grad d:  grad e: What does your thing say on the back ? grad d: Testing . grad f: Yeah , well , I g guess it 's coming up then , or grad d: Cuz it 's That starts counting from zero and these start counting from one . grad d: Your mike number is what we 're t grad e: Look at the back . grad d: Ho ! grad b: So grad d: I 've bested you again , Nancy . Damn ! Foiled again ! grad d: So is Keith showing up ? He 's talking with George right now .  , is he gonna get a rip  rip himself away from from that ? grad b: He 'll probably come later . grad d: Oh , then it 's just gonna be the five of us ? professor c: Yeah . grad e: Well , he he was very affirmative in his way of saying he will be here at four . So , Eva just reported she 's really happy about the CBT 's being in the same order in the XML as in the  be Java declaration format grad f: Yeah . The e grad e: so you don't have to do too much in the style sheet transversion . grad e: The  , Java the embedded Bayes wants to take input  , a Bayes - net in in some Java notation and Eva is using the Xalan style sheet processor to convert the XML that 's output by the Java Bayes for the into the , E Bayes input . grad f: Actually , maybe I could try , like , emailing the guy and see if he has any something already . grad f: That 'd be weird , that he has both the Java Bayes and the embedded Bayes in grad d: But that 's some sort of conversion program ? grad f: Yeah . grad e: And , well pretty mu pretty much on t on the top of my list , I would have asked Keith how the " where is X ? " hand parse is standing . grad d: So the trees for the XML trees for the for the gene for the synthesizer are written . Just gonna be you know professor c: Oh ! You were gonna send me a note about hiring grad e: Yes . grad e: OK , so natural language generation produces not a just a surface string that is fed into a text - to - speech but , a surface string with a syntax tree that 's fed into a concept - to - speech . grad e: Now and this concept - to - speech module has certain rules on how if you get the following syntactic structure , how to map this onto prosodic rules . grad e: And Fey has foolheartedly agreed to rewrite  , the German concept  syntax - to - prosody rules grad b: I didn't know she spoke German . And  therefore the ,  if it 's OK that we give her a couple of more hours per week , then she 'll do that . grad d: What language is that written i Is that that Scheme thing that you showed me ? grad e: Yeah . grad d: She knows how to program in Scheme ? I hope ? grad e: No , I My guess is I I asked for a commented version of that file ? If we get that , then it 's doable , even without getting into it , even though the Scheme li  , stuff is really well documented in the Festival . grad d: Well , I guess if you 're not used to functional programming , Scheme can be completely incomprehensible . But anyway , send me the note and then I 'll - I 'll check with , Morgan on the money . Oh , so this was You know , on the generation thing ,  if sh y she 's really going to do that , then we should be able to get prosody as well . grad d: Are we gonna Can we change the voice of the of the thing , because right now the voice sounds like a murderer . grad b: Wh - Which one ? grad d: The the little Smarticus Smarticus sounds like a murderer . grad e: It is  , we have the choice between the , usual Festival voices , which I already told the SmartKom people we aren't gonna use because they 're really bad . grad b: Festival ? professor c: It 's the name of some program , grad b: Oh , oh . grad e: OGI has , crafted a couple of diphone type voices that are really nice and we 're going to use that . grad d: Does OGI stand for ? Original German Institute ? professor c: Orego grad b: So . grad b: Oregon Graduate Insti professor c: Oregon @ @ Graduate Institute grad d: Oh . professor c: It turns out there 's the long - standing links with these guys in the speech group . professor c: In fact , there 's this guy who 's basically got a joint appointment , Hynek Hermansky . And it 's probably also absolutely uninteresting for all of you to ,  learn that as of twenty minutes ago , David and I , per accident ,  managed to get the whole SmartKom system running on the  , ICSI Linux machines with the ICSI NT machines thereby increasing the number of running SmartKom systems in this house from one on my laptop to three . grad e: I suggested to try something that was really kind of even though against better knowledge shouldn't have worked , but it worked . grad b: Will it work again , grad e: Maybe maybe maybe a bit for the AI i intuition thing . It - it 's just like why why the generation ma the presentation manager is now working ? grad a:  ! This is something you ha you get used to as a programmer , right ? grad e: Which grad a: You know , and it 's cool , it works out that way . So , the the people at Saarbruecken and I decided not to touch it ever again . grad a: What what thing is this ? grad e: Where is X ? grad a: OK . grad e: Oh , but by  , we can ask , did you get to read all four hundred words ? professor c: I did . That professor c: You know , i Yeah , it grad d: Each paragraph is good , though . grad b: Yeah , I didn't know about it until Robert told me , like ,  professor c: Yeah , I I ra I ran across it in I don't even know where , you know some just some weird place . And , yeah , I I 'm surprised I didn't know about it grad b: Y yeah . I was like , why didn't Dan tell me ? professor c: since we know all the invited speakers , an grad a: Right . Before we get started on this st so I also had a nice email correspondence with Daphne Kohler , who said yes indeed she would love to work with us on the , you know , using these structured belief - nets and stuff but starting in August , that she 's also got a new student working on this and that we should get in touch with them again in August and then we 'll figure out a way for you  you to get seriously connected with ,  their group . So ,  And it looks to me like we 're now at a good point to do something start working on something really hard . grad a: Oh ! professor c: w Which is mental spaces and  and - or grad a:  ! grad b: It 's hard . But the other part of it is the way they connect to these , probabilistic relational models . So there 's all the problems that the linguists know about , about mental spaces , and the cognitive linguists know about , but then there 's this problem of the belief - net people have only done a moderately good job of dealing with temporal belief - nets . professor c: So there 's a term " dynamic belief - net " , doesn't mean that . But one of the things I w would like to do over the next , month , it may take more , is to st understand to what extent we can not only figure out the constructions for them for multiple worlds and  sort of what the formalism will look like and where the slots and fillers will be , but also what that would translate into in terms of belief - net and the inferences . So the story is that if you have these probabilistic relational models , they 're set up , in principle , so that you can make new instances and instances connect to each other , and all that sort of stuff , so it should be feasible to set them up in such a way that if you 've got the past tense and the present tense and each of those is a separate  , belief structure that they do their inferences with just the couplings that are appropriate . But that 's g that 's , as far as I can tell , it 's it 's putting together two real hard problems . One is the linguistic part of what are the couplings and and when you have a certain , construction , that implies certain couplings and other couplings , you know , between let 's say between the past and the present , or any other one of these things and then we have this inference problem of exactly technically how does the belief - net work if it 's got  , let 's say one in in , you know , different tenses or my beliefs and your beliefs , or any of these other ones of of multiple models . So  you know , in the long run we need to solve both of those and my suggestion is that we start digging into them both , in a way we that , you know , th hopefully turns out to be consistent , so that the  . But anyway , so that 's ,  grad a: Oh yeah , like  , I solved the the problem of  we were talking about how do you various issues of how come a plural noun gets to quote " count as a noun phrase " , you know , occur as an argument of a higher construction , but a bare singular stem doesn't get to act that way . grad a: and it would take a really long time to explain it now , but I 'm about to write it up this evening . I solved that at the same time as " how do we keep adjectives from floating to the left of determiners and how do we keep all of that from floating outside the noun phrase " to get something like " I the kicked dog " . No , I know , I th I I think that is gonna be sort of the key to this wh to th the big project of the summer of of getting the constructions right is that people do manage to do this so there probably are some , relatively clean rules , they 're just not context - free trees . professor c: And if we if the formalism is is good , then we should be able to have , you know , sort of moderate scale thing . And that by the way is is , Keith , what I encouraged George to be talking with you about . professor c: The p And Oh , another thing ,  there was this ,  thing that Nancy agreed to in a in a weak moment this morning that grad a:  ! grad b: I was really strong . professor c: Anyway , that we were that we 're gonna try to get a  , first cut at the revised formalism by the end of next week . professor c: just trying to write up essentially what what you guys have worked out so that everybody has something to look at . We 've talked about it , but only the innermost inner group currently , grad a:   grad a: There 's The group as a whole knows but no individual member kno professor c: Well that that yeah th there 's one of the advantages of a document , right ? , grad a: Yeah . Anyway , so , with a little luck  l let 's , let 's have that as a goal anyway . grad a: So , what was the date there ? professor c: And grad a: Monday or ? It 's a Friday . grad b: But , but but the two of us will probably talk to you at well before th grad a: I thought you said beginning of n Yeah . Anyway , w let 's talk separately about how t grad a: Yeah , I have a busy weekend but after that Yeah , gung - ho . grad a: Great , professor c: Now if it turns out that that effort leads us into some big hole that 's fine . There 's a really hard problem we haven't solved yet that , that 's just fine . grad a: But at at least sort of try and work out what the state of the art is right now . professor c: Right , t t if to the extent that we have it , let 's write it grad a: OK . professor c: and to the extent we don't , let 's find out what we need to do . professor c: So ,  grad e: Can we ? Is it worth thinking of an example out of our tourism thing domain , that involves a a a decent mental space shift or setting up professor c: I think it is , but  but I interrupted before Keith got to tell us what happened with " where is the Powder - Tower ? " or whatever grad b: Right .  , what was supposed to happen ? I 've sort of been actually caught up in some other ones , so , you know , I don't have a write - up of or I haven't elaborated on the ideas that we were already talking about which were grad e: yeah . I think I think we already came to the conclusion that we have two alternative paths that we two alternative ways of representing it . grad e:  grad a: The question of whether the polysemy is sort of like in the construction or pragmatic . grad a: so d ' you Is it clear what we 're talking about here ? grad b: I agree . grad a: The question is whether the construction is semantic or like ambiguous between asking for location and asking for path . grad e: It 's grad a:  or or whether the construction semantically , is clearly only asking for location grad e: Should we have a a a grad b:  grad a: but pragmatically that 's construed as meaning " tell me how to get there " . grad e: So assume these are two , nodes we can observe in the Bayes - net . grad e: So these are either true or false and it 's also just true or false . If we encounter a phrase such as " where is X ? " , should that set this to true and this to true , and the Bayes - net figures out which under the c situation in general is more likely ?  , or should it just activate this , have this be false , and the Bayes - net figures out whether this actually now means ? professor c:  w that 's a s grad b: Slightly different . professor c: So I a I I th I agree with you that , it 's a disaster to try to make separate constructions for every  , pragmatic reading , grad a:   professor c: there there 's some that grad b: Or have every construction list all the possible pragmatic implications of the same one . But , you know , c  almost certainly " can you pass the salt " is a construction worth noting that there is this th this this this  grad a: Yeah . Is it is it like that or is it just sort of obvious from world knowledge that no one you wouldn't want to know the location without wanting to know how to get there or whatever . grad e: One Or in some cases , it 's it 's quite definitely professor c: Yeah . Well the question is basically , is this conventional or conversational implicature ? professor c: Exactly . professor c: And I guess , see , the more important thing at this stage is that we should be able to know how we would handle it in ei f in the short run it 's more important to know how we would treat technically what we would do if we decided A and what we would do if we decided B , than it is t to decide A or B r right now . professor c: So I guess In the short run , let 's let 's be real clear on h what the two alternatives would be . grad e: And then the we had another idea floating around  , which we wanted to , get your input on , and that concerns the But the nice thing is w we would have a person that would like to work on it , and that 's Ir - Irina Gurevich from EML who is going to be visiting us , the week before , August and a little bit into August .  , and one of the reas one of the those ideas was , so , back to the old Johno observation that if y if you have a dialogue history and it said the word " admission fee " was  , mentioned  , it 's more likely that the person actually wants to enter than just take a picture of it from the outside . Now what could imagine to , you know , have a list for each construction of things that one should look up in the discourse history , yeah ? That 's the really stupid way . Then there is the really clever way that was suggested by Keith and then there is the , middle way that I 'm suggesting and that is you you get X , which is whatever , the castle . The ontology will tell us that castles have opening hours , that they have admission fees , they have whatever . And then , this is We go via a thesaurus and look up certain linguistic surface structures that are related to these concepts and feed those through the dialogue history and check dynamically for each e entity . We look it up check whether any of these were mentioned and then activate the corresponding nodes on the discourse side . But Keith suggested that a a much cleaner way would be is , you know , to keep track of the discourse in such a way that you if you know that something like that ha has been mentioned before , this just a continues to add up , you know , in th in a grad a: So if someone mentions admission f fees , that activates an Enter schema which sticks around for a little while in your rep in the representation of what 's being talked about . And then when someone asks " where is X ? " you 've already got the the Enter schema activated grad b: Kind of a priming professor c:   professor c:  grad d: Well , is it doesn't it seem like if you just managed the dialogue history with a a thread , that you know , kept track of ho of the activity of  , cuz it would the the thread would know what nodes like , needed to be activated , so it could just keep track of how long it 's been since something 's been mentioned , and automatically load it in . But here 's here 's a way in th in the bl Bayes - net you could you could think about it this way , that if  at the time " admissions fee " was mentioned you could increase the probability that someone wanted to enter . grad d: We - yeah th th that 's what I wa I wasn't I was I wasn't thinking in terms of Enter schemas . I was just professor c: Fair enough , OK , but , but , in terms of the c c the current implementation right ? so that  grad b: It would already be higher in the context . professor c: th that th the the the conditional probability that someone So at the time you mentioned it This is this is essentially the Bayes - net equivalent of the spreading activation . professor c: It 's In some ways it 's not as good but it 's the implementation we got . Now Now my guess is that it 's not a question of time but it is a question of whether another intervening object has been mentioned . professor c: we could look at dialo this is Of course the other thing we ha we do is , is we have this data coming grad a: Yeah . professor c: but but skipping that so so but my guess is what what 'll probably will happen , Here 's a here 's a proposed design . is that there 're certain constructions which , for our purposes do change the probabilities of EVA decisions and various other kinds and th that the , standard way that that the these contexts work is sort of stack - like or whatever , but that 's sort of the most recent thing . And so it could be that when another  , en tourist entity gets mentioned , you grad b: Renew professor c: re re essentially re - initiali you know , re - i essentially re - initialize the state . professor c: And of course i if we had a fancier one with multiple worlds you could have  , you could keep track of what someone was  saying about this and that . professor c: You know , " I wanna go in the morning grad a: " Here 's my plan for today . " professor c: Yeah , or Yeah , in the morning morning I I 'm planning t to go shopping , grad a: hypothetically . professor c: tal so I 'm talking about shopping and then you say , you know , well ,  " What 's it cost ? " or something . professor c: But I do th think that the It 'll turn out that it 's gonna be depend pretty much on whether there 's been an override . grad e: Yeah , if if you ask " how much does a train ride and and cinema around the vineyards cost ? " and then somebody tells you it 's sixty dollars and then you say " OK How much is ,  I would like to visit the " whatever , something completely different , " then I go to , you know , Point Reyes " , professor c: Yeah . grad e: it it 's not more likely that you want to enter anything , but it 's , as a matter of fact , a complete rejection of entering by doing that . grad b: So when you admit have admission fee and it changes something , it 's only for that particular It 's relational , right ? It 's only for that particular object . Well , and and and the simple idea is that it 's on it 's only for m for the current  , tourist e entity of instre interest . But that 's  this this function , so , has the current object been mentioned in in with a question about concerning its professor c: No , no . Is When th When the this is mentioned , the  probability of of , let 's say , entering changes grad b: Of that object . grad d: You could just hav  , just basically , ob it It observes an er , it sets the a node for " entered " or " true " or something , professor c: Yeah . Now ,  But I think Ro - Robert 's right , that to determine that , OK ? you may well want to go through a th thesaurus grad d: " discourse enter " . professor c: and and So , if the issue is , if so now th this construction has been matched and you say " OK . Does this actually have any implications for our decisions ? " Then there 's another piece of code that presumably does that computation . professor c: But but what 's Robert 's saying is is , and I think he 's right , is you don't want to try to build into the construction itself all the synonyms and all you know , all the wo  maybe . Well , it 's just another , sort of , construction side is how to get at the possible inferences we can draw from the discourse history or changing of the probabilities , and - or grad b: Guess it 's like I g The other thing is , whether you have a m m user model that has , you know , whatever , a current plan , whatever , plans that had been discussed , and I don't know ,  grad d: What  , what 's the argument for putting it in the construction ? Is it just that the s synonym selection is better , or ? professor c: Oh , wel Well , the ar the The argument is that you 're gonna have the If you 've recognized the word , you 've recognized the word , which means you have a lexical construction for it , so you could just as well tag the lexical construction with the fact that it 's a  , you know , thirty percent increase in probability of entering . You So you could you could you could invert invert the whole thing , so you s you tag that information on to the lexicon grad d: Mmm . at at Yeah , and this is grad e: Even though  the lexical construction itself out out of context , won't do it . grad e: " But I but I 'm not interested in the opening times " is sort of a more a V type . But , we 'll   , we have time to This is a s just a sidetrack , but  I think it 's also something that people have not done before , is  , sort of abuse an ontology for these kinds of , inferences , on whether anything relevant to the current something has been  , has crept up in the dialogue history already , or not . And ,  I have the ,  If we wanted to have that function in the dialogue hi dialogue module of SmartKom , I have the written consent of Jan to put it in there . professor c: So the point is , it 's very likely that Robert 's thesis is going to be along these lines , grad b: Oh , s professor c: and the local rules are if it 's your thesis , you get to decide how it 's done . So if , you know if this is seriously , if this becomes part of your thesis , you can say , hey we 're gonna do it this way , that 's the way it 's done . So h he 's got a th he 's got a meet meeting in Germany with his thesis advisor .  , this is this is , speaking of hard problems , this is a very good time  , to start trying to make explicit where construal comes in and you know , where c where the construction per - se ends and where construal comes in , grad a:   But that 's part of what the f grad b: We have many jobs for you , Ro - Robert . professor c: is is because th it is gonna have implicit in it grad e: Was I ? In the room ? grad b: No , you weren't there on purpose . professor c: Yeah , that That 's the point , is is th grad a: Yeah . grad d: Yeah , but it he the decisions I made wer had to do with my thesis . So consequently don't I get to decide then that it 's Robert 's job ? professor c: No . grad b: Well , I 'll just pick a piece of the problem and then just push the hard stuff into the center and say it 's Robert 's . grad e: I 've always been completely in favor of consensus decisions , grad b: I can professor c: Right . professor c: not grad e: It it might even be interesting then to say that I should be forced to  , sort of pull some of the ideas that have been floating in my head out of the ,  out of the top hat professor c: Yes . grad e: Yes , and , it 's Ha - None of that is basically still around , grad b: I didn't get professor c: And a another draft OK . grad e: but it 's professor c: D i grad a: That 's normal . professor c: I i grad b: Oh , I guess it 's good I didn't read it . professor c: and grad e: Yeah , and I would like to d discuss it and , you know , get you guys 's input professor c: Right . professor c:  So that , so th thi this  , so this is the point , is we we 're going to have to cycle through this , grad a: Yeah . professor c: but th the draft of the p proposal on the constructions is is going to tell us a lot about what we think needs to be done by construal . grad b:  grad e: Meeting regular meeting time for the summer , we really haven't found one . It 's - it 's a coincidence that he can't do couldn't do it today here . professor c: And the NTL meeting moved to Wednesday , grad e: So professor c: cuz of of ,  grad e: Yeah , it was just an exception . professor c: Yeah , you weren't here , but but but s  , And so , if that 's OK with you , grad a: It 's i Is it staying basically at the Wednesday noon ? professor c: you would grad a: OK . How do we feel about doing it Wednesdays ? Because it seems to me that this is sort of a time where when we have things to discuss with other people , there they seem to be s tons of people around . professor c: The only disadvantage is that it may interfere with other grad e: Or subgroup meetings professor c: s you know , other other No , you  , people in this group connecting with with grad b: Those people who happen to be around . I I  you know I have no fixed grad a: To tell you the truth , I 'd rath I 'd , I 'd would like to avoid more than one ICSI meeting per day , if possible .  that grad e: The I 'd like to have them all in one day , grad a: Yeah , I can understand that . professor c: Well p grad e: so package them up and then professor c: people people differ in their tastes in this matter . I 'm always here anyway , grad e: It 's OK , that grad b: so It doesn't matter . grad e: Well , if one sort of thing is , this room is taken at after three - thirty pr pretty much every day by the data collection . grad e: So we just knew i grad b: So did you just say that Ami can't make one o ' grad e: No , he can . About the c the th grad b: Could we do Thursday at one - thirty ? Would that that be horrible ? grad e: No . grad b: Oh really ? grad e: Because , this room is again taken at two - thirty by Morgan . grad e: And the s meeting recorder meeting meeting meeting recording on meeting meetings grad b: OK , OK , OK . professor c: I I could grad b:  we usually meet Tuesday or l like , linguists  , at two . Do you want to meet again here bef grad d: And the s Is the Speech - Gen meeting still at on Tuesdays ? grad e:  w Well , actually we w we we did scrap our Monday time just because Bhaskara couldn't come Monday . grad a: That doesn't apply to a grad d: Although I thought you wanted to go camping on Monday er , take off Mondays a lot so you could go camping .  ! grad b: Well , the linguists ' meeting i happens to be at two , but I think that 's  . grad a: And , you know , of course Nancy and I are just sort of always talking anyway and sometimes we do it in that room . grad e: Monday ? professor c: OK , whate  What I think Robert 's saying is that grad a: Earlier in the week professor c: earlier we At least for next week , there 's a lot of stuff we want to get done , grad a:   grad b: At o o o o one , two , three ? grad e: One , two , three ? Three 's too late . professor c: Oh , I i Yeah , I actually Two is the earliest I can meet on Monday . professor c: Here I 'm blissfully agreeing to things and realizing that I actually do have some stuff scheduled on Monday . grad b: You guys will still remind me , right ? grad d: No way ! grad b: Y you 'll come and take all the the headph the good headphones first and then remind me . grad e: And grad b: Why do I have this unless I 'm gonna write ? grad e: do I get to see th  , your formalism before that ? grad b: Fine . grad e: I wo I would like I would sort of get a get a notion of what what you guys have in store for me . professor c: Well m @ @ you know , w maybe Mond - Maybe we can put This is part of what we can do Monday , if we want . grad b: Yeah , so there was like , you know , m m in my head the goal to have like an intermediate version , like , everything I know . grad b: And then , w I would talk to you and figure out everything you know , that you know , see if they 're consistent . Why don't w Maybe you and I should meet sort of more or less first thing Monday morning and then we can work on this . I might I might  , grad e: You - y grad b: s You said you 're busy over th until the weekend , right ? grad a: Yeah , sort of through the weekend because Kate has a photography show . So , maybe I 'll send you some grad a: if you have time after this I 'll show you the noun phrase thing . OK , and we 'll You wanna m grad e: So the idea is on Monday at two we 'll we 'll see an intermediate version of the formalism for the constructions , grad a: Yeah . grad b: So that 's OK for you grad e: and do an on - line merging with my construal ideas . grad e: So it won't be , like , a for semi - formal presentation of my proposal . grad b: Cuz then you 'll find out more of what we 're making you do . Can you also write it up ? grad b: It 's like , " this is what we 're doing . " grad e: I 'll I 'll send you I 'll I 'll send you a style file , right ? grad b: OK . grad e: You just grad b: I already sent you my fi my bib file . grad a: Someday we also have to we should probably talk about the other side of the " where is X " construction , which is the issue of , how do you simulate questions ? What does the simspec look like for a question ? grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , now , we we w grad a: We had to we had an idea for this which seemed like it would probably work . I professor c: OK ? So let 's think of a name for for whatever the this intermediate structure is . Oh , we talked about semspec , for " semantic spec specification " grad a: Mmm . grad a: It 's more general professor c: You know , so it 's a m minimal change . professor c: Right , a little substi substi You know , that 's what text substitution  macros are for . professor c: Anyway , so let 's let 's for the moment call it that until we think of something better . professor c: And , yeah , we absolutely need to find Part of what was missing were markings of all sorts that weren't in there , incl including the questions grad a:   professor c: We didn't we never did figure out how we were gonna do emphasis in in  , the semspec . grad b: Yeah , we 've talked a little bit about that , too , which  , it 's hard for me to figure out with sort of our general linguistic issues , how they map onto this particular one , grad a: Yeah . professor c: But that 's part of the formalism is got to be  , how things like that get marked . grad b: W do you have data , like the the You have preliminary data ? Cuz I know , you know , we 've been using this one easy sentence and I 'm sure you guys have  , maybe you are the one who 've been looking at the rest of it grad a: I grad b: it 'd it 'd be useful for me , if we want to have it a little bit more data oriented . grad a: To tell you the truth , what I 've been looking at has not been the data so far , grad b: Yeah . grad a: I just sort of said " alright let 's see if I can get noun phrases and , major verb co  , constructions out of the way first . grad a: So , I have not really approached a lot of the data , but  obviously like these the the question one , since we have this idea about the indefinite pronoun thing and all that , you know , I ca can try and ,  run with that , you know , try and do some of the sentence constructions now . grad a: Oh yeah , the basic idea is that  ,  you know  , let 's see if I can formulate this . grad e: So you perform the mental sum and then , you know , " who fixed the car with a wrench ? " You basically are told , to to do this In the in analogously to the way you would do " someone fixed the car with a wrench " . And then you hand it back to your hippocampus and find out what that , you know , grad a: Means . grad a: The WH question has this as sort of extra thing which says " and when you 're done , tell me who fills that slot " or w you know . And , you know , this is sort of a nice way to do it , the idea of sort of saying that you treat from the simulation point of view or whatever you treat , WH constructions similarly to  , indefinite pronouns like " someone fixed the car " because lots of languages , have WH questions with an indefinite pronoun in situ or whatever , grad b: Use actually the same one . So it makes sense professor c: Alright , which is grad a:  professor c: Skolemization . professor c: In in logic , it 's it 's @ @ it 's actual Huh ? grad b: Right . professor c: That - that 's not that 's not saying it 's bad , grad a: Right . Anyway , but just that kind of thing and we 'll figure out exactly how to write that up and so on , but professor c: Good . We sort of just dropped that cuz it was too weird and we didn't even know , like , what we were talking about exactly , what the object of study was . Well , if if  , i part of of what the exercise is , t by the end of next week , is to say what are the things that we just don't have answers for yet . grad e: Well , if you if you do wanna discuss focus background and then get me into that because  , I wo I w scientifically worked on that for for almost two years . grad b: Yeah , you should definitely ,  be on on that maybe maybe by after Monday we 'll y you can see what things we are and aren't grad a: Yeah . grad b: I would say that tha that those discussions have been primarily , Keith and Keith and me , but  like in th the meeting  , he sort of I thin like the last meeting we had , I think we were all very much part of it grad a: Yeah . grad b: but  grad a: Sometimes Hans has been sort of coming in there as sort of like a devil 's advocate type role or something , grad b: but different perspec Yeah . grad a: like " This make you know , I 'm going to pretend I 'm a linguist who has nothing to do with this . " And he 'll just go off on parts of it which definitely need fixing grad b: Right . grad a: but aren't where we 're at right now , so it 's grad b: Like like what you call certain things , grad a: Yeah . grad b: But in a sense , it 's good to know that he of all people professor c: OK . grad b: you know , like maybe a lot of people would have m much stronger reactions , so , you know , he 's like a relatively friendly linguist grad a: Yeah . professor c: OK , which was that o one of the things I would like to see happen is a paper that was tentatively called " Towards a formal cognitive semantics " which was addressed to these linguists  who haven't been following this stuff at all . professor c: So it could be that he 's actually , at some level , thinking about how am I going to communicate this story grad a: Yeah . professor c: But if he g if he turns is is really gonna turn around and help t to write this version that does connect with as many as possible of the other linguists in the world  then then it becomes important to use terminology that doesn't make it hard grad a:   professor c: it 's gonna be plenty hard for for people to understand it as it is , grad a: Yeah . I just wanted t to I have to catch up with him , and I wanted t to get a feeling for that . grad a: So I don't know what his take will be on these meetings exactly , you know . grad a: Cuz sometimes he sort of sounds like we 're talking a bunch of goobledy - gook from his point of view . grad b: I think it 's good when we 're when we 're into data and looking at the some specific linguistic phenomenon in in English or in German , in particular , whatever , that 's great , professor c: Yeah . grad b: and Ben and and Hans are , if if anything , more you know , they have more to say than , let 's say , I would about some of these things . grad b: But when it 's like , well , w how do we capture these things , you know , I think it 's definitely been Keith and I who have d you know , who have worried more about the grad a:   That 's I I I think that should be the the core group grad b: s Which is fine . professor c: and  that 's , you know , I think very close to the maximum number of people working together that can get something done . And then we 're gon we 're gonna because of this other big thing we haven't talked about is actually implementing this stuff ? So that I guess the three of us are gonna connect tomorrow about that . I was just gonna say , though , that , for instance , there was you know , out of a meeting with Johno came the suggestion that " oh , could it be that the meaning constraints really aren't used for selection ? " which has sort of been implicit in the parsing strategy we talked about . grad b: In which case we w we can just say that they 're the effects or the bindings . Which  , so far , in terms of like putting up all the constraints as , you know , pushing them into type constraints , the when I 've , you know , propo then proposed it to linguists who haven't yet given me you know , we haven't yet thought of a reason that that wouldn't work . professor c: Yeah , it has to in the sense that you 're gonna use them eventu it 's you know , it 's sort of a , generate and test kind of thing , grad b: if there are some constraints that you hold back and don't use  , in your initial matching then you 'll match some things grad b:   professor c: I I d I don't think there 's any way that it could completely fail . It it could be that  , you wind up  The original bad idea of purely context - free grammars died because there were just vastly too many parses . And so th the concern might be that not that it would totally fail , but that grad b:   Right ? So by just having semantic even bringing semantics in for matching just in the form of j semantic types , right ? professor c: it would still genera grad b: Like " conceptually these have to be construed as this , this , and this " might still give us quite a few possibilities professor c: Yeah .  , cuz I think i I think it 's As you know , I think it 's real hard and if w if we Right . grad e: So , you your dance card is completely filled now ? grad a: Shoot . grad e: Why don't grad b: No , that 's not really true , grad a: Bummer . grad b: but like grad d: What about What about DDR ? grad b: It 's almost true . grad f:  grad b: Oh , I don't have it this weekend , so , tsk don't have to worry about that . professor c: DDR , he asked ? grad b: Speaking of dance , Dance Dance Revolution I can't believe I 'm It 's a it 's like a game , but it 's for , like , dancing . Hard to It 's like karaoke , but for dancing , and they tell you what It 's amazing . Well , y you know of it ? I i i it 's one of your hobbies ? It 's great exercise , I must say . They have , like , places instead of like Yeah , instead of karaoke bars now that have , like , DDR , like Yeah , yeah , I didn't until I started hanging out with this friend , who 's like " Oh , well , I can bring over the DDR if you want