Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site rochester.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!seismo!rochester!gary From: gary@rochester.UUCP (Gary Cottrell) Newsgroups: net.jokes Subject: Seminar Announcement Message-ID: <5118@rochester.UUCP> Date: Wed, 22-Feb-84 00:42:40 EST Article-I.D.: rocheste.5118 Posted: Wed Feb 22 00:42:40 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 23-Feb-84 04:27:33 EST Sender: gary@rocheste.UUCP Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept. Lines: 88 From: Gary CottrellUniversity 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