From: terry@cs.umd.edu (Terry Gaasterland)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Natural Language newsgroup
Date: 26 Jan 93 18:33:18 GMT
Organization: Math and CS Division, Argonne National Lab, Illinois

In article <1jvq1jINNidk@mojo.eng.umd.edu> clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles Lin) writes:
>***
>Charter for Natural Language Newsgroup

It is important to differentiate between a comp.ai.natural-lang 
group and existing groups:  e.g. sci.lang, the nl-kr group (I 
forget its newsgroup name), and the LINGUIST list.  What would
a comp.ai.natural-lang group provide that these groups do not?

NL-KR is carefully moderated.  As a result, it is not so much a forum 
for dialog as a place for announcements and requests for information.
The main problem with the NL-KR group is that people ask questions
and others answer them privately.  Many times over the years, I have 
sent people requests for a copy of the responses that they get --- 
usually to no avail.  

The sci.lang group has a general scope that basically covers all 
issues in linguistics.  It tends to get a lot of noise.  I would hope 
that a comp.ai.natural-lang group would successfully focus on the 
issues involved in getting computers to deal with processing language.

The LINGUIST list is a forum for linguists to exchange views, argue
about points, give circumstantial data points to each other, and 
post announcements.  The focus is on linguistics, not on how to 
get computers to deal with language.  Its very high volume of 
messages reflects the size of the readership and its willingness 
to participate in discussions.  The list is a good place for a 
computer scientist to pick up a general sense of issues and 
topics in linguistics.  Because it is lightly moderated, the 
LINGUIST list is less noisy than the sci.lang group.  Because
of the quality of the list members, the discussion tends to 
stay at a professional, scientific level.  These properties
are harder to acheive with an unmoderated newsgroup.

The issues that are dealt with in (computer oriented) natural 
language research lie at the heart of AI.  A comp.ai.natural-lang 
group should provide a forem for specific, detailed "intra-disciplinary" 
discussion (intra-AI, that is) that explores for example, the 
relationships between language learning and visual recognition, 
language understanding and visual perception, memory and language 
generation, knowledge representation and language generation, 
planning and language generation, spatial representation and 
locative prepositions, temporal representation and tense and
aspect, to name just a few current areas of active investigation.

Comments?  Suggestions?

>     Name: comp.ai.natural-lang
>     Moderated?:  Unmoderated
>     Purpose:   To discuss issues related to natural language, especially
>                but not solely the kind of issues that researchers in
>                AI would consider important to natural language.   This
>                would include issues such as:
>
>                    * Natural Language Understanding
>                    * Natural Language Generation
>                    * Machine Translation
>
>                Issues related to specific research being done in the
>                field may also be considered.
>
>***
>
>    If anyone else has any additions, please contact me at clin@eng.umd.edu.
>Jaime Cisneros has expressed interest in helping out, but to make it 
>easier, I'll use my e-mail address.   If this bounces, you can try
>him at cisneros@eola.cs.ucf.edu...
> ...
>--
>Charles Lin
>clin@eng.umd.edu


I think that the clarifications above, or some instantiation of them,
should be made part of the charter so that unfocused, unprofessional, 
and/or rampantly unscientific discussion can be moderated through
peer pressure with references to the charter.

  -- Terry Gaasterland 

	 (gaasterland@mcs.anl.gov   or   terry@cs.umd.edu)