Ron Kaplan - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Ron Kaplan

Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) start... more Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) started at about the same time, about 40 years ago. The GUI was a lot easier to implement, and it made computing and information resources available to ordinary people-but over the years it has lost much of its simplicity and charm. The CUI has taken many more years to develop, requiring major scientific and engineering advances in speech, natural language processing, user-modeling, and reasoning, not to mention increases in cost-effective computation. But the infrastructure is now in place for the widespread distribution of conversational interfaces, and we have begun to imagine and create sophisticated ways of exploiting this new mode of interaction. This may well be the "killer app" for deep natural language processing and complex reasoning.

Before the advent of the personal workstation, office work practice revolved around the paper doc... more Before the advent of the personal workstation, office work practice revolved around the paper document. Today the electronic medium offers a number of advantages over paper, but it has not eradicated paper from the office. A growing problem for those who work primarily with paper is lack of direct access to the wide variety of interactive functions available on personal workstations. This paper describes a desk with a computer-controlled projector and camera above it. The result is a system that enables people to interact with ordinary paper documents in ways normally possible only with electronic documents on workstation screens. After discussing the motivation for this work, this paper describes the system and two sample applications that can benefit from this style of interaction: a desk calculator and a French to English translation system. We describe the design and implementation of the system, report on some user tests, and conclude with some general reflections on interactin...

Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) start... more Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) started at about the same time, about 40 years ago. The GUI was a lot easier to implement, and it made computing and information resources available to ordinary people—but over the years it has lost much of its simplicity and charm. The CUI has taken many more years to develop, requiring major scientific and engineering advances in speech, natural language processing, user-modeling, and reasoning, not to mention increases in cost-effective computation. But the infrastructure is now in place for the widespread distribution of conversational interfaces, and we have begun to imagine and create sophisticated ways of exploiting this new mode of interaction. This may well be the “killer app” for deep natural language processing and complex reasoning.

Linguistic theory and computer …, 1987

Journal of Information Science and Engineering, 1989

This paper describes the basic architectural concepts that underlie the formal theory of Lexical-... more This paper describes the basic architectural concepts that underlie the formal theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar. The LFG formalism, which h a s e v olved from previous computational, linguistic, and psycholinguistic research, provides a simple set of devices for describing the common properties of all human languages and the particular properties of individual languages. It postulates two l e v els of syntactic representation for a sentence, a constituent structure and a functional structure. These are related by a piece-wise correspondence that permits the properties of the abstract functional structure to be de ned in terms of con gurations of constituent structure phrases. The basic architecture crucially separates the three notions of structure, structural description, and structural correspondence. This paper also outlines some recent extensions to the original LFG theory that enhance its ability t o express certain kinds of linguistic generalizations while remaining compatible with the underlying architecture. These include formal variations in the elementary linguistic structures, in descriptive notation, and in the arrangement of correspondences.

Proceedings of the sixth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1993

The formal architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar offers a particular formal device, the stru... more The formal architecture of Lexical Functional Grammar offers a particular formal device, the structural correspondence, for modularizing the mapping between the surface forms of a language and representations of their underlying meanings. This approach works well when the structural discrepancies between form and meaning representations are finitely bounded, but there are some phenomena in natural language, e.g. adverbs in English, where this restriction does not hold. In this paper, we describe rule-based type-driven interpretation algorithms which cover cases of such a structural misalignment by exploiting a new descriptive device, the "restriction operator". The algorithms are set up in such a way that recursive rules can be derived for the interpretation of adjunct sets within a codescripiion approach (see [Kaplan and Wedekind, 1993] for details).

Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982

Chomsky&#x27;s argument that natural languages are not finite state languages puts a lowe... more Chomsky&#x27;s argument that natural languages are not finite state languages puts a lower bound on the weak generative capacity of grammars for natural languages (Chomsky (1956)). Arguments based on weak generative capacity are useful in excluding classes of formal devices as characterizations of natural language, but they are not the only formal considerations by which this can be done. Generative grammars may also be excluded because they cannot assign the correct structural descriptions to the terminal strings of a ...

Proceedings of the LFG2004 Conference. CSLI Publications, 2004

A primary goal of generative syntactic theory is to identify generalizations about classes and su... more A primary goal of generative syntactic theory is to identify generalizations about classes and subclasses of lexical items, and in doing so to explore and characterize the structure of the lexicon. A word like bakes belongs to several lexical classes: it is a third-person, singular, present-tense verb which can be either transitive or intransitive. It shares some of these properties with a verb like cooked, and others with a verb like appears.

Butt and King (eds.), 1997

On-line Proceedings of the LFG2004 Conference, 2004

LFG encodes linguistic generalizations not in terms of formal relations in a type hierarchy, but ... more LFG encodes linguistic generalizations not in terms of formal relations in a type hierarchy, but in terms of relations between descriptions of structures. An LFG functional description–a collection of equations–can be given a name, and this name can be used to stand for those equations in linguistic descriptions. In computational treatments, these named descriptions are generally referred to as templates. The use of templates allows for linguistic generalizations to be captured. Template definitions can refer to other templates; thus, a ...

Palo Alto Research Center, 2006

Descript.i ve linguisLs, compuLaLional linguisu;, and psycholinguist.s have traditionally been co... more Descript.i ve linguisLs, compuLaLional linguisu;, and psycholinguist.s have traditionally been co ncerned with different aspects of the formal study of languag~. Linguists want ~xp licit grammatical formulations to charad.eri:.~e the well-formed senlences of a language and Lo indicaLe in some systema tic wa y how the sequence of clements th at makes up an utterance en codes Lhal ut.Lerance's m e aning. They don't. parLicularly care aboul specific processing algorithms that might be used to identify well-formed s~nt~n c~s or to asso <:iat~ t h~m with th~ir nwanings, bnt this is a c~ntral concern of compuLaLional linguists. Comput.aLional linguisls are inlerested in discovering the feasible algorithms that can interpret granunatical descriptions Lo recognize or produce ut.Leran ces, and in undersLanding how the performance of these algorithms depends on various properties of grammars and machin~ ar<:hit~ctnr~s. Psy<:holingni sts ar~ also conc~rn~d with processes and algorithms, bul noL jusl with ones LhaL are feasible within conventional computational architectures. They focus on algorithms and ar<:hit~ctnr~s that mod~l or ~h1cidat~ tlw langnag~ pro<:~ssing capabilities of human speakers and listeners.

Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) start... more Work on both the graphical user interface (GUI) and the conversational user interface (CUI) started at about the same time, about 40 years ago. The GUI was a lot easier to implement, and it made computing and information resources available to ordinary people—but over the years it has lost much of its simplicity and charm. The CUI has taken many more years to develop, requiring major scientific and engineering advances in speech, natural language processing, user-modeling, and reasoning, not to mention increases in cost-effective computation. But the infrastructure is now in place for the widespread distribution of conversational interfaces, and we have begun to imagine and create sophisticated ways of exploiting this new mode of interaction. This may well be the “killer app” for deep natural language processing and complex reasoning.