Flu shot causes cold?

It doesn't make sense, but it's the second time that it happens to me.
So sitting in the couch, feeling really poorly. and downloading software, so I can do some proper work next week.

But I don't know what will happen to the weekend work...

Very late Ada Lovelace Day 2012 picture...

"Computing is too important to be left to men"
Karen Sparck-Jones, 2007.

Shieber post

When Margaret Tatcher resigned in 1990, Karen came to my office in the Computer Lab, shared with several other postdocs, excited by the news. Since I was alone in the office in the early morning, she exclaimed, `oh there is no one here' presumably  for her to tell the good news, turn around and left. I started laughing, the news were really cause for jubilation.

Later on we became good friends and I remember fondly a walk in Nancy, after the conference dinner in 2004, talking about computing, linguistics, marriage and children.

Wayback Machine, I love you! IMLA 1999

I was looking for the data on previous IMLA workshops, as we need to organize the new one, the 6th IMLA, which is happening in Rio de Janeiro, in April 2013, as part of 4th Unilog.

Now the web is vast and things never disappear from it. Unless you want them, that is.

For instance the whole Hypatia archive of pdf papers (kudos to M. Dawson -- I believe-- for creating it in the early nineties) has disappeared without a trace... But I am not going down the rabbit hole of trying to find it. Had enough of rooting around the wayback machine today to find the program of IMLA 1999.

Luckily I did find the IMLA 1999 program and at least one associated page that tells me the program committee and invited speaker. This is enough for one Saturday...

But while I'm at it I must repeat that the Wayback Machine is wonderful. The guys who conceived the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine and that keep it going are my heroes!

Reproducing the program of IMLA  1999 here to have it easily.

Patent win?...

Two great things happened two Mondays ago:

I started working at Nuance Communications in Sunnyvale, yay!

And my patent with Ji Fang, Jessica Staddon and other colleagues in PARC on detecting sensitive content in documents was granted. (Funny, only got to know about it because the guys who sell you wooden plaques told me...)

Now, I do not like the idea of patents at all.
Probably would prefer if we lived in a world where they didn't exist.

But I feel that during  my years at PARC I contributed to several projects where others got  patents and I didn't, which wasn't fair. So this is very sweet!

From Quirky Case to Representing Space: AnnieFest one year later...

AnnieFest was almost a year ago and I'm pleased to report that because Tracy H. King is such a powerhouse of organization all is well with the volume arising from it.

Listing here the talks, as PARC doesn't keep its pages going for very long...

• Danny Bobrow, PARC Host
• Joan Bresnan, Stanford University and CSLI
• Anette Frank, Heidelberg University
• Joan M. Maling, Brandeis University and U.S. National Science Foundation
• Geoffrey Nunberg, University of California at Berkeley
• Livia Polanyi, Microsoft Corporation
• Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI and Saarland University

5 October 2011
2:00-5:30pm
George E. Pake Auditorium, PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, California

description

This symposium is being held on the occasion of Annie Zaenen's retirement from PARC to honor her significant contributions to theoretical and computational linguistics over a long and distinguished career.
The symposium features speakers who have collaborated closely with Annie at different times and on different topics, representing the broad sweep of her theoretical and practical concerns. The talks and discussion will reflect on their collaborations with Annie and offer new perspectives on language issues of current interest.
Speakers:
Joan Maling, Brandeis University and U.S. National Science Foundation
Chapter 1. Iceland: Is Icelandic a natural language
Joan Bresnan, Stanford University and CSLI
The evolution of syntax in the time of Annie
Hans Uszkoreit, DFKI and Saarland University
NLP is OOG?
Anette Frank, Heidelberg University
Diving into semantics -- and getting hidden meanings out
Livia Polanyi, Microsoft Corporation
Sentiment Analysis and the linguistic structure of Discourse
Geoffrey Nunberg, University of California at Berkeley
L'avis des mots
Organizers:
Danny Bobrow, PARC
Ron Kaplan, Microsoft
Tracy King, eBay
Valeria de Paiva, Rearden Commerce
Sponsored by PARC.

Constructive modal logics? in the plural?

(picture by Eric Volpe, check his flickr stream)

A long time ago I started compiling a bibliography of work on constructive modal logics. Now I've decided to make it a Google Docs so that people can help me improve it,  adding and correcting things.

Online bibliographies seem to me  a sensible idea.

Where's the meeting that was cancelled?

When I was still at PARC -- 2008 seems an awful long time ago now -- I invited Patricia Amaral, then a recently graduated research student to come and visit us for a short while. She was applying to be a research assistant in Linguistics, Stanford and being in Palo Alto a little earlier was a good idea. It was lucky that the Gulbekian Foundation agreed too. We wanted to work on improving the system Bridge (about which I will write informally some other day, but an official description can be found in PARC's Bridge and Question Answering System and a personal preliminary take can be found here).

Being a latecomer to computational linguistics and perhaps a bit too optimistic about research, I always have dozens of ideas of things I want to get done, but little ability to predict the time that it takes to get those things done. In this case, however, everything worked well. Patricia got the hang of the system very quickly and soon enough made gigantic progress on the issue I wanted to deal with.

Despite our claims in Preventing Existence (and despite the beautiful algorithm that Rowan, Cleo and Lauri described in Computing Relative Polarity for Textual Inference) the Bridge system could, at that stage, only deal with logical contexts introduced by verbs with a full complement phrase. So something like Ed knew that Mary arrived  would be fine, a logical context would be created with the right polarity, but Ed knew of Mary's arrival  would not create a logical context. (The Bridge system works with full deep LFG parses of sentences and it easier to mark the complemented verbs.)

Thus my goal for the work with Patricia was the extension of the marking of verbs that introduce context, from the ones with full complement to ones that were simply directly transitive.  As usual the problem was much harder than I expected and Patricia, at the end of her stay, gave us a huge presentation with millions of issues and a possible classification that would be a first stab at solving the original problem.

This was written up in a paper  (by Patricia, myself, Cleo Condoravdi and Annie Zaenen) submitted to the workshop on contexts associated with ECAI2008. The paper accepted, but none of us could attend. So we withdraw the paper, hoping to improve it.

Very recently I took the initiative of re-submitting the paper to ONTOBRAS2012 in Recife, Brazil, as I had hoped to go visit some  friends there. But this was not possible, so the paper, again accepted,  had to be withdrawn. Again.

The newly named Where's the meeting that was cancelled? paper seems a bit unlucky, but the work is very cool. Patricia came up with this idea of treating verbs that change  existential commitments as pre and post conditions reminiscent of Hoare's logic. This connection is hinted at in the paper, but not pursued, as the need for classification large-scale was definitely more important then. Someone should work on this, though.

(Meanwhile together with Lottie Price and Tracy King, I worked a little on nouns that introduce logical contexts, cf. Contexts Inducing Nouns.)