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Sesquipedalian #20
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To: ling-local
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Subject: Sesquipedalian #20
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From: Kyle Wohlmut <kyle@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
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Date: Thu, 16 Mar 95 14:05:06 PST
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Cc: gopher-quip
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume V, No. 20
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Freedom of Information Day March 16, 1995
A TYPICAL DAILY PBS SCHEDULE
(IF THE PUBLIC BROADCASTING LEADERS CAVE IN TO REPUBLICAN PRESSURE)
Mark Harmon (Texas Tech)
8:00 am Morning Stretch: Arnold Schwarzenegger does squats while
reciting passages of "Atlas Shrugged."
9:00 am Mr. Rogers' Segregated Neighborhood: King Friday sings
"Elitism is neat." The House Un-American Activities
investigation of Mr. McFeely continues. Mr. Rogers explains
why certain kids can't be his neighbor.
10:00 am Sesame Street: Jerry Falwell teaches Big Bird to be more
judgemental. Oscar the Grouch plays substitute for Rush
Limbaugh. Bert and Ernie are kicked out of the military.
Jesse Helms bleaches all the Muppets white.
11:00 am Square One: A MathNet episode "Ernest Does Trickle-Down."
Jim Varney explains how cutting taxes for the rich and
spending more on defense will balance the budget.
Noon Washington Week in Review: Special guest Senator Bob Dole,
explaining why the current pension crisis, budget deficit,
bank closings, farm foreclosures, S & L bailouts, inflation,
recession, job loss, and trade deficit can all be blamed on
someone else.
1:00 pm Where in the world is Carmen San Diego? Guest detective Pat
Buchanan helps kids build a wall around the U.S.
2:00 pm William F. Buckley's Firing Line: Guests George Will, Rush
Limbaugh, John Sununu, Pat Buchanan, James Kilpatrick, Mona
Charen, G. Gordon Liddy, Robert Novak, Bay Buchanan, Pat
Robertson, Joseph Sobran, Paul Harvey, Phyllis Schafly,
Maureen Reagan, and John McLaughlin bemoan the need for more
conservative media voices.
3:00 pm Nature: Join James Watt and Charlton Heston as they use
machine guns to bag endangered species.
4:00 pm NOVA: "Creationism: Discredited, but what the hell?"
5:00 pm Newt Ginrich News Hour: Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood
present in-depth personal reports on sexual harassment. Pat
Buchanan says he is being shut out from national exposure.
6:00 pm Mystery Theater: Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, and Sherlock
Holmes team up to investigate Whitewater.
7:00 pm Great Performances: Pat Buchanan is a guest conductor of
Wagner's "Prelude to a Cultural War."
8:00 pm Masterpiece Theater: Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Phyllis
Schafly adds to this classic with an added scene where Nora
gladly gives up her independence while her husband chains
her to the stove.
9:30 pm Washington Week in Review: Guests George Will, Rush
Limbaugh, John Sununu, Pat Buchanan, James Kilpatrick, Mona
Charen, G. Gordon Liddy, Robert Novak, Bay Buchanan, Pat
Robertson, Joseph Sobran, Paul Harvey, Phyllis Schafly,
Maureen Reagan, and John McLaughlin discuss liberal media
bias.
10:00 pm Adam Smith's Money World: How to Profit from Ozone
Depletion
10:30 pm Nightly Business Report: Wall Street celebrates the end
of all laws regarding antitrust, consumer protection,
work-place safety, environmental protection, minimum wage
and child labor.
11:00 pm Insights of Dan Quayle
11:01 pm Sign-Off
^/^/^/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \^\^\^
Stanford Linguistics Colloquium
Friday, March 17, 1995
Cordura 100
3:30 PM
Reception to follow
The Once and Future Dictionary
Geoff Nunberg
Xerox PARC & Stanford Linguistics
The Dictionary is at once the most conservative and conventionalized
of print genres, to the point where it has "grown a capital letter,"
and represents a kind of ideal type. In this talk I want to start by
considering the Dictionary as a descriptive template that implies a
number of claims about the lexicon. For example, it entails a picture
of compositionality as an absolute rather than gradient phenomenon. It
suggests a "Gricean" view of the relation of lexical to encyclopedic
information, where the latter is a kind of contextually added
inference. It implies a uniformitarian understanding of the meaning
relation, and it supports a notion of the lexicon as a system of
elements that participate in a single, if messy, semantic hierarchy.
These and other implications of the Dictionary form have had a
considerable influence on popular and theoretical conceptions of the
lexicon and on the way that people have tried to use the Dictionary as
a model for constructing lexical knowledge representations. And yet
most of these claims are ultimately grounded neither in empirical
reality nor the "informational" needs that lexicographers invoke when
they explain their enterprise. As I'll try to show here, they follow
instead from the symbolic role of the Dictionary, by which I mean not
its prescriptive value (which is slight in any case), but its role as
the embodiment of a certain picture of how discourse operates in a
print culture, as "the book written by books." Finally, I want to
argue that the "on-line" dictionary is in a certain sense a
contradiction in terms: we should think of electronic lexical systems
and utilities not simply as improved dictionaries, but as a different
sort of arepresentation entirely.
For other scheduled talks, see
http://bhasha.stanford.edu/~kessler/colloq/colloq.html
^/^/^/ CALL FOR PAPERS \^\^\^
-- COLLOQUE DE SYNTAXE ET SEMANTIQUE DE PARIS (THE PARIS SYNTAX AND
SEMANTICS CONFERENCE), October 12-14, 1995. The University of Paris 7
and CNRS organize a Syntax and Semantics Conference. One of the aims
of the conference is to promote discussion between competing theories
and formalisms. The meeting will consist of a general session and a
thematic one. Papers are invited for both sessions. Papers are
accepted in English and French. The thematic session will be
dedicated to THETA ROLES. Abstracts are invited for 30 mn talks. Send
8 hard copies of an anonymous 2 p. abstract, and a camera-ready
original with the author's name, affiliation, address, and e-mail
address to the following address.
Colloque de syntaxe et semantique de Paris
Universite Paris 7, Linguistique,
UFRL, Case 7003
Tour Centrale, 9o etage,
2 Place Jussieu, 75251 Paris-Cedex 05, France
Please do not send abstracts via Fax or e-mail. Deadline for the
submission of abstracts: MAY 30 1995 Notification of acceptance: JULY
10 1995. WWW: http//www.linguist.jussieu.fr/cssp95.html
-- Third European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication
(Edinburgh (Scotland), 10-21 July 1995). Multilinguality in Speech
and Language Processing. Call for papers:
ftp.let.ruu.nl:/pub/colibri/nlp/general/elsnet_sumschool.10-1995
mail-server@let.ruu.nl: send
colibri/nlp/general/elsnet_sumschool.10-1995
-- XII National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Cuernavaca,
Morelos (Mexico), 20-23 September 1995). Call for papers. Deadline:
2 May 1995.
ftp.let.ruu.nl:/pub/colibri/nlp/general/rnia95.10-1995
mail mail-server@let.ruu.nl: " send
colibri/nlp/general/rnia95.10-1995 "
^\^\^\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS /^/^/^
-- UNDERGRAD RA: A research project investigating the syntax and
semantics of reciprocal constructions across languages needs an
undergraduate research assistant this summer. The RA's duties will
include (1) searching an on-line corpus of text in a language other
than English (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, German) to extract occurrences
of the reciprocal construction in that language, (2) coding of the
meaning of each reciprocal found in accord with a scheme which has
been developed by the project's research staff, and (3) analyzing the
distribution of examples across categories coded. The work to be done
requires fluent reading ability in the language the RA will work on.
Which language is chosen for investigation will depend on the language
skills of the RA employed and the availability of a suitable on-line
corpus of text. The RA must be a US citizen or permanent resident
because of National Science Foundation funding requirements. Students
who may be interested are invited to contact Stanley Peters
(peters@csli) for further information and to discuss their
qualifications.
-- UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX: One fully-funded PhD Studentship (3 years).
Applications are invited from UK/EU students to pursue doctoral
research for up to three years. Fees will be paid by the University
and students will receive a bursary from the Department at current
Research Council rates.
One part-funded PhD Studentship (3 years). Applications are invited
from students anywhere in the world to
pursue doctoral research for up to three years. UK/EU rate fees will
be paid by the University and students will receive a bursary from the
Department at current Research Council rates. Non UK/EU students will
eb liable for the residue of the fees (current fee difference is 3,200
pounds per annum), although the possibility exists of applying for
further support to the ORS.
Students applying for either of the above studentships shoudl
have a good first degree and be willing to investigate a topic
compatible with the department's research priorities. Applications
are particularly welcome from those wishing to pursue research in
theoretical aspects of language acquisition (first or second), syntax,
psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics or phonology, but applicants with
other interests should not be discouraged from applying. Successful
candidates will be required to undertake limited teaching and/or
research assistant duties. The closing date is 31st March 1995.
Further details and an application form can be obtained from:
Graduate Admissions Secretary,
Department of Language and Linguistics,
University of Essex,
Wivenhoe Park,
COLCHESTER, CO4 3SQ, UK
tel: +44 1206 872083
fax: +44 1206 872085
email: laladms@essex.ac.uk
Web page at http://www.essex.ac.uk
^\^\^\ TRUE LINGUISTICS /^/^/^
Top ten signs you are becoming an internet geek:
10. When filling out your driver's license application, you give your
IP address.
9. You no longer ask 'What's your sign?' Now your line is, 'What's
your URL?'
8. Instead of calling you to dinner, your spouse sends you e-mail.
7. You're amazed to find out spam is a food.
6. You 'ping' people to see if they're awake, 'finger' them to find
out how they are, and 'AYT' them to make sure they're listening
to you.
5. You search the net endlessly hoping to win every free t-shirt
contest.
4. You introduce your wife as 'lady@wife.home' and refer to your
children as 'client applications.'
3. You introduce your husband as 'my domain server.'
2. After winning the office hockey pool, you blurt out,
'Colon-right-parentheses!'
1. Two words: PIZZA'S HERE!
[Macmillan Information Superlibrary]
^/^/^/ 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.)
-- MIT: The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology invites applications for a PostDoctoral
Associate, Position #95-0148C. A Postdoctoral Associate in
computational linguistics is needed to work with a team developing a
natural language understanding system targeted at unrestricted
domains. The research will be part of a fundamental research project
seeking to embed intelligence into the information infrastructure;
several prototypes have been developed that have been tested and used
by the U.S. White House. The individual will develop a bidirectional
parser-generator for English as a component of a larger system. The
parser-generator will be closely coupled to a semantic representation
built on research in lexicalist and constructivist semantics and
directed towards bottom-up acquisition of knowledge from text. The
system will be applied to unrestricted English and must fail
gracefully when its coverage is exceeded. Qualifications: PhD in
computational linguistics or related field. Individual must
demonstrate an exceptional ability to design and implement complex
systems in Common Lisp; Lisp Machine experience is a plus. Excellent
communications and computational skills are important because this
individual will be working with a team and building on a substantial
software base. NOTE: At present we anticipate that funding for this
position will continue through 7/31/96, with potential follow-on
funding. Qualified applicants, please respond mentioning position #
to
Mr. James McCarthy
MIT Personnel Office
Building E19-238
400 Main Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
MIT is an Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity Employer.
This is a non-smoking environment.
-- Price Waterhouse Technology Centre. Natural Language Processing
Research Scientist (Menlo Park, California). The Research and
Development Group at PWTC has ongoing efforts in object-oriented
programming, expert systems, model-based reasoning, and machine
learning. We are expanding our effort in the area of intelligent
information retrieval. We are seeking a person with a Ph.D. or M.S.
in natural language processing or equivalent experience to play a key
role in this expanding effort. Requirements: * Proven ability to
implement your ideas on problems of realistic scale * Ability to work
cooperatively as part of a diverse team * Willingness to learn about
and work in a MS Windows environment * Interest in learning about and
working in financial domains Advantages (not required): * Specific
experience with MS Windows programming tools * Specific experience in
financial domains The position is full-time with competitive salary
and benefits. The work environment is a small but growing research
and development group backed by the stability of a Big Six accounting
firm. Interested candidates should send resumes to one of these
addresses (but NOT to me personally, please):
employment@tc.pw.com Principals only.
Human Resources No phone calls, please.
Price Waterhouse Technology Centre An equal opportunity/affirmative
68 Willow Road action employer
Menlo Park, CA 94025
fax: (415) 617-7898
-- Speech Recognition Opportunities in Cambridge: Entropic Research
Laboratory of Washington DC and Cambridge University have recently
joined together to form a new company called the Entropic Cambridge
Research Laboratory (ECRL). ECRL's primary goal is to develop speech
recognition products based on the HTK Hidden Markov Model Toolkit.
ECRL wishes to recruit technical staff with skills in C programming
and signal processing or pattern recognition. Experience in speech
recognition technology, especially using HTK would be of particular
interest. Candidates will normally have a good first degree in a
relevant discipline. ECRL has a town-centre location and close links
with Cambridge University Engineering Department. Salary and
conditions are negotiable in the range 20k to 30k. Applications
including a CV should be sent to Steve Young, Technical Director,
Entropic Cambridge Research Laboratory, Sheraton House, Castle Park,
Cambridge, CB3 0AX (Email: sjy@entropic.com; Fax: 01223 324560).
-- UMASS: The Departments of Linguistics and Psychology at the
University of Massachusetts/Amherst anticipate the availability of one
postdoctoral traineeship, contingent upon funding. The NIH- sponsored
traineeship provides advanced training in linguistic and psychological
perspectives on psycholinguistics. Holders of the PhD degree in
linguistics, psychology, or allied disciplines may apply. NIH
requires that all trainees be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
Current stipend for individuals with no post- doctoral experience is
$19,608. Initial appointment will be for one year with the
possibility of a one-year renewal. Interview not required. Send
vita, statement of interests, reprints, and three letters of
recommendation to Dr. Thomas Maxfield, Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of
Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003. The traineeship will become
available after July, 1995. Review of applications will begin March
14. The University of Massachusetts is an Affirmative Action/Equal
Opportunity Employer.
-- MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, Nijmegen, The
Netherlands: The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics invites
applications for a three-quarter-time postdoctoral research position
in its Language Production Research Unit. The duration of the
appointment will be three years. The junior staff member will
participate in the research project on lexical access, which traces
the process of spoken word production from accessing a lexical concept
to the initiation and execution of a word's articulation in context.
The project relies heavily on reaction time experimentation and
computational modeling; it also links up with brain imaging work in
the Institute. Applicants should have a PhD in one of the relevant
cognitive sciences (such as psycholinguistics, phonology, phonetics).
We are in particular interested in applicants who have the rare
combination of skills in both reaction time experimentation and
lexical/sub-lexical phonology, because phonological encoding of words
is a major theme in the project. Applications including a CV (mention
any languages you know), a list of publications/reports, and names of
two referents should be sent per e-mail, fax, or letter to
Prof. Willem J.M. Levelt, director
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Wundtlaan 1
NL-6525 XD Nijmegen
The Netherlands
fax: (31-)80-521213
e-mail: PIM@MPI.NL
Deadline for applications: April 3, 1995.
-- JOBS in EFS: Stanford graduate students needed for teaching summer
English for Foreign Students classes. Actual teaching time is six
weeks. Please see the information bulletins in the department or
contact Cristy Juenke (3-3636 or cristy@csli). Applications due May
1, 1995.
The EFS program also seeks a part-time program assistant for
Spring and Summer quarters. Program assistant will assist Coordinator
and Office Assistant in administering the four summer programs.
Contact Cristy for details.
(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 \^\^\^
-- NAME THAT TUNE: Find the starting letter, and follow the path along
adjacent letters (up, down, side-to-side, or diagonally) to reveal
this week's mystery quote and win the insta-prize:
I B A C D N E
G S A Y A A P
T R R T Y S K
I C K L F O S
Solution to OPERATIONS RESEARCH: Assuming the baby can sleep through
mowing and vacuuming, the tasks can be accomplished in 45 minutes,
thusly: Spume 1 starts to take care of the baby, while Spume 2 does 15
minutes of mowing the lawn and then starts the vacuuming. After Spume
1 is done with the baby, he/she finishes the lawn mowing that Spume 2
left, finishing exactly as Spume 2 is completing the half-hour of
vacuuming. Two people doing 90 minutes of work in 45 minutes-- amazing!
\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/^\^/
^\^\^\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /^/^/^
So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
online at Stanford (in directory /user/linguistics/Sesquip/93-94), and
at Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.) The most current issue of
the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.
Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
any legal liability or responsibility regarding any information,
disclosed, in this publication, or represents that its use would not
infringe privately owned rights. No specific reference constitutes or
implies endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by Stanford
University or the Linguistics Department, or their employees. Any
similarity to actual linguists, living or dead, is purely
coincidental. The views and opinions expressed herein do not
necessarily reflect those of Stanford University or the Linguistics
Department, or their employees, and shall not be used for advertising
or product endorsement purposes.
Close cover before striking
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