Ústav formální a aplikované lingvistiky Matematicko-fyzikální fakulty Univerzity Karlovy v Praze zve na přednášku Interpreting Discourse by Abduction, kterou přednese prof. Jerry R. Hobbs (USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California, USA). Přednáška se koná v pátek 5. září 2008 od 10 hodin v místnosti S1 ve 4. patře Matematicko-fyzikální fakulty na Malostranském náměstí 25 (Praha 1).
Abstrakt:
We interpret the situations we encounter by coming up with the best explanation for observables in our environment, i.e., we apply abduction. When the observable is an utterance, the best explanation is usually (1) that the string that is uttered conventionally conveys or describes some situation and (2) that the speaker has the goal that the hearer considers that situation in some fashion. (1) leads to the informational aspect of interpreting discourse, (2) leads to the intentional aspect of interpreting discourse, and the fact that in abduction one looks for minimal proofs ensures that the two aspects will be tightly connected. On the informational side, interpretation of extended discourse amounts to explanation of the adjacency of discourse segments, where the explanations are the coherence relations, primarily dependent on such relations as causal and similarity among the eventualities conveyed. Within clauses the best explanations of adjacency are the predicate-argument relations captured by the rules of syntax. This kind of analysis bottoms out in the logical form of the sentences in the discourse, and coming up with the best explanation for that logical form often solves as a by-product many of the local pragmatics problems in the discourse, such as coreference resolution, metonymies, the interpretation of vague predicates, and the resolution of syntactic and lexical ambiguities.
Životopis přednášejícího:
Dr. Jerry R. Hobbs is a prominent researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence. He earned his doctor's degree from New York University in 1974 in computer science. He has taught at Yale University and the City University of New York. From 1977 to 2002 he was with the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, Menlo Park, California, where he was a principal scientist and program director of the Natural Language Program. He has written numerous papers in the areas of parsing, syntax, semantic interpretation, information extraction, knowledge representation, encoding commonsense knowledge, discourse analysis, the structure of conversation, and the Semantic Web. He is the author of the book "Literature and Cognition", and was also editor of the book "Formal Theories of the Commonsense World". He led SRI's text-understanding research, and directed the development of the abduction-based TACITUS system for text understanding, and the FASTUS system for rapid extraction of information from text based on finite-state automata. The latter system constituted the basis for an SRI spinoff, Discern Communications. In September 2002 he took a position as research professor and ISI Fellos at the Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. He has been a consulting professor with the Linguistics Department and the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He has served as general editor of the Ablex Series on Artificial Intelligence. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In January 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
Přidat komentář