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Sesquipedalian #26
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VII, No. 26
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National Tavern Month begins May 1, 1997
-/-\-/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM /-\-/-
Friday, May 2, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall (460), Room 146
Geoff Nunberg
Xerox PARC and Stanford
New Frontiers in Punctuation Research
For a long time punctuation seemed a subject unworthy of serious
linguistic attention, a victim of the general neglect of the
structures of written language, which was regarded on grounds of
general principle as merely a degenerate representation of the spoken
language. Serious linguistic studies of punctuation began to appear a
few years ago, as part of a reconsideration of standard linguistic
dogma about written language that was motivated to some degree by the
increased importance of written texts in work on parsing, generation,
and other NLP problems. These studies -- for example Nunberg (1990),
Dale (1991), Jones (1993), Briscoe (1994, 1995), Lee (1995), White
(1995), Say (1996), and Akman and Say (1997) -- have revealed a rich
and by no means obvious grammatical subsystem, which shows interesting
formal differences from the rules of the spoken language.
There are roughly three possible approaches to punctuation. The first
is the approach of traditional grammar, which associates each mark
with a number of distinct syntactic and semantic functions, whose
relationship is generally not specified. The second is the approach
developed in Nunberg (1990) and most subsequent studies, where
punctuation marks are treated as the surface indicators of various
syntactic categories. From this point of view it is the underlying
categories, rather than marks themselves, that bear most of the
theoretical interest. One difficulty with this way of thinking about
things, though, is that it fails to capture certain generalizations
about specific mark types. For example the semicolon can appear both
as a separator of items in series (i.e., the "promotion" semicolon)
and as a kind of sentential conjunction. But while these two functions
are syntactically distinct, all semicolons have the property of
insisting on widest scope within their clause, and this property is
best thought of "punctocentrically," as a single constraint associated
with a particular mark, rather than as a set of constraints affecting
the various categories that it is used to separate. By way of
demonstrating the advantages of this approach, I'll show how it allows
us to explain a number of changes in the uses of the semicolon over
the past hundred years or so by positing the disappearance of a single
rule of the grammar of the written language.
------------------
Reception follows.
For directions and a complete list of colloquia, see
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/Linguistics/colloq/colloq.html
-/-\-/ SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM /-\-/-
Stockmaster: Anatomy of a Profitable Startup
Mark Torrance
President, Marketplace.net Inc.
http://www.stockmaster.com/
stockmaster@stockmaster.com
Thursday, 1 May, 4:15pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 146
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ABSTRACT
StockMaster was the first stock chart service on the Web. It was
started by Mark as a hobby while he was in grad school at the M.I.T.
Artificial Intelligence Lab. The company has grown into a profitable
business supported primarily through advertising, and additionally
through selling investor relations products to public companies with an
Internet presence. Mark will share his experience in starting and
running the company, including the challenges he has faced keeping
his company successful in the face of competition.
Mark will also comment on the pros and cons of entrepreneurship vs. the
academic career path he originally chose, and on the preparation
Symbolic Systems provided for grad school and for entrepreneurship.
BIO
Mark Torrance has an M.S. in EECS from M.I.T. and a B.S. in Symbolic
Systems from Stanford. While at Stanford, he worked with Nils Nilsson
on Action Networks and with Yoav Shoham on Agent-Oriented Programming.
Mark's M.I.T. Master's Thesis, "Natural Communication with Mobile
Robots", was supervised by Professor Lynn Andrea Stein. His recent work
at M.I.T. on the Intelligent Room, with Rod Brooks, Lynn Andrea Stein
and Tomas Lozano-Perez, was presented at the 1995 Conference on
Computer-Human Interaction. Mark has also worked at Sun Microsystems
Labs and at Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab.
-\-/-\ SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER LECTURE \-/-\-
The Symbolic Systems Student Society Presents
The 1997 Distinguished Speaker Event
"Post Symbolic Systems"
by Jaron Lanier
Annenberg Auditorium
15 May, 1997
4:00pm-6:00pm
Biography of Speaker:
--------------------
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.
Lanier is probably best known for his work in Virtual
Reality. He coined the term 'Virtual Reality', and founded the VR
industry. He started the first VR company, VPL Research, Inc., which
produced most of the world's VR equipment for many years. He is the
co-inventor of fundamental VR components such as interface gloves and
VR networking.
Lanier was also the first to propose and implement a variety
of technologies that have since spawned industries in their own
right. Among his lineup of "firsts" are the first "avatar" for network
communications, the first moving camera virtual set for television
production, and the first performance animation for 3D computer
graphics. He was the first to propose web-based network
computers. Along with Dr. Joe Rosen and Scott Fisher he initiated the
fields of real-time endoscopic surgical simulation and telesurgery. As
a computer scientist, Lanier is also known as a pioneer in the field
of visual programming.
Music is Lanier's first love and he has been an active
composer and performer in the world of new classical music since the
late seventies. He is also a pianist and a specialist in unusual
musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of
Asia. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass,
Ornette Coleman, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Barbara Higbie, and Stanley
Jordan. He also writes chamber and orchestral music. His record
"Instruments of Change" was released on Point/Polygram in 1994. In the
works are a new album of chamber music for Sony Classics, an
orchestral commission for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and a
Ballet, "The Thinning of the Veil".
Lanier's paintings and drawings have been exhibited in
galleries in the United States and Europe and in the Internet. In 1994
he directed the film "Muzork" under a commission from ARTE
Television. His 1983 "Moondust" is generally regarded as the first art
video game, and the first interactive music publication. In 1996 he
presented the "Video Feedback Waterbed", a large installation at Exit
Art in New York City. Lanier's best known visual art, however, is his
work in the design of virtual worlds, including "The Sound of One
Hand", and many others.
Lanier is also a well known author and speaker. He writes on
numerous topics, including the philosophy of consciousness, internet
politics, and the future of humanism in a technological world. He is a
founding contributing writer for Wired Magazine, and was the guest
editor of a special issue of the magazine SPIN devoted to the future
(November 1995). He appears on national television regularly, on
shows such as "Nightline" and "Charlie Rose", has been profiled in
many prominent publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, and has
had his original research featured on the cover of Scientific American
twice.
Abstract of Talk
----------------
Virtual Reality has lead me to explore some of the extremes of what
might be possible in both natural languages and programming languages, and
these two explorations have influenced each other in surprising ways.
I originally became involved with VR in the hopes of improving user
interfaces for large and complex computer programming tasks. In the course
of this work, I became convinced that advanced user interfaces would
influence the core as well as the surface of programming language design.
Some of the most entrenched ideas about computer programming languages
might be understood better as mnemonic devices to help users cope with
text-based or text-influenced user interfaces. I have explored this
possibility by designing a series of user interface-intensive programming
languages that reject seemingly ubiquitous ideas like parsers and source
code.
I also started to wonder about the role of symbols and abstraction
in natural language. I have postulated a new type of natural
communication, as a thought experiment, that might be at least
theoretically possible at some time in the future. There would be
excellent modeling and programming tools for networked VR in this future,
and a community of people highly skilled in the fast construction of shared
virtual worlds. Members of this community could hypothetically communicate
by creating rapidly changing content in a shared, objective world. They
would create and share content directly, instead of referring to
contingencies indirectly with words or other symbolic devices. This is
what I call post-symbolic communication.
While it might at first seem that symbols, abstractions, and
categories would be needed to communicate anything substantial, even in
this future, that does not appear to be the case. For just one example,
instead of abstract categories or platonic ideals, it might be possible to
create a concrete, but very large, collection of objects that are to be
considered as similar. Such a collection could be held inside a virtual
jar, for instance, that is small on the outside but big inside, and could
be available as conveniently as a word.
Another way to say this is that concreteness could be as versatile
as abstraction, if it becomes very easy to make and change concrete things.
If it is at least possible that our understanding of the range of
potential natural languages has been limited by assumptions based on text,
it is certainly worth re-examining our assumptions about computer
languages.
-\-/-\ 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.)
-- HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Lecturer on Linguistics. The Department of
Linguistics at Harvard University announces a one-year nontenured
position, Lecturer on Linguistics, effective September 1, 1997. The
teaching load of four undergraduate courses includes one course in
field methods and another in semantics. Applications from specialists
in such areas as morphology, semantics, language acquisition, and
sociolinguistics are particularly welcome. Three letters of
recommendation required. Applicants should forward a detailed
curriculum vitae, including a complete bibliography to
Prof. Michael S. Flier, Chairman
Linguistics Search Committee
Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
77 Dunster Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
The deadline for receipt of applications and all supporting materials
is May 15,1997. Harvard University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity
Employer. Qualified women and minority candidates are especially
encouraged to apply.
-- UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO: Subject to availability of
funding, the Department of Linguistics at the University of
California, San Diego is seeking one or more temporary Lecturers for
the 1997/98 academic year. Appointments may be full-time or
part-time. Initial appointments may be for one or two quarters, and
may be renewable. Salary is based on University of California pay
scales. A Ph.D. is preferred, but ABD's will be considered. The
successful candidate will demonstrate a potential for excellence in
teaching and scholarship. We encourage applications from candidates
qualified and available to teach phonology, syntax, and semantics
courses at all levels. A letter of application, a curriculum vitae,
the names and addresses (including email addresses) of 3 referees, and
brief descriptions of proposed courses should be sent to
University of California, San Diego
Search Committee
Department of Linguistics, 0108
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0108
Review of applications will begin May 15, 1997, and will continue
until all positions are filled. The University of California is an
equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.
(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 \-/-\-
Solution to last week's word jumble: GO OAKLAND A'S (and take the
Sharks with you!)
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