Tursday, March 13, Rm Volen 101, 2:00-4.00 pm
Commonsense knowledge is required for natural language understanding, intelligent behavior by smart artifacts, and a host of other applications. We are engaged in an effort to encode commonsense knowledge in first-order logic in several fundamental domains. I will describe four of these efforts:
(1) one part of the theory of scalar notions, namely, half orders of magnitude, giving a rough but useful intermediate structure on scales.
(2) our efforts to define a useful notion of causality, in terms of a monotonic notion of "causal complex" and a nonmonotonic notion of "cause".
(3) an effort to develop an ontology of time that could gain wide acceptance in the Semantic Web community, covering topological, durational, and clock and calendar concepts, and linking with natural language annotation efforts.
(4) the initial theory in a larger project to encode commonsense psychology, specifically, a commonsense theory of memory.
Bio: 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 senior computer scientist 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.
Host: James Pustejovsky