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Sesquipedalian #16
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VII, No. 16
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New Zealand Day February 6, 1996
BONN, Germany
(Reuter) -- Thousands of Germans are keeping unfortunate surnames
such as Kotz (Vomit), Moerder (Murder), Brathuhn (Roast chicken)
and even Hitler, even though they could legally change them, a
magazine reported Sunday.
The German phonebook lists hundreds of people with the surnames
Faul (Lazy), Fett (Fat), Dreckmann (Filth-man), Dumm (Stupid)
and Schwein (Pig), the weekly Focus magazine said in an advance
release ahead of publication Monday.
Unflatteringly named Germans said that they mainly had problems
with their names as children and that later in life they had
decided not to bow to social pressure to change them.
"Why should I have a different name from my father and
grandfather?" said one Herr Schwein.
[Reuters News Service]
-/-\-/ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /-\-/-
-- Some local heroes will be presenting at the BLS next weekend:
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University, TBA
Rudolf P. Gaudio, University of Arizona, "Acting Like Women,
Acted Upon: Gender and Agency in Hausa Sexual Narratives"
Charlotte Linde, Institute for Research on Learning and
Stanford University, "Other People's Stories: Person
and Evidentiality in Individual and Group Memory"
Linda Uyechi, Stanford University and Janine Toole, Simon
Fraser University, "Formal Symmetry in American Sign
Language"
Brad Davidson, Stanford University, "Diagnosing Illness Across
Languages"
-/-\-/ SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM /-\-/-
THE GAMES INDUSTRY AND GAME THEORY
by
Michael Oswall
on Thursday, February 6
4:15 p.m., Bldg. 460:146 (Margaret Jacks Hall)
Refreshments will be served at the forum.
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Abstract:
1. An overview of the games industry, how to get a job here, what different
companies might be able to offer, what to look out for, why it's hard work
but extremely rewarding. Also, the benefits of working for a small company
in particular. Oh yeah, and the cons. Etc...
2. Our game and the engine that runs it. Jeffrey McArthur and I have spent
a couple of years on R&D and implementation of an extremely versatile object
oriented game development "language". The game which we have been working
on demands pushing the Sony Playstation to its limits, and therefore we have
had to handle a number of interesting technical issues in our development.
I think we have had some pretty creative solutions to everything from the
individual technical components of the game to the overall game development
process. Oh yeah, we have rad artists to work with, and a terrific team
atmosphere around the studio.
Biography:
As far as a bio goes... Hmm.. I'm 24 and have been out of Stanford
almost 3 years. I wasn't the best of students during my undergraduate
tenure, but I got by and had a great time. I live and work in S.F. I could
bore you to death with this one. I shall end here.
-/-\-/ CALL FOR PAPERS /-\-/-
-- ESSLLI'97 STUDENT SESSION: FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS. Deadline: May
3rd, 1997.
http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~esslli97
Papers are invited for submission to the student session of
the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
(ESSLLI'97). These papers, after evaluation and selection, will be
presented during the Summer School which will take place in Aix in
Provence (France) in August 11-22, 1997. The student session will give
students the opportunity to present their work in progress and get
valuable feedback from Senior researchers and fellow-students.
Presentation of creative and innovative ideas is encouraged. The
student session has its own timeslot in the ESSLLI'97 schedule: every
day, this session will last 60 minutes. Six fields will be considered:
Logic, Linguistics, Computation, Logic & Linguistics, Logic &
Computation, and Linguistics & Computation. Abstracts can be sent in
French or in English. Presentations will last 30 mns (including 10 mns
of discussion). Student authors should submit 2 copies of an
anonymous abstract (approximately 4 pages long including references),
plus a title page with the authors' addresses and the paper's field.
The 'stylesheet' for submissions is: A4, Font Times Roman 12pt,
margins 1 inch all around, 1.5 line-spacing, no columns. Electronic
submissions are highly encouraged and should be sent to the program
chair (alice@cogsci.ed.ac.uk) before Saturday May 3rd at 1.30 pm
CET. Please, do send the title page separately from your
paper. Accepted formats are: Latex, RTF and PostScript. Once reviewed
by experts, papers will be selected by a committee of students and
co-chairs. Please note the following: in order to present a paper at
the Student Session, you have to be registered as a participant at
ESSLLI'97. Authors of accepted ' papers will benefit from the early
registration fee. For all information concerning ESSLLI'97, please
consult our Web site : http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~esslli97
-- LACL-97 (Logical applications of Computational Linguistics):
CRIN-C.N.R.S. & INRIA-Lorraine -- NANCY -- 22-24 SEPTEMBER 1997.
GENERAL TOPIC: The first edition of the LACL conference, which was
held in Nancy in September 1996, was very successful. This fact proves
that there is a growing interest in the use of logic in natural
language processing, both for syntactical and semantical
models. LACL'97 wants to continue to bring together linguists,
logicians, philosophers and computer scientists around this theme in
order to present the latest results and to discuss the different
approaches.
TOPICS (not exclusive):
- Proof-theoretical aspects of the syntactical and semantical
models of natural languages.
- Automatic proof-search techniques for syntactical analysis and
generation.
- Grammars based on non-commutative linear logics.
- Relations between categorial grammars, context-free grammars
and TAGs.
- Natural language interfaces for automatic provers.
Authors are invited to submit before April 30 a 4-page
abstract (including the bibliography) of a paper which has not been
submitted elsewhere. This abstract must be sent to the chairman of the
program commitee by electronic mail (LaTeX, PostScript, dvi or ascii
format), or by surface mail. The notifications of acceptance will
be sent before May 31. The collection of the selected abstracts will
be available at the conference. After the conference, the authors are
invited to submit a full paper (up to 20 pages) for publication. The
final papers for the previous conference are to appear in a special
volume of the Springer-Verlag series of Lecture Notes in Computer
Science.
The submissions must be sent to:
Prof. Alain Lecomte
Departement IMSS TEL: +33 4 76 82 78 52
Universite Pierre Mendes-France FAX: +33 4 76 82 56 65
BP 47 X 38040 GRENOBLE Cedex 9
FRANCE
EMAIL: lecomte@shm.upmf-grenoble.fr
SCHEDULE:
30 April: 4-page abstract due
31 May: notification of acceptance
31 August: final 4-page abstract due
WWW homepage: http://www.loria.fr/~bechet/LACL.html
Contact: E-mail: lamarche@loria.fr Tel: +33 3 83 59 30 28
-- ENVGRAM: Computational Environments for Grammar Development and
Linguistic Engineering. Madrid, Spain, July 11 or 12, 1997 (in
conjunction with ACL-97/EACL-97). With a growing number of NLP
applications going beyond the status of simple research systems, there
is also a more evident need for better methods, tools and environments
to support the development and reuse of large scale linguistic
resources and efficient processors. This new area of research, often
referred to as Linguistic Engineering, is rapidly gaining interest
along side the more traditional ones concerned with formalisms or
algorithm studies and development. Aspects of linguistic engineering
range from grammar development environments, through the construction
and maintenance of large scale linguistic resources, to methodologies
for quality assurance and evaluation. Some of the most prominent
examples of sophisticated development platforms comprising tracer,
debugger and all kinds of highly important visualization tools are
ALEP (funded by the European Union), GATE (common infrastructure for
building LE architectures using pre-existing components), GWB
(LFG-workbench developed at Xerox Parc) PAGE (typed feature
logics-based grammar development developed at DFKI), and many others.
There have been a number of projects on the development of large-scale
computational lexicons (e.g. Acquilex), as well as projects concerned
with the development of standards and reference data for diagnostics
and evaluation (e.g. TSNLP). However, while these platforms and
components typically provide fairly clean formalisms, processing
components and data, it is not yet clear to which extent current
results and approaches fit the requirements for scale development and
deployment of real NLP applications. In this connection, a number of
pending issues need be addressed, the relevance of which becomes
particularly clear when the focus is shifted from linguistic formalism
to usability and user/application requirements.
- - What is the state of the art in Grammar Development Environments?
- - How can we meet the demands arising from distributed grammar
development?
- - How can we meet the demands of multi-lingual grammar development?
- - What is the appropriate division of labour in a large scale
development environment?
- - How can we facilitate the shift from reusability to usability?
- - What are the necessary ingredients for quality assurance in
grammar development?
The workshop will be the occasion to discuss the results achieved and
the most promising directions and to highlight pending problems.
Contributions are solicited from institutions (both research-oriented
and industrial) involved in the production of NLP applications.
Authors are asked to submit previously unpublished papers; ALL
SUBMISSIONS SHOULD BE SENT TO FABIO PIANESI. A limited number of
position papers could also be considered. Each submission will
undergo multiple reviews. The papers should be full length (not
exceeding 3200 words, exclusive of references), also including a
descriptive abstract of about 200 words. Electronic submissions are
strongly preferred, either in self-contained LaTeX format (using the
ACL-97 submission style; see: ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/acl-l/, as
well as the submission guidelines for the main conference, at
http://www.ieec.uned.es/cl97/), or as a PostScript file. In
exceptional circumstances, Microsoft Word files will also be accepted
as electronic submissions, provided they follow the same formating
guidelines. Hard copy submissions should include eight copies of the
paper. A separate title page should include the title of the paper,
names, addresses (postal and e-mail), telephone and fax number of all
authors. Any correspondence will be addressed to the first author
(unless otherwise specified). Authors will be responsible for
preparation of camera-ready copies of final versions of accepted
papers, conforming to a uniform format, with guidelines and a style
file to be supplied by the organisers. A paper accepted for
presentation cannot be presented or have been presented at any other
meeting. Please indicate in your submission if you have submitted
your paper to another conference. Presentations will be allocated 25
minute slots each, plus an extra five minutes for discussion,
distributed over morning and afternoon sessions, including an invited
talk and a (closing) general discussion.
Submission deadline: 10 March 1997
Notification of acceptance: 4 April 1997
Camera-ready versions of accepted papers due: 27 April 1997
Workshop: 11 or 12 July 1997
ADDRESS FOR SUBMISSIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION
Fabio Pianesi
IRST - Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica
38050, Povo Trento, Italy
tel: +461-314327
fax: +461-302040
e-mail: pianesi@irst.itc.it
-\-/-\ TRUE LINGUISTICS \-/-\-
Our own Stanley Peters makes a brief appearance in David Foster
Wallace's new novel _Infinite Jest_:
"Her desk has what looks like a skyline of stacks of file folders and
books in neat cross-hatched stacks; nothing teeters. The open book on
top facing Mario is Dowty, Wall and Peters' seminal _Introduction to
Montague Semantics_,(*) which has very fascinating illustrations that
Mario doesn't look at this time...
(*) (c) B.S. 1981, Routledge & Kegan Paul Plc., London UK, wildly
expensive hdcover; not on disk."
-\-/-\ INSTA-PRIZE \-/-\-
-- What is the record for fastest two goals scored by a single player
in an NHL all-star game?
Solution to The McNuggett Problem: 193.
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-\-/-\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE \-/-\-
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