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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 12 March 2003, vol. 18:24
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
12 March 2003 Stanford Vol. 18, No. 24
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A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 12 MARCH 2003 TO 21 MARCH 2003
WEDNESDAY, 12 MARCH 2003
1:00pm Special University Oral Examination
CIS-X Auditorium
"Robust Low-Latency Voice and Video Communication over
Best-Effort Networks"
Yi Liang
Information Systems Laboratory
http://www.stanford.edu/~yiliang/
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
Hossein Eslambolchi
President, AT&T Laboratories
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
3:45pm Psychology Department Colloquium
Jordan Hall 420:041
"The Amygdala, Social Behavior and Emotion: What's Fear Got To
Do With It?"
David Amaral
UC Davis
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium
Gates B03 (NEC Auditorium)
"Bytecode-to-bytecode adaptive optimization for Smalltalk
Compilation and execution architecture for late-bound
object-oriented programming languages"
Eliot Miranda
Visualworks Engineering, Cincom
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
4:15pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Using Analogy to Acquire Knowledge from Human Contributors"
Timothy Chklovski
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
5:30pm Syntax Workshop
Margaret Jacks 460, Terrace Room
"Why Are Natural Languages So Ambiguous?"
Tom Wasow
Stanford University
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
Abstract below
THURSDAY, 13 MARCH 2003
12 noon CSLI CogLunch
Cordura Hall, Room 100
"Constructive perception: a skill for coordinating perceptual
discovery and conceptual generation"
Masaki Suwa
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar
Gates 104
Title to be announced
Victor Bahl
Microsoft
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
4:00pm Personality Seminar
Jordan Hall 420:100
Title to be announced
Anda Gershon and Ying Wong,
Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/news.html#person_lab
4:00pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Modeling Human Neurodegenerative Diseases in Drosophila"
Mel Feany
Harvard Medical School
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series
EJ228, SRI International
"Conflict Resolution Strategies and Their Performance Models
for Large-Scale Multiagent Systems"
Hyuckchul Jung
University of Southern California
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"DIVER: Point-of-View Authoring of Video for Learning,
Education and Other Purposes"
Roy Pea
Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley CIS Seminar
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
"Computer Assisted Forensic Identification"
Eugene Myers
UC Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Abstract below
4:15pm CSLI Seminar on Computational Learning and Adaptation
Cordura Hall, room 100
"Mining Molecular Fragments:
Finding Relevant Substructures in Sets of Molecules"
Michael R. Berthold
Tripos Data Analysis Research Lab
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
Abstract below
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Empirical Investigations in Social Choice Theory"
Raja Shah
Symbolic Systems, Stanford
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 14 MARCH 2003
all day Fourth Annual Semantics Fest
Cordura 100
"The Construction of Meaning"
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/semfest.html
Information below
11:00am Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Seminar
Tolman 5101 (Berkeley)
"Language learners and Language change:
The regularization of inconsistencies by adults and children"
Carla Hudson
Psychology, UC Berkeley
http://socrates.berkeley.edu:4247/seminar.html
12 noon Logical Methods in the Humanities
Bldg. 380:383N (math corner)
"On G\"{o}del's philosophical development"
Mark van Atten
Philosophy, Leuven
(Joint work with Juliette Kennedy, Mathematics, Helsinki)
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
Abstract below
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar
Gates B03
"Technology Demonstrations: What are they for?"
Wally Smith
Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Qualia and Intentionality"
Brian Loar
Rutgers University
http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/loar.html
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
4:15pm CS545: Database Seminar
Gates B12
"Thinking Relational: Using SQL for spatial data access the way god
intended-- it's sets stupid!"
Jim Gray
Microsoft Research
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 17 MARCH 2003
4:00pm UC Berkeley Theory Seminar
Soda Hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
"Putting the Combinatorics in Combinatorial Game Theory"
David Wolfe
Gustavus Adolphus College
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~elitza/Seminars/
Abstract below
5:00pm Art @ Stanford
Cummings Art Building
"Typology, Iconography, and the Grammar of Thought in the
Thirteenth-Century Moralized Bibles"
Christopher Hughes
Lecturer, U.C. Riverside
(for information call 650-723-3404)
WEDNESDAY, 19 MARCH 2003
3:00pm Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program Seminar
email for location mailto:digitalvision@csli.stanford.edu
Satjiv S. Chahil
Palm, Inc.
http://reuters.stanford.edu/seminar_speakers.html
THURSDAY, 20 MARCH 2003
4:00pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Imaging the Structure and Function of Dendritic Spines"
Rafael Yuste
Columbia University
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
4:00pm PARC Forum
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
Title to be announced
Gary Starkweather
Microsoft
http://www.parc.com/forum/
FRIDAY, 21 MARCH 2003
2:15pm NLP Reading Group
Math Corner, 380:383P
"Using morphosyntactic diagnostics to automatically measure
the degree of transitivity"
Presented by: Effi Georgala, IMS Stuttgart
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center status: shortage of A+, O+, O-, and A-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time.
____________
ANNOUNCEMENT
At Stanford, this week is dead week and next week is finals (and the
week after is Spring Break), hence the paucity of upcoming Stanford
events.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 12 March 2003, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Using Analogy to Acquire Knowledge from Human Contributors"
Timothy Chklovski
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://web.media.mit.edu/~timc/
This talk describes an approach to capturing commonsense knowledge
about objects in their properties from non-expert human contributors.
Capturing such knowledge will clear the path to more intelligent
human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason
about our world. In the domain of natural language processing, it will
provide the world knowledge much needed for semantic processing of
natural language. In this talk, I will introduce _cumulative analogy_,
a class of nearest-neighbor based analogical reasoning algorithms; I
will also present theoretical and empirical results about its
effectiveness. Finally, I will discuss LEARNER, a deployed system that
implements cumulative analogy to collect knowledge (a live system is
available at http://teach-computers.org/ ) Specifically, Learner
acquires assertion-level knowledge by constructing shallow semantic
analogies between a KA topic and its nearest neighbors and then posing
these analogies as natural language questions to human contributors.
Suppose, for example, that based on the knowledge about "newspapers"
already present in the knowledge base, Learner judges "newspaper" to
be similar to "book" and "magazine." Further suppose that assertions
"books contain information" and "magazines contain information" are
also already in the knowledge base. Then Learner will use cumulative
analogy from the similar topics to ask humans whether "newspapers
contain information." Because similarity between topics is computed
based on what is already known about them, Learner exhibits
_bootstrapping_ behavior --- the quality of its questions improves as
it gathers more knowledge. By summing evidence for and against posing
any given question, Learner (and cumulative analogy) also exhibits
_noise tolerance_, limiting the effect of incorrect
similarities. Empirically, evaluating the percentages of questions
answered affirmatively, negatively and judged to be nonsensical in the
cumulative analogy case compares favorably with the baseline,
no-similarity case that relies on random objects rather than nearest
neighbors. Of the questions generated by cumulative analogy,
contributors answered 45% affirmatively, 28% negatively and marked 13%
as nonsensical; in the control, no-similarity case 8% of questions
were answered affirmatively, 60% negatively and 26% were marked as
nonsensical. The central finding reported in the talk is the knowledge
acquisition power of shallow semantic analogy from nearest neighbors.
About the speaker: Dr. Timothy Chklovski has joined MIT as an
undergraduate in CS and Math in 1994. After a 2.5 years, Dr. Chklovski
has continued at MIT as a graduate student in CS. In 1999, he took a
leave of absence to found and run aQuery, an NLP document
understanding and IR company financed and mentored by Mitchell Kapor
and Accel partners. At aQuery, Dr. Chklovski has developed a number
of advanced NLP based search engine, text mining, and document
understanding technologies. In 2001, Dr. Chklovski has returned to
MIT to carry out his doctoral research. Dr. Chklovski holds PhD,
Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Computer science, as well as a
Bachelor's degree in Math, all from MIT. Russian-born Dr. Chklovski
has immigrated to the United States and learned English at the age of
13. From childhood, he has been interested in Artificial Intelligence
and problem solving; in '93, his interest in problem solving and
mathematics has led him to represent the United States on a team of
six at the International Math Olympiad in Istanbul, Turkey. His
current interests include knowledge acquisition & representation and
natural language processing (esp. lexical semantics).
____________
SYNTAX WORKSHOP
on Wednesday, 12 March 2003, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall, fourth floor, Terrace Room
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/sssg/
"Why Are Natural Languages So Ambiguous?"
Tom Wasow
Stanford University
Every explicit theory of language processing, both psycholinguistic
and computational, entails that ambiguity makes processing harder.
This makes intuitive sense, since disambiguation is an additional
task, and ambiguity increases the probability of misinterpretation.
For this reason, the artificial languages of mathematics and computer
science are unambiguous by design. Yet natural languages are massively
ambiguous, exhibiting frequent lexical, syntactic, and scopal
ambiguities.
Psycholinguistic experiments and corpus studies provide little
evidence that speakers use the grammatical resources of their
languages to avoid ambiguity. My investigations of heavy NP shifting
and the dative alternation in English indicate that ambiguity
avoidance is not a significant factor in the choice of one constituent
ordering over the other. This is surprising, in light of the
widespread agreement that ambiguity impedes processing.
There are a number of explanations that might be given for the
ambiguity of natural language. One might deny the premise, pointing
out that people rarely notice any but the intended interpretations.
But this just begs the question: how do people do it? What makes us so
good at disambiguation, when all of our models of language processing
make it seem so hard? Perhaps ambiguous languages have some
advantages. For example, they might allow more concise expression,
helping us to overcome what Levinson calls "the
bottleneck...constituted by the remarkably slow transmission rate of
human speech". And they might convey certain communicative advantages,
such as facilitating interactions with people speaking different
dialects, or permitting speakers to convey different messages to
different audiences with the same utterance.
Speculations like these suggest that the pervasiveness of ambiguity in
natural language may have certain benefits, as well as its well-known
costs. I am part of a team that has begun investigating these
trade-offs through computational modeling of the evolution of
language. We represent the language of an individual as a matrix, with
symbols on one dimension and their denotations on the other; in each
cell, we put the probability that that symbol will be used to denote
that meaning. A fully unambiguous language would have only ones and
zeros in the cells, and degree of ambiguity can be measured by how
closely a matrix approaches that limit. Our simulations involve
interactions among individuals, followed by adjustments of the values
of the probabilities in the cells, based on the success or failure of
the interactions. We run populations of such matrices through
thousands of generations of interactions to see what happens to the
ambiguity of their language. Various parameters can be adjusted to
simulate some of the costs and benefits of ambiguity. These studies
are still in their early stages, but they have already yielded some
interesting results.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 13 March 2003, 12:15pm-1:30pm
Cordura Hall, Room 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Constructive perception:
A skill for coordinating perceptual discovery and conceptual generation
Masaki Suwa
School of Computer and Cognitive Sciences, Chukyo University
One aspect of expertise, in chess, in diagrammatic reasoning, in
design, and in other domains, is inferring conceptual ideas from
perception. We propose that underlying a skill for this is a process
we call constructive perception, the deliberate adoption of perceptual
strategies in the service of cognition, from comprehension to
creativity. In the case of enabling new ideas in design, this seems to
be a coordination of two processes: reorganizing perception and
associating ideas. The present research presents evidence for the two
components underlying constructive perception. Generating new
interpretations of ambiguous sketches was correlated independently
with a perceptual ability, reorganizing parts of figures, and with a
conceptual ability, associative fluency. We speculate on implications
for expertise and for its nurturing.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 13 March 2003, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Conflict Resolution Strategies and Their Performance Models for
Large-Scale Multiagent Systems"
Hyuckchul Jung
USC
Distributed, collaborative agents are promising to play an important
role in large-scale multiagent applications. Such collaborative agents
may enter into conflicts over shared resources, joints plans, or
tasks, e.g., one domain motivating our work is distributed sensor
networks where agents must resolve conflicts over shared sensors.
While efficient conflict resolution techniques to enable fast
convergence to a solution are required in a large-scale multiagent
system, conflict resolution strategies in such a system have not been
systematically investigated. In this talk, we first introduce conflict
resolution strategies based on the notion of local cooperativeness
which is defined by the flexibility given towards neighboring agents.
We formalize a set of cooperative conflict resolution strategies in
the context of DCSP (distributed constraint satisfaction problem), and
investigate the performance of the strategies with systematic
experiments. Second, we introduce formal models to analyze the
performance of the conflict resolution strategies so as to predict the
right strategy to adopt in a given domain. In general, performance
modeling has not received significant attention in the multiagent
literature. Our performance models are based on a distributed POMDP
(partially observable Markov decision process) framework. To address
scale-up issues in a large-scale multiagent system, we introduce
small-scale models called "building blocks" that represent the local
interaction among a small group of agents, and investigate several
ways to combine the building blocks. By modeling and combining
building blocks, we are able to predict the performance of different
conflict resolution strategies.
About the Speaker: Hyuckchul Jung received his B.S. degree and
M.S. degree in Computer Science from Seoul National University, Korea,
in 1995 and 1998 respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the
Computer Science department of the University of Southern California,
and is expected to defend his dissertation titled "Conflict Resolution
Strategies and Their Performance Models for Large-Scale Multiagent
Systems" in Summer 2003, under the supervision of Prof. Milind Tambe.
Note for Visitors to SRI: Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in
order to sign in and be escorted to the conference room. SRI is
located at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park. Visitors may park in
the visitors lot in front of Building E, and should call extension
2592 to be escorted to the meeting room.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 13 March 2003, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"DIVER: Point-of-View Authoring of Video
for Learning, Education and Other Purposes"
Roy Pea
Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning
Multimedia records are an increasingly important type of data for
researchers in a variety of fields, because they make it possible to
capture the complexity of "mind in context." The DIVER project
provides new software tools for easily taking digital video source
materials and authoring annotations coupled to point-of-view pathways
within the video so as to focus on specific aspects of events. These
"dives" into video can then be shared with others and commented on in
an Internet-based interface called WebDIVER. These functionalities are
powerful in supporting "guided noticing" as an instructional method
(e.g., in teacher education, graduate education), in collaborative
researcher analyses of videorecords, and for other applications such
as entertainment and commerce. Progress will also be reported in our
work to create a new "instrument" for the learning sciences by
integrating 360-degree panoramic video capture for use with DIVER
software to make possible "virtual videography" and such scenarios as
parallel study of multiple learning groups within a classroom. Our
aspiration is to accelerate cultural appropriation of video as a fluid
expressive medium for generating, sharing and critiquing different
perspectives on the same richly recorded events, and to work with
others to provide a Digital Video Collaboratory that enables
cumulative knowledge building from video-as-data for discovery and
commentary.
About the Speaker: Roy Pea is Professor of Education and the Learning
Sciences at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Center
for Innovations in Learning. His work is devoted to exploring,
defining, and researching new issues in how information technologies
can fundamentally support and advance learning and teaching, with
particular focus on topics in science, mathematics, and technology
education. Particular areas of interest are computer-supported
collaborative and on-line community learning, uses of digital video
for learning research and teacher education, scientific visualization,
and pervasive learning with wireless handheld computers. He has
published over 110 chapters and articles on cognition, education, and
learning technologies, and was co-author of the 2000 National Academy
Press volume, How People Learn. Roy also serves as a Director for
Teachscape, a company he co-founded that provides comprehensive K-12
teacher professional development services incorporating web-based
video case studies of standards-based teaching and communities of
learners. He was Director of the Center for Technology in Learning at
SRI International (1996-2001), and John Evans Professor of Education
and the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University (1991-1996),
where he served as Dean of the School of Education and Social
Policy. Dr. Pea is a Fellow of the National Academy of Education, the
American Psychological Society, and the World Technology Network. In
1978, he received his doctorate in developmental psychology from the
University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
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UC BERKELEY CIS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 13 March 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 380 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~eyal/cis-seminar
Computer-Assisted Forensic Analysis of Mass Disasters
Eugene Myers
Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~gene/
We examine the problem of identifying remains in mass disasters such
as the World Trade Center, Waco, and airplane crashes. Typically, the
problem is closed or nearly so, in that the individuals that could be
involved are known. Depending on the state of the remains, nuclear
DNA profiles, typically the 13 CODIS loci used by the FBI, are
produced for each sample, and in cases where the remains are
significantly degraded, as in the case of severe heat or fire, one may
also sequence mitochondrial DNA from the hyper-variable control
region. The problem is to determine the individual from whom each
sample came from, given the genetic profiles of near relatives and
possibly direct evidence from personal effects of the victim.
The talk will elaborate on the nature of the data, develop the
necessary background on computing the probability of a pedigree, and
formulate the overall goal as a series of algorithmic problems with a
preliminary progress report on each.
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CSLI SEMINAR ON COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING AND ADAPTATION
on Thursday, 13 March 2003, 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Cordura 100
http://cll.stanford.edu/scla.html
"Mining Molecular Fragments
Finding Relevant Substructures in Sets of Molecules"
Michael R. Berthold
Tripos Data Analysis Research Lab
Joint work with Christian Borgelt and Heiko Hofer
We present an algorithm to find fragments in a set of molecules that
help to discriminate between different classes of, for instance,
activity in a drug discovery context. The resulting molecular
fragments are connected subgraphs that appear frequently in molecules
of the class of interest and appear less frequent in molecules of
other classes. The presented method is based on an algorithm from
association rule mining and a new approach to generate fragments by
embedding them in all appropriate molecules in parallel, which results
in substantially faster searches by eliminating the need for frequent,
computationally expensive re-embeddings. In addition, the search tree
is pruned based on a local ordering of atoms and bonds, which reduces
the number of redundant fragments drastically and makes this type of
search feasible also for real world data sets.
In this talk I will present the underlying algorithm, explain how
incorporation of expert knowledge about chemical structures results in
a few extensions that result in further speed-ups, and illustrate the
usefulness of the new algorithm by demonstrating the discovery of
activity-related groups of chemical compounds in the National Cancer
Institute's HIV-screening dataset.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 13 March 2003, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu:8081/ssp-dynamic/servlet/ssp_events
"Empirical Investigations in Social Choice Theory"
Raja Shah
M.S. Candidate, Symbolic Systems Program
Social choice theory is the formal theory of democracy, and was given
a mathematical footing in Kenneth Arrow's celebrated "impossibility
theorem" (1950). Arrow showed that no procedure for making collective
choices -- other than *dictatorship* -- could satisfy a small set of
reasonable-looking criteria. I will present a set of experiments I
have conducted with Todd Davies, which test whether people -- when
deciding what is best for a group -- act in accordance with one of
Arrow's key criteria: the "independence of irrelevant alternatives"
(IIA). This condition requires that all of the information necessary
for a collective choice between two alternatives must be contained in
individuals' pairwise preferences among those two options, so that
their relative rankings with respect to other alternatives cannot have
any influence. The need to impose IIA has been called into question
on philosophical grounds by various authors, and has recently come
under renewed fire. Arrow himself once allowed that IIA is "stricter
than desirable" (1967). Our findings indicate that subjects violate
IIA and the related criterion known as "regularity" (which implies
IIA) in very strong numbers, even when the presentation format only
shows pairwise individual preferences. One critique of Arrow has been
that his philosophical arguments for IIA are actually arguments for
another criterion that does not lead to impossibility. We define this
weaker notion as "independence of unavailable alternatives" (IUA). A
set of studies still in progress is examining whether IUA has more
intuitive appeal than IIA itself. I will discuss the relevance of
experiments such as ours to the search for defensible democratic
principles.
____________
FOURTH ANNUAL SEMANTICS FEST
on Friday, 14 March 2003, 9:00am - 5:00pm
Cordura 100
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/semfest.html
The Construction of Meaning
Preliminary Schedule
8:45- 9:00 Coffee and bagels
Session 1 - Chair: Brady Clark
9:00- 9:30 Ashwini Deo: Three classes of dative subjects in Marathi
9:30-10:00 Maya Arad: Back to the roots: the semantic and phonological
reality of the Hebrew root
10:00-10:15 Coffee break
Session 2: Chair: Beth Levin
10:15-10:45 Ivan Garcia Alvarez: A semantic restriction on exceptive NPs
10:45-11:15 Tomoko Matsui: Ad-hoc concepts - not quite an open and shut class
11:15-11:30 Coffee break
Session 3 - Chair: Arnold Zwicky
11:30-12:00 Philip Hofmeister: Mixing it up: generic operators and
scope interactions
12:00-12:30 David Beaver and Cleo Condoravdi: `before' and `after'
really are converses after all
12:30-13:30 Lunch break
Session 4 - Chair: Tham Shiao-Wei
13:30-14:00 John Beavers and Andrew Koontz-Garboden: `your ass' is a
universal pronoun
14:00-14:30 Paul Kiparsky: From adverbs to affixes: tense and mood in Sanskrit
14:30-14:45 Coffee break
Session 5 - Chair: Ivan Sag
14:45-15:15 Dominic Widdows and Scott Cederberg: Combining information
to learn word-meanings
15:15-15:45 Daniel G. Bobrow, Cleo Condoravdi, Dick Crouch, Valeria
Paiva, and Reinhard Stolle: Flattened Semantic Representations
15:45-16:00 Coffee break
Session 6 - Chair: Hana Filip
16:00-16:30 David Oshima and Roger Levy: Nouns with multiple classifiers
and non-transitive information flow in Japanese
16:30-17:00 Florian Jaeger and Michael Wagner: When warriors mourn longer
____________
LOGICAL METHODS IN THE HUMANITIES
on Friday, 14 March 2003, 12 noon-1:15pm
Math Corner 380:383N
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminars.html
"On G\"{o}del's philosophical development"
Mark van Atten
Philosophy, Leuven
(Joint work with Juliette Kennedy, Mathematics, Helsinki)
It is by now well known that G\"{o}del first advocated the philosophy
of Leibniz and then, since 1959, that of Husserl. This raises three
questions:
1. How is this turn to Husserl to be interpreted? Is it a complete
dismissal of the Leibnizian philosophy, or a different way to
achieve similar goals, or could the relation be even closer than that?
2. Why did G\"{o}del turn specifically to the later Husserl's
transcendental idealism?
3. Is there any detectable influence from Husserl on G\"{o}del's
writings?
The second question is particularly pressing, given that G\"{o}del
was, by his own admission, a realist in mathematics since 1925.
Wouldn't the uncompromising realism of the early Husserl's Logical
Investigations have been a more obvious choice for a Platonist like
G\"{o}del? We want to suggest that the answer to the first question
follows immediately from the answer to the second; and the third
question can only be approached when an answer to the second has been
given. We will present an answer to the second question and then see
how it sheds light on the other two. To support our argument, we
adduce unpublished material from the G\"{o}del archive.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 14 March 2003, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B03
http://www-pcd.stanford.edu/cs547/
"Technology Demonstrations: What are they for?"
Wally Smith
Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
On the surface, a demonstration of information technology is a
straightforward case of 'look before you buy'. However, the
demonstration is markedly different from most other parts of systems
development and procurement. Much of what is transacted between
demonstrator and demonstratee is left implicit, and little is ever
recorded. Demonstrations are generally regarded as important for a
project's success, but reasons given for this vary. At one extreme, a
demonstration is a dry evaluation of requirements, while at another
extreme, it is a drama in which a performer charms, or fails to charm,
his or her audience through a brief glimpse into a technological
potential.
The talk reports an investigation of demonstrations based on
interviews with experienced practitioners in various IT areas. The aim
is to better understand the function of demonstrations and to examine
what makes them a success or failure. Issues raised are the complexity
of organizational communications surrounding demonstrations, the
ever-present potential for trickery and deception, and the consequent
importance placed on trust and understanding between possible future
partners. The analysis draws on a range of informational and
dramaturgical concepts including Erving Goffman's (1974) frame
analysis.
About the speaker: Wally Smith has interests in human-computer
interaction, organizational decision-making and training, and
knowledge management. Recent research has involved the development of
a software tool to assist the design and re-design of disaster
scenarios for training in emergency management. An ongoing project is
investigating the role of technology demonstrations in systems design
and associated decision-making. Related to this project, Wally is an
amateur magician and member of the Magic Circle. He holds a PhD in
Psychology from the University of London and is currently a Senior
Lecturer in Information Systems at Edith Cowan University in Western
Australia. Previously he has held positions at University College
London, City University London and the University of Western
Australia.
____________
CS545: DATABASE SEMINAR
on Friday, 14 March 2003, 4:15pm - 5:15pm
Gates B12
http://www-db.stanford.edu/dbseminar/
"Thinking Relational:
Using SQL for spatial data access the way god intended--it's sets stupid!"
Jim Gray
Microsoft Research (San Francisco)
(This work is joint with Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University.)
Spatial objects, temporal objects, or in fact subspaces in any metric
space can be described by constraints that define the union of convex
hulls (and their negations). These objects have a disjunctive normal
form representation and obey DeMorgan's Laws under Boolean operations.
They can be represented by a pair of relations that allow very
efficient object manipulation and very simple containment queries. The
SQL programs are short, simple, and execute quickly, mostly because
SQL is a set-oriented programming language. A related but different
problem is computing all neighbors of a point set. This computation
runs slowly if programmed as a loop outside SQL; but, when expressed
as set manipulations runs two orders of magnitude faster. The
take-away from this is that there are real incentives for using SQL as
a set-manipulation language rather than a record-at-a-time access
method.
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UC BERKELEY THEORY SEMINAR
on Monday, 17 March 2003, 4:00pm-5:00pm
Soda Hall 306 (UC Berkeley)
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~elitza/Seminars/
"Putting the Combinatorics in Combinatorial Game Theory"
David Wolfe
Gustavus Adolphus College
(Work with Dan Calistrate, Bill Fraser, Susan Hirshberg and Marc Paulhus)
Under Conway's simple but powerful game theory axioms, games form a
group with a partial order. While a great deal has been known about
the group structure of large subsets of games, surprisingly little was
known about the overall partial order. We prove that games lasting a
fixed number of turns form a distributive lattice, but that the
collection of all finite games does not form a lattice.
We will also present theorems about the structure of this lattice. A
direct corollary of these theorems is that all maximal chains in the
day n lattice are of the same length, that length being exactly one
plus twice the number of games born by day n-1. We are also able to
give stronger bounds on the number of games born on day n than those
known previously.
This talk will be introductory and I'll explain the relevant game
theory and lattice theory as we go.
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NLP READING GROUP
on Friday, 21 March 2003, 2:15pm
Math Corner, 380:383P
http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/nlpgroup.html
Using morphosyntactic diagnostics
to automatically measure the degree of transitivity
Effi Georgala
IMS Stuttgart
Empirical evidence suggests that transitivity is a central property of
language use. Transitivity, loosely speaking, involves at least two
participants and an action which is typically effective in some way
[Hopper & Thompson, 1980]. Many discussions on transitivity recognize
a semantic prototype for transitive verbs [Lakoff, 1977, Croft, 1997
etc.].
Prototypical transitive verbs are semantically defined as those verbs
which describe an action that both affects and necessarily changes the
state of the patient [Tsunoda, 1985]. So, unlike destroy, break etc.,
verbs such as kick and rub do not always entail a change of state.
[Levin, 1999] focuses on the contrast between prototypical transitive
verbs, which she calls core transitive verbs, while she terms the
remaining transitive verbs as non-core transitive verbs. She
identifies core transitive verbs with causative verbs of a complex
event structure with two sub-events. In contrast, non-core transitive
verbs have a simple event structure and denote only one sub-event.
[Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 1998] and [Levin, 1999] propose that the
morphosyntactic behavior of two-argument verbs associated with a
simple event structure differs from those verbs that are associated
with a complex event structure. Unlike simple event verbs, complex
event verbs (such as verbs of change of state, e.g. open, break,
murder) have highly circumscribed distributions and therefore cannot
be found in English with: (i) unspecified objects, (ii) the prefix
out-, and (iii) the resultative construction.
The talk will present research which aims to automatically measure the
degree of transitivity for verbs of English and Greek by examining
their distributional range in large corpus data. Broad-coverage
lexicalized probabilistic grammars are used to collect observations of
valence frames and the heads of their fillers [Carroll & Rooth,
1998]. In a subsequent step, a model for classification (e.g. decision
tree learning) is used to: (i) assign verbs to the category of core or
non-core transitive verbs, and (ii) identify those attributes which
are relevant for the classification, i.e. morphosyntactic diagnostics,
such as the omissibility of patient argument.
____________
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