6.847, FYI: Call for Reviewers, Cognitive Science Reports

[The Linguist List]

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-6-847. Thu Jun 22 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  233
 
Subject: 6.847, FYI: Call for Reviewers, Cognitive Science Reports
 
Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Assoc. Editor: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselin at emunix.emich.edu>
Asst. Editors: Ron Reck <rreck at emunix.emich.edu>
               Ann Dizdar <dizdar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
               Annemarie Valdez <avaldez at emunix.emich.edu>
 
Editor for this issue: hdry at emunix.emich.edu (Helen Dry)
 
---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Sat, 15 Apr 1995 15:03:04 EDT
From:  adderley at quijote.lang.usf.edu (Mark Adderley)
Subject:  review books
 
2)
Date:  Thu, 23 Mar 1995 10:59:14 EST
From:  jbkerper at central.cis.upenn.edu (Jodi Kerper)
Subject:  Cognitive Science Technical Reports
 
---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Sat, 15 Apr 1995 15:03:04 EDT
From:  adderley at quijote.lang.usf.edu (Mark Adderley)
Subject:  review books
 
The following books are available for review in the "Language Quarterly."
 
Aaron Halpern, "On the Placement and Morphology of Clitics."
 
Bruce hayes, "Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies."
 
Makoto Kanazawa and Christopher J. Pinon, "Dynamics, Polarity and
Quantification."
 
Young-Key Kim-Renaud, "Theoretical Issues in Korean Linguistics."
 
R. E. Batchelor, "Using Spanish Synonyms."
 
If you would like to review any of these books, please contact me by
e-mail at <adderley at quijote.lang.usf.edu>.
 
Sincerely
 
Mark Adderley
Managing Editor, Language Quarterly
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2)
Date:  Thu, 23 Mar 1995 10:59:14 EST
From:  jbkerper at central.cis.upenn.edu (Jodi Kerper)
Subject:  Cognitive Science Technical Reports
 
The following new technical reports are now available from the Institute for
Research in Cognitive Science:
 
Centering: A Framework for Modelling the Local Coherence of Discourse
Barbara J. Grosz
Aravind K. Joshi
Scott Weinstein
IRCS-95-01
$2.40
 
Our original paper (Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein, 1983) on centering claimed
that certain entities mentioned in an utterance were more central than others
and that this property imposed constraints on a speaker's use of different
types of referring expressions. Centering was proposed as a model that
accounted for this phenomenon. We argued that the coherence of discourse was
affected by the compatibility between centering properties of an utterance and
choice of referring expression. Subsequently, we revised and expanded the ideas
presented therein. We defined various centering constructs and proposed two
centering rules in terms of these constructs. A draft manuscript describing
this elaborated centering framework and presenting some initial theoretical
claims has been in wide circulation since 1986. This draft (Grosz, Joshi, and
Weinstein 1986, hereafter, GJW86) has led to a number of papers by others on
this topic and has been extensively cited, but has never been published.
 
We have been urged to publish the more detailed description of the centering
framework and theory proposed in GJW86 so that an official version would be
archivally available. The task of completing and revising this draft became
more daunting as time passed and more and more papers appeared on centering.
Many of these papers proposed extensions to or revisions of the theory and
attempted to answer questions posed in GJW86. It has become ever more clear
that it would be useful to have a "definitive" statement of the original
motivations for centering, the basic definitions underlying the centering
framework, and the original theoretical claims. This paper attempts to meet
that need. To accomplish this goal, we have chosen to remove descriptions of
many open research questions posed in GJW86 as well as solutions that were only
partially developed. We have also greatly shortened the discussion of criteria
for and constraints on a possible semantic theory as a foundation for this
work.
 
A First-Order Axiomatization of the Theory of Finite Trees
Rolf Backofen
James Rogers
K. Vijay-Shanker
IRCS-95-02
$3.29
 
We provide first-order axioms for the theories of finite trees with bounded
branching and finite trees with arbitrary (finite) branching. The signature is
chosen to express, in a natural way, those properties of trees most relevant to
linguistic theories. These axioms provide a foundation for results in
linguistics that are based on reasoning formally about such properties. We
include some observations on the expressive power of these theories relative to
traditional language complexity classes.
 
A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar for English
The XTAG Research Group
IRCS-95-03
$11.75
 
This document describes a sizable grammar of English written in the TAG
formalism and implemented for use with the XTAG system. This report and the
grammar described herein supersedes the TAG grammar described in [Abeilli et
al., 1990]. The English grammar described in this report is based on the TAG
formalism developed in [Joshi et al., 1975], which has been extended to include
lexicalization ([Schabes et al., 1988]), and unification-based feature
structures ([Vijay-Shanker and Joshi, 1991]). The grammar discussed in this
report extends the grammar presented in [Abeilli et al., 1990] in at least
two ways. First, this grammar has more detailed linguistic analyses, and
second, the grammar presented in this paper is fully implemented. The range of
syntactic phenomena that can be handled is large and includes auxiliaries
(including inversion), copula, raising and small clause constructions,
topicalization, relative clauses, infinitives, gerunds, passives, adjuncts,
it-clefts, wh-clefts, PRO constructions, noun-noun modifications,
extraposition, determiner phrases, genitives, negation, noun-verb contractions,
sentential adjuncts and imperatives. The XTAG grammar has been relatively
stable since November 1993, although new analyses are still being added
periodically.
 
Preservation Theorems in Finite Model Theory
Eric Rosen
Scott Weinstein
IRCS-95-04
$2.25
 
We develop various aspects of a finite model theory. We establish the
optimality of normal forms over the class of finite structures and demonstrate
separations among descriptive complexity classes. We establish negative results
concerning preservation theorems. We introduce a generalized notion of
preservation theorem and establish some positive results concerning
"generalized preservation theorems" for first-order definable classes of finite
structures which are closed under extensions.
 
CLiFF Notes
Research in the Language, Information and Computation Laboratory of the
 University of Pennsylvania
Annual Report 1994, Vol. 4
Matthew Stone and Libby Levison (eds.)
IRCS-95-05
MS-CIS-95-07
$9.35
 
This report takes its name from the Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum
(CLiFF), an informal discussion group for students and faculty. However the
scope of the research covered in this report is broader than the title might
suggest: this is the yearly report of the LINC Lab, the Language, Information
and Computation Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania.
 
It may at first be hard to see the threads that bind together the work
presented here, work by faculty, graduate students and postdocs in the Computer
Science and Linguistics Departments, and the Institute for Research in
Cognitive Science. It includes prototypical Natural Language fields such as:
Combinatorial Categorial Grammars, Tree Adjoining Grammars, syntactic parsing
and the syntax-semantics interface; but it extends to statistical methods, plan
inference, instruction understanding, intonation, causal reasoning, free word
order languages, geometric reasoning, medical informatics, connectionism, and
language acquisition.
 
Naturally, this introduction cannot spell out all the connections between these
abstracts: we invite you to explore them on your own. In fact, with this issue
it's easier than ever to do so: this document is accessible on the "information
superhighway". Just call up
 
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cliff-group/94/cliffnotes.html
 
In addition, you can find many of the papers referenced in the CLiFF Notes on
the net. Most can be obtained by following links from the authors' abstracts in
the web version of this report.
 
 
The abstracts describe the researchers' many areas of investigation, explain
their shared concerns, and present some interesting work in the Cognitive
Science. We hope its new online format makes the CLiFF notes a more useful and
interesting guide to Computational Linguistics activity at Penn.
 
****************************************************************************
The reports are available in bound form for the price listed above, or may be
obtained for free, electronically.
 
To obtain a compressed postscript copy of the report, open an anonymous ftp
session on
 
ftp.cis.upenn.edu
path: pub/ircs/technical-reports
 
The files are named according to their number.  For example, Report 95-01 is
stored as 95-01.ps.Z, 95-02 is stored as 95-02.ps.Z, etc.
 
If you are using ftp, change the setting to binary and download the file. To
get a copy of Report 95-01, you would type:
 
binary
get 95-01.ps.Z
 
You can also obtain files through electronic mail.  Send a mail message to
ircsserv at ftp.cis.upenn.edu.  The message should read "send technical-reports
filename". You will receive the compressed postscript file in reply.
 
Requests for bound copies should be sent to the address listed below, and
include a check for the price of the desired report. Checks should be
made payable to "Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania."
 
 
Jodi Kerper             jbkerper at central.cis.upenn.edu
 
Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400C
Philadelphia, PA  19104-6228
 
 
 
 
 
 
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