From: august@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Stephanie August)
Subject: 9/17/92 TACART: Dahlgren on Computational Linguistics or Statistics?
Originator: august@oahu.cs.ucla.edu
Keywords: natural language processing, computational linguistics
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Distribution: ca
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 92 17:16:32 GMT


Los Angeles (LA) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Technical Activity Committee on Artificial Intelligence (TACART)

                          TACART

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NOTE:  TACART will be meeting on the third  *THURSDAY* of each month
       this year.  Please note this change in your calendar.
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TOPIC:       Computational Linguistics or Statistics?
SPEAKER:     Dr. Kathleen Dahlgren, Intelligent Text Processing, Inc.
DATE:        Thursday, 17 September 1992
TIME:        The talk will begin at 7:30 p.m.
ABSTRACT:    Research in natural language processing has taken a 
             turn toward statistical methods recently.  There are 
             two key claims.  First, it is infeasible to implement
             linguistic approaches to natural language processing.
             Both software development  cost and processing time are
             too costly.  Second, statistical methods can produce 
             useful natural language applications.  This talk will 
             argue against the second claim and will explore  some
             of the key reasons it does not hold up. The talk will
             examine each of the complexities of natural language
             which places a permanent ceiling on the results which
             can be expected with statistical methods.  The
             performance of statistical methods in application
             domains will be reviewed.  The first claim concerning
             the infeasibility of linguistic approaches is based
             upon history rather than theory.  The talk will explore
             some of the recent advances in linguistic theory which
             make computational applications of them more likely
             now to succeed.
BIOGRAPHY:   Kathleen Dahlgren has a BS in mathematics from UCLA, 
             a PhD in linguistics from UCLA, and a post-doc in
             computer science from UCLA.  She is the author of the
             book _Naive Semantics for Natural Language Understanding_.
             She has taught linguistics and AI at the Claremont 
             Colleges, was a senior scientist at the IBM Los Angeles
             Scientific Center until 1990, and since then has formed
             a software development company with several colleagues
             from IBM.  The firm, Intelligent Text Processing, Inc.,
             is developing a text retrieval product.
PLACE:       The Conference Room, in the Basement of the Santa Monica
             Public Library, located at the corner of 6th St. and 
             Santa Monica, in Santa Monica (4th/5th St. Exit from I-10).
DINNER:      No dinner is planned.  No social activities are planned.
CONTACT:     Stephanie E. August  august@cs.ucla.edu  (310) 645-9657


********************************************************************
NOTE:  TACART will be meeting on the third *THURSDAY* of each month
       this year.  Please note this change in your calendar.
********************************************************************