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From: gary@rochester.UUCP (Gary Cottrell)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Seminar Announcement
Message-ID: <5117@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22-Feb-84 00:42:40 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.5117
Posted: Wed Feb 22 00:42:40 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 23-Feb-84 04:27:51 EST
Sender: gary@rocheste.UUCP
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 88

From: Gary Cottrell  







                University of Cottage Street
                    Dept. of Dog Science
                     55 Cottage Street
                 Rochester, New York 14608


                          SEMINAR


                 Saturday, 25 February 1984
                       55 Cottage St.
                         9:00 p.m.

                          Speaker
                    Garrison W. Cottrell
                University of Cottage Street

                           Topic

       "New Directions in Connectionist Dog Modeling"

     Further work has been done in the last year on the con-
nectionist (spreading activation) formalism for modeling the
generic dog (see Dog: A Canine  Architecture,  Cottrell  81;
Toward  Connectionist  Dog Modeling, Cottrell 82). We extend
the model to  investigate  sub-primate  language  use.  This
greatly  simplifies  the  task  of language study, since the
language generation system consists of little more than

                  S->"arf"|"rough"|"bark"

thereby circumventing the transformational theories of Chom-
sky  and his gang of leftist thugs. Our first resuIt is that
the language comprehended by the generic dog is

                      S-> {"no"}{N|V}

with  no  lexical  items  in  common  with  the   generation
language.   We  can therefore study the comprehension system
as totally independent of the  generation  system.  In  this
impoverished  domain,  we  may  study lexical access to word
information independent of any surrounding  sentence  struc-
ture.  In particular, we may study the well known effects of
pragmatic context on comprehension. For example, the  string
"Call  the  elevator, JellyBean" when uttered in the context
of "no elevator", causes the dog  to  jump  on  the  nearest
wall,  whether it has a button or not.(1) Therefore, in this
language domain, the appropriateness of the context is actu-
ally  computed by the speaker, while the hearer must make do
with whatever resources are available  to him at  the  time.
The second result is that the dog has few internal resources
available (little brain).

     We intend to put the model to a practical test by show-
ing that previous "impoverished phoneme" naming verification
experiments, which showed that the dog accepted "whiskey" as
"biscuit"  in  the  context  of  a  biscuit, generalize to a
forced choice paradigm, i.e.,  where whiskey is actually one
of  the  choices, the generic dog will still choose the bis-
cuit, showing that the problem is one of an inadequate world
knowledge frame (no brain). The materials remaining from the
test will be served to observers, in the interest of gaining
introspective   intuitions  as  to  the  nature  of  such  a
decimated world view.

_____

1. Such a result also shows that the lexicon of the dog  may
be collapsed from previous estimates of 20-30 words to a few
modifiers of the current state.  For  example  "get  in  the
back"  (of  the  car)  when uttered in the office causes the
animal to get up and move.  Giving any credence to the  look
of  confusion  on his face is surely the result of anthropo-
morphizing.


-------------------------------------------------
This was a recent party announcement here. I was encouraged to share it with
the world at large. Hope you enjoy it.
gary cottrell