From: clin@eng.umd.edu (Charles C. Lin)
Newsgroups: news.announce.newgroups,news.groups,comp.ai,sci.lang,comp.groupware,comp.speech,sci.lang
Subject: RFD: comp.ai.natural-lang
Followup-To: news.groups
Date: 28 Jan 1993 23:43:18 -0500
Organization: College of Engineering, Maryversity von Uniland, College Park
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

This is an official request for discussion (RFD) for the formation of
the newsgroup, comp.ai.natural-language

             Charter for comp.ai.natural language

Name:         comp.ai.natural-language

Moderation:   This group will be unmoderated.

Purpose:      To discuss issues relating to natural language, especially
              computer-related issues from an AI viewpoint.   The topics
              that will be discussed in this group will concentrate on, but
              are not limited to, the following:

                   *   Natural Language Understanding
                   *   Natural Language Generation
                   *   Machine Translation
                   *   Dialogue and Discourse Systems
                   *   Natural Language Interfaces
                   *   Parsing
                   *   Computational Linguistics
                   *   Computer-Aided Language Learning

              This group will avoid discussing issues that are more properly
              covered by other newsgroups.   For example, speech synthesis
              should be discussed in comp.speech.   However, due to the
              interdisciplinary nature of the field, there may be overlap in
              material between other groups.    To try to keep this to a 
              minimum, topics should pertain to computer-related aspects
              of natural language.

Rules of Decorum:  Because of the unmoderated format, anyone with access to
                   this newsgroup will be able to post without review.
                   This is meant to encourage discussion of the topics.
                   Please refrain from "flames" or unnecessary criticism
                   of a person's viewpoints or personality in a harsh
                   or insulting manner.   Criticisms should constructive
                   and polite whenever possible.

Intended Audience:  The following is a repost of Terry Gaasterland's opinion
                    on how this newsgroup would fit in to the other alternative
                    newsgroups and mailing lists.

Terry writes:

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.

End of charter
--------

    The above is, by no means, a final version of the charter.   The
name was selected so that it would be obvious, for the time being, to
see what the purpose of this newsgroup.   Right now, comp.ai.nlp seems
the most popular, and we will probably require a vote to work the details
out.   People should argue for why they want the newsgroup named as they
do.   In addition, some parts of the charter may be modified after a
period of discussion.

Discussion period:   The period of discussion will last no less than three
                     weeks.   If discussion continues (especially concerning
                     the nature of the charter) beyond four weeks, we will
                     move the discussion to e-mail.   If there appears to 
                     be no major disagreements, then we will attempt to
                     make a call for votes in three weeks time, from
                     Wednesday, January 27.   Instructions on how to
                     vote will be given then as well as a final form for
                     a charter.

Reminders:  Reminders for discussion will be posted to news.announce,newgroups
            about once a week.

E-mail:    Any questions or suggestions can be e-mailed to me, Charles Lin,
           at clin@eng.umd.edu.   If there are any problems e-mailing me, let
           me know via posting, or asking another person to forward mail
           to me (this might be preferable).

Followup discussion:   All followup discussion will be carried out on
                       news.groups.   You may wish to crosspost to other
                       groups, but to keep clutter in other groups to
                       a minimum, discussion is preferably confined to
                       news.groups.
-- 
Charles Lin
clin@eng.umd.edu
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