From: august@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Stephanie August)
Subject: 10/15/92 TACART:  Sumida on Natural Language Processing
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Distribution: ca
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 92 17:44:19 GMT



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

                          TACART

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

TOPIC:       Natural Language Processing with Parallel Distributed 
             Semantic Networks
SPEAKER:     Ronald A. Sumida, UCLA Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
DATE:      Thursday, 15 October 1992
TIME:      The talk will begin at 7:30 p.m.
ABSTRACT:  The traditional approach to natural language understanding 
   is to represent all knowledge symbolically, with rules 
   indicating how various knowledge structures are related to one another. 
   Symbolic systems have been successful at parsing large pieces of 
   connected text, but they require very complex processing and
   learning mechanisms.  Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) systems have
   recently emerged as an alternative.  PDP systems represent knowledge in a
   highly interconnected network of nodes and weighted links, and use simple
   mechanisms for processing through spreading activation and learning 
   through weight modification.  Unfortunately, PDP systems have so far 
   been unsuccessful at representing the high-level knowledge necessary 
   for language understanding, and they require enormous amounts of 
   training time.  This talk presents Parallel Distributed Semantic (PDS) 
   Networks, a connectionist approach that integrates the best features 
   of symbolic and PDP approaches to natural language processing.  
   PDS Networks store knowledge in ensembles of PDP networks, connect
   the networks in the manner of a semantic network, and use Propagation 
   Filters to determine how information is passed between networks.  PDS 
   Networks and Propagation Filters use only simple PDP-style processing 
   and learning mechanisms, but are able to perform many of the functions 
   necessary for language understanding: storing and retrieving high-level 
   knowledge, generating dynamic inferences, addressing the problems of 
   sequencing and ambiguity resolution, and using prior knowledge to 
   efficiently learn new information.
BIOGRAPHY:  Ronald A. Sumida has an AB in Computer Science from the 
   University of California, Berkeley and an MS in Computer Science from 
   UCLA.  He has worked as a software engineer for IBM Corporation and he 
   is currently working on his PhD at the UCLA Artificial Intelligence 
   Laboratory.
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.