IRList Digest Thursday, 21 May 1987 Volume 3 : Issue 13 Today's Topics: Query - Text DBMS for Mac? - Are IRList queries answered? - Automatic query formulation assistance? - References on knowledge based systems for document retrieval Announcement - Machine readable dictionaries available - Position: intelligent systems for automated math reasoning Call for Papers - ACL Applied Natural Language Conference - 1988 Conference on Office Information Systems News addresses are ARPANET: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu BITNET: foxea@vtvax3.bitnet CSNET: fox@vt UUCPNET: seismo!vtisr1!irlistrq ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 5 May 87 18:36:09 PDT From: homo obsolescensis Subject: Seeking TDBMS [From: INFO-MAC Digest Wednesday, 6 May 1987 Volume 5 : Issue 85 - Ed] I apologize if this subject has been covered already, but I haven't been able to locate an answer so far. I am trying to locate a text data base management system (TDBMS) for the mac that would be similar to Instant Recall or AskSam on the ibm. If anyone know of such a program, I would be grateful if they would let me know (off-net preferably). Thanks in advance. Walter Henry xb.k98@forsyth.stanford.edu xb.k98@stanford ------------------------------ Date: Tue 5 May 87 23:33:14 From: Roland Hjerppe Subject: Re: IRList Digest V3 #2 Dear Ed, . . . Sometimes when reading questions or requests for information I wonder if others have already answered or whether I should venture an answer. It would be nice to have some kind of indication (satisfied, still open, no answers) in the next issue (a regular feature) of the fate of previous requests. [Note: I think this is a great idea! Can the folks asking the questions in future please do so? All the discussion I see is sent along in later issues, so only the person raising the question can really do wnat you ask. I expect that there are many people like you who are being shy but who have important points to make that are not being said. I'll be happy to filter replies if the volume or quality is not appropriate - recently there has not been a lot of input to IRList. - Ed] Roland Hjerppe LIBLAB, Linkoping University ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 May 87 14:51:32 edt From: egyhazy@vtcs1 Subject: query formulation aids . . . On a related topic,do you happen to know of papers,companies..dealing with AUTOMATED QUERY FORMULATION AIDS? Any lead appreciated..................Csaba [Note: this refers to the situation of heterogeneous distributed DBMS but could apply to IR systems too. See clarification obtained later, below. Any comments on either topic should be of interest. - Ed] Sorry,here are the specifics: As part of my work at NASA's DAVID Project, a DBMS for heterogeneous distributed databases,we are starting to think about possible front ends for the astrophysics community of users and their data- bases collected by earth telescopes and future space telescopes.In other words we are dealing with massive scientific databases such as location,movement etc., of stars,quasars and other such neighbors. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 19 May 87 13:44:40+0900 From: Kim Young Whan Subject: References on Knowledge-based Document Retrieval I'm writing a Ph.D Thesis about Knowledge Based System for Document Retrieval, especially about rule based system using uncertainty handling mechanism (Bayesian, D-S Theory, Fuzzy Set Theory). I'm looking for any reference having anything to do with it. I'm also interesting in public-domain programs that are related to this field. Sources written in LISP(Common LISP, GCLISP,Frantz-LISP, Zeta LISP) would be preferred. The information obtained will be collected and summarized and made available to researcher on request. Thanks for your assistance. [Note: there has been quite a lot of work on this. There will be a special issue of Information Processing and Management out this summer on this topic. Several papers at the ACM SIGIR Conf. on R&D in Information Retrieval in New Orleans in a few weeks will be about this - I will announce how to get proceedings from ACM when they become available. There was a 2 part article in JASIS by Biswas et al. recently. Notable other systems include I3R by Croft and Thomson, RUBRIC by Tong et al., CODER by Fox et al, CANSEARCH by Pollitt, ... Also, there are abstracts in issues of ACM SIGIR Forum. If you are not an ACM SIGIR member, I encourage joining -- it still only costs $6 to ACM members, but dues will jump to $12 soon. - Ed] Young-Whan Kim Dept. of CS KAIST P.O.Box 150, Cheongryang Seoul, 131 Republic of Korea. ywkim%csd.kaist.ac.kr@relay.cs.net(from cs-net) ywkim%csd.kaist.ac.kr@wiscvm.wisc.edu(from bitnet) ------------------------------ From: Mike Wilson Date: Tue, 12 May 87 19:08:31 -0100 Subject: Machine Usable Dictionaries. The Oxford Text Archive is one of the specialist facilities supported by the Oxford University Computing Service for the use of scholars. The Archive has over 750 machine usable texts which it distributes for research purposes. Among these are several machine usable and machine readable dictionaries. Two of these may be of particular use to researchers in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Psychology. The Computer Usable version of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary prepared by Roger Mitton at Birckbeck College, London. This is available as two files listing 38205 and 68742 words, with their pronunciation, detailed syntactic information and verb patterns. The MRC Psycholinguistic Database, Machine Usable Dictionary: Version 2 prepared by Michael Wilson at the SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxon. This is available as a dictionary file and two access programs. The dictionary file contains 150837 words (115331 different strings), giving 26 linguistic/psycholinguistic properties for subsets of these. These properties include part of speech, written and spoken word frequency, imagability, concreteness, Meaningfulness, phonetic transcription and status of usage. The dictionary was designed to be used to select stimuli for psycholinguistic experiments, but it may be used in other ways. To obtain copies of texts a signed order form (containing a declaration that the texts will be used for private scholarly research only) and prepayment must be sent before any materials can be distributed. A flat fee of 5 pounds sterling is charged for each text ordered. In addition, there is a charge to cover media and postage, currently 15 pounds per tape (or diskette) within Europe, or 25 pounds per tape (or diskette) outside Europe. The number of texts that can fit on one tape varies greatly, according to the format used to write the tape as well as the size of the text. Further information about ordering the dictionaries is available from: Oxford Text Archive Oxford University Computing Service 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN U.K. Messages and enquiries sent by electronic mail are welcomed. The Archive has an account on the British Joint Academic Network (JANET), which also has connections to EDUNET (ARPANET), EARN (BITNET, NORTHNET) etc ... The JANET address for electronic mail is: ARCHIVE@UK.AC.OX.VAX3 >From ARPANET try: ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OX.VAX3@CS.UCL.AC.UK >From EARN/BITNET try: ARCHIVE%UK.AC.OX.VAX3@UK.AC.RL.EARN ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 12 May 87 17:21:42 GMT From: Alan Bundy Subject: Lectureship at Edinburgh UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH DEPARTMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TEMPORARY LECTURESHIP IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AUTOMATED MATHEMATICAL REASONING) The Department of Artificial Intelligence is the leading European university centre for research into intelligent systems. Applications are invited for a five year temporary lectureship in the area of automated mathematical reasoning. The post has been created as the result of the award of an SERC senior fellowship to Dr. Alan Bundy. Candidates should have post-doctoral, or equivalent, experience and proven ability for independent research and innovation. Besides participating in the Department's teaching programme, the successful candidate will be expected to contribute to its research in automated mathematical reasoning. Salary will be on the lecturer scale, 8,735 - 18,210 pounds per annum, with superannuation under the University's scheme. The starting salary will depend on age, qualifications and experience. Further particulars may be obtained from: The Personnel Office 63 South Bridge Edinburgh, EH1 1LS SCOTLAND. quoting reference number 1301. Applications (six copies) including curriculum vitae and the names and addresses of three referees, should be sent to the same address not later than 8th June 1987. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Apr 87 02:49:39 edt From: walker@flash.bellcore.com Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS: ACL Applied Natural Language Conference "CALL FOR PAPERS" SECOND CONFERENCE ON APPLIED NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 9-12 February 1988, Austin, Texas, USA Organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics CONFERENCE SUMMARY: This meeting will focus on the application of natural language processing techniques to real world problems. It will include invited and contributed papers, panel discussions, tutorials, exhibits, and demonstrations. Original papers are being solicited in areas such as human-machine interfaces (including databases, expert systems, report writers, etc.), speech input and output, information retrieval, text generation, machine translation, office automation, writing aids, computer-aided instruction, tools for natural-language processing, and applications to medical, legal, or other professional areas. Papers may present applications, evaluations, limitations, and general tools and techniques. Papers that critically evaluate a formalism or processing strategy are especially welcome. Papers or panel proposals discussing end-user experience with natural language systems are also encouraged. REQUIREMENTS FOR SUBMISSION: Authors should submit ten copies of a 6-8 page summary (single-spaced, exclusive of references, pica or elite size type). The first page should begin with the title, the name(s) of the author(s), complete address(es), and a short (5-6 line) abstract. Papers should be sent to: Bruce Ballard AT&T Bell Laboratories, 3C-440A Murray Hill, NJ 07974 (201)582-5440 allegra!bwb@ucbvax.berkeley.edu The submission should identify distinctive aspects of the work and clearly indicate the extent to which an implementation has been completed; vague or unsubstantiated claims will be given little weight. Submissions should be substantively different from papers currently under review or to be submitted elsewhere before the notification date. All papers will be reviewed by members of the Program Committee , which is composed of Bruce Ballard, chair (AT&T Bell Laboratories), Madeleine Bates (BBN Laboratories), Tim Finin (University of Pennsylvania), Ralph Grishman (New York University), Carole Hafner (Northeastern University), George Heidorn (IBM Corporation), Paul Martin (SRI International), Graeme Ritchie (University of Edinburgh), and Harry Tennant (Texas Instruments). SCHEDULE: Papers must be received by September 1, 1987. Notification of acceptance will be sent by October 5, 1987. Camera-ready versions of the full paper must be received by November 30, 1987. OTHER ACTIVITIES: The meeting will include one day of tutorials by noted contributors to the field. Facilities for exhibits and system demonstrations will also be available. Persons wishing to arrange an exhibit or present a demonstration should contact Kent Wittenburg or Carl Weir, MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TX 78759; (512)338-3626 or 338-3616; wittenburg@mcc.com or weir@mcc.com. CONFERENCE INFORMATION: Local arrangements are being handled by Jonathan Slocum and Barbara Smith, MCC, 3500 W. Balcones Center Drive, Austin, TX 78759; (512)338-3571 and 338-3527; slocum@mcc.arpa and barbara@mcc.arpa. For additional information on the conference or about the ACL, contact Donald Walker, Bell Communications Research, 445 South Street, MRE 2A379, Morristown, NJ 07960; (201)829-4312; walker@flash.bellcore.com or ucbvax!bellcore!walker. In addition to the persons named above, the Conference Committee includes Norman Sondheimer, USC/Information Sciences Institute, General Chair; Martha Palmer, UNISYS, Tutorials; Jeffrey Hill and Brenda Nashawaty, Artificial Intelligence Corporation, Publicity. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 4 May 87 14:29:36 edt From: "Robert B. Allen" Subject: OIS conference CONFERENCE ON OFFICE INFORMATION SYSTEMS Palo Alto, CA - March 23-25, 1988 Sponsored by: ACM-SIGOIS IEEE Computer Society TC-OA In Cooperation with IFIP W.G. 8.4 COIS is a conference concerned with intelligent processing of information in organizations - topics of interest include: Effects of Technology on Human Organizations Information Systems Object-Oriented and Intelligent Databases Planning Systems Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Social Processes Multimedia/Hypertext Systems Organizational Design Distributed Artificial Intelligence User Models Voice/Video/Graphics Interconnect PROGRAM COMMITTEE: G. Bracchi (Milan), S. Christodoulakis (Waterloo), Bruce Croft (UMass), Peter DeJong (MIT), Les Gasser (USC), Eli Gerson (San Francisco), Irene Greif (Lotus), Benn Konsynski (Harvard), Yoshifumi Masunaga (Tokyo), Norm Meyrowitz (Brown), Alain Michard (INRIA), Juzar Motiwalla (Singapore), John Mylopoulos (Toronto), Bill Newman (London), Margi Olson (NYU), Fausto Rabitti (Pisa), Ron Rice (USC), Jeff Rulifson (Syntelligence), Chris Schmandt (MIT), Lucy Suchman (Xerox PARC), Dennis Tsichritzis, Geneva), C.J. van Rijsbergen (Glasgow), Andrew Whinston (Purdue), Thomas Wu (NPS), Stan Zdonik (Brown) CONFERENCE COMMITTEE: Najah Naffah (General Chair, Bull), Bob Allen (Program Chair, Bellcore), Dave Choy (IBM, SJ), Skip Ellis (MCC), Carl Hewitt (MIT), Fred Lochovsky (Toronto), Bob Root - (Treasurer, Bellcore), Sig Treu (Pittsburgh), Alex Verrijn-Stuart (Leiden) KEYNOTE SPEAKER: TERRY WINOGRAD INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS: Submissions by September 21, 1987. Papers will be judged for technical merit by appropriate subgroups of the program committee. Submissions (max. 3500 words) may be made either on paper (5 copies) or on some standard electronic medium to: Conference on Office Information Systems Dr. Robert B. Allen 2A-367 Bell Communications Research Morristown, NJ 07960