grad b:  grad d: How many batteries do you go through ? grad b: Thank you . My suggestion is that Robert and Johno sort of give us a report on last week 's adventures  to start . So everybody knows there were these guys f  from Heidelber -  , actually from  DFKI  , part of the German SmartKom project , who were here for the week and , I think got a lot done . The we got to the point where we can now speak into the SmartKom system , and it 'll go all the way through and then say something like " Roman numeral one , am Smarticus . " It actually says , " Roemisch einz , am Smarticus , " grad b: OK . " grad d: " I am Sm - I am Smarticus " is what it 's saying . grad d: I gue grad e: The  sythesis is just a question of  , hopefully it 's just a question of exchanging a couple of files , once we have them . And , it 's not going to be a problem because we decided to stick to the so - called concept to speech approach . So I 'm I 'm I 'm going backwards now , so " synthesis " is where you sort of make this  , make these sounds , and " concept to speech " is feeding into this synthesis module giving it what needs to be said , and the whole syntactic structure so it can pronounce things better , presumably . Bu -  , i The way the  , the dialogue manager works is it dumps out what it wants to know , or what it wants to tell the person , to a er in XML and there 's a conversion system for different  , to go from XML to something else . And th so , the knowledge base for the system , that generates the syntasti syntactic structures for the ge generation is  , in a LISP - like the knowledge base is in a LISP - like form . So , you have a basically , a goal and it , you know , says " OK , well I 'm gonna try to do the Greet - the - person goal , grad b:   grad d: so it just starts  , it binds some variables and it just decides to , you know , do some subscold . grad e: But I think that the point is that out of the twelve possible utterances that the German system can do , we 've already written the the syntax trees for three or four . grad d: and instead of , you know , breaking down to , like , small units and building back up , they basically took the sentences , and basically cut them in half , or you know , into thirds or something like that , and made trees out of those . And so  ,  Tilman wrote a little tool that you could take LISP notation and generate an XML , tree . And so basically you just say , you know , " noun goes to " , you know , Er , nah , I don't re I 've never been good at those . So there 's like the VP goes to N and those things in LISP , and it will generate for you . grad e: And because we 're sticking to that structure , the synthesis module doesn't need to be changed . So all that f fancy stuff , and the Texas speech version of it , which is actually the simpler version , is gonna be done in October which is much too late for us . Right now it 's brittle and you need to ch start it up and then make ts twenty changes on on on on seventeen modules before they actually can stomach it , anything . And send in a a a couple of side queries on some dummy center set - up program so that it actually works because it 's designed for this seevit thing , where you have the gestural recognition running with this s Siemens virtual touch screen , which we don't have here . grad e: And so we 're doing it via mouse , but the whole system was designed to work with this thing and it was It was a lot of engineering stuff . No science in there whatsoever , but it 's working now , and  , that 's the good news . grad d: Why I had I did need to chan generate different trees than the German ones , mainly because you know like  , the gerund in in German is automatically taken care of with just a regular verb , grad e: You have to switch it on . grad d: so I 'd  have to add " am walking , " grad b: OK . grad d: or I 'd have to add a little stem for the " am " , when I build the built the tree . Yeah , I noticed that  , that some of the examples they had , had you know , non - English word orders and so on , you know . professor c: So it might be worth , Keith , you looking at this , grad b: Yeah . professor c:  grad b: I I still don't I still don't really understand e like grad d: Well Tilman s grad b:  we sort of say ,  You know , I I still don't exactly understand sort of the information flow  in in this thing , or what the modules are and so on . So , you know , like just that such - and - such module   decides that it wants to achieve the goal of greeting the user , and then magically it sort of s professor c: Yeah grad b: how does it know which syntactic structure to pull out , and all that ? professor c: I thi Yeah . professor c: but sort of when you get free and you have the time  either Robert or Johno or I can walk you through it .  , was this , I I think he talked about the idea of like ,  He was talking about these lexicalized  , tree adjoining grammars where you sort of for each word you ,  grad d: OK , you know how to do it ? grad b: For each lexical item , the lexical entry says what all the  trees are that it can appear in . If it turns out we can also give them lots more than that by , you know , tapping into other things we do , that 's great . professor c: But i it turns out not to be in an any of the contracts grad d: There 's like a little The twisty thing , you can move it with . So , the reason I 'd like you to understand  what 's going on in this demo system is not because it 's important to the research . So that if we come up with a question of " could we fit this deeper stuff in there ? " or something . professor c: So it 's just ,  in the sam same actually with the rest of us we just need to really understand what 's there . Is there anything we can make use of ?  , is there anything we can give back , beyond th the sort of minimum requirements ? But none of that has a short time fuse . professor c: So th the demo the demo requirements for this Fall are sort of taken care of as of later this week or something . And then So , it 's probably fifteen months or something until there 's another serious demo requirement . professor c: That doesn't mean we don't think about it for fifteen months , grad b: Right . The plan for this summer  , really is to step back from the applied project , grad e: Right . professor c: And , so The idea is there 's this  , other subgroup that 's worrying about formalizing the nota getting a notation . But sort of in parallel with that , the hope is tha in particularly you will work on constructions in English Ge - and German for this domain , grad b:   professor c: but y not worry about parsing them or fitting them into SmartKom or any of the other anything lik any other constraints for the time being . professor c: It 's hard enough to get it semantically and syntactically right and then and get the constructions in their form and stuff . professor c: And , I don I don't want you f feeling that you have to somehow meet all these other constraints . And similarly with the parsing ,  we 're gonna worry about parsing  , the general case you know , construction parser for general constructions . And , if we need a cut - down version for something , or whatever , we 'll worry about that later . grad b: So  , the the point is that like the meetings  so far that I 've been at have been sort of been geared towards this demo , professor c: Right . grad b: And then we 'll sort of shift gears a Fairly substantially , professor c: Yeah . What I what I think is is a good idea that I can can show to anyone who 's interested , we can even make a sort of an internal demo , and I I show you what I do , grad b:   grad e: And so you when somebody on the streets com comes up to you and asks you what is SmartKom so you can , sort of , give a sensible answer . professor c: So , c sh we could set that up as actually an institute wide thing ? Just give a talk in the big room , and and so peo people know what 's going on ? when you 're ready ? grad e: Absolutely . professor c: Yeah  , that 's the kind of thing That 's the level at which you know we can just li invite everybody and say " this is a project that we 've been working on and here 's a demo version of it " and stuff like that . Well d we we do wanna have all the bugs out b where you have to sort of pipe in extra XML messages from left and right before you 're grad b:  - huh . Actually , roughly starting  let 's say , nex next meeting , cuz this meeting we have one other thing to tie up besides the trip report .  there are a lot of issues , what 's the ontology look like , grad b:   professor c: you know what do the constructions look like , what 's the execution engine look like , mmm lots of things . Now before we do that , let 's get back in Oh ! But , it 's still , I think , useful for you to understand the demo version enough , so that you can can see what what it is that that  it might eventually get retro - fitted into or something . professor c: And Johno 's already done that , looked at the dem  the looked at the SmartKom stuff . grad d: Wa  To some de  what what part of th the SmartKom stuff ? professor c: Well , the parser , and that stuff . So , the trip the report on these the last we we sort of interrupted you guys telling us about what happened last week . Well it was just amazing to to see  how how instable the whole thing is , professor c: Maybe you 're done , then . grad e: and if you just take the And I g I got the feeling that we are the only ones right now who have a running system . I don't know what the guys in Kaiserslautern have running because e the version that is , the full version that 's on the server d does not work . And so it 's And even Tilman and Ralf sort of said " yeah there never was a really working version that  did it without th all the shortcuts that they built in for the  October @ @ version " . So we 're actually maybe ahead of the System Gruppe by now , the system the integration group . And it was ,  It was fun to some extent , but the  the outcome that is sort of of scientific interest is that I think both Ralf and Tilman  , I know that they enjoyed it here , and they r they they liked , a lot of the stuff they saw here , what what we have been thinking about , and they 're more than willing to to  , cooperate , by all means . And  , part of my responsibility is  to use our internal " group - ware " server at EML , make that open to all of us and them , so that whatever we discuss in terms of parsing and and generating and constructions w we we sort of  put it in there and they put what they do in there and maybe we can even  , get some overlap , get some synergy out of that . And  , the ,  If I find someone at in EML that is interested in that ,  I I may even think that we could look take constructions and and generate from them because the tree adjoining grammars that that Tilman is using is as you said nothing but a mathematical formalism . And you can just do anything with it , whether it 's syntactic trees , H P S G - like stuff , or whether it 's construction . So if you ever get to the generation side of constructing things and there might be something of interest there , but in the moment we 're of course definitely focused on the understanding , pipeline . professor c: Anyth - any other  repo visit reports sort of stories ?  we so we now know I think , what the landscape is like . And one of the things we need to do is the  , and this I think is relatively tight tightly constrained , is to finish up this belief - net stuff . And I was going to switch to start talking about that unless there 're m other more general questions . OK so here 's where we are on the belief - net stuff as far as I understand it . Going back I guess two weeks ago  Robert had laid out this belief - net , missing only the connections . Right ? That is So , he 'd put all th all the dots down , and we went through this , and , I think , more or less convinced ourselves that at least the vast majority of the nodes that we needed for the demo level we were thinking of , were in there . So ,  Bhaskara and I went off and looked at some technical questions about were certain operations sort of legitimate belief - net computations and was there some known problem with them or had someone already  , solved you know how to do this and stuff . The answer seems to be  , " no , no one has done it , but yes it 's a perfectly reasonable thing to do if that 's what you set out to do " . And , so the current state of things is that , again , starting now ,  we 'd like to actually get a running belief - net for this particular subdomain done in the next few weeks . So Bhaskara is switching projects as of the first of June , and  , he 's gonna leave us an inheritance , which is a  hopefully a belief - net that does these things . And there 're two aspects to it , one of which is , you know , technical , getting the coding right , and making it run , and  stuff like that . OK ? What all you know , what are the considerations and how and what are the ways in which they relate . So he doe h he doesn't need help from this group on the technical aspects or if he does  we 'll do that separately . professor c: But in terms of what are the decisions and stuff like that , that 's something that we all have to work out . Is is that right ?  that 's that 's both you guys ' understanding of where we are ? grad e: Absolutely . grad g: So , I guess ,  Is there like a latest version of the belief - net of the proposed belief - net ? Like grad e: We had  decided grad g: like grad e:  . We wanted to look into maybe getting it , the visualization , a bit clearer , but I think if we do it , sort of a paper version of all the nodes and then the connections between them , that should suffice . grad d: Yeah , I professor c: We do in the long run wanna do better visualization and all that stuff . grad d: I did look into that ,  in terms of , you know , exploding the nodes out and down ag professor c: Yep . It 'd probably take two weeks or so to actually go through and do it , professor c: Not not at this point . grad d: and I went through all the other packages on Murph - Kevin Murphy 's page , professor c: Right . grad d: and I couldn't find the necessary mix of free and  with the GUI and , with this thing that we want . OK , so then I 'll go back and look at the ones on the list that professor c: OK . grad e: But grad g: Yeah , the one that  people seem to use is  Hugin or whatever ? professor c: Hugin , yeah that 's free . grad g: How exp I don't think it 's Is it free ? Because I 've seen it advertised in places so I it seems to professor c: it may be free to academics . professor c:  but yo I noticed people do use Hugin so  , grad d: How do you spell that ? professor c: HUGIN . So then , in any case ,  But paying a lit You know , if i if it 's  Probably for university , it 's it 's gonna be real cheap anyway . grad e: I I also s would suggest not to d spend two weeks in in in changing the the JavaBayes code . grad e: I I will send you a pointer to a Java applet that does that , it 's sort of a fish - eye . You you have a node , and you click on it , and it shows you all the connections , grad d: Mmm . grad e: and then if you click on something else that moves away , that goes into the middle . If that doesn't work , it 's not a problem we we need to solve right now . What I 'm what my job is , I will , give you the input in terms of of the internal structure . Maybe node by node , or something like this ? Or should I collect it all grad g:   grad g: just any like like sort of rough representation of the entire belief - net is probably best . And  you 're gonna be around ? t again , always Tuesdays and Thursdays afternoon - ish ? As usual ? Or will that change ? grad g: Yeah  , yeah , I can like I c  . This week I guess  , kind of I have a lot of projects and stuff but after that I will generally be more free . professor c: Yeah and this is not a crisis that  , you do , e everybody who 's a student should , you know do their work , get their c courses all in good shape and and and and then we 'll dig d dig down on this . grad b: How do you go about this process of deciding what these connections are ? I know that there 's an issue of how to weight the different things too , and stuff . grad e: It 's professor c: One is you design and the other is you learn . OK ? So  what we 're gonna do initially is is do design , and , i if you will , guess .  that is you know use your best knowledge of of the domain to  , hypothesize what the dependencies are and stuff . professor c: If it 's done right , and if you have data then , there are techniques for learning the numbers given the structure grad b: Yeah . professor c: and there are even techniques for learning the structure , although that takes a lot more data , and it 's not as @ @ and so forth and so on . So  but for the limited amount of stuff we have for this particular exercise I think we 'll just design it . Fo - Hopefully as time passes we 'll get more and more data from Heidelberg and from people actually using it and stuff . grad e: But to solve our problems ag  a mediocre design will do I think in the beginning . Yeah , oh , and by the way , speaking of data , are there I could swore  , I could swear I saw it sitting on someone 's desk at some point , but is there a  a transcript of any of the , sort of , initial interactions of people with the with the system ? Cuz you know , I 'm still sort of itching to to look at what look at the stuff , and see what people are saying . So and and , of course Keith would like the German as well as the English , so whatever you guys can get . Yeah ,  I I sort of  found the  ,  the audio of some of those , and  , it kind of sounded like I didn't want to trudge through that , you know . professor c: OK , so while we 're still at this sort of top level , anything else that we oughta talk about today ? grad e: Ho - how was your thingy . grad b: Oh , I just wanted to , s like mention as an issue , you know last meeting I wasn't here because I went to a linguistics colloquium on the fictive motion stuff , professor c: Oh right . grad b: and that was pretty interesting and you know , seems to me that that will fairly obviously be of relevance to  to what we 're doing here because you know people are likely to give descriptions like you know , " What 's that thing  right where you start to go up the hill , " or something like that , you know , meaning a few feet up the hill or whatever from some reference point and all that stuff so  , I 'm sure in terms of you know , people trying to state locations or , you know , all that kind of stuff , this is gonna be very relevant . So , now that was the talk was about English versus Japanese , which obviously the Japanese doesn't affect us directly , except that , some of the construction he 'd what he talked about was that you know in English we say things like th you know , " your bike is parked across the street " and we use these prepositional phrases , you know , " well , if you were to move across the street you would be at the bike " , but  in in Japanese the the more conventionalized tendency is to use a sort of a description of " where one has crossed to the river , there is a tree " .  , and you know , you can actually say things like , " there 's a tree where one has crossed the river , but no one has ever crossed the river " , or something like that . So the idea is that this really is you know that 's supposed show that 's it 's really fictive and so on . But  But the point is that that kind of construction is also used in English , you know , like " right where you start to go up the hill " , or " just when you get off the train " , or something like that to  , to indicate where something is . grad b: So we 'll have to think about professor c: So how much is that used in German ? grad e:  . grad e: the the Deep Map project which  is undergoing some renovation at at the moment , but this is a a three language project : German , English , Japanese . grad e: And  , we have a  ,  I have taken care that we have the the Japanese generation and stuff . Well , if yo if you 're interested in that , so how how ,  it does sort of go d all the way down to the conceptual level to some extent . professor c: So , where is this huge project ? grad e: It 's KLEIST . grad e:  professor c: Well , that may be another thing that Keith wants to look at . grad e: But  , I I think we should leave Japanese constructions maybe outside of the scope for for now , grad b: Yeah . phd a: Are are you going to p pay any attention to the relative position of of the direction relative relative to the speaker ? For example , there are some differences between Hebrew and English . We can say  " park in front of the car " as you come beh you drive behind the car . In Hebrew it means " park behind the car " , because to follow the car is defined as it faces you . phd a: So , i i i is German  closer to to E  ,  to E   grad e:   phd a: I don't think it it 's related to syntax , though , so it may be entirely different . Did you ever get to look at the the rou paper that I sent you on the on that problem in English and German ? grad b: I think grad e: Carroll , ninety - three . grad e: So it 's they actually say " the monkey in front of the car , where 's the monkey ? " grad b:   grad e: And , they found statistically very significant differences in English and German , so I I I It might be , since there are only a finite number of ways of doing it , that that German might be more like Hebrew in that respect . phd a: That but it wasn't was grad e: That syntactic facto factors do do play a role there , wh whether you 're more likely , you know , to develop  , choices that lead you towards using  intrinsic versus extrinsic reference frames . grad b: it seems to me that you can get both in in English depending o professor c:  . grad b: You know , like , " in front of the car " could you know Like , here 's the car sideways to me in between me and the car or something 's in front of the car , or whatever . grad b: but But anyway , so you know , this was this was a a very good talk on those kinds of issues and so on . grad e: I can also give you  , a pointer to a paper of mine which is the the ultimate taxonomy of reference frames . " reference frames " ? grad e: It 's called a phd a:   grad e: It 's it 's spatial reference frames . You can either do a two - point or a three - point which is you You 're familiar with th with the " origo " ? where that 's the center " Origo " is the center of the f frame of reference . professor c: So that would be " origin " in English , grad f: This was like grad b: The origin . grad e: And three - point relations is if something has an intrinsic front side like this chair then your f shoe is behind the chair . You you can actually say things like , " it 's behind the tree from me " or something like that , I think , in in in certain circumstances in English , right ? As sort of " from where I 'm standing it would appear that " grad e: Yeah . professor c: Yeah , it sounds like it , doesn't it , grad b: Yeah . Egocentric two - point , egocentric three - point , or you can have allocentric . grad e: So , " as seen from the church , the town hall is right of that  , fire station " . aa - huh It 's hardly ever used but it 's w phd a: I 'd love to see it if you if you have a copy kind of . Well , why don't you just put it on the web page ? There 's this EDU Right ? grad e: Yeah it 's or or just Yeah . professor c: By the way , there something that I didn't know until about a week ago or so , is apparently , there are separate brain areas for things within reach , and things that are out of reach . professor c: So there 's there 's  all this linguistic stuff about you know , near and far , or yon and and so forth . That , you know they do MRI , and and if you 're  got something within reach then there 's one of your areas lights up , and if something 's out of reach  a different one . So there 's a a line on the wall over there , and you give them a laser pointer , and you say , " Where 's the midpoint ? " And they do fine . There 's just that part of the brain isn't functioning , so they can't do that . The same thing on the wall , you give them a laser , " where is it ? " , grad b:   Give them a stick , long stick , and say " do it " , they can't do it . So they doubled the the end the end of this grad f: Because it 's within reach now ? grad b: Yeah , professor c: It 's not within reach and you use the Within - Reach  , mechanism . professor c: And so this doe This is ,  First of all , it explains something that I 've always wondered about and I 'll do this this test on you guys as well . How - I have had an experience , not often , but a certain number of times , when , for example , I 'm working with a tool , a screwdriver or something , for a long time , I start feeling the tip directly . professor c: And people who are  accomplished violinists and stuff like that , claim they also have this kind of thing where you get a direct sensation of , physical sensation , of the end affector . What 's going on at the end of the tool , phd a: The ext the the The extension , grad b: yeah . professor c: Huh ? grad b: What 's going on at the end of the tool , or whatever .  i i it 's not exactly the th same thing , but but s it it it 's getting close to that . grad f: W what does it feel like ? professor c: Oh i it feels like your as if your  neurons had extended themselves out to this tool , and you 're feeling forces on it and so forth and and you deal directly with it . phd a: I once I I was playing you know with those   devices that allow you to manipulate objects when it 's dangerous to get close ? So you can insert your hand something grad b: Oh , OK . phd a: Very kind of you stop back and suddenly it goes away and you have to kind of work again to recapture it , but yeah . professor c: Right , Yeah , so anyway , so So this was the first actual experimental evidence I 'd seen that was consistent with this anecdotal stuff . So in addition to e ego and allocentric  which appear all over the place , you also apparently have this proximal - distal thing which is very deeply  embedded . S grad e: Well , Dan Montello sort of , he he does the   th the cognitive map world , down in Santa Barbara . And he he always talks about these He he already well i probably most likely without knowing this this evidence  is talking about these small scale spaces that you can manipulate versus large scale environmental spaces . Well there 's there 's  been a lot of behavioral things o on this , but that was the first neur neuro - physiological thing I saw . We 're starting to do science , right ? And so these issues about  , reference , and spatial reference , discourse reference ,  -  -  -  all this sort of stuff , deixis which is part of what you were talking about , grad b:   And so , in addition to the business about just getting the linguistics right , and the formalism and stuff , we 're actually gonna build something and  , Johno is point person on the parser , analyzer , whatever that is , and we 're gonna start on that in parallel with the  , the grammar stuff . professor c: But to do that we 're gonna need to make some decisions like ontology , so ,  And so this is another thing where we 're gonna , you know , have to get involved and make s relatively early I think , make some decisions on  , " is there an ontology API that that " There 's a sort of standard way of getting things from ontologies and we build the parser and stuff around that , or is there a particular ontology that we 're gonna standardize on , and if so For example , is there something that we can use there . i Does  either the  SmartKom project or one of the projects at EML have something that we can just p pull out , for that . But we aren't gonna ignore those cuz we 're we 're not only going The plan is not only to lay out this thing , but to actually  build some of it . Part of it , if it works right , is wh It looks like we 're now in a position that the construction analyzer that we want for this applied project can be the same as the construction analyzer that Nancy needs for the child language modeling . It 's always been out of phase but it now seems that  , there 's a good shot at that . So we 've talked about it , and the hope is that we can make these things the same thing , grad b: OK . professor c: and of course it 's only w In both cases it 's only one piece of a bigger system . To to come full circle on that , this formalization task , OK ? is trying to get the formalism into into a shape where it can actually  grad b: Yeah . Be of use to someone who 's trying to do this , right ? professor c: d Well , yeah , where it actually is is covers the whole range of things . And the the the the thing that got Mark into the worst trouble is he had a very ambitious thing he was trying to do , and he insisted on trying to do it with a limited set of mechanisms . professor c: and he seemed fully committed to both sides of this i i irreconcilable thing . So there 's you know sort of , yeah , deep , really deep , emotional commitment to a certain theory being  , complete . grad f: You don't have a hidden purist streak ? grad d: Oh no . professor c: We - well it hasn't it it certainly hasn't been observed , in any case . Why a actually , the thing is , you you do but , th the thing you have to im implement is so small that  . professor c: Within that , yeah , grad f: Yes , professor c: and  , it 's a and still , I think , you know , get something done . grad b: Cool ! professor c: But to try to do something upscale and purist Particularly if if  what you 're purist about doesn't actually work , is real hard . And then the other thing is while we 're doing this  Robert 's gonna pick a piece of this space , phd a: It 's possible yeah . grad e: The - th There there 's a drive - in thesis  sh joint over in Saarbruecken . But , But anyway , so , that 's  , also gotta be worked out , hopefully over the next few weeks , so that that it becomes clear  , what piece  , Robert wants to jump into . And , while we 're at this level , there 's at least one new doctoral student in computer science who will be joining the project , either next week or the first of August , depending on the blandishments of Microsoft . Nobody believed th th that grad f: Yeah , I thought it had to be a joke , of your part , you know professor c: Yeah . " grad g: Is this person someone who 's in first - year this year , professor c: No , first year coming . grad g: or professor c: So , she 's she 's now out here she 's moved , and she 'll be a student as of then . professor c: And probably she 'll pick up from you on the belief - net stuff , so sh she 'll be chasing you down and stuff like that . grad f: We always get these people who are not in the class , who professor c: Some of th some of them , yeah . professor c: So anyway , but  she 's another one of these ones with a three point nine average and so forth and so on . Oh there 's yet another one of the incoming first incoming first - year graduate students who 's expressed interest , so we 'll see how that goes .  , anyway , so , I think as far as this group goes , it 's certainly worth continuing for the next few weeks to get closure on the  belief - net and the ideas that are involved in that , and what are th what are the concepts . We 'll see whether it 's gonna make sense to have this be separate from the other bigger effort with the formalization stuff or not , I 'm not sure . And then , Ami , you can decide , you know , how much time you wanna put into it and  , it it 's beginning to take shap shape , phd a: OK . professor c: so  and , phd a: Right professor c: I think you will find that if you want to look technically at some of the your traditional questions in this light ,  Keith , who 's buil building constructions , will be quite happy to  see what , you know , you envision as the issues and the problems and  , how they might  get reflected in constructions . phd a: I I may have to go to Switzerland for in June or beginning of July for between two weeks and four weeks , but  , after that or before that . And , if it 's useful we can probably arrange for you to drop by and visit either at Heidelberg or at the German AI center , while you 're in in the neighborhood . Yeah be  actu actually I 'm invited to do some consulting with a bank in Geneva which has an affiliation with a research institute in Geneva , which I forgot the name of . professor c: Well , we we 're connected to  There 's a there 's a a very significant connection between We 'll we 'll go through this , phd a: Yeah . professor c: ICSI and EPFL , which is the ,  It 's the Fr Ge - Germany 's got two big technical institutes . professor c: E T and then there 's one , the French speaking one , in Lausanne , grad b: Oh , so in Switzerland . Yeah , and so anyway we c  We can m undoubtedly get Ami  to give a talk at  EML or something like that . I I think the one you you gave here a couple of weeks ago would be of interest there , too . Actually , either place , DFKI or  Yeah , so , and and if there is a book , that you 'll be building up some audience for it . professor c: Cuz they 've actually these DFKI guys have done as much as anyone over the last decade in trying to build them . So , unless we wanna start digging into the  the belief - net and the decisions now , which would be fine , it 's probably grad e: I I tho It 's probably better if I come next week with the  version O point nine of the structure . So , how about if you two guys between now and next week come up with something that is partially proposal , and partially questions , saying " here 's what we think we understand , here are the things we think we don't understand " . professor c: OK ?  , " these are the decisions " I don't think we 're gonna get lots more information . grad e: And  , the the sem semester will be over next week but then you have projects for one more week to come ? grad g: No , I I think I 'll be done everything by this  by the end of this week . This Well , I 've I have projects , but then the my prof professor of one of my classes also wa has a final that he 's giving us . professor c: OK , so I guess that 's grad d: So , the seventeenth will definitely be the last day , like it or not for me . So let 's do this , and then we we well there 's gonna be some separate co these guys are talking ,  we have a group on the formalization ,  Nancy and Johno and I are gonna talk about parsers . professor c: Of course , nothing gets done even in a meeting of seven people , grad b: Right . professor c: right ? So , two or three people is the size in which actual work gets done . Oh , the other thing we wanna do is catch up with  , Ellen and see what she 's doing because the  image schemas are going to be  , an important pa grad b: Yeah . Yeah , I 'm actually probably going to be in contact with her  pretty soon anyway because of various of us students were going to have a reading group about precisely that sort of thing over the summer , grad d: OK . professor c: That 's great ! Yeah , I I Shweta mentioned that , although she said it 's a secret . grad d: Hi grad b: Right , no faculty ! professor c: Th - the faculty aren't faculty aren't supposed to know . professor c: But  , I 'm sufficiently clueless that I count as a grad b: Yeah , right . It 's as if we didn't tell anyone at all , grad d: Bhaskara


grad c: Now can you give me the  remote T ? professor d: OK , so Eva , co  could you read your numbers ? grad a: Go ahead and read . grad b: Robert , do you  have any way to turn off your  screensaver on there so that it 's not going off every  , it seems to have about at two minute grad c: Yeah , I 've I  it 's not that I didn't try . grad c: and  I I told it to stay on forever and ever , but if it 's not plugged in it just doesn't obey my commands . grad c: But  we 'll just be m m working on it at intensity so it doesn't happen . grad c: So what I 've tried to do here is list all the decision nodes that we have identified on this side . So all of these tasks The reading is out of these tasks more or less imply that the user wants to go there , sometime or the other . And these are the data tasks where w we can assume the person would like to enter , view or just approach the thing . Analogously the same on the object information we can see that , you know , we have sort of created these tasks before we came up with our decision nodes so there 's a lot of things where we have no analogous tasks , and that may or may not be a problem . We can change the tasks slightly if we feel that we should have data for e sort of for every decision node so trying to im  implant the intention of going to a place now , going to a place later on the same tour , or trying to plant the intention of going sometime on the next tour , or the next day or whenever .  one of them is to work on the semantics of the belief - net which is going to be the main inference engine for thi the system  making decisions . so f the natural language understanding thing is  , we think gonna only have to choose parameters , but You know , a fairly large set of parameters . One of which is figure out what all the choices are , which we 've done a fair amount . Then we need to figure out what influences its choices and finally we have to do some technical work on the actual belief relations and presumably estimates of the probabilities and stuff . And we 're also , sort of  in the same process , going to work with Fey on what there should be in the dialogues . So One of the s steps that 's coming up real soon is to actually get subjects  in here , and have them actually record like this . And depending on what Fey sort of provokes them to say , we 'll get information on different things . grad c: Well how people phrase different intentions more or less , professor d: So Fo - v yeah people with the phrase them grad c: huh ? professor d: and so  for , you know , Keith and people worrying about what constructions people use ,  we have some i we have some ways to affect that by the way the dialogues go . So what Robert kindly did , is to lay out a table of the kinds of  things that that might come up , and , the kinds of decisions . So if if we 're right , you can get by with  just this middle column worth of decisions , and it 's not all that many , and it 's perfectly feasible technically to build belief - nets that will do that . grad c:  you can look at this if you want , these are what our subject 's going to have to fill out . grad c: Let me summarize in two sentences , mainly for Eva 's benefit , who probably has not heard about the data collection , at all . grad c: Or have you heard about it ? grad a: Not that much you didn't . grad c: Then then they will read  a task where lots of German words are sort of thrown in between . And  and they have to read isolated proper names And these change professor d: S I don't see a release grad c: No , this is not the release form . grad c: And  And then they gonna have to f   choose from one of these tasks , which are listed here . Six different things they sort of think they would do if they were in Heidelberg or traveling someplace and  and they have a map . grad c: And  grad b: This is a fictional system obviously , grad c: The comp Yeah , the computer system sits right in front of you , grad b: huh . So she can copy sentences into a window , or type really fast and this machine will use speech synthesis to produce that . So if you ask " How do I get to the castle " then a m s several seconds later it 'll come out of here " In order to get to the castle you do " grad b: Yeah . " And we sort of get the idea what people do when they s think they speak to a machine and what people say when they think they speak to a human , or know , or assume they speak to a human . grad c: And we 're gonna start tomorrow at three ? four ? one ? undergrad e: Tomorrow , well we don't know for sure . undergrad e: but grad c: And  we 're still l looking for a room on the sixth floor because they stole away that conference room . But professor d: Well , there are these   oh , I see , we have to Yeah , it 's tricky . And  I can report a so I did this but I also tried to do this so if I click on here , Isn't this wonderful ? we get to the   belief - net just focusing on on the g Go - there node . grad c: And what w what happened is that  design - wise I 'd sort of n noticed that we can we still get a lot of errors from a lot of points to one of these sub Go - there User Go - there Situation nodes . So I came up with a couple of additional nodes here where  whether the user is thrifty or not , and what his budget is currently like , is going to result in some financial state of the user . Being the same at this just the money available , which may influence us , whether he wants to go there if it is you know charging tons of dollars for admission or its gonna g cost a lot of t e whatever . grad c: So , and this actually turned out to be pretty key , because having specified sort of these  this this intermediate level  and sort of noticing that everything that happens here let 's go to our favorite endpoint one is again more or less we have  then the situation nodes contributing to the the endpoint situation node , which contributes to the endpoint and so forth .  I can now sort of draw straight lines from these to here , meaning it g of course goes where the sub - S everything that comes from situation , everything that comes from user goes with the sub - U , and whatever we specify for the so - called " Keith node " , or the discourse , what comes from the  parser , construction parser ,  will contribute to the D and the ontology to the sub - O node . And  one just s sort of has to watch which also final decision node so it doesn't make sense t to figure out whether he wants to enter , view or approach an object if he never wants to go there in the first place . And  now all w that 's left to do then is the CPG 's , the conditional probabilities , for the likelihood of a person having enough money , actually wanting to go a place if it costs , you know this or that . and once  Bhaskara has finished his classwork that 's where we 're gonna end up doing . And  And for now  the the question is " How much of these decisions do we want to build in explicitly into our data collection ? " So  , one could sort of think of you know we could call the z see or you know , people who visit the zoo we could s call it " Visit the zoo tomorrow " , so we have an intention of seeing something , but not now but later . Yeah , so let 's s  s see I th I think that from one point of view , all these places are the same , so that d d That ,  in terms of the linguistics and stuff , there may be a few different kinds of places , so I th i it seems to me that We ought to decide you know , what things are k are actually going to matter to us .  are all big - ish things that  you know have different parts to them , and one of them might be fine . Yeah The the reason why we did it that way , as a as a reminder , is  no person is gonna do all of them . professor d: And grad c: They 're just gonna select u  , according to their preferences . grad c: " Ah , yeah , I usually visit zoos , or I usually visit castles , or I usually " And then you pick that one . professor d: Right , no no , but but s th point is to to y to build a system that 's got everything in it that might happen you do one thing . professor d: T to build a system that  had the most data on a relatively confined set of things , you do something else . So , all I 'm saying is i th there 's there 's a kind of question of what we 're trying t to accomplish . and I think my temptation for the data gathering would be to  , you know And each person is only gonna do it once , so you don't have to worry about them being bored , so if if it 's one service , one luxury item , you know , one big - ish place , and so forth and so on ,  then my guess is that that the data is going to be easier to handle . Now of course you have this I guess possible danger that somehow there 're certain constructions that people use  when talking about a museum that they wouldn't talk about with a university and stuff ,  but I guess I 'm I  m my temptation is to go for simpler . But I don't know what other people think about this in terms of grad b: So I don't exactly understand professor d:  grad b: like I I I guess we 're trying to limit the detail of our ontology or types of places that someone could go , right ? But who is it that has to care about this , or what component of the system ? professor d: Oh , well ,  th I think there are two places where it comes up . One is  in the th these people who are gonna take this and and try to do speech with it . professor d:  Lots of pronunciations of th of the same thing are going to give you better data than l you know , a few pronunciations of lots more things . grad b: So we would rather just ask  have a bunch of people talk about the zoo ,  and assume that that will that the constructions that they use there will give us everything we need to know about these sort of zoo , castle , whatever type things , these bigger places . professor d: Bigger Y yeah thi well this is a question for grad b: And that way you get the speech data of people saying " zoo " over and over again or whatever too . professor d: and , you know , if we if we do , and we probably will , actually try to  build a prototype ,  probably we could get by with the prototype only handling a few of them anyway . So ,  grad c: Yeah , the this was sort of these are all different sort of activities . So , " Go to place " and then give them a choice , you know either they 're the symphony type or opera type or the tourist site guide type or the nightclub disco type person and they say " yeah this is on that " go to big - ish place " , grad b:   " And then we have the " Fix " thing , and then maybe " Do something the other day " thing , so . My question is I guess , to some extent , we should y we just have to try it out and see if it works . It would be challenging , in in a sense , to try to make it so so complex that they even really should schedule , or to plan it , a more complex thing in terms of OK , you know , they should get the feeling that there are these s six things they have to do and they sh can be done maybe in two days . grad c: So they make these decisions , professor d: Well I think th th grad c: " Can I go there tomorrow ? " professor d: yeah . So , the  system could say , " Well ,  we 'd like to to set up your program for two days in Heidelberg , you know , let 's first think about all the things you might like to do . So there th i i in  in I th I I 'm sure that if that 's what you did then they would start telling you about that , and then you could get into  various things about ordering , if you wanted . And that can be done , sort of to say , " OK now we 've picked these six tasks . grad c: And th w professor d: No , we have to help we have to decide .  , one is a planner The other , it kind of give you instructions on the spot grad c: Yeah , but th the I don't I 'm not really interested in sort of " Phase planning " capabilities . But it 's more the how do people phrase these planning requests ? So are we gonna masquerade the system as this as you said simple response system , " I have one question I get one response " , or should we allow for a certain level of complexity . professor d: Well , so Keith , what do you think ? grad b: Well ,  it seems that Yeah , off the top of my head it kinda seems like you would probably just want , you know , richer data , more complex stuff going on , people trying to do more complex sets of things .  you know , if our goal is to really sort of be able to handle a whole bunch of different stuff , then throwing harder situations at people will get them to do more linguistic more interesting linguistic stuff . But  I 'm I 'm not really sure  , because I don't fully understand like what our choices are of ways to do this here yet . grad c:  w we have tested this and a y have you heard listen to the f first two or th as a matter of fact the second person is  is was faced with exactly this kind of setup . grad b: I started to listen to one and it was just like , sort of depressing . grad c: And grad b: I thought I 'd just sort of listen to the beginning part and the person was just sort of reading off her script or something . grad b: So  , I grad c: it is already with this it got pretty with this setup and that particular subject it got pretty complex . grad c: Maybe I suggest we make some fine tuning of these , get sort of run through ten or so subjects grad b:   grad c: and then take a breather , and see whether we wanna make it more complex or not , depending on what what sort of results we 're getting . It In fact , I am just you know today , next couple days gonna start really diving into this data . I 've basically looked at one of the files you know one of these l y y y you gave me those dozens of files and I looked at one of them which was about ten sentences , found fifteen , twenty different construction types that we would have to look for and so on and like , " alright , well , let 's start here . So I haven't really gone into the , you know looked at all of the stuff that 's going on . So I don't really Right , once I start doing that I 'll have more to say about this kind of thing . grad c: And y and always professor d: But well th but you did say something important , which is that  you can probably keep yourself fairly well occupied  with the simple cases for quite a while . professor d: Although , obviously th so so that sa s does suggest that  , now , I have looked at all the data , and it 's pre it 's actually at least to an amateur , quite redundant . professor d: That that it was it was very stylized , and quite a lot of people said more or less the same thing . grad b: I  I did sort of scan it at first and noticed that , and then looked in detail at one of them . So grad c:  w do we wanna get going beyond more , which is sort of the professor d: Well , OK , so let 's let 's take let 's I I think your suggestion is good , which is we 'll do a b  a batch . And , Fey , How long is it gonna be till you have ten subjects ? Couple days ? Or thr f a A week ? Or I don't I don't have a feel for th undergrad e:  I can Yeah ,  I s I think can probably schedule ten people , whenever . professor d: Well , it 's it 's up to you ,  I j I  e We don't have any huge time pressure . It 's just when you have t undergrad e: How long will it be ? professor d: Yeah . grad c: This means audio , but professor d: and Huh ? grad c: no transcriptions of course , yeah . professor d: No , we won't have the transcriptions , but what we should be able to do and I don't know if , Fey , if you will have time to do this , but it would be great if you could , not transcribe it all , but pick out  , some stuff . professor d: Oh , we could get  , you can buy another disk for two hundred dollars , right ?  it 's it 's not like OK . grad c: No , he  , he he has been solving all our problems or is wonderful , professor d: OK . But anyway , so , If you if you can think of a way to  , point us to th to interesting things , sort of as you 're doing this or or something  , make your make notes or something that that this is , you know , something worth looking at . And other than that , yeah I guess we 'll just have to  , listen although I guess it 's only ten minutes each , right ? Roughly . professor d: People I understand , but people people you know  undergrad e: It feels like a long time grad c: Yeah .  But anyway yeah , so I think it 's a good idea to start with the sort of relatively straight forward res just response system . And then if we want to  get them to start doing  multiple step planning with a whole bunch of things and then organize them an  tell them which things are near each other and you know , any of that stuff .  You know , " Which things would you like to do Tuesday morning ? " grad c: Yeah . undergrad e: But were you saying that grad c: I need those back by the way . grad c: That 's for professor d: I 'm sorry , Fey , what ? undergrad e: That w maybe one thing we should do is go through this list and sort of select things that are categories and then o offer only one member of that category ? professor d: That 's what I was suggesting for the first round , yeah . undergrad e: And then , they could be alternate versions of the same If you wanted data on different constructions . professor d: They could , but i but i  tha eh they c yeah , but  but undergrad e: Like one person gets the version with the zoo as a choice , and the other person gets the professor d: You could , but i but I I I think in the short run , grad c: And no , th the per the person don't get it .  , this is why we did it , because when we gave them just three tasks for w part - A and three tasks for part - B a professor d: Right . But  I I think this approach will very well work , but the person was able to look at it and say " OK , This is what I would actually do . grad c: OK , we gotta we gotta disallow  traveling to zoos and  castles at the same time , sort of undergrad e:  there they are significantly different , but . grad c: But no , they 're  they 're sort of this is where tour becomes you know tourists maybe a bit different undergrad e: Yeah , I guess so . grad c: But we can  professor d: Yeah , in fact if y if y if you use the right verb for each in common , like at you know , " attend a theater , symphony or opera " is is a group , and " tour the university , castle or zoo " , grad c:  -  Yeah . professor d: all of these d do have this kind of " tour "  aspect about the way you would go to them . professor d: So it may turn out to be not so many different kinds of things , grad c:   professor d: and then , what one would expect is that that the sentence types would  their responses would tend to be grouped according to the kind of activity , you would expect . phd f: But  i it seem that  there is a difference between going to see something , and things like " exchange money " or " dine out " professor d: Oh , absolutely . grad c: Yeah , this is where yeah th the function stuff is definitely different and the getting information or g stuff yeah . So since people gonna still pick something , we we 're not gonna get any significant amount of redundancy . And  we would be ultimately more interested in getting all the possible ways of people asking , oh , for different things with or with a computer . And so if you can think of any other sort of high level tasks a tourist may do just always just m mail them to us and we 'll sneak them into the collection . But it seems like since we since we are getting towards  subject  fifty subjects and if we can keep it up  to a  sort of five four - ish per week rate , we may even reach the one hundred before Fey t takes off to Chicago . professor d: Well , these are all f people off campus s from campus so far , undergrad e: Yeah . professor d: So we yeah we don't know how many we can get next door at the  shelter for example . So , alright , so let 's go let 's go back then , to the the chart with all the decisions and stuff , and see how we 're doing . professor d: Do do people think that , you know this is is gonna  cover what we need , or should we be thinking about more ? grad c: Okay , in terms of decision nodes ?  , Go - there is is a yes or no . grad c: I 'm also interested in th in this " property "  line here , so if you look at sorry , look at that  , timing was  I have these three . Do we need a final differentiation there ? Now , later on the same tour , sometimes on the next tour . grad b: What 's this idea of " next tour " ?  grad c: It 's sort of next day , so you 're doing something now and you have planned to do these three four things , grad b:   grad c: you could sort of tag it on to that tour grad b: Or OK . grad c: or you can say this is something I would do s I wanna do sometime l in my life , basically . So so this tour is sort of just like th the idea of current s round of of touristness or whatever , professor d: Right . professor d:  if you if if you wanted precise about it ,  you know , grad b: Got it . professor d: You know , " OK , we 'll go back to the hotel and then we 'll go off grad b: OK . professor d: and " phd f: So all tours b a tour happens only within one day ? professor d: Yes . grad c: Well , my visit to Prague there were some nights where I never went back to the hotel , so whether that counts as a two - day tour or not we 'll have to think . grad b: You just spend the whole time at U Fleku or something , phd f: Yeah . What is the  the the English co   cognate if you want , for " Sankt Nimmerlandstag " ? grad b: Keine Ahnung grad c: Sort of " We 'll do it on when you say on that d day it means it 'll never happen . grad c: Do you have an expression ? Probably you sh grad b: Not that I know of actually . grad c: Yeah , when hell Yep , we 'll do it when hell freezes over .  , the reason why why do we go there in the first place IE  it 's either  for sightseeing , for meeting people , for running errands , or doing business . grad b: So , business is supposed to  , be sort of it like professional type stuff , right , or something like that ? grad c: Yep . " Who is the the tour is the person ? " So it might be a tourist , grad b:   grad c: it might be a business man who 's using the system , who wants to sort of go to some grad b: Yeah . He is going to  He 's there to teach a course at the business school but he also is touring around and so he may have some mixture of these things . grad c: He would phd f: What ab What do you have in mind in terms of  socializing ? What kind of activities ? grad c: Eh , just meeting people , basically . " I want to meet someone somewhere " , which be puts a very heavy constraint on the " EVA " phd f: Oh grad b: Yeah . grad c: you know , because then if you 're meeting somebody at the town hall , you 're not entering it usually , you 're just want to approach it . grad b: So  , does this capture , like , where do you put " Exchange money " is an errand , right ? But what about  grad c: Yep . professor d:  -  grad b: So , like " Go to a movie " is now entertainment , " Dine out " is phd f: Socializing , I guess . professor d: but but  I would say that if " Dine out " is a special c  if you 're doing it for that purpose then it 's entertainment . professor d: And we 'll also as y as you 'll s further along we 'll get into business about " Well , you 're you know this is going over a meal time , do you wanna stop for a meal or pick up food or something ? " grad b:   That 's that 's sort of part of th that 's not a destination reason , that 's sort of " en passant , " right .  , " mode " , I have found three , " drive there " , " walk there "  or " be driven " , which means bus , taxi , BART . professor d: Obviously taxis are very different than buses , but on the other hand the system doesn't have any public transport This the planner system doesn't have any public transport in it yet . grad c: So this granularity would suffice , I think w if we say the person probably , based on the utterance we on the situation we can conclude wants to drive there , walk there , or use some other form of transportation . grad b: H How much of Heidelberg can you get around by public transport ?  in terms of the interesting bits . There 's lots of bits where you don't really I 've only ev was there ten years ago , for a day , so I don't remember , but .  , like the sort of the tourist - y bits professor d:  - Well , grad c: Everywhere . grad b: is it like professor d: you can't get to the Philosophers ' Way very well , grad b: Yeah . professor d: but ,  there are hikes that you can't get to , but grad b: OK . grad a: So is like " biking there " part of like " driving there " , grad c: Yeah ,  we actually biking should be should be a separate point because we have a very strong bicycle planning component . grad c: Bicycles c should be in there , but , will we have bic  is this realistic ?  grad b: Yeah . grad c: We can we can sort of  , drive grad b: I would I would lump it with " walk " because hills matter . professor d: right ? grad c: OK , " Length " is  , you wanna get this over with as fast as possible , professor d: Alright . But we should just make a decision whether we feel that they want to use some substantial or some fraction of their time . grad c: You know , they wanna do it so badly that they are willing to spend  you know the necessary and plus time . And  And y you know , if we feel that they wanna do nothing but that thing then , you know , we should point out that to the planner , that they probably want to use all the time they have . It seems like it  you 're you 're talking about rather than having the user decide this you 're supposed t we 're supposed to figure it out ? professor d: w well grad c: Th - the user can always s say it , but it 's just sort of we we hand over these parameters if we make if we have a feeling that they are important . grad c: And that we can actually infer them to a significant de degree , or we ask . professor d: And par yeah , and part of the system design is that if it looks to be important and you can't figure it out , then you ask . professor d: But hopefully you don't ask you know , a all these things all the time . professor d: Or eh so , y but there 's th but definitely a back - off position to asking . grad c: And if no no part of the system ever comes up with the idea that this could be important , no planner is ever gonna ask for it . grad c: y so And I like the idea that , you know , sort of Jerry pushed this idea from the very beginning , that it 's part of the understanding business to sort of make a good question of what 's s sort of important in this general picture , what you need t grad b:   grad c: If you wanna simulate it , for example , what parameters would you need for the simulation ? And , Timing , Length would definitely be part of it , " Costs " , " Little money , some money , lots of money " ? professor d:   But a I as a tourist , I 'll just paying what 's what 's more or less is required . I think there are there 're different things where you have a ch choice , undergrad e: Mmm . professor d: for example ,  this t interacts with " do am I do oh are you willing to take a taxi ? " grad b: Dinner . professor d: Or  , you know , if if you 're going to the opera are you gonna l look for the best seats or the peanut gallery phd f: The best seat or or Right . So professor d: whatever ? S so I think there are a variety of things in which  Tour - tourists really do have different styles eating . grad c: The what what my sort of sentiment is they 're Well , I I once had to write a a a a charter , a carter for a a student organization . And I looked at the other ones and they always said ten percent of the student body has to be present at their general meeting otherwise it 's not a And I wrote in there " En - Enough " people have to be there . And it was hotly debated , but people agreed with me that everybody probably has a good feeling whether it was a farce , a joke , or whether there were enough people . grad c: And if you go to Turkey , you will find when people go shopping , they will say " How much cheese do you want ? " and they say " Ah , enough . Because the person selling the cheese knows , you know , that person has two kids and you know , a husband that dislikes cheese , so this is enough . grad c: And  so the middle part is always sort of the the golden way , right ? So you can s you can be really make it as cheap as possible , or you can say " I want , er , you know , I don't care " grad b: Money is no object . grad c: in much the same way as how how d you know should the route be ? Should it be the easiest route , even if it 's a b little bit longer ? grad b:   grad c: No steep inclinations ? Go the normal way ? Whatever that again means , er or do you does the person wanna rough it ? grad b:    th so there 's a couple of different ways you can interpret these things right ? You know " I want to go there and I don't care if it 's really hard . grad b: Right ? you know , so I assume we 're going for the first interpretation , undergrad e: Right . grad b: right ? Something like I 'll go th  I 'd li I dunno . It 's different from thing to professor d: No , I think he was going for the second one ar actually . grad b: Yeah ? I I professor d: Anyway , we 'll sort th yeah , we 'll sort that out .  " Object information " , " Do I do I wanna know anything about that object ? " is either true or false . if I care about it being open , accessible or not , I don't think there 's any middle ground there .  , either I wanna know where it is or not , I wanna know about it 's history or not , or ,  I wanna know about what it 's good for or not . professor d: Yeah , now ob OK , I 'm sorry , go ahead , what were you gonna say ? grad c: One could put scales in there . So " object " becomes " entity " , right ? grad c: Yep , that 's true . professor d: And we think that 's it , interestingly enough , that  , you know , th or or or something very close to it is going to be  going to be enough . professor d: Alright , so  So I think the order of things is that  , Robert will clean this up a little bit , although it looks pretty good . And grad c: What , well this is the part that professor d: Huh ? grad c: this is the part that needs the work . professor d: Yeah , so right , so So ,  In parallel ,  three things are going to happen .  Robert and Eva and Bhaskara are gonna actually build a belief - net that that , has CPT 's and , you know , tries to infer this from various kinds of information . And Fey is going to start collecting data , and we 're gonna start thinking a about  what constructions we want to elicit . And then w go it may iterate on  , further data collection to elicit grad b: D Do you mean Do you mean eliciting particular constructions ? Or do you mean like what kinds of things we want to get people talking about ? Semantically speaking , eh ? professor d: Well , yes . professor d: And And so  grad b:  from my point of view I 'm I 'm trying to care about the syntax , so you know professor d: Well that too , grad b: OK . professor d: but  You know if th if we in if we you know , make sure that we get them talking about temporal order . professor d: OK , that would be great and if th if they use prepositional phrases or subordinate clauses or whatever , grad b:   professor d: But I I think that probably we 're gonna try to look at it as you know , s what semantic constructions d do we do we want them to  do direc grad b: OK . professor d: you know , " Caused motion " , I don't know , something like that . professor d:  But , Eh -  this is actually a conversation you and I have to have about your thesis fantasies , and how all this fits into that . grad c: Because I have not been able to dig out all the stuff out of the m ta thirty D V grad b: OK . grad c:  If you grad b: Is that roughly the equivalent of of what I 've seen in English or is it grad c: No , not at all . Like what What have I got now ?  I have  what what I 'm loo what I Those files that you sent me are the user side of some interaction with Fey ? grad c: A little bit of data , I grad b: Is that what it is ? Or ? grad c: With nothing . grad c: And  the see this this this  ontology node is probably something that I will try to expand . Once we have the full ontology API , what can we expect to get from the ontology ? And hopefully you can sort of also try to find out , you know , sooner or later in the course of the summer what we can expect to get from the discourse that might , you know or the grad b:   grad c: in terms of  professor d: Right , but we 're not expecting Keith to actually build a parser .  He 's g he 's hoping to do this for his masters ' thesis s by a year from now . grad b:  sometime , I have to talk to some subset of the people in this group , at least about  what sort of constructions I 'm looking for .  , you know obviously like just again , looking at this one  thing , you know , I saw y things from sort of as general as argument structure constructions . I have to do   unbounded dependencies , you know , which have a variety of constructions in   instantiate that . On the other hand I have to have , you know , there 's particular  , fixed expressions , or semi - fixed expressions like " Get " plus path expression for , you know , " how d ho how do I get there ? " , professor d:   grad b: " How do I get in ? " , " How do I get away ? " professor d: Right . Like professor d: OK , so this is I think we 're gonna mainly work on with George . professor d: OK , and hi let me f th say what I think is is so the idea is  first of all I misspoke when I said we thought you should do the constructions . So what I yeah , OK , So what what I meant was " Do a first cut at " . professor d: OK , Because  we do wanna get them r u perfectly but I think we 're gonna have to do a first cut at a lot of them to see how they interact . And I I me it would it would be completely out of the question to really do more than , say , like , oh I don't know , ten , over the summer , professor d: Yeah . grad b: but  , but you know obviously we need to get sort of a general view of what things look like , so yeah . So the idea is going to be to do sort of like Nancy did in some of the er these papers where you do enough of them so you can go from top to bottom so you can do f you know , f f  have a complete story ov of s of some piece of dialogue . professor d: And that 's gonna be much more useful than having all of the clausal constructions and nothing else , or or or something like that . professor d: So that the the trick is going to be t to take this and pick a some sort of lattice of constructions , grad b:   professor d: so some lexical and some phrasal , and and , you know , grad b:   professor d: whatever you need in order to  , be able to then , by hand , you know , explain , some fraction of the utterances . professor d: And so , exactly which ones will partly depend on your research interests and a bunch of other things . But  in terms of the s th sort of level of  of analysis , you know , these don't necessarily have to be more complex than like the " Out of " construction in the BCP paper where it 's just like , you know , half a page on each one or something . professor d: And if if there 's something that really requires a lot more than that then it does and we have to do it , grad b: Yeah . grad c: We could sit down and think of sort of the the ideal speaker utterances , grad b:   grad c: and  two or three that follow each other , so , where we can also sort of , once we have everything up and running , show the tremendous , insane inferencing capabilities of our system . This is sort of their standard demo dialogue , which is , you know , what the system survives and nothing but that . grad c: we could also sor sort of have the analogen of o our sample sentences , the ideal sentences where we have complete construction coverage and , sort of , they match nicely . grad c: So the the " How do I get to X ? " , grad b: Yeah . grad c: And hey , that 's that 's already covering eighty percent of the system 's functionality . grad c: No , we can w throw in an " Out of Film " construction if you want to , but professor d: No , no , no . Well the th the thing is there 's a lot that needs to be done to get this right . professor d: OK , I th We done ? grad c: I have one bit of news . grad c: the action planner guy has wrote has written a a p lengthy proposal on how he wants to do the action planning . grad c: And I responded to him , also rather lengthy , how he should do the action planning . And I tacked on a little paragraph about the fact that the whole world calls that module a dis disc dialogue manager , professor d: Right . grad c: and wouldn't it make sense to do this here too ? professor d: Right . grad c: And also Rainer M Malaka is going to be visiting us shortly , most likely in the beginning of June . grad c: And  m making me incapable of going to NAACL , for which I had funding . grad c: When is the  Santa Barbara ? professor d: S grad c: Who is going to ?  should a lot of people . grad b: How much does it cost ? grad c: There 's grad b: I haven't planned to go . So , if we all decide it 's a good idea for you to go then you 'll we 'll pay for it . professor d:  I I don't have a feeling one way or the other at the moment , grad b: OK