IRList Digest Friday, 17 October 1986 Volume 2 : Issue 56 Today's Topics: Discussion - Electronic authorship, books, and information retrieval Announcement - Proceedings of ACM SIGIR Int'l Conf. (Pisa) available - Table of contents of new ACM Trans. on Office Inf. Systems Call for Papers - Workshop on Visual Languages COGSCI - Inferring Domain Plans in Question Answering CSLI - Categorial Unification Grammar News addresses are ARPANET: fox%vt@csnet-relay.arpa BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet CSNET: fox@vt UUCPNET: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 7 Oct 86 09:13:18-PDT From: Mark Frisse Subject: electronic textbooks Office: Medical Center TC-135, 725-3397 Message-ID: <12244923425.39.FRISSE@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Dr. Fox, I read IRList regularly and would love to send an abstract of my work in several weeks. Briefly, I am interested in the "electronic textbook" area. My Department in St. Louis publishes a little paper "memex" called the Washington University Manual of Medical Therapeutics (Little, Brown, and Co,). It's a 500 page pocket guide for interns and residents that contains "everything you need to know until help arrives in the morning". The book assumes a rigid user model (even 2nd year medical students don't have the conceptual structures to exploit the book). The structure of the book is hierarchical - almost outline form, and is extremely "non-linear", there are many pointers to the secondary literature and to other portions of the text. Since it represents the "compiled" knowledge of the authors and has to fit in the pocket of a white coat, many, many secondary references must be deleted from the text. I've been following the dynabook literature and reading work of Kay, Weyer, Trigg (now at PARC on Notecards), and CMU people (ZOG, CoalSort, etc). Unfortunately, I find little guidance in methodology to search paragraphs (or "notecards"). I suspect that someone has amply shown that some of the traditional approaches break down as the size of the retrieved document shrinks. I will be returning to St. Louis in one year. We hope to develop a research group to study electronic authorship, textbooks, and IR. We have one of the strongest digital radiology groups in the US - at our Mallinkrodt Institute they routinely transmit x-rays to the ER and ICUS over broadband, so naturally Optical disk research is a major priority. We also are building a new medical school library and hope to incorporate some of this technology into its construction. ... If you know of people with similar interests, please give them my net address. Best Wishes mark frisse (Wasnington U. St. Louis and Stanford Medical Computer Science) (frisse@sumex-aim.stanford.edu) [Note: I have taken the liberty of distributing this, and hope we will still receive an abstract soon. - Ed] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Oct 86 17:18:28 edt From: fox (Ed Fox) Subject: Proceedings of Pisa Conference The Proceedings from the International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval held in Pisa in September can be obtained from ACM, 11 West 42nd Street, NY, NY 10036 by referring to Order Number 606860. The cost is $18 to members and $24 to non-members. The Proceedings costs more than the dues to ACM SIGIR (now only $6!), so it will not be sent to members. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Oct 86 18:34:04 edt From: rba@LAFITE.BELLCORE.COM Subject: Contents of recent TOOIS issue ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems July, 1986 Supporting distributed office problem solving. C.C. Woo and F.H. Lochovsky, U. Toronto The intergration of computing and routine work. Les Gasser, USC A visual interface for a database with version management J.W. Davison and S.B. Zdonik, Brown U. Analyzing due process in the workplace. E.M. Gerson and S.L. Star Offices are open systems. C. Hewitt, MIT ------------------------------ Date: Tue 14 Oct 86 17:26:14 From: Roland Hjerppe Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS, FOR DISTRIBUTION Message-Id: <6N63PQ0.1R.R-HJERPPE@LISBET> CALL FOR PAPERS IEEE Computer Society 1987 Workshop on Visual Languages August 19 - 21, 1987, Linkoping, Sweden Papers are invited on theory, methodology, and applications of visual languages, including both languages that have a heavy visual component and languages designed for operating on visual objects. Areas related to visual languages, such as Man-Machine Interface, Office Automation, Computer Aided Design, Computer Hardware, and Knowledge Based Systems are also of interest if the visual language aspect is in focus. Topics include, but are not limited to: Visual Data Structures Formal, Cognitive and Semantic Models for Visual Languages Shape Grammars Visual Programming Visual Support for Software Production Visualization of Programs and their Behavior User Interfaces Using Visual Objects Representation and Acquisition of Visual Knowledge Icon and Iconic System Design Animation Research Multimedia Systems Important Dates Submission Deadline February 20, 1987 Acceptance Notification April 20, 1987 Final Copy Due May 20, 1987 Conference August 19-21, 1987 Three copies of each paper - maximum length 5 000 words - should be submitted to: Erland Jungert FFV Elektronik AB Agatan 122 S-582 22 Linkoping Sweden Conference Chairman: Prof. Robert Korfhage, Dept. of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Program Chairman: Erland Jungert, FFV Elektronik AB Organizers: Roland Hjerppe, Christian Krysander, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Linkoping, S-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden For details, contact the the Organizers at: UUCP:RHJ@LIUIDA ARPA: RHJ%LIUIDA.UUCP@SEISMO ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 Oct 86 02:46:46 edt From: DEJONG%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed] Date: Thursday, 9 October 1986 15:09-EDT From: Brad Goodman subject: BBN Labs AI Seminar Thursday, 16 October 10:30am Room: 3rd floor large conference room BBN Labs, 10 Moulton Street Cambridge BBN Laboratories Science Development Program AI/Education Seminar Inferring Domain Plans In Question-Answering Martha E. Pollack Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International (Pollack@Sri-Warbucks.Arpa) The importance of plan inference in models of conversation has been widely noted in the computational-linguistics literature, and its incorporation in question-answering systems has enabled a range of cooperative behaviors. The plan inference process in each of these systems, however, has assumed that the questioner (Q) whose plan is being inferred and the respondent (R) who is drawing the inference have identical beliefs about the actions in the domain. I demonstrate that this assumption is too strong, and often results in failure not only of the plan inference process, but also of the communicative process that plan inference is meant to support. In particular, it precludes the principled generation of appropriate responses to queries that arise from invalid plans. I present a model of plan inference in conversation that distinguishes between the beliefs of the questioner and the beliefs of the respondent. This model rests on an account of plans as mental phenomena: "having a plan" is analyzed as having a particular configuration of beliefs and intentions. Judgements that a plan is invalid are associated with particular discrepancies between the beliefs that R ascribes to Q, when R believes Q has some particular plan, and the beliefs R herself holds. I define several types of invalidities from which a plan may suffer, relating each to a particular type of belief discrepancy, and show that the types of any invalidities judged to be present in the plan underlying a query can affect the content of a cooperative response. The plan inference model has been implemented in SPIRIT -- a System for Plan Inference that Reasons about Invalidities Too -- which reasons about plans underlying queries in the domain of computer mail. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 Oct 86 02:46:51 edt From: EMMA@CSLI.STANFORD.EDU Subject: CSLI Calendar, October 9, No. 2 [Extract - Ed] NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR Categorial Unification Grammar Lauri Karttunen and Hans Uszkoreit October 16, 1986 The introduction of unification formalism and new types of rules has brought about a revival of categorial grammar (CG) as a theory of natural language syntax. We will survey some of the recent work in this framework and discuss the relationship of lexical vs. rule-based theories of syntax. Non-transformational syntactic theories traditionally come in two varieties. Context-free phrase structure grammar (PSG) consists of a very simple lexicon and a separate body of syntactic rules that express the constraints under which phrases can be composed to form larger phrases. Classical CG encodes the combinatorial principles directly in the lexicon and, consequently, needs no separate component of syntactic rules. Because a unification-based grammar formalism makes it easy to encode syntactic information in the lexicon, theories such as LFG and HPSG, which use feature sets to augment phrase structure rules, can easily encode syntactic information in the lexicon. Thus syntactic rules can become simpler and fewer rules are needed. In this respect, HPSG, for example, is much closer to classical CG than classical PSG. Pure categorial grammars can also be expressed in the same unification-based formalism that is now being used for LFG and HPSG. This includes more complex versions of CG employing the concepts of functional composition and type raising as they are currently exploited in the grammars of Steedman, Dowty, and others. The merger of strategies from categorial grammar and unification grammars actually resolves some of the known shortcomings of traditional CG systems and leads to a syntactically more sophisticated grammar model.