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Center for Cognitive Science The Puzzle of the Mind |
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| Spring
2005 Colloquia
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| January 25 Business Meeting February March April |
Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, at 280 Park Hall, North Campus and are open to the public. Refreshments are served. (Calender of Events: Spring 2005) For related CogSci events please go to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Philosophy. If you are interested in receiving email announcements of each event, please subscribe to one of our email mailing lists. Calendar of Events
Abstracts
Wednesday,
January 25, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Business Meeting
Wednesday,
February 2, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Stuart
Shapiro, Ph.D. "A
Logic of Arbitrary and Indefinite Objects"
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 9, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Selmer
Bringsjord , Ph.D. & Chris Chris McEvoy "Building a Virtual Person (E) from the "Dark Side" We
describe our general approach to building what we call advanced
synthetic characters (or *bona fide* virtual persons), within the
paradigm of logic-based AI. This approach, based on our RASCALS
architecture, seeks to use a cognitive architecture for ``mid-level"
cognition, and advanced logical systems for more advanced reasoning-intensive
thought. To focus our general approach, we provide a glimpse of
our attempt to bring to life one particular advanced synthetic character
from the "dark side" --- the character known simply as
E (for, as you may have guessed, evil). Building E entails, among
other things, that we formulate an underlying logico-mathematical
definition of evil, and that we manage to engineer as well an appropriate
presentation of E. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 16, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Conor
McLennan , Ph.D. "Variability in Spoken Word Recognition"
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 23, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Jürgen
Bohnemeyer , Ph.D. "Manner
and path in nonlinguistic cognition"
1.
Verb-framed languages: 2.
Satellite-framed languages: For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 2, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus William
Rapaport , Ph.D. "In
Defense of Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: "Context"
is notoriously vague, and its uses multifarious. Researchers in
"contextual vocabulary acquisition" differ over the kinds
of context involved in vocabulary learning, and the methods and
benefits thereof. References: Schatz,
Elinore Kress, & Baldwin, R. Scott (1986), Rapaport,
William J. (submitted, 2004), For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 23, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Elsi
Kaiser , Ph.D. "Picture of who? An experimental investigation of pronouns and reflexives in representational noun phrases" The observation that English pronouns and reflexives have a (nearly) complementary distribution is central to standard binding theory (BT). Representational NPs (RNPs, e.g. 'picture of her/herself') are a well-known exception, as both pronouns and reflexives are acceptable (e.g. Kuno 1987, Pollard & Sag 1992, Reinhart & Reuland 1993, Tenny 2003). Thus, they may provide a useful window into the syntax/pragmatics/semantics interface. In this talk I discuss experiments we conducted on English and Finnish investigating (i) the idea that reflexives in RNPs refer to "sources-of-information" (see Kuno 1987) and (ii) Tenny's observation that pronouns in RNPs refer to "perceivers-of-information." We used the action-based visual-world paradigm, which crucially provides both time-course data and information about the referent assigned to the anaphor on each trial. The results for English picture NP constructions show that both reflexives and pronouns are influenced by source and perceiver information respectively, but that the effects are much stronger for pronouns and, crucially, arise even when binding theory is not violated. The results for Finnish, a typologically different language with greater morphological complexity, show that in postnominal RNP constructions, there is a perceiver preference for pronouns as well as a source preference for certain reflexive forms. Thus, in the Finnish reflexive system, morphological differences correspond to interpretational differences. However, prenominal RNP constructions in Finnish show no source/perceiver effects for either anaphoric option. In sum, on the basis of the English data we can conclude that discourse/semantic factors interact with BT, but affect pronouns with local antecedents more than reflexives with non-local antecedents. The Finnish data suggest that whether discourse/semantic factors interact with BT depends on the structural domain, since different domains show presence and absence of verb effects in RNPs. As a whole, the findings suggest that in order to better understand the referential properties of pronouns and reflexives, we need to take into account not only the structural configuration but also other kinds of information such as the source/perceiver distinction. For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
March 30, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Dan
Gildea , Ph.D. Syntactic Structure and Statistical Machine Translation Given
that statistical methods have revolutionized both natural language
parsing and machine translation, it may seem surprising that most
current statistically-based translation systems make no use of syntactic
structure. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 6, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Julia
Hirschberg , Ph.D. "Recognizing a Speaker's Emotional State" A speaker's emotional state is conveyed by acoustic and prosodic factors, as well as the words they choose and the gestures they use. We are studying several different contexts in which emotional state is important to determine: 1) an automatic tutoring system, in which students studying physics may be confident or uncertain, frustrated, or angry, and should receive appropriate handling for that state; 2) speech in varied public settings, where speakers may be perceived as charismatic or not, providing some indication of the likely success of speakers' attempts to gain political power; and 3) recorded interviews in which speakers may be telling the truth or not. In each case, our focus is on identifying prosodic and acoustic as well as lexical cues to these different speaker states, so that we may develop systems which automatically distinguish between, e.g., confidence and uncertainty, frustration and satisfaction, charimatic and non-charismatic speech, and deceptive and non-deceptive speech. These studies represent joint work with the University of Pittsburgh, SRI International, and the University of Colorado. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 20, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Len
Talmy , Ph.D. "The Attention System of Language" This talk reports on work in progress to outline the fundamental attentional system of language. This system includes some fifty basic factors, the "building blocks" of the system. Each factor involves a particular linguistic mechanism that increases or decreases attention on a certain type of linguistic entity. Although able to act alone, the basic factors also regularly combine and interact to produce further attentional effects. This attentional system shows commonalities and differences across individual languages, across modalities (spoken vs. signed language), and across cognitive systems (e.g., between language and visual perception). The methodology used in the analysis, introspection, is itself made the subject of investigation to determine its profile of better and worse function and its consequent relation to other methodologies. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 27, 2005 280 Park Hall, North Campus Dedre
Gentner , Ph.D. "Acquiring and Using Relational Representations: Computational and Empirical Details and Theoretical Speculations"
For a printable version of this file click here
Dedre
Gentner , Ph.D. "Why we're so smart" Human
cognitive abilities are remarkable, and even more remarkable is
the the rapidity with which children develop cognitive insight.
How does this insight arise? A pervasive view in cognitive development
is that these rapid gains can only be explained by assuming that
infants begin with substantial amounts of innate knowledge. In this
talk I propose an alternative approach, centered on mechanisms of
human learning. I suggest two powerful forces that contribute to
human learning and reasoning ability: (1) analogical processing;
and (2) the acquisition of relational language. I will present evidence
that the structure-mapping processes that occur during analogy and
similarity are a core mechanism by which abstract knowledge arises
from experience. Our studies of learning in adults and children
show that analogical comparison processes foster learning in several
ways: by aligning common relational structure, by suggesting inferences
between situations, by focusing attention on relevant differences,
and by inviting relational abstractions. About
Dedre Gentner: In
language learning, Gentner’s hypothesis of a language-universal
advantage for nouns in children’s early word learning that
has engendered considerable research. Her recent work unites analogical
thinking and language learning and investigates possible interactions
between language and cognition. Her theoretical and empirical work
provides evidence that relational language has a formative role
in the development of relational thought. She is also investigating
the hypothesis that analogical For a printable version of this file click here
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Last updated on Sunday, February 19, 2006 9:47 AM by H. Jones
Contact:
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The Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, State University
of New York, 201 Bell Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645-3180 ext. 125, Fax: (716) 645-3464, Stuart Shapiro, Ph.D.,
Professor and Director.
© Copyright 2005, Center for Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, All Rights Reserved.