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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 17 May 2000, vol. 15:31
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
______________________________________________________________________
17 May 2000 Stanford Vol. 15, No. 31
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 17 MAY TO 26 MAY 2000
WEDNESDAY, 17 MAY 2000
3:15pm ME297: Design Theory and Methodology Seminar
Terry Winograd
Computer Science
http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
Abstract below
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
Made for Each Other:
Metric Localization and Distributed Topological Mapping
Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Robotics Research Lab, USC
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B1 (Hewlett-Packard Auditorium)
Fundamental Issues in Scaling CMOS Devices
Paul A. Packan
Intel
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
4:15pm Biomedical Computation: Challenges and Opportunities
Bldg. 300:300W (near Memorial Church)
Building Intelligent Systems in Biomedicine
Mark Musen
http://calendus.stanford.edu/bioeng/
Contact: Scott Delp (delp@leland.stanford.edu)
(I'm not sure this is open to the general public, check)
THURSDAY, 18 MAY 2000
11:00am CCRMA Hearing Seminar
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
Observer weighting, sound localization, and "echo suppression"
Chris Stecker, Berkeley
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Events/Events.html
Abstract below
12:00pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
On the Concept of a 'genetic Program'
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Stanford University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
3:15pm Stanford Learning Lab
SLL Bldg. (formerly Bambi)
Tools to Increase Access to Advanced Mathematics
Learning for All Children
Jeremy Roschelle
Senior Cognitive Scientist
SRI's Center for Technology in Learning
http://sll.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
Robust Systems and Source-Available Software
Peter G. Neumann
SRI International
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
4:15pm Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation (SCLA)
Cordura Hall, room 100
A Connectionist Approach to Reinforcement Learning for
Robotic Control: The Advantages of Indexed Partitioning
Maria L. Gini
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 19 MAY 2000
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
Arousal Responses to Interactive Media
Byron Reeves
Stanford Dept. of Communication
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm NLP Reading Group
Gates 200
Reading: Compiling Language Models from a
Linguistically Motivated Unification Grammar
by Manny Rayner, Beth Ann Hockey, Frankie James,
Elizabeth Owen Bratt, Sharon Goldwater, and Jean Mark Gawron
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/frankie/rialist/coling_paper.pdf
Presented by John Dowding
http://www.stanford.edu/~manning/nlpgroup.html
3:15pm Infolab Seminar
201 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
The Web, Digital Libraries, and Metadata
Steve Lawrence
NEC Research
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
3:30pm Stanford Linguistics Colloquium
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
Coradicals
Gregory Stump
University of Kentucky
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 22 MAY 2000
4:15pm Bio-Mechanical Engineering Division 2000 Distinguished Lecture
Fairchild Auditorium
Innovation in Implant Design: When is New Better?
Peter S. Walker
http://www.stanford.edu/group/biomech/distinguished.html
Poster review from the BME division starts at 3:00pm
WEDNESDAY, 24 MAY 2000
2:00pm E-Commerce Seminar
GSB S161 (Graduate School of Business)
B2B Exchanges and Metamarkets
Kevin Grieve,
Partner and co-leader, Financial Services practice
Diamond Technology Partners
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/CEBC/comun_act/seminar.html
4:15pm Broad Area Colloquium in AI,
Geometry, Graphics, Robotics, and Vision
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
Principled Methods for Behavior-Based Control and
Learning Applied to Robot Teams and Humanoids
Maja J Mataric'
University of Southern California
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium
Gates B1 (Hewlett-Packard Auditorium)
The Personal PC
Hardware has less inertia than software
Vaughan Pratt
Stanford University and TIQIT Computers Inc
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/contents.html
4:15pm Biomedical Computation: Challenges and Opportunities
Bldg. 300:300W (near Memorial Church)
Simulation of Fundamental Surgical Maneuvers
Leroy Heinrichs and Kevin Montgomery,
http://calendus.stanford.edu/bioeng/
Contact: Scott Delp (delp@leland.stanford.edu)
(I'm not sure this is open to the general public, check)
THURSDAY, 25 MAY 2000
12:00pm CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
Saying and Meaning: A look back at the Gricean Program
Robert Stalnaker
MIT
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm Xerox PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at Xerox PARC
"We Like Big 'bots!": The Story of G-Force 2000
The Gunn High School Robotics Team
http://www.parc.xerox.com/ops/projects/forum/
FRIDAY, 26 MAY 2000
all day Ninth Annual CSLI Workshop on Logic, Language, and Computation
Cordura 100
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/llc/
Information below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
Frontiers in Attentive Environments:
An overview of IBM Almaden Research Center's BlueEyes project
Myron Flickner
IBM Almaden Research
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
3:15pm Infolab Seminar
201 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
Preliminary Topic: Mediators
Robin A. McEntire
SmithKline Beecham
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
SATURDAY, 27 MAY 2000
all day Ninth Annual CSLI Workshop on Logic, Language, and Computation
Cordura 100
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/llc/
Information below
SUNDAY, 28 MAY 2000
all day Ninth Annual CSLI Workshop on Logic, Language, and Computation
Cordura 100
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/llc/
Information below
____________
NOTE
I would like to encourage any Stanford person who is responsible for
cognitive science event to enter it on the Cognitive Science calendus
page; this would greatly increase the chance it gets in this Calendar.
See http://calendus.stanford.edu/CogSci/ . Those of you who are
responsible for non-Stanford Bay Area cognitive science events may
want to arrange with a Stanford person to have your events entered.
Note that as the calendar moderator I reserve the right to remove
events that are not cognitive science (I'll be quite generous but, for
instance, dance festivals fall outside).
People can also subscribe to calendus so that upcoming events on
calendars they choose are mailed to them on a daily or weekly basis.
____________
ME297: DESIGN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY SEMINAR
on Wednesday, 17 May 2000, 3:15pm
http://cdr.stanford.edu/DD/Courses/me297/
Terry Winograd
Computer Science
Software design is happening all the time, some of it good, and much
of it mediocre or bad. We see notable examples of skilled
practitioners who have learned through some combination of formal
training, experience and apprenticeship. But on the average, the
relevant skills aren't well taught in existing institutions and aren't
well applied in the commercial world of software development. There
is an important difference between the "constructor's-eye view" that
dominates computer science and software engineering, and a
"designer's-eye-view" that takes the system, the users, and the larger
context all together as a starting point. When a constructor says
that a piece of software "works" he or she means that it is robust,
reliable, and meets its functional specification. When a designer
says that something "works" (e.g., a building or a visual layout)
there is a much broader sense it works for someone in a context of
values and needs, to produce quality results in use.
Over the past few years we have been developing courses at Stanford on
software design (or more accurately, "software interaction design")
and have been working with others to articulate a professional field
of software design, which is devoted to creating software that "works"
in the broad sense. Its concerns will overlap with those of existing
communities in software engineering, human-computer interaction, and
product design (among others) but the focus isn't quite the same as
any of those. In this talk I will describe the overall goals and some
of what we have learned from the courses and interactions with
software developers and designers from other fields.
Biography: Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford
University. He has done extensive research and writing on the design
of human-computer interaction. His early research on natural language
understanding by computers was a milestone in artificial intelligence,
and he has written two books and numerous articles on that topic. His
book, *Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for
Design* (Addison-Wesley, 1987, co-authored with Fernando Flores), took
a critical look at work in artificial intelligence and suggested new
directions for the design of computer systems and their integration
into human activity. He co-edited a volume on usability with Paul
Adler, (*Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools* Oxford,
1992). His most recent book, *Bringing Design to Software*
(Addison-Wesley, 1996) brings together the perspectives of a number of
leading proponents of software design.
At Stanford, Winograd directs the Project on People, Computers, and
Design, and the teaching and research program on Human-Computer
Interaction Design. He is one of the principal investigators in the
Stanford Digital Libraries project, and the Interactive Workspaces
Project. He was a founder of Action Technologies, a developer of
workflow software, and was a founding member of Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility, of which he is a past national president.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 17 May 2000, 4:00pm
TCseq201 (across from Gates)
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Made for Each Other:
Metric Localization and Distributed Topological Mapping
Gaurav S. Sukhatme
Robotics Research Lab
University of Southern California
mailto:gaurav@usc.edu
http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~gaurav/
Localization and mapping have received considerable attention
recently. I will present a Kalman filter-based approach to precision
robot localization which optimally combines local rate sensing with
global landmark information. Using the resulting location estimates, I
will show how robots may easily build topological representations of
their surroundings. Such representations are lightweight yet useful,
and they scale very well. As an example I will show how multiple
robots can efficiently combine individual topological maps without a
priori knowledge of each others' coordinate systems. I will conclude
with a discussion of open problems and extensions to a new domain
(ubiquitous intelligent embedded systems).
About the Speaker: Gaurav Sukhatme is a Research Assistant Professor
in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern
California (USC) and the Associate Director of the Robotics Research
Laboratory. He was an undergraduate at IIT Bombay before receiving a
M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from USC. His research interests
and previous work include sensor fusion for robot fault tolerance,
robot localization and mapping, and human-robot interfaces. He has
recently begun a new research effort in algorithms for distributed,
intelligent, embedded systems design. He is a member AAAI and
IEEE.
____________
CCRMA HEARING SEMINAR
on Thursday, 18 May 2000, 11:00am
CCRMA Library, The Knoll
http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/CCRMA/Events/Events.html
Observer Weighting, Sound Localization, and "Echo Suppression"
G. Christopher Stecker
Auditory Perception Laboratory
Dept. of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley
Several phenomena in sound localization point to a mechanism in the
auditory system which acts to enhance localization cues available at a
stimulus' onset, suppress later-arriving sound, or both. In this talk,
I will present some recent (and ongoing) work, where we have employed
correlational techniques to estimate change in binaural sensitivity
over the duration of an extended stimulus. Direct sound localization
tasks in the free-field were used along with lateralization tasks in
headphones. The results will be discussed in terms of implications for
proposed mechanisms of binaural adaptation, sound localization, and
the precedence effect.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 18 May 2000, 12:00pm
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
On the Concept of a 'genetic Program'
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Stanford University
This is not a talk on genetic programming in the Koza sense. Its a
talk on the role of computational and semantic concepts within
genetics. Its not really on the mind, but I want to take advantage of
the expertise of the coglunch crowd.
____________
STANFORD LEARNING LAB
on Thursday, 18 May 2000, 3:15pm
SLL Bldg. (formerly Bambi), Conference room
http://sll.stanford.edu/
Tools to Increase Access to Advanced Mathematics Learning
for All Children
Jeremy Roschelle
Senior Cognitive Scientist and Technology Designer
SRI's Center for Technology in Learning
In this talk, I will discuss advances in how technology is being used
in K-12 mathematics education. Particularly I will focus on (1) how
technology can be used to teach mathematics in better concordance with
what we now know from the Learning Sciences (2) how technology can be
used to enable ordinary children to learn more modern and complex
mathematics and (3) the challenges of implementing smart technology
use in today's classrooms.
Biography: Jeremy Roschelle is a Senior Cognitive Scientist and
Technology Designer at SRI International's Center for Technology and
Learning. He current co-leads the Educational Software Components of
Tomorrow Project and the SimCalc Project, both of which aim to advance
the use of technology in mathematics learning. Dr. Roschelle has a
Ph.D from Berkeley in Education, and has published and presented
internationally on topics including educational software design for
math and science learning; cognitive analysis of student learning;
discourse analysis of collaborative learning; application of component
software, reuse & interoperability techniques in education; and video
analysis tools & techniques. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal
of the Learning Sciences, the Secretary for AERA SIG on Advanced
Technologies for Learning, and past program chair of the Computer
Supported Collaborative Learning Conference.
____________
SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION (SCLA)
on Thursday, 18 May 2000, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/cll/scla.html
A Connectionist Approach to Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Control:
The Advantages of Indexed Partitioning
Maria L. Gini
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Minnesota
We explore the use of a connectionist-learning system designed to
allow the application of reinforcement learning to robotic control. In
particular, we compare direct and indexed partitioning methods and
find that indexed partitioning has advantages in time complexity,
space complexity, learning speed (measured in trials), and success
rate. As application domain we chose the problem of learning to back a
truck and trailer rig to a target location by steering the front
wheels of the truck. We present extensive simulation results and
results from runs on a real robot which learns on-line. We describe
some of the subtle difficulties we faced in transferring our algorithm
from simulation to a real robot. In simulation we obtained a good
success rate when using a uniform distribution for the initial
configuration of the truck and trailer rig. This proved to be very
difficult to achieve with the real robot, and required us to build a
robot with a self-positioning mechanism which is capable of achieving
any desired initial configuration.
____________
SEMINAR ON PEOPLE, COMPUTER, AND DESIGN
on Friday, 19 May 2000, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03 (NEC Classroom)
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Arousal Responses to Interactive Media
Byron Reeves
Stanford Dept. of Communication.
mailto:reeves@stanford.edu
Interactive media create new opportunities to affect psychological
arousal in users. Arousal responses are important determinants of
attention to media, memory for information, and evaluation of media
experiences. This presentation will review the basic research about
arousal responses to old and new media, and present results of new
experiments that show how different media content and forms of
interaction can affect physiological arousal.
Biography: Byron Reeves is the Paul C. Edwards Professor of
Communication and Director of the Institute for Communication Research
at Stanford University, with an appointment in Symbolic Systems. His
research is about the psychological processing of media in the areas
of attention, emotions, learning, and physiological responses. He is
co-author (with Clifford Nass) of The Media Equation: How People Treat
Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (New
York: Cambridge University Press). His research has been the basis for
a range of products, including software agents, telephone systems,
entertainment systems, and test instrumentation. His academic
background is in graphic design and music (B.F.A., Southern Methodist
University), and communication and psychology (Ph.D., Michigan State
University).
____________
CS545: INFOLAB SEMINAR
on Friday, 19 May 2000, 3:15pm
201 tcSEQ (across from Gates)
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/dbseminar.html
Web Search, Digital Libraries, and Metadata
Steve Lawrence*
NEC Research Institute
http://wwwmetrics.com/
http://csindex.com/
The web and search engines represent a significant improvement for
information access, however there is much room for improvement to
existing techniques. Our results show that search engines only index a
fraction of all publicly indexable web pages, do not index sites
equally, and may not index new pages for months. We also analyze
metadata and the volume and distribution of information on the web. We
discuss CiteSeer, which is the largest free full-text index of
scientific literature in the world. CiteSeer automatically extracts
metadata from research articles, and provides a number of novel
features including autonomous citation indexing and the extraction of
citation context.
Biography: Steve Lawrence is a Research Scientist at NEC Research
Institute in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Lawrence has published over 50
articles in areas including information retrieval, web analysis,
digital libraries, and machine learning, including articles in
Science, Nature, CACM, and IEEE Computer. Dr. Lawrence has been
interviewed by many news organizations including the New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press, UPI,
CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and NPR. Hundreds of articles about his research have
appeared worldwide in over 10 different languages.
____________
STANFORD LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 19 May 2000, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://calendus.stanford.edu/semantics/
Coradicals
Gregory Stump
University of Kentucky
I use the term coradicals to refer to roots which belong to distinct
inflectional classes and which participate jointly in the definition
of a single lexeme's inflectional paradigm. In Sanskrit, for
instance, the paradigm of the lexeme heart arises from the coradicals
h'adaya- and h'ad-: the former gives rise to direct-case forms,
inflecting according to the a-stem declension, while the latter gives
rise to oblique-case forms, inflecting according to the consonant-stem
declension. Following traditional terminology, a lexeme having a
paradigm of this sort will be said to be heteroclite. Early Indic
languages present unusually complex systems of coradical alternations.
I argue that these systems involve three types of rules: rules of
coradical inference, which determine a root's form and inflectional
class from those of its coradical; domain-of-alternation rules, which
specify the paradigmatic contexts in which the use of some class of
roots overrides the use of their coradicals; and rules of coradical
referral, which represent the individual override relations between
the coradicals of specific lexemes.
Gender differences often coincide with differences in declension-class
membership in Sanskrit; it is therefore usual for adjectival lexemes
to have (at least) two coradicals. Because the formal and
declensional contrasts between an adjectival lexeme's coradicals are
generally highly regular, rules of coradical inference are motivated
by the need to minimize lexical redundancy. The task of determining
the form and declension-class membership of a bahuvrhi compound's
coradicals reveals the unexpected complexity of the Sanskrit system of
rules of coradical inference.
On first consideration, Occam's Razor favors the assumption that the
alternation between a lexeme's coradicals is regulated by a single
kind of rule. But closer scrutiny of the phenomenon of coradical
alternations reveals the need to distinguish domain-of-alternation
rules from rules of coradical referral: the former are motivated by
(a) the need to associate a recurrent pattern of coradical alternation
with an entire class of heteroclite lexemes in a nonredundant way,
while the latter are motivated by (b) the need to account for
variation in the extent to which a given lexeme participates in the
pattern of coradical alternation with which it is associated.
Suppose that a language's system of inflectional classes is
represented as a default inheritance hierarchy having the roots of
individual lexemes as its terminal nodes (so that a heteroclite
lexeme's coradicals appear as distinct terminal nodes). In such a
hierarchy, need (a) can be satisfied by situating a
domain-of-alternation rule at a nonterminal node, from which it is
inherited by an entire class of roots; by contrast, need (b) can be
satisfied by situating rules of coradical referral at specific
terminal nodes in the hierarchy.
I motivate this approach to coradical alternations with
evidence from P'yli, an early Middle Indic relative of Sanskrit. In
the evolution of the P'yli declensional system, a new pattern of
coradical alternation emerges in the inflection of nt-stem adjectives
and spreads in a gradual way; this gradualness is manifested both
lexically (in the pattern's spread from one lexeme to another) and
paradigmatically (in its spread from one cell to another within a
given lexeme's paradigm). The association of this new pattern with
the nt-stem declension is expressible as a single
domain-of-alternation rule situated at the nonterminal node NT housing
the default properties of the nt-stem declension; the lexical and
paradigmatic dimensions of the pattern's gradual spread are
expressible by rules of coradical referral situated at the individual
terminal nodes dominated by NT.
I develop these points in the context of detailed morphological
analyses in KATR, a Kentucky-bred extension of the DATR language
(Evans & Gazdar 1996).
Evans, Roger & Gerald Gazdar (1996), DATR: A Language For Lexical
Knowledge Representation, Computational Linguistics 22: 167-216.
____________
BROAD AREA COLLOQUIUM FOR
AI-GEOMETRY-GRAPHICS-ROBOTICS-VISION
on Wednesday, 24 May 2000, 4:00pm
TCseq201 (across from Gates)
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Principled Methods for Behavior-Based Control and
Learning Applied to Robot Teams and Humanoids
Maja J Mataric'
University of Southern California
Behavior-based control, which exploits the dynamics of collections of
concurrent, interacting processes coupled to the external world, is
both biologically relevant and effective for control problems
featuring local information, uncertainty, and non-stationarity. In
this talk we describe methods we have developed for principled
behavior-based control and learning in two problem domains:
multi-robot coordination and humanoid imitation.
In the multi-robot domain the key challenges involve reconciling
individual and group-level goals and achieving scalable, on-line
real-time learning. How to do all of this in a distributed
behavior-based way in a timely and consistent fashion? We describe
methods for Pareto-optimal behavior selection for principled group
coordination, publish/subscribe messaging for distributed
communication, and augmented Markov models for on-line real-time model
building for group adaptation. The results are demonstrated on groups
of locally-controlled but globally efficient mobile robots performing
distributed collection, multiple-target-tracking, and object
manipulation. In the second part of the talk we describe the
application of behavior-based control in the form of basis behaviors
or primitives to the problem of humanoid control. Here, the challenges
include the high dimensionality of the system and the need for tight
coupling between the perceptual and motor systems. We describe an
imitation model that employs direct sensory-motor mappings within the
behavior-based framework to segment and map the observed movement onto
the existing motor system. The same biologically motivated method
facilitates recognition, classification, prediction, and learning. The
results are demonstrated on a 20 degree-of-freedom dynamic humanoid
imitating dance and sports movements from visual data of human
demonstrations.
Biography: Maja Mataric is an assistant professor in the Computer
Science Department and the Neuroscience Program at the University of
Southern California, Director of the USC Robotics Research Labs and
Associate Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent
Systems. She received her PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science and
AI from MIT in 1994, and 1990, respectively. She is a recipient of the
NSF Career Award, the MIT TR100 Innovation Award, the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society Early Career Award, and is featured in the
upcoming movie about scientists, "Me & Isaac Newton". In her
collaborations, she has interacted with a variety of human and robotic
colleagues (ranging from LEGO robots to humanoids) at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Lab, the Free University of Brussels AI Lab, LEGO Cambridge
Research Labs, GTE Research Labs, the Swedish Institute of Computer
Science, and ATR Human Information Processing Labs in Japan. Her
Interaction Lab at USC performs research in the areas of control and
learning in behavior-based multi-robot systems and humanoids.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 25 May 2000, 12:00pm
Cordura 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Saying and Meaning: A look back at the Gricean Program
Robert Stalnaker
MIT
Paul Grices project of analyzing speaker meaning (initiated in his
paper Meaning, published in 1957) and his theory of conversation
(developed in his William James lectures at Harvard in 1967) have had,
and continue to have, a major influence on the development of both
linguistic semantics and pragmatics and the philosophy of
language. The analysis of speaker meaning generated a cottage industry
of counterexample and patch that flourished for ten years or so. It
then faded away, as such industries tend to do, but the root idea of
Grices analysis still affects the way we think about what people
mean. The theory of conversation helped to shape the development of
semantic and pragmatic theory and provided some conceptual tools that
have become standard resources of philosophical analysis and
argument. In this informal talk, I plan to look back at the central
aims of and motivations for the Gricean project, as I understand them,
and at some of the problems the project encountered - to see how they
look in light of what has happened since.. I will consider what
problem the analysis of meaning was trying to solve, and how that
problem relates to the theory of conversation.
The patterns of reasoning brought to light by Grices discussions of
meaning and conversation are, as many people have noted, a kind of
strategic reasoning - reasoning in which agents interact, basing their
decisions about what to do in part on expectations about the rational
actions of others. So Grices enterprise points naturally to game
theory - the theory designed to provide abstract models of strategic
interaction. I will look at some simple games in which moves are
naturally interpreted, intuitively, as acts of meaning something, and
consider whether the facts about what is meant in such acts can be
explained in terms of assumptions about the beliefs and intentions of
the agents. I want to suggest that some of the problems Grice
encountered in developing the details of his analysis of meaning are
reflected in problems in explaining, in the game-theoretic context,
what it is for an action to be an act of meaning, or expressing,
something.
____________
NINTH ANNUAL CSLI WORKSHOP ON
LOGIC, LANGUAGE & COMPUTATION
May 26-28, 2000
Cordura 100
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/llc/
For each of the last eight years, CSLI has hosted a workshop on Logic,
Language and Computation. The program has involved a lively mix of
topics concerning the sources and flow of information in the various
disciplines that CSLI was designed to bring together. This year is no
exception. A whole day of the workshop is devoted to the interface of
Games and Logic, and the remaining sessions emphasize the nature and
logical formalization of inference in the foundations of mathematics,
the theory of computation, and computational linguistics.
As has become a tradition by now, the program includes contributions
by both established researchers and newcomers to the field. The
workshop is open to all.
See web page for more information.
____________
END MATERIAL
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mailto:incalendar@csli.stanford.edu.
Requests to be added to the mailing list should be sent to
majordomo@csli.stanford.edu. With the lines in the body of the text
of either subscribe csli-calendar for the long form or subscribe
csli-short-calendar for the short form. Problems with subscribing or
unsubscribing should be sent to owner-csli-calendar@csli.stanford.edu.
The full current issue is at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/Archive/calendar/current.shtml
and the archives at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/Archive/calendar/
People on most of the CSLI computers can type 'help csli-calendar' to
see the current issue.
The CSLI Calendar is also posted each week to
news://nntp-csli.stanford.edu/csli.bboard.
and
news://nntp.stanford.edu/su.events
Information about CSLI's research program is available at
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
For maps to the Stanford University campus see
http://www.stanford.edu/home/visitors/maps.html
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