The FINITE STRING Newsletter Announcements

Announcements Lecture topics will include computer vision, compu- tational linguistics, expert systems, robotics, AI pro- gramming languages, hardware for AI, and psychologi- Computer Modeling of Linguistic Theory: cal modelling. Late-night programming classes will be An Announcement and a Call for Papers conducted for novices with little or no programming The ACL is sponsoring three sessions on experience, and experts who wish to extend their LISP "Computer Modeling of Linguistic Theory" in con- or PROLOG skills. There will be a set of workshops junction with the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic for industrial participants focussing on case studies of Society of America which will be held in New York AI applications. A parallel series of workshops on City at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, December 28-30, research methods will cover experimental design, paper 1981. and thesis writing, and seminar presentation skills. The specific objective is to address a number of For further information, contact: ideas -- some old, some new -- that have been gain- Mrs. Olwyn Wilson ing the attention of both theoretical and computational AISB School Administrator linguists alike. These ideas include new models for Institute of Educational Technology grammars and new strategies for parsing, motivated by Open University the goal of relating grammatical competence and per- Walton Hall formance in a principled way. People from both lin- Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, ENGLAND guistics and computational linguistics are becoming conversant with augmented transition networks, lexical NATO Symposium on Artificial functional grammars, phrase structure grammars, Mo- and Human Intelligence ntague grammars, and transformational grammars, and beginning to explore their implications for each other. A Symposium on Artificial and Human Intelligence, sponsored by the Human Factors Subcommittee of To further this dialogue, the ACL, with the cooper- NATO, will be held at the Chateau de Chapeau Cornu ation of the LSA, is soliciting two sessions of contrib- near Lyon, France, October 26-30, 1981. The two uted papers and planning a panel session on the com- major topic areas to be addressed are: (1) the struc- puter modeling of linguistic theory. To submit a paper ture of memory, the representation of the problem, for consideration in the contributed paper sessions, and the knowledge and belief base available to the send abstracts of .two to eight pages by August 21 to problem-solver -- key issues in both human and ma- either: chine intelligence; and (2) the structure of language Stan Petrick and the role that languages play in problem solving. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Other areas of interest include inductive, deductive, P.O. Box 218 and analog thinking, roles in research of expert sys- Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 tems, benchmarks and yardstick problems, constraints of complexity and computability, and priorities in AI or: Terry Langendoen research. CUNY Graduate Center 33 West 42nd Street Further information may be obtained from the New York, New York 10036 conference director: Dr. Alick Elithorn The Royal Free Hospital AISB School on Artificial Intelligence Skills Pond Street The AISB School on Artificial Intelligence Skills London NW3 2QG, ENGLAND will be held in Milton Keynes, September 21-25, 1981. This Autumn school is designed for both industrial and Cognitive Studies at Essex academic participants. Industrial participants will have the opportunity to acquire the skills associated with The University of Essex has founded a Cognitive applying AI techniques to real world-problems. Aca- Studies Centre to encourage joint research between demic research scientists will be able to learn about the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engi- recent AI developments and enhance their program- neering Science, Language and Linguistics, Mathemat- ming and communication skills. The school will have ics and Philosophy. The first Director of the Centre is places for 55 residential participants and will provide Mr. J. Doran of the Department of Computer Science. lectures, tutorials, workshops and 24-hour access to The Centre invites applications from suitably quali- computing facilities. fied graduates interested in study leading to Ph.D.,

American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 1, January-March 1981 49 The FINITE STRING Newsletter Announcements

M.Phil. and M.Sc./M.A. degrees by dissertation. Stu- nement dans les sciences de l'homme." The members dents will be attached to the Centre and registered in of this department are: Marie-France Bastianelli, An- the department of their choice. Study will be by su- dree Borillo, Mario Borillo, Jean-Paul Cheylan, Fran- pervised research, but students may be required to coise Desbordes/Cheylan, Luis Farinas Del Cerro, attend courses in relevant aspects of Cognitive Science Colette Ravinet, and Jacques Virbel. Their address is: during their initial year of study. LISH/CNRS Alternatively, graduates preferring a taught M.Sc. Universite de Toulouse Le Mirail with a smaller dissertation may be attached to the 109 bis, rue Vauquelin Centre and admitted to the Cognitive Studies option 31058 Toulouse Cedex FRANCE of the M.Sc. Computer Studies scheme offered by the (61) 40.12.22 Department of Computer Science.

All students have access to the University's excel- Other Conferences lent computing facilities based upon a DEC System- 10. The Fourth Annual International SIGIR Conference will be held at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, Cali- Applications for entry and requests for further fornia, from May 31 to June 2, 1981, sponsored by information should be addressed to the Director of ACM SIGIR in cooperation with ASIS and hosted by Studies for the Centre: the School of Library and Information Studies of the Professor Yorick Wilks University of California. For further information con- Department of Language and L!nguistics tact: University of Essex Dr. Jessie Herr Wivenhoe Park Research Libraries Group Colchester CO4 3SQ, ENGLAND Stanford UniTersity Stanford, California 94305 Post-Graduate Studies in Linguistics at Essex The Third Annual Meeting of the Society for Schol- The Department of Language and Linguistics at the arly Publishing will be held at the Golden Gateway University of Essex offers one-year M.A. degrees in Holiday Inn in San Francisco, California, June 1-3, Theoretical Linguistics, and Phonetics, as well as a 1981. Further information may be obtained from: nine-month M.A. in Applied Linguistics. They also Elizabeth C. Fake offer a Diploma and a number of Certificates in as- Society for Scholarly Publishing pects of Applied Linguistics. 2000 Florida Avenue N.W. Research interests of the academic staff include Washington, D.C. 20009 Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Phonology, Experimental (202) 638-5970 Phonetics, Semantics, Lexicography, Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. They invite The Symposium on Text Manipulation, sponsored applicants for Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in these and jointly by the ACM Special Interest Groups on Pro- other topics, and for appropriate topics offer an M.Sc. gramming Languages and Office Automation, will be in Cognitive Studies in conjunction with the Cognitive held June 8-10, 1981, in Portland, Oregon. [See Studies Centre at the University. [See announcement AJCL 6:3-4, pg. 194.] The conference chairman is: above.] The Department has extensive laboratory and Paul Abrahams computational facilities. ACM Symposium on Text Manipulation More details of these programs are in the booklet P.O. Box 161 Language and Linguistics at Essex, available from: Deerfield, Massachusetts 01342 The Chairman The Seventh Conference of the Canadian Man- Department of Language and Linguistics Computer Communication Society, sponsored by the University of Essex Canadian Man-CCS and the Canadian Image Process- Wivenhoe Park ing and Pattern Recognition Society, will be held in Colchester CO4 3SQ, ENGLAND Waterloo, Ontario, June 10-12, 1981. For further information contact: LISH: A New Department In Toulouse Dr. K. Booth The "Laboratoire d'Informatique pour les Sciences Department of Computer Science de l'Homme" has opened a new department in Tou- University of Waterloo louse: "Analyse informatique et linguistique du raison- Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, CANADA

50 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 1, January-March 1981 The FINITE STRING Newsletter Abstracts of Current Literature

The Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Abstracts of Current Literature Society will be held in Berkeley, California, August 19-21, 1981. Information about the meeting can be The Transformational Question Answering obtained from: (TQA) System: Description, Operating Robert Wilensky Experience, and Implications Computer Science Division Fred J. Damerau Department of EECS Mathematical Sciences Department University of California, Berkeley IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center Berkeley, California 94720 Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 Research Report RC 8287, May 1980. The Seventh International Joint Conference on Arti- This paper sketches the structure of the TQA sys- ficial Intelligence will be held in Vancouver, British tem with some examples, discusses some of the results Columbia, Canada, August 24-28, 1981. [See AJCL of running the system in a user site during the year 6:3-4, pg. 194.] 1978, and outlines a few of the implications of a natu- ral language query system for larger and more diverse Questions about the technical program should be data bases. It is apparent that a number of problems addressed to: remain to be solved, but it also seems likely that a Roger C. Schank useful system can be constructed for some domains. Program Chairman, IJCAI-81 Department of Computer Science Design for an Intelligent Office System Box 2158 Yale Station Janet L. Kolodner Yale University Department of Computer Science New Haven, Connecticut 06520 Yale University New Haven, Connecticut 06520 (203) 436-0606 IBM Research Report RC 8385, July 1980. General questions about the conference may be This paper addresses the problem of designing an addressed to: intelligent office system to help principals (managerial, Pat Hayes administrative, or professional level office workers) General Chairman, IJCAI-81 with their work. A system is described which would Department of Computer Science use normative models of semi-routine office proce- Mathematical Sciences Building dures to anticipate the user's next steps, to provide University of Rochester him automatically with files, documents, and forms he Rochester, New York 14627 needs to complete a task, and to perform automated subtasks at the correct times. A number of intelligent The 1981 Annual Conference of the British Society functions that would perform some of the tasks secre- taries generally do (scheduling, reminding, filing) are for the Philosophy of Science will be held at Wivenhoe described, along with the knowledge necessary for House at the University of Essex, September 18-20, performing those functions. In addition, an approach 1981. [See AJCL 6:3-4, pg. 194.] Further details of to building a more intelligent system which would the conference may be obtained from: understand natural language commands given by the Liaison Officer user and understand and deal with routine mail is pres- University of Essex ented. Wivenhoe Park Colchester CO4 3SQ, Essex, ENGLAND Memory Organization and Search Processes for Narratives The 1981 ACM Annual Conference will be held at Michael G. Dyer and Wendy G. Lehnert the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, California, Department of Computer Science November 9-11, 1981. [See AJCL 6:3-4, pg. 194.] Yale University New Haven, Connecticut 06520 For further information contact: Research Report 175, April 1980. Mrs. A.C. Toni Shelter BORIS represents the first system to integrate the Xerox Corporation, A3-49 knowledge-based inference techniques of scripts, 701 South Aviation Boulevard plans, goals, and themes, within a single narrative un- E1 Segundo, California 90245 derstanding program. This report discusses techniques (213) 679-4511 x1968 used by BORIS for memory representation and memo-

American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 7, Number 1, January-March 1981 51