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Sesquipedalian #16

the SESQUIPEDALIAN 				      Volume V,  No. 16
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Annual Sit & Spit Club Contest			      February 16, 1994


		CONCATENATING PHRASES PRODUCE CONFUSING
		       RESULTS IN BANK RESPONSES

BayBank, a Massachusetts chain, has recently started offering "linked
accounts."  For example, a recent ad shows the former hockey great,
Bobby Orr, using his telephone to transfer money from his account to
his son's.  I figured it would be neat to have something in common
with Bobby Orr, so I had them set up the same thing for me and my
daughter who's at U. Mass.  Before setting up the link, my accounts,
as shown at ATM machines or over the phone, were identified as
"savings" and "checking."

BayBank has a feature which they call "custom account names."  You
might think this means you can pick any name you want, but what it
actually means is that you can select from a list of about a hundred
names, with highly personalized choices like "daughter 1" and "son 2."
The BayBank rep who set up my account suggested the "custom" names "my
checking," "daughter's checking," "my savings," and "daughter's
savings," which sounded sensible to me.

The first time I tried to be like Bobby Orr, here's what the
confirmation dialog I got over the phone was: "Seventy dollars have
been transferred from your my savings account to your daughter's
checking account.  The reference number for this transaction is one
thousand eight hundred and four."  This caused me to say "huh?" three
times.  The grammar of "seventy dollars have" isn't bad; I would have
preferred that the transaction number be read as "one eight zero
four;" but the phrase "your my savings account" stopped me cold.

So, next month my daughter gets her bank statement and, yep, you
guessed it: her statement shows this as "BayBank XP24 Transfer From BB
Boston My Savings."  See, it's my daughter's statement, but it's not
_her_ my savings, it's _my_ my savings.

[Daniel P.B. Smith  dpbsmith@world.std.com]

		      ^\^\^\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /^/^/^

-- In conjunction with J. Herman Blake, John Rickford gave a talk on
public service learning at the new CSU-Monterey campus last Friday.
Among other topics, John discussed the community service trip he made
to Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, as an undergraduate in 1970, as
well as the public service component of his current courses.

-- At the Georgetown Linguistics Society conference (Developments in
Discourse Analysis) this weekend, Jennifer Arnold presents 'Focus of
attention and verbal form in Mapudungun,' Charlotte Linde will deliver
'Other people's stories: Third person narrative in individual and
group identity; and Gertraud Benke (Education) will present 'News
about news: Textual features of news agency copies and their usage in
the newsproduction.'

-- BLS ROUNDUP: Rachel Nordlinger, 'Split tense and mood inflection in
Wambaya;' Julie Solomon, 'Local and global functions of a
borrowed/native pair of discourse markers in a Yucatec Maya
narrative;' Eric Jackson, 'Negative concord and logical form;'
Jong-Bok Kim, 'English negation from a non-derivational perspective;'
John McWhorter, 'Renewing our vows: Creole studies and historical
linguistics;' Young-Mee Yu-Cho, '"Ordering Paradoxes" revisited.'

LOOK WHO'S COMING: Peter Austin, former visiting professor in the
Department of Linguistics, currently visiting lecturer in English at
the University of Hong Kong, will be paying us a visit Feb. 20-27.
Anyone who would like to meet with him, please contact Joan Bresnan. 

 	           ^/^/^/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \^\^\^

In deference to the BLS, this week's colloquium should be considered
an 'away game' at Berkeley.  See you all there.

	 	      ^/^/^/ CALL FOR PAPERS \^\^\^

-- ACL's SIGDAT and SIGNLL present the THIRD WORKSHOP ON VERY LARGE
CORPORA, June 30, 1995 - immediately following ACL-95 (June 27-29),
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.  As in past years, the workshop
will offer a general forum for new research in corpus-based and
statistical natural language processing.  Areas of interest include
(but are not limited to): sense disambiguation, part-of-speech
tagging, robust parsing, term and name identification, alignment of
parallel text, machine translation, lexicography, spelling correction,
morphological analysis and anaphora resolution.  This year, the
workshop will be organized around the theme of Supervised Training vs.
Self-organizing Methods.  Is annotation worth the effort?
Historically, annotated corpora have made a significant contribution.
The tagged Brown Corpus, for example, led to important improvements in
part-of-speech tagging.  But annotated corpora are expensive.  Very
little annotated data is currently available, especially for languages
other than English.  Self-organizing methods offer the hope that
annotated corpora might not be necessary.  Do these methods really
work?  Do we have to choose between annotated corpora and unannotated
corpora?  Can we use both?  The workshop will encourage contributions
of innovative research along this spectrum.  In particular, it will
seek work in languages and applications where appropriately tagged
training corpora do not currently exist.  It will also explore what
new kinds of corpus annotations (such as discourse structure,
co-reference and sense tagging) would be useful to the community, and
will encourage papers on their development and use in experimental
projects.  The theme will provide an organizing structure to the
workshop, and offer a focus for debate.  However, we expect and will
welcome a diverse set of submissions in all areas of statistical and
corpus-based NLP.  Authors should submit a full-length paper
(3500-8000 words), either electronically or in hard copy. Electronic
submissions should be mailed to "yarowsky@unagi.cis.upenn.edu", and
must either be (a) plain ascii text, (b) a single postscript file, or
(c) a single latex file following the ACL-95 stylesheet (no separate
figures or .bib files). Hard copy submissions should be mailed to Ken
Church (address below), and should include four (4) copies of the
paper.  Papers should describe original work. A paper accepted for
presentation cannot be presented or have been presented at any other
meeting. Papers submitted to other conferences will be considered, as
long as this fact is clearly indicated in the submission.  Submission
Deadline: March 20, 1995.  Contact
   Ken Church                           David Yarowsky
   Room 2B-421                          Dept. of Computer and Info. Science
   AT&T Bell Laboratories               University of Pennsylvania
   600 Mountain Ave.                    200 S. 33rd St.
   Murray Hill, NJ 07974  USA           Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389  USA
   e-mail: kwc@research.att.com         email: yarowsky@unagi.cis.upenn.edu

 	         ^\^\^\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS /^/^/^

-- MRC COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT UNIT: PhD studentship available.  A
Medical Research Council studentship for a PhD is available at the MRC
Cognitive Development Unit in London (jointly with University College
London), for three years from October 1995, for a student interested
in how studies of cognitive development can be used to further our
understanding of the mind/brain.  The CDU focuses on both normal and
abnormal cognitive development spanning early infancy to middle
childhood in a variety of domains: the development and neural basis of
visual attention in infants, the use of connectionist modelling and
neuroimaging to study the development of brain functions, language
acquisition, communication, event memory, eye witness, false memories
in 3-9 year olds, focal lesion infants, Down syndrome, autism,
dyslexia, Williams syndrome, etc.  The studentship requires a good
grounding in experimental psychology, but not necessarily a background
in developmental psychology.  Competence or interest in computer
modelling and/or neuroscience would be an added advantage. The CDU is
a small and very lively group of scientists with varied interests and
common theoretical concerns.  Students are also part of the University
College London PhD programme and enjoy all facilities of both the CDU
and UCL.  Students with, or expecting, a first class or upper second
class degree in experimental psychology, cognitive science, or other
related fields, must first apply to University College London
Psychology Department, whose entrance criteria they must meet:
                PhD Programme,Psychology Department,
        University College London,Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT.        
but should also send a CV and a brief outline of research interests, to: 
        Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith,
        Medical Research Council, Cognitive Development Unit,
        4 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BT.
        fax: 0171 383 0398.   email: annette@cdu.ucl.ac.uk
CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS:   28th February 1995
A brochure giving details of CDU scientists' research interests, as well
as those of our current and previous PhD students, is either already
available in your Department or can be obtained from the CDU at the
above address. 

		      ^\^\^\ TRUE LINGUISTICS /^/^/^

-- I was standing in line at the checkout counter behind a woman who
had her arms full of intended purchases.  She would drop something,
reach down to pick it up, drop something else as she got up, bend down
and drop something else, and so on.  Finally, exasparated, she looked
up at me and said, 'I'd give my right arm to be ambiguous.'

[Village Idiom]

		     ^/^/^/ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS \^\^\^

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

-- SFU: Simon Fraser University.  Applications are being accepted for
a tenure-track position at the rank of assistant or associate
professor, for appointment commencing September 1, 1995, subject to
final approval of funding.  The successful candidate will be expected
to assume a leadership role the University's new Language Centre,
which is being developed to promote innovative approaches to language
learning in the University, especially through developing facilities
employing new instructional technologies, and to foster ongoing
research into second language acquisition at the university level.
Candidates should hold a Ph. D. in an area relevant to second language
acquisition and maintain an active research program in a related area,
as well as have significant experience in second language teaching. A
specific background in a major Asian language is desirable but not
essential. Applicants should be thoroughly familiar with recent
developments in technologically-assisted language learning, and be
prepared to direct the development and implementation of
learner-centered systems.  Send a letter of application, curriculum
vitae, and sample publications by March 16, 1995 to
        Dr. T. Perry, Chair
        Linguistics Department
        Simon Fraser University
        Burnaby, B.C.
        V5A 1S6 Canada
        phone: (604)291-3554
        FAX: (604)291-5659
        E-mail: perry@sfu.ca
        Candidates should arrange for three letters of recommendation
to be sent to the Department by the deadline.  In accordance with
Canadian Immigration requirements, this advertisement is di rected to
Canadian citizens and permanent residents. SFU is committed to the
prin ciple of employment equity, and offers equal employment
opportunities to qualified applicants.

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

		        ^\^\^\ INSTA-PRIZE /^/^/^

-- HAT TRICK: Name the three stars from last night's Vancouver at San
Jose match-up to win this week's insta-prize.

Solution to CAPITAL FUNISHMENT: Each sentence contains a US state and
capital (Carson City, Nevada; Juneau, Alaska; Frankfort, Kentucky;
Boise, Idaho; and Hartford, Conn. (which does have a hockey team but
is currently last in the standings)).


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