grad b: Actually grad f: I just had one of the most frustrating meetings of my career . grad a: So that 's why Keith and I are going to be a little dazed for the first half m the meeting . Yeah , I I I avoided that as long as I could for you guys , grad f: growl . grad d: Oh yeah , how di how d exactly did , that paper lead to anti - lock brakes ? grad f: Oh , I could tell you had a rough day , man ! grad d: Nah . grad c: Oh yeah , Liz suggested we could start off by  , doing the digits all at the same time . professor e: e grad a: Really ? Do we have to like , synchronize ? professor e: Well , I think you 're supposed to OK . grad f: Are you being silly ? grad d: Oh wait do we have t professor e: Everybody 's got different digits , grad c: Yep . professor e: right ? grad d: Yeah , do we have to time them at the same time or just overlapping grad f:  . grad a: And any rate ? professor e: e yeah , the grad f: Alright . professor e: Well , they they have s they have the close talking microphones for each of us , grad a: Yeah , that 's true . grad a: Are we gonna start all our meetings out that way from now on ? professor e: No . grad d: Are we to r Just to make sure I know what 's going on , we 're talking about Robert 's thesis proposal today ? Is that grad c: We could . grad d: Is professor e: Well , you you had s you said there were two things that you might wanna do . grad c: Not not rehearse , I have just not spent any time on it , so I can show you what I 've got , get your input on it , and maybe some suggestions , that would be great . I don't know how much of a chance you had to actually read it grad a: I haven't looked at it grad c: because grad a: yet , grad c: but you could always send me comments per electronic mail grad a: but I will . grad c: the It basically says , well " this is construal " , and then it continues to say that one could potentially build a probabilistic relational model that has some general , domain - general rules how things are construed , and then the idea is to use ontology , situation , user , and discourse model to instantiate elements in the classes of the probabilistic relational model to do some inferences in terms of what is being construed as what grad a:  . grad c:  ? grad d: OK , we can we can we can pass pass my ,  we can pass my extra copy around . grad d: Er , actually , my only copy , now that I think about it , grad f: Alrigh grad a: OK . grad c: actually this is the the newest version after your comments , grad f: OK . grad c: and professor e: Yeah , no I s I s I see this has got the castle in it , and stuff like that . grad d: Oh , maybe the version I didn't have that I mine the w did the one you sent on the email have the professor e: Yeah . grad c: if you would have checked your email you may have received a note from Yees asking you to send me the , up - to - d grad a: Oh . grad c: And any type of comment whether it 's a spelling or a syntax or grad a:   grad c: readability grad f: There 's only one " S " in " interesting " . grad c:  ? grad f: There 's only one " S " in " interesting " . And y  , email any time , but most usefully before grad d: The twenty - first I 'm assuming . grad f: That 's grad d: What , today 's the twenty - first ? grad f: Well , better hurry up then ! grad d: Oh , man ! grad a: Before the twenty - ninth , grad c: The twenty - ninth . grad c: That 's when I 'm meeting with Wolfgang Wahlster to sell him this idea . grad c: OK ? Then I 'm also going to present a little talk at EML , about what we have done here and so of course , I 'm I 'm gonna start out with this slide , so the most relevant aspects of our stay here , and  , then I 'm asking them to imagine that they 're standing somewhere in Heidelberg and someone asks them in the morning The Cave Forty - Five is a is a well - known discotheque which is certainly not open at that that time . grad c: they 're supposed to imagine that , you know , do they think the person wants to go there , or just know where it is ?  , which is probably not , the case in that discotheque example , or in the Bavaria example , you just want to know where it is . So basically we can make a point that here is ontological knowledge but if it 's nine nine PM in the evening then the discotheque question would be , for example , one that might ask for directions instead of just location . Then what have we done so far ? We had our little bit of , SmartKom stuff , that we did , everth grad f: Oh , you 've got the parser done . Then I 'm going to talk about the data , you know these things about  , actually I have an example , probably . grad c: But they 're they 're mimicking the synthesis when they speak to the computer , grad f: Oh , OK . grad c: the you can observe that all the time , they 're trying to match their prosody onto the machine . grad c: Yeah , you have to grad a: Wh grad f: The system breaking .  , I will talk about our problems with the rephrasing , and how we solved it , and some preliminary observations , also , I 'm not gonna put in the figures from Liz , but I thought it would interesting to , point out that it 's basically the same .  , as in every human - human telephone conversation , and the human - computer telephone conversation is of course quite d quite different from , some first , observations . Then sort of feed you back to our original problem cuz ,  how to get there , what actually is happening there today , and then maybe talk about the big picture here , e tell a little bit as much as I can about the NTL story . I I wa I do wanna ,  I 'm not quite sure about this , whether I should put this in , that , you know , you have these two sort of different ideas that are or two different camps of people envisioning how language understanding works , and then , talk a bit about the embodied and simulation approach favored here and as a prelude , I 'll talk about monkeys in Italy . And , Srini was gonna send me some slides but he didn't do it , so from but I have the paper , I can make a resume of that , and then I stole an X - schema from one of your talks I think . So X - schemas , then , I would like to do talk about the construction aspect and then at the end about our Bayes - net . Should I mention the fact that , we 're also actually started going to start to look at people 's brains in a more direct way ? professor e: You certainly can .  I y I you know , I don't know grad a: You might just wanna like , tack that on , as a comment , to something . professor e: Well , the time to mention it , if you mention it , is when you talk about mirror neurons , then you should talk about the more recent stuff , about the kicking grad c: Yeah . professor e: and , you know , the yeah , yeah and that the plan is to see to what extent the you 'll get the same phenomena with stories about this , so that grad c:   professor e: which , actually , i i even on your five - layer slide , you you 've got an old one that that leaves that off . grad c: But , you know , it would But I don't think I I am capable of of do pulling this off and doing justice to the matter .  , there is interesting stuff in her terms of how language works , so the emergentism story would be nice to be you know , it would be nice to tell people how what 's happening there , plus how the , language learning stuff works , professor e: OK , so , so anyway , I I agree that 's not central . professor e: What you might wanna do is , and may not , but you might wanna this is rip off a bunch of the slides on the anal there the there we 've got various i generations of slides that show language analysis , and matching to the underlying image schemas , and , how the construction and simulation that ho that whole th grad c: Yeah , th that that 's c that comes up to the X - schema slide , grad a: OK , right . grad c: so basically I 'm gonna steal that from Nancy , grad a: OK , I can give you a more recent if you want grad c: one of Nancy 's st grad a: well , that might have enough . grad c: I yeah , but I also have stuff you trash you left over , professor e: OK . professor e: You could get it out of there , or some grad a: Which I can even email you then , you know , like there probably was a little few changes , not a big deal . Sorry grad c: Well , I I don't feel bad about it at all grad a: No , you shouldn't . grad c:  on the the , you 're that 's see , that 's you . grad c:  I might even mention that this work you 're doing is sort of also with the MPI in Leipzig , so . grad a: It 's it 's certainly related , grad c: Because , EML is building up a huge thing in Leipzig . Would professor e: Yeah , it 's different , this is the , DNA building , or someth the double helix building . professor e: The yeah it was it turns out that if if you have multiple billions of dollars , y you can do all sorts of weird things , and grad d: Wait , they 're building a building in the shape of DNA , grad a: What ? grad d: is that what you said ? professor e: Roughly , yeah . grad f: Oh ! Oh boy ! grad a: O professor e: Including cr cross - bridges , grad a: What ? professor e: and grad a: Oh my god ! grad f: That 's brilliant ! Hhh . professor e: You d you really now I I spent the last time I was there I spent maybe two hours hearing this story which is ,  grad a: Of what grad d: Y You definitely wanna w don't wanna waste that money on research , grad a: the building ? grad d: you know ? professor e: Right . grad c: Well , the the offices are actually a little the , think of  , ramps , coming out of the double helix and then you have these half - domes , glass half - domes , and the offices are in in the glass half - dome . grad c: But I th professor e: So , yeah , I think that 's that 's a good point , th th that the date , the , a lot of the this is interacting with , people in Italy but also definitely the people in Leipzig and the the b the combination of the biology and the Leipzig connection might be interesting to these guys , yeah . grad f: You might want to , double - check the spellings of the authors ' names on your references , you had a few , misspells in your slides , there . grad f: unless there 's a person called " Jackendorf " , grad a: On that one ? professor e: No , no , no . grad a: I 'll probably I c might have I 'll probably have comments for you separately , not important . professor e: So I did note i i it looks like the , metaphor didn't get in yet . grad c: it did , there is a reference to Srini professor e: Well , s reference is one thing , the question is is there any place Oh , did you put in something about , grad a: Metonymy and metaphor here , right ? professor e: the individual , we 'd talked about putting in something about people had ,  Oh yeah , OK . professor e: But , what I meant is , I think even before you give this , to Wahlster , you should , unless you put it in the text , and I don't think it 's there yet , about we talked about is the , scalability that you get by , combining the constructions with the general construal mechanism . professor e: OK , so where where is it , cuz I 'll have to take a look . grad c: but I I did not focus on that aspect but ,  Ehhh , it 's just underneath , that reference to metaphor . grad c: But that 's really grad a: That 's not about that , is it ? grad c: Yeah . professor e: No , it it it s says it but it doesn't say it doesn't it d it d grad c: Why . professor e: Cuz let me tell the gang what I think the punch line is , because it 's actually important , which is , that , the constructions , that , Nancy and Keith and friends are doing , are , in a way , quite general but cover only base cases . And to make them apply to metaphorical cases and metonymic cases and all those things , requires this additional mechanism , of construal . And the punch line is , he claimed , that if you do this right , you can get essentially orthogonality , that if you introduce a new construction at at the base level , it should com  , interact with all the metonymies and metaphors so that all of the projections of it also should work . professor e: And , similarly , if you introduce a new metaphor , it should then  , compose with all of the constructions . professor e: And it to the extent that that 's true then then it 's a big win over anything that exists . grad d: So does that mean instead of having tons and tons of rules in your context - free grammar you just have these base constructs and then a general mechanism for coercing them . So that , you know , for example , in the metaphor case , that you have a kind of direct idea of a source , path , and goal and any metaphorical one and abstract goals and all that sort of stuff you can do the same grammar . But , the trick is that the the way the construction 's written it requires that the object of the preposition for example be a container . Well , " trouble " isn't a container , but it gets constr construed as a c container . So that 's that 's where this , grad d: So with construal you don't have to have a construction for every possible thing that can fill the rule . So 's it 's it it 's a very big deal , i i in this framework , and the thesis proposal as it stands doesn't , I don't think , say that as clearly as it could . That is , there are physical containers , there are physical paths , there you know , et cetera . grad c: But " walked into the cafe and ordered a drink , " and " walked into the cafe and broke his nose , " that 's sort of professor e: Oh , it doesn't mean that they 're unambiguous . professor e: a cafe can be construed as a container , or it can be construed you know as as a obstacle , grad f:  - huh . professor e: But it does say that , if you walked into the cafe and broke your nose , then you are construing the cafe as an obstacle . professor e: And if that 's not consistent with other things , then you 've gotta reject that reading . grad d: You con you conditioned me with your first sentence , and so I thought , " Why would he walk into the cafe and then somehow break his nose ? "  , oh ,  grad f: He slipped on the wet floor . grad c: You don't find that usage , I checked for it in the Brown national corpus . grad c: The " walk into it " never really means , w as in walked smack professor e: But " run into " does . grad c: Yeah , but , y y if you find " walked smacked into the cafe " or " slammed into the wall " professor e: Yeah , no , but " run into " does . professor e: Because you will find " run into , "  , grad d: Cars run into telephone poles all the time . grad a: Yeah , " run into " might even be more impact sense than , you know , container sense . professor e: But Like , " run into an old friend " , it probably needs its own construction .  , you know , George would have I 'm sure some exa complicated ex reason why it really was an instance of something else grad a:   professor e: and maybe it is , but , there are idioms and my guess is that 's one of them , but ,  I don't know . grad f: Sudden surprising contact , professor e: Yeah , but it 's it 's it 's it 's Right . It 's sort of partially inspired by the spatial professor e: Well , this is this motivated but yeah grad f: Yeah . professor e: oh yeah , mo for sure , motivated , but then you can't parse on motivated . grad a: There 's there 's lots of things you could make T - shirts out of , but , this has gotten  wh We don't need the words to that . grad a: What ? Oh , no no no no no no no no no , we 're not going there . professor e: anything else you want to ask us about the thesis proposal , you got grad c: Well , professor e: We could look at a particular thing and give you feedback on it . grad c: Well there actually the i what would have been really nice is to find an example for all of this , from our domain . grad a:  wh when you say all this , do you mean , like , I don't know , the related work stuff , grad c: How grad a: as well as , mappings ? grad c: w Well we have , for example , a canonical use of something professor e: Right right r grad c: and y it 's , you know , we have some constructions and then it 's construed as something , and then we we may get the same constructions with a metaphorical use that 's also relevant to the to the domain . professor e: OK , f let 's let 's suppose you use " in " and " on " . professor e: So " in the bus " and " on the bus , "  , that 's actually a little tricky in English because to some extent they 're synonyms . grad c: I had two hours w with George on this , so it , professor e: OK , what did he say . Oh , h that 's grad c: " On the bus " is a m is a metaphorical metonymy that relates some meta path metaphorically and you 're on on that path and th w  it 's he there 's a platform notion , professor e: Yeah , I I believe all that , it 's just grad c: right ? " he 's on the standing on the bus waving to me . grad c: But th the regular as we speak " J Johno was on the bus to New York , " professor e: Yeah . grad c: he 's that 's , what did I call it here , the transportation schema , something , professor e: Yeah . grad c: where you can be on the first flight , on the second flight , professor e: Yeah . professor e: like " under the bus , " or something , where grad c: But it 's it 's unfortunately , this is not really something a tourist would ever say . grad c: And there 's a lot of " out of " analysis , so , professor e: Right . grad c: could we capture that with a different construal of grad a: Yeah , it 's a little it 's ,  we 've thought about it before ,  t  to use the examples in other papers , and it 's it 's a little complicated . Cuz you 're like , it 's a state of there 's resource , grad f: Out of out of film , in particular . You 're out of the state of having film , right ? and somehow film is standing for the re the resour the state of having some resource is just labeled as that resource . grad f: yeah , grad a: It 's a little bit grad f: but and plus the fact that there 's also s  , can you say , like , " The film ran out " you know , or , maybe you could say something like " The film is out " grad a: Yeah , is film the trajector ? grad f: so like the the film went away from where it should be , namely with you , or something , right ? You know . The the film the film is gone , right ?  , I never really knew what was going on ,  I I find it sort of a little bit farfetched to say that that " I 'm out of film " means that I have left the state of having film or something like that , grad a: It 's weird . professor e:  b but the difference grad c: Is the d the final state of running out of something is being out of it . professor e: But ,  grad f:  ! professor e: Yeah , so so nob so no one has in in of the , professional linguists , grad a:  . grad a: There was ? Who ? professor e: Well , there I thought or there was a paper on it . professor e: Huh ? grad f: There was one on on " out " or " out of " ? professor e: There was a Well , it may be just " out " . professor e: I think there was " over " but there was also a paper on " out " . grad f: Yeah , Lind - Susan Lindner , grad a: Oh , yeah , you 're right . grad f: right ? The the " the syrup spread out " ? professor e: Yeah , and all that sort of stuff . And undoubtably there 's been reams of work about it in cognitive linguistics , professor e: OK . So ,  grad a: It 's not one of the y it 's more straightforward ones forward ones to defend , so you probably don't want to use it for the purposes grad c:   grad a: th these are you 're addressing like , computational linguists , professor e: OK . Or are you ? grad c: There 's gonna be four computational linguists , grad a: OK . But more emphasis on the computational ? Or emphasis on the linguist ? grad c: computer it 's More there 's going to be the just four computational linguists , by coincidence , but the rest is , whatever , biocomputing people and physicists . I 'm - we 're worrying about the th the thes grad c: Oh , the thesis ! grad a: Oh , I meant this , professor e: it 's just for one guy . grad c: That 's that 's computa should be very computational , grad a: you know , like OK . grad a: You know , it 's an obvious one grad f: Totally weird stuff . grad c:  the the old bakery example might be nice , grad a: but ,  grad c: " Is there a bakery around here " . grad a: Around ? grad c: No , it 's the bakery itself grad a: Oh . grad c: is it a building ?  , that you want to go to ? or is it something to eat that you want to buy ? grad a: Oh , oh yeah . The question is d do you wanna do you wanna construe do you wanna constr - strue grad f: Sh grad d: It 's a speech - act . It 's because do you wanna c do you want to view the bakery as a p a place that that i for example , if y grad a: Yeah . But the other is , yo you might have smelled a smell and are just curious about whether there 'd be a bakery in the neighborhood , or , grad f:   professor e: pfff you know , you wonder how people here make their living , and there 're all sorts of reasons why you might be asking about the existence of a bakery grad f: Yeah . professor e: But  , those are interesting examples but it 's not clear that they 're mainly construal examples . grad a: So it 's a lot of pragmatics , there , that grad f: Yeah . professor e: So let 's so let 's think about this from the point of view of construal . So let 's first do a So the metonymy thing is probably the easiest and a and actually the Though , the one you have isn't quite grad a: You mean the s You mean " the steak wants to pay " ? professor e: N no not that one , that 's that 's a the sort of background . grad c: How old is it ? How much does it cost ? grad d: Oh . grad a: To go in , that 's like grad f: Two hundred million dollars . grad a: Like , " it " doesn't refer to " thing , " it refers to acti you know , j thing standing for activ most relevant activity for a tourist you could think of it that way , but . grad f: Well , shoot , isn't that  , that 's what grad c: Well , my argument here is it 's it 's it 's the same thing as " Plato 's on the top shelf , " grad f: figuring that out is what this is about . grad c: I 'm con you know , th that you can refer to a book of Plato by using " Plato , " grad a: Yeah . No no , I I 'm agreeing that this is a good ,  grad c: and you can refer back to it , and so you can Castles have as tourist sites , have admission fees , so you can say " Where is the castle , how much does it cost ? "  . grad c: So , You 're also not referring to the width of the object , or so , grad a:  . Can we think of a nice metaphorical use of " where " in the tourist 's domain ?  . professor e: So you know it 's you you can sometimes use " where " f for " when " grad f: O professor e: in the sense of , you know , where wh where where was , " where was Heidelberg , in the Thirty Years ' War ? " Or something . grad f: Like what side were they on , grad a: What ? professor e: Yeah .  , grad a: Ah ! Or like its developmental state or something like that , you could I guess you could get that . grad f: there 's also things like  , s  , I guess I could ask something like " Where can I find out about blah - blah - blah " in a sort of doesn't nece I don't necessarily have to care about the spatial location , just give me a phone number professor e: Yeah . grad f: and I 'll call them or something like that ? professor e: You know , " Where could I learn its opening hours , " or something . professor e: So we 're thinking about , or we could also think about ,  grad c: Well , I I I professor e: How about " I 'm in a hurry " ? grad a: State . professor e: It i But it 's a state and the the issue is , is that it may be just a usage , grad f:  ? professor e: you know , that it 's not particularly metaphorical , I don't know . grad a: I 'm really into professor e: Ah ! How about I I I you know , " I 'm in I 'm in a state of exhaustion " ? grad a: Do you really say that ? professor e: or something like that , which a tourist w Huh ? grad a: Would you really say that ? professor e: A st  , well , you can certainly say , you know , " I 'm in overload . grad a: Yeah , I was gonna say , like grad d:  professor e: Oh , you can do that ? Really ? Of course that 's that that 's definitely a ,  grad f: Fixed . grad a: There 're too there 're all sorts of fixed expressions I don't like  " I 'm out of sorts now ! " professor e: Right . grad a: Like " I 'm in trouble ! " grad c: Well I when ,  just f u the data that I 've looked at so far that rec professor e: Yeah . grad c: So , you know , mak re making reference to buildings as institutions , as containers , as build professor e: Right .  , so ib in mus for example , in museums , you know , as a building or as something where pictures hang versus , you know , ev something that puts on exhibits , so forth . grad a: Why don't you want to use any of those ? grad c:  ? grad a: So y you don't wanna use one that 's grad c: Yeah , well No , but this that 's what I have , you know , started doing . professor e: The castle the that old castle one is sort of grad c: Metonymy , polysemy . grad c: But I think the argument should be  , can be made that , you know , despite the fact that this is not the most met metaphorical domain , because people interacting with HTI systems try to be straightforward and less lyrical , professor e: Yeah . grad c: construal still is , you know , completely , key in terms of finding out any of these things , so ,  . So that 's that 's that 's a that 's a reasonable point , that it in this domain you 're gonna get less metaphor and more metonymy . grad c: We ,  I with a I looked with a student I looked at the entire database that we have on Heidelberg for cases of metonymy . grad c: But OK this is just something we 'll we 'll see , professor e: Right . I guess if anybody has additional suggestions , grad c:  maybe the " where is something " question as a whole , you know , can be construed as , u i locational versus instructional request . grad c: So , if we 're not talk about the lexic grad a: Location versus what ? grad c: instruction . grad a: Oh , I thought that was definitely treated as an example of construal . grad a: Right ? grad c: Yeah but then you 're not on the lexical level , that 's sort of one level higher . grad c: Also it would be nice to get ultimately to get a nice mental space example , professor e: We grad c: so , even temporal references are just in the spatial domain are rare . professor e: What was this p instead of wh what you know how was this painted , what color was this painted , was this alleyway open . grad c: We c we can show people pictures of objects and then have then ask the system about the objects and engage in conversation on the history and the art and the architecture and so forth . grad d: For some reason when you said " feedback electronically " I thought of that you ever see the Simpsons where they 're like the family 's got the buzzers and they buzz each other when they don't like what the other one is saying ? grad a: Yeah