and the
                  Good Life (1979) and Keynote Address:
                  B.F. Skinner [Remarks to the American 
               Psychological Association Convention] (1990)

                               ____________

                              STASS SEMINAR
                            on Thursday, 9 May
                    10:00 a.m., Cordura Hall, Room 100
           Second-Order Logic and Plural Noun Phrases - Part 2
                            Jan Tore Loenning
                  University of Oslo Linguistics & CSLI

                               ____________

                              CSLI COGLUNCH
                            on Thursday, 9 May
                    12:00 noon, Cordura Hall, Room 100
                            Unappraised Affect
                                Bob Zajonc
                           Stanford Psychology
                
                                ____________

                    LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
                            on Thursday, 9 May
                    3:30 p.m., Building 260, Room 146
                          Title to be announced
                           Janet Pierrehumbert
                         Northwestern University

                                ____________

                                SSP FORUM
                            on Thursday, 9 May
                    4:15 p.m., Building 60, Room 61-F
                          Title to be announced
                              John Campbell
                            Oxford University

                               ____________

                  SEMINAR ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
                            on Friday, 10 May
                     12:30 p.m., Skilling Auditorium 
      The Design and Long-Term Use of a Personal Electronic Notebook
                     Thomas Erickson, Apple Computer
                           [thomas@apple.com ]

A general design problem is discovering how to make something useful, as
opposed to just usable. This problem is particularly acute for systems like
electronic notebooks that support the capture, use, and management of personal
information. Unlike conventional applications such as word processors or
spreadsheets, a notebook is very personal: it only becomes useful over
time-months or years-as it becomes the repository of more and more personally
relevant information, and as it becomes increasingly entwined with its user's
work practices. While it is straightforward to study usability, it is much
more of a challenge to understand which features, and which modes of use,
would make such a notebook useful.

In this talk I'll describe the design and use -- over a period of three and a
half years -- of a personal electronic notebook. The findings provide a useful
data point for those interested in the issue of how to design highly
customizable systems for managing personal information. After a description of
the notebook's interface and the usage practices that have co-evolved with the
interface, I'll discuss some of the features which have made the notebook
useful over the long term, as well as reflecting on trends in the evolution of
its design.
                               ____________

                     PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
                            on Friday, 10 May
                     3:15 p.m., Encina Hall, Room 423
               Is the Critique of Judgment "Post-Critical"?
                              Henry Allison
                             UCSD Philosophy

                               ____________