From - Mon Mar 8 10:31:14 2004 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 Path: acsu.buffalo.edu!rapaport From: rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu (William J. Rapaport) Newsgroups: sunyab.cse.740 Subject: COG SCI: NATURAL LANGUAGE PRAGMATICS Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 06:52:49 -0500 (EST) Organization: Computer Science and Engineering Lines: 78 Sender: Ncs@buffalo.edu Distribution: sunyab Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: castor.cse.buffalo.edu X-Trace: prometheus.acsu.buffalo.edu 1078660369 2492 128.205.32.14 (7 Mar 2004 11:52:49 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@buffalo.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 11:52:49 +0000 (UTC) X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test76 (Apr 2, 2001) Xref: acsu.buffalo.edu sunyab.cse.740:85 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: COG SCI: NATURAL LANGUAGE PRAGMATICS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This week's CogSci speaker's topic may be relevant to CVA: CENTER FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCE University at Buffalo, State University of New York Wednesday, March 10, 2004 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall, North Campus Chrysanne DiMarco, Ph.D. School of Computer Science University of Waterloo "COMPUTATIONAL MODELS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE PRAGMATICS" Current natural language processing (NLP) systems are, almost without exception, still able to deal only with restricted, simplified, language. While researchers in natural language are now beginning to produce systems with real-world utility, NLP systems are still challenged by basic problems associated with analyzing syntax and determining semantic content. A major component of language, the pragmatics of human communication, remains understudied and under-represented in current computational systems. But, in the real world, the pragmatics of natural language---complex nuances of language involving exact choices of words, syntactic arrangement, and discourse structure---carry a good deal of the meaning of a text or utterance. If NLP systems are to be truly effective in everyday use, they must be able to handle much more of these complexities of real-world language. In this talk, I will describe three stages of problems that we have addressed involving aspects of pragmatics in natural language systems: preserving style in machine translation, generating finely tailored documents, and classifying the rhetorical purpose of citations in scientific writing. Through this progression, various views of natural language pragmatics will be highlighted, together with the research issues raised in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. A hardcopy of this flyer can be found here: http://www.cogsci.buffalo.edu/Activities/Colloquium/CLLQs04/dimarcoannouncement.pdf Please print it out and post it in your department/office. Center for Cognitive Science University at Buffalo, State University of New York 652 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 Phone: (716) 645-3794, Fax: (716) 645-3825 Email: ccs-cogsci-contact@buffalo.edu http://www.cogsci.buffalo.edu/Activities/Colloquium/CLLQs04/2004spring.htm All Center for Cognitive Science Events are sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research University at Buffalo State University of New York Heike Jones Center for Cognitive Science University at Buffalo 652 Baldy Hall Buffalo, NY 14260 P: (716) 645-2177 ext. 717 F: (716) 645-3825 Email: ccs-cogsci-contact@buffalo.edu URL: http://www.cogsci.buffalo.edu