Subject: collins

From: Michael Hawley <mike>
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 87 14:08:35 EST

hm, well, since jrd has made this list, here's some info for you.
i have a collins english dictionary on tape (undecoded)
and here is what other people know about it:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From [email-masked] Fri Aug  8 10:55:37 1986
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 86 09:06:57 EDT
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #33

IRList Digest           Thursday, 7 August 1986      Volume 2 : Issue 33

Today's Topics:
   Discussion - Machine Readable Collins Dict., Job at Leeds Univ.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:     24-JUL-1986 23:09:36
From:     [email-masked]
Subject: The Machine-Readable Collins English Dictionary, Job at Leeds

                The Machine-Readable Collins English
                     Summary of work in progress

                        Sebastian Rahtz
                Department of Computer Studies
                   University of Southampton

1. Introduction:
This short document summarizes the responses I had to a letter sent
out in June 1986 to all the people who have ordered a tape of Collins
English Dictionary from the Oxford Text Archive (my thanks to Lou
Burnard for the list of names and addresses). I am grateful to all
those who replied to my request for information about how they had
decoded the text, and what they were doing with it; since it was
apparent that quite a lot of work had been done, and that some were
much further on than others, it seemed sensible to send out a summary
of the replies. I have either included sections of electronic mail directly,
or summarized paper mail. ...

2. Philip Taylor, University of London
  Date:	1-JUL-1986 11:23:07
  From:	[email-masked]

I carried some some work on transliterating the dictionary from photo-
typesetting codes to a more useable form some years ago, when I first received
the tape.  I had two objectives:- (1) to provide an online English-language
HELP system, using VMS help, for all entries in the dictionary, and (2) to
integrate the dictionary into the Dennison spelling checker (which also runs
on the VAX).  Neither of these projects was 100% successful, but the
intermediate results may be of some use to you.  (As part of (1), I also
implmented the core of the IPA on a Mellordate DT80/1 (VT-100 look-alike),
with reasonable success).

I should be happy to pass on all the work I have done, provided only that any
publications resulting from this work acknowledge the various contributors, and
that any further work which you carry out should be equally freely available
among the Academic community.

Philip Taylor (RHBNC, Univ. of London) [[email-masked]]

2.1 Pascal programs

Here are the more useful files from my work on the Collins English
Dictionary; they are written in Pascal and Macro-32.  The programs TYPESET,
DECRYPT and PARSE are good starting points.  TYPESET, as is, will produce quite
acceptable output even on unmodified VT100s; if you have any DT80/1s, I can
copy the IPA ROM for you, and the output will then be as close to Collins type-
set form as I was able to achieve within the time available.

If you have no DT80s, I could let you have the IPA in 8*8 dot-matrix form, and
you could burn it into ROMs for whatever devices you do have.

3. Ian Ellis, University of New England
  From:	[email-masked]  3-JUL-1986 03:41
  Date: Thu, 3 Jul 86 11:30:10 est

Thank you for your letter regarding CED. As yet no one on this Campus has
tried to use CED other than a list of words. We did try to figure some of
the symbols and produce a database but lack of user pressure has allowed
us to put it on the back burner

Ian Ellis,
Director,
Computer Centre,
University of New England

4. Edward Fox, Virginia Tech
  From:	[email-masked]  3-JUL-1986 08:06

You have hit the jackpot!

I have worked with several students during the last year on
the Collins English Dictionary.  One completed his M.S. project
specifically on this.

We are almost done with production of a database, that can be
used from Prolog or from any relational database system, and
probably modified for other systems.  I hope to be sending a tape
to Oxford Text Archive by the end of August.

Ed Fox (BITNET[cheapest]:foxea@vtvax3 or [email-masked];
  CSNET:fox@vt;Internet:[email-masked];UUCP:seismo!vtisr1!fox)
      Dr. Edward A. Fox; Dept. of Computer Science; 562 McBryde Hall
      Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA 24061; (703) 961-5113 or 6931

   We have done everything EXCEPT for the phonetic and etymology
information - I hope you don't need them!  All I have so far is
the MS report - ...

5. David Eckersley, University of Salford
  Date:     MON, 07 JUL 86 13:57:38 GMT
  From:     [email-masked]
   University of Salford Computing Services:  Dr J B Slater, Director

I reply to your letter of June 24th concerning the Collins English Dictionary
from the Oxford Text Archive.  I'm afraid we have for the time being shelved our
plans for using this data.  The person who was do to the work left us, and I
have not taken it up.  We did not manage to attach any consistent meanings to
the embedded codes in the text.

D Eckersley
(Secretary, IUSC)

6. Eric Atwell, University of Leeds
  From: E S Atwell [[email-masked]]
  Date: Tue, 15 Jul 86 13:26:11 bst

I'm afraid I haven't done anything of use to
you with the CED tape: I got it mainly to evaluate it and compare
it  to  the  machine-readable versions of two other dictionaries,
the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) and  the  Longman
Dictionary  of  Contemporary  English  (LDOCE).  I am researching
into aspects of parsing and grammatical analysis  of  unresticted
`raw'  text,  for which a large non-`toy' dictionary is required.
Each  word  in  the   dictionary   needs   detailed   grammatical
information; and the grammatical codes used in OALD and LDOCE are
far more refined and detailed  than  those  of  CED,  so  I  have
concentrated  work on the other two.   In fact, LDOCE has already
been converted into a database-type  format,  and  this  form  is
available  for general (including commercial) research, though at
a price - at the Alvey workshop on linguistic theory and computer
applications  at  UMIST  last  september, a figure of pounds 30,000 was
mentioned!  As an alternative, I have a copy of  the  OALD  tape,
and  last  year  I  got  one  of  our undergraduates to attempt a
reformatting of this as a Third Year Project.  Unfortunately,  he
did  not get as far as a form worthy of general distribution, but
after graduating he stayed on here  over  the  summer  to  finish
parsing  the  original file; the end result is exemplified by the
sample at the end of this letter.

I am currently trying to get some funding from OUP to carry  this
work   further   (in  collaboration  with  Prof  Sampson  of  the
linguistics  dept.  and  Tony  Cowie  from  our  English   dept.)
However, if you are committed to using the CED, I suggest you get
in touch with the Speech research group at IBM Scientific  Centre
in  Winchester;  they  have  extracted a quarter-million wordlist
from CED I believe, with grammatical part-of-speech and  phonetic
transcription  codes  (but  with  other  fields ignored); the CED
phonetic transcriptions are, they say, better than those of  OALD
or LDOCE, which is why they are 'out on a limb' in the sense that
most other researchers i know of are using OALD or LDOCE.

 Eric Steven Atwell                  Artificial Intelligence Group
                                    Department of Computer Studies
 phone: +44 532 431751 ext 6307/6119              Leeds University
 JANET: [email-masked]                          Leeds LS2 9JT
 UUCP:  ...!seismo!mcvax!ai.leeds.ac.uk!eric               England
 EARN/BITNET/ARPA: [email-masked]

EXAMPLE OF PARSED REFORMATTED OALD FILE:
headword			    :B
alternative spelling of headword    :b
pronunciation			    :bi
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
conjugation or plural label	    :pl
conjugation or plural spelling	    :B's
conjugation or plural spelling	    :b's
pronunciation			    :biz
__________definition__________
text				    :the second letter of the English alphabet.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :baa
pronunciation			    :bq
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :cry of a sheep or lamb.
***change in part of speech***
word class label		    :vi
text				    :(baaing, baaed or baa'd /bqd/) make this
                                      cry; bleat.
====subentry====
derivative			    :%@-lamb
word class label		    :n
---subentry definition---
text				    :child's word for a sheep or lamb.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :baas
pronunciation			    :bqs
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :(S Africa) boss.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :babble
pronunciation			    :%babl
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :vi
word class label		    :vt
__________definition__________
verb pattern			    :2A
verb pattern			    :2B
verb pattern			    :2C
text				    :talk in a way that is difficult to
                                     understand; make sounds like a b
__________definition__________
verb pattern			    :6A
verb pattern			    :15B
====subentry====
idiom				    :@ (out)
text				    :, repeat foolishly; tell (a secret):
                                     @ (out) nonsense/secrets.
***change in part of speech***
word class label		    :n
nountype			    :U
text				    :childish or foolish talk; confused talk
                                     not clearly to be understoo
__________definition__________
text				    :gentle sound of water flowing over
                                     stones, etc.
====subentry====
derivative			    :bab.bler
pronunciation			    :%bablE(r)
word class label		    :n
---subentry definition---
text				    :person who @s, esp one who tells secrets.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :babe
pronunciation			    :beIb
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :(liter) baby.
__________definition__________
text				    :inexperienced and easily deceived person.
__________definition__________
text				    :(US sl) girl or young woman.
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :babel
pronunciation			    :%beIbl
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :the Tower of B@, tower built to reach
                                     heaven. (Gen 11).
__________definition__________
text				    :(sing with indef art) scene of noisy and
                                     confused talking: What a @
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :ba.boo
alternative spelling of headword    :babu
pronunciation			    :%bqbu
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :(as Hindu title) Mr; Hindu gentleman;
                                     Hindu clerk; (old use, pej) H
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :ba.boon
pronunciation			    :bE%bun
US pronunciation		    :ba-
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
__________definition__________
text				    :large monkey (of Africa and southern Asia)
                                     with a dog-like face.
cross reference		    	    :the illus at ape
**********end of entry**********
headword			    :baby
pronunciation			    :%beIbI
+++++++start of pieces+++++++
word class label		    :n
conjugation or plural label	    :pl
conjugation or plural spelling	    :-bies
__________definition__________

6.1 Further remarks
It will be interesting to see what others are doing with CED  and
other  dictionary  tapes,  so  please do circulate your findings.
You may like to join Euralex, the European association for
lexicography,  and  find other related work through their bulletin (I
assume you are not already a member as your name did  not  appear
on  the  recent  membership list).  For details contact RRK
Hartmann, Language Centre, Exeter  University,  Exeter  EX4  4QH  (no
JANET address that I know of!)

I would also like to hear how your 3rd year project student  gets
on.   TEFL  students  might  prefer  a ``browser aid" for LDOCE or
OALD,  as  these  as  specifically  designed  for  2nd   language
learners;  in  my previous job at Lancaster University, I wrote a
browser aid for the LDOCE which ELT MA students could  use.   The
speaking  CED  sounds  a  great idea.  A major problem with
`off-the-shelf' speech synthesisers is that they have no way  of
producing  varied ``listenable" intonation contours for sentences and
longer texts; but this problem is neatly sidestepped in a talking
dictionary,  as most fields (keyword, part of speech, spelling)do
not require smooth continuous speech, and the  definition  fields
tend  to  be  short  sentences or sentence-fragments where a very
simple intonation contour would be quite acceptable to the  user.
Even  so, as you suggest, it is still quite ambitious for a third
year project!

6.2 an interesting job
  From:	E S Atwell [[email-masked]] 22-JUL-1986 16:10
  Subj:	vacancy for NLP/AI/OR Software Engineer

I am collaborating with Professor Sampson on a Parsing research project, and
we have just had the go-ahead to advertise for a software engineer to work
with us on the project.  I would be most grateful if you could bring the
following details to the attention of any potential candidates you know of.

********* UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS ****** ANNEALING PARSER PROJECT *********
Applications are invited for a post of SOFTWARE ENGINEER, to work on a project
developing a parser for unrestricted English using the connexionist technique
of simulated annealing.  The project (funded by the Joint Speech Research
Unit) is supervised by Prof. Geoffrey Sampson of the Linguistics & Phonetics
Department (where the post will be tenable) and Eric Atwell of the Computer
Studies Department.  The person appointed will be working on a SUN-3/52M
Workstation dedicated to his/her use.  Candidates should have a good honours
degree; experience with natural language analysis, and of programming in a
Unix environment, will be advantages.

The post is available from 1 October 1986 for a fixed term of up to 3 years.
Starting salary will be within the range 8020 to 9495 pounds (under rev
Other-Related IA Grade, according to age, qualifications, and experience.

Informal enquiries may be made to Prof. Sampson on (0532) 431751 ext.6252;
or by electronic mail to Eric Atwell, [email-masked] via JANET or
[email-masked] via EARN or BITNET.  For application forms and
further particulars write to the Registrar, The University, Leeds LS2 9JT,
quoting reference no. 14/20.
****** The closing date for applications is 14 AUGUST 1986 ******

Leeds University is one of the largest and most influential universities in
the country.  Leeds itself is the commercial, social and sporting centre for
much of North and West Yorkshire; it has all the facilities you would expect
of a major city, yet the outskirts of Leeds lead directly out onto 2,00 square
miles of outstandingly beautiful countryside.  Leeds also offers some of the
cheapest housing in England; for example, pounds 15,000 buys a two-bedroomed
se or a larger terraced house.

Simulated Annealing, a technique originating in statistical mechanics, can be
used in operational research and artificial intelligence in optimisation
problems requiring an efficient search of a very large search space.  We plan
to apply this technique to parsing unrestricted English, where the search
space is a set of trees.  The appointee will find a stimulating research
environment at Leeds: the University is a thriving centre for research in
Computer Analysis of Language and Speech, Artificial Intelligence, Operational
Research and related areas.  In addition to her/his dedicated workstation, the
appointee will have access to a wide range of equipment and software,
including specialist Departmental libraries, a VAX 11/750 dedicated to
Artificial Intelligence research, and a spacious SUN LOUNGE with a network of
Suns, fileserver, laserprinter, and large south-facing windows.

7. Ron Hardie, Brighton Polytechnic
[summary of letter] has only just started thinking about CED;
interested to hear what others are doing.

Ron Hardie, Department of Modern Languages, Brighton Polytechnic,
Brighton BN1 9PH

8. Herbert Wenzel, Erlangen
[summary of letter] writing text retrieval system for PC, now
integrating dictionary, but has problems physically reading tape (sent
suggestion).

Professor H. Wenzel, Institut fEuLr Technische Chemie II,
Egerlandstr. 3, Erlangen, W. Germany.

9. Roger Mitton, University of London
[summary of letter] looked at Collins dictionary but finds the Oxford
Advanced Learner's more useful. Has produced a database from the
OALDCE as part of research into spelling checking, which is available
from the Oxford Text Archive.

Roger Mitton,
Dept Computer Science, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX

------------------------------

END OF IRList Digest
********************

>From [email-masked] Fri Aug  8 15:51:43 1986
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 86 14:28:54 EDT
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #34

IRList Digest           Friday, 8 August 1986      Volume 2 : Issue 34

Today's Topics:
   Discussion - Differences between document files (diff -b)
   Announcement - Advance Program of ACM SIGIR 1986 Int'l Conf. (Pisa)
   Call for Papers - ACM SIGIR 1987 Int'l Conf. on R&D in IR
   COGSCI - Knowledge Bases as Qualitative Models 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: seismo!hplabs!pesnta!lsuc!dave
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 86 07:34:50 pdt
Subject: IRList Digest V2 #32 [Note: see issues 24, 31 too - Ed]

Re: significant differences
A rather trivial point, but the UNIX "diff" command has
a "-b" option which causes it to ignore differences which
are only in the blanks and tabs (whitespace).

Dave Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
[email-masked]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 8 Aug 86 13:43:23 EDT
From: fox
Subject: ACM SIGIR-86 Conference in Pisa, Italy

[Note: the following was typed based on program in upcoming issue of
 ACM SIGIR Forum. Await receipt of that for more details, or contact
 G. Salton <[email-masked]> with questions. - Ed]

                           ADVANCE PROGRAM

          1986 -- ACM Conference on Research and Development in
                         Information Retrievel

           Palazzo des Congressi, Via Matteotti, 1, Pisa ITALY
                        September 8-10, 1986

    Sponsored by Italian National Research Council in cooperation with
          ACM SIGIR    AICA-GLIR    BCS-IRSG    IDI     ESA-IRS

SUNDAY Sept. 7, 1986
 16:00 - 21:00 Conference Registration (18-19:00 welcoming drink)

MONDAY Sept. 8, 1986
 8:00 - 9:00   Conference Registration
 9:00 - 9:30   Opening Session
 9:30 - 10:30  Keynote Speech - Recent trends in automatic IR (G. Salton)
 10:30 -11:00  Chairman: F. Rabitti
             Using structural representation of anomalous states of knowledge 
             for choosing doc. retrieval strategies (N.J. Belkin, B.H. Kwasnik)
 11:30-13:00   OFFICE SYSTEMS - Chairman F. Rabitti
             Doc. presentations and query formul. in Muse (Gibbs,Tsichritzis)
             Approach to multimedia inf. mgmt. (Gallelli,Iacobelli,Marchisio)
             Method. issues for the design of an office information server
                (Truckenmuller,Rathgeb)            
 14:30-16:00   USER INTERFACES - Chairman W.B. Croft
             IR, NLP, AI and UFOS: or IR-relevance, Natural Language Problems, 
                Artful Intelligence and User-Friendly Online Systems (Doszkocs)
             Visual display of info. in an IR environment (D. Crouch)
             Improved subject access, browsing and scanning mechanisms
                in modern on-line IR (Ingwersen, Wormwell)
 16:30-18:00   STORAGE STRUCTURES - Chairman P. Willett
             S-Tree: Dynamic balanced signature index for office ret. (Deppisch)
             Improved hierarchical bit-vector compression in doc. ret.
                systems (Fraenkel, Klein, Choueka, Segal)

TUESDAY Sept. 9, 1986
 8:30 - 10:00   LINGUISTIC RETRIEVAL - Chairman Y. Chiaramella
             Incorporating syntactic information into a doc. ret.
                 strategy: An investigation (Smeaton)
             CALIN: A user interface based on a simple natural
                 language (Bosc, Courant, Robin)
             Solving grammatical ambiguities within a surface
                 syntactical parser for automatic indexing (Berrut, Palmer)
 10:30-12:00    INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS - Chairman D. Kraft
             A design of a distributed full text retrieval system
                 (Macleod, Martin, Nordin)
             REALIST: Retrieval aids by linguistics and statistics (Thurmair)
             COREL: A conceptual ret. system (DiBenigno,Cross,DeBessonet)
 13:30-14:45    CLUSTERING - Chairman P. Bollman
             Hierarchical doc. classification using Ward's clustering method
                 (El-Hamdouchi, Willett)
             User-oriented doc. clustering: A framework for learning
                 in IR (Raghavan, Deogun)
             The efficiency of inverted index and cluster searches (Voorhees)
 15:10-16:00    RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES - Chairman M. Agosti
             On extending the vector space model for Boolean query
                 processing (S.K.M. Wong, Ziarco, Raghavan, P.C.N. Wong)
             An experimental study of factors important in doc.
                 ranking (D. Williamson)

WEDNESDAY Sept. 10, 1986
 9:00-10:30    KNOWLEDGE BASED IR (I) - Chairman C.J. van Rijsbergen
             Invited paper - A new theoretical framework for IR 
                (C.J. van Rijsbergen)
             User-specified domain knowledge for doc. ret. (Croft)
 11:00-12:30   KNOWLEDGE BASED IR (II) - Chairman C.J. van Rijsbergen
             IOTA: A full text IR system (Chiaramella,Defude,Bruandet,Kerkouba)
             An IR system based on AI techniques (DeJaco,Garbolino)
             The use of inference mechanisms to improve the retrieval
                facilities from large relational databases (Zarri)
 14:00-15:30   LEARNING SYSTEMS - Chairman G. Salton
             A machine learning approach to IR (S.K.M. Wong, W. Ziarko)
             An automatic and tunable doc. indexing system (Ozkarahan,Can)
             Performance of self-taught documents (Bookstein)
 15:50-18:00   PROBABILISTIC RETRIEVAL - Chairman A. Bookstein
             Two models of retrieval with prob. indexing (Fuhr)
             Two Poisson and binary indep. assumptions for prob. doc.
                retrieval (Losee, Bookstein, Yu)
             Non-binary independence model (Yu, Lee)
             The maximum entropy principle in IR (Kantor, Lee)
             An interpretation of index term weighting schemes based
                on doc. components (Kwok)

THURSDAY Sept. 11, 1986
  The Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (GLIR) of the
  Italian Computing Society (AICA) is organizing a Tutorial Day on
  FUTURE DIRECTIONS IN IR
 9:00-10:45    Design of automatic retrieval systems (G. Salton)
 11:00-12:30   Future directions in IR: theory   (C.J. van Rijsbergen)
 14:00-15:30   Future directions in IR: practice (C.J. van Rijsbergen)
 15:45-17:15   Technological trends in IR hardware (T. Toszkocs)
 17:15         Concluding remarks

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 29 Jul 86 11:06:46 cdt
From: Don <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re:  1987 conference [Reformatted for CRT - Ed]
     
              Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
        Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR)

                 1987 International Conference on 
           Research and Development in Information Retrieval

                          June 3-5, 1987
              Monteleone Hotel (in the French Quarter)
                   New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

                         CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on theory, methodology, and applications of information
retrieval.  Emerging areas related to information retrieval, such as office
automation, computer hardware technology, and artificial intelligence and
natural language processing are welcome.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

retrieval system modelling                     user interfaces    
retrieval in office environments               hardware development
natural language processing                    mathematical models
retrieval system performance                   linguistic models    
system development and evaluation              multimedia retrieval    
storage and search techniques                  complexity problems
cognitive and semantic models                  knowledge representation
information retrieval and database management

Submitted papers can be either full length papers of approximately twenty
to twenty-five pages or extended abstracts of no more than ten pages.  All
papers should contain the authors' contributions in comparison to existing
solutions to the same or to similar problems.

Important Dates:
Submission Deadline        December 15, 1986
Acceptance Notification    February 15, 1987
Final Copy Due             March 20, 1987
Conference                 June 3-5, 1987

Four copies of each paper should be submitted.  Papers submitted from
North America can be sent to Clement T. Yu; submissions from outside North
America should be sent to C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen.

Conference Chairman    Treasurer               Publicity Chairman
Donald H. Kraft        Bert R. Boyce           Vijay Raghavan
Department of          School of Library and   Department of
  Computer Science       Information Science     Computer Science
Louisiana State Univ.  Louisiana State Univ.   Univ. of Regina
Baton Rouge, LA 70803  Baton Rouge, LA  70803  Regina, Saskatchewan Canada
(504) 388-1495         (504) 388-3158                  and 
                                               Center for Advanced Studies
                                               Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana
                                               P.O. Box 44330
                                               Lafayette, LA  70504

Arrangements Chairman  Technical Program Co-Chair  Technical Program Co-Chair
Michael C. Stinson     Clement T. Yu               C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen
Department of          Department of               Department of
  Computer Science       Elect. Engineering          Computer Science
Lousiana State Univ.     and Computer Science      University of Glascow
Baton Rouge, LA 70803  Univ. of Illinois, Chicago  Lilybank Gardens,
                                                   Glascow G12 8QQ
(504) 388-1495         Chicago, IL  60680          Scotland
                       (312) 996-2318              (041) 339-8855

Technical Program Committee Members:
Abraham Bookstein (USA)                 Nick Cercone (Canada)    
Stavros Christodoulakis (Canada)        Yves Chiaramella (France)    
Martha Evens (USA)                      Aviezri Fraenkel (Israel)
Jochum Friedbert (Germany)              Richard Frost (Scotland)    
Tetsuro Ito (Japan)                     W. S. Luk (Canada)    
Michael McGill (USA)                    Esen Ozkarahan (USA)
Fausto Rabitti (Italy)                  Gerard Salton (USA)    
Peter Scheuermann (USA)                 C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen (Scotland)
Michael Wong (Canada)                   Clement T.  Yu (USA)

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 25 Jul 86 18:57:49 edt
From: [email-masked]
Subject: Cognitive Science Calendar [Extract - Ed]

    Date: Friday, 18 July 1986  10:09-EDT
    from: [email-masked]
    Subject: Seminar on Knowledge Bases

              BBN Laboratories Inc.
            Science Development Program
              AI/Education Seminar
             Friday, 1 August   10:30am

  From Guidon to Neomycin and Heracles--Viewing               
       Knowledge Bases as Qualitative Models 

          Dr. William J. Clancey 
          Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory 
          Computer Science Department 
          701 Welch Road, Bldg C 
          Palo Alto, CA 94304 

Beginning with early attempts to improve MYCIN's representation of
knowledge for use in teaching, we have followed the approach of
decomposing knowledge from how it is used, abstracting knowledge
structures and reasoning procedures, and formulating an increasingly more
general understanding of what knowledge engineering and knowledge bases
are all about.  In NEOMYCIN, medical knowledge and diagnostic procedure
are separately represented in well-structured languages to facilitate
explanation and student modeling.  In HERACLES, this knowledge base is
viewed as a classification model of some physical, cognitive, or social
system that is heuristically related to some design, modification,
prediction, or control action.  That is, we view the knowledge base as a
qualitative model of some system in the world, designed with practical
engineering value in mind.  From this perspective, the "diagnostic
strategy" of Neomycin is a general inference procedure that describes
memory activation and search for constructing a situation-specific model. 

This talk will review the development of NEOMYCIN from GUIDON and
summarize the generalizations that we are now exploiting in our 
development of the HERACLES shell and GUIDON2 teaching programs. 

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END OF IRList Digest
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