LINGUIST List 4.424

Wed 02 Jun 1993

FYI: new policy, preprints

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1. The Linguist List, New policy: announcing article preprints
2. , Cognitive Science Preprint

 As you can see from the message below, we received an announcement of
 the availability of an electronic version of an article to post on
 LINGUIST. It brought to our attention that in other disciplines,
 authors are making "preprints," or electronic versions, of articles
 available by anonymous FTP; and it seemed like an excellent idea
 for linguistics -- where hypotheses change so rapidly -- to do the
 same. LINGUIST doesn't have the facilities to store articles, but
 we can announce the availability of an article stored elsewhere.

 We'll have to confine announcements to articles available by anonymous
 FTP, however -- we don't have the resources to announce every article
 that comes out in print. (After all, if each of us writes an article
 a year -- we all do, don't we? -- that would be a minimum of 3509
 articles to announce.)

 So, if you want to announce the availability of your article via
 LINGUIST, will you please place an electronic version at a
 site which allows anonymous FTP access. One such site is the
 linguistics server at the U. of Michigan; so we've included in the
 box below a message from John Lawler, who is currently in charge of the
 archive, explaining how you can put your article on this server.


 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
 | |
 | How to Put Your Paper on the Archives via Anonymous FTP |
 | |
 | John Lawler <jlawlerumich.edu> |
 | |
 | First, make sure your paper is either in plain ASCII format or RTF |
 | (transfer) format. RTF is recommended for papers with special |
 | fonts. The author is responsible for all format and font matters. |
 | If there are any problems, don't tell us - tell them. |
 | |
 | Second, be aware that your paper, wonderful as it no doubt is, is |
 | not likely to be as useful in this format after a certain amount of |
 | time has passed. Also, disk space is cheap, but not free. Hence we |
 | can only keep preprints online for a limited period. For the nonce, |
 | that period is set arbitrarily at one (1) year; this is subject to |
 | change, however. |
 | |
 | Finally, there are two steps to putting the paper on the archive: |
 | |
 | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
 | |
 | (a) Actually FTP-ing it there. Here's how you do that: |
 | |
 | (1) FTP to linguistics.archive.umich.edu |
 | (if you don't know how, check with your local system guru) |
 | (2) log in as "anonymous" |
 | (without the quotes, of course :-) |
 | (3) give your e-mail address as your password |
 | (actually, anything works, but this is the convention) |
 | (4) cd linguistics/uploads |
 | (this changes your directory to one anybody can write to) |
 | (5) put <filename> |
 | (where <filename> is your paper [in ASCII or RTF format]) |
 | (6) quit |
 | (That's it; your paper is now on the archive) |
 | |
 | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
 | |
 | (b) Notifying the archivist what you've done. |
 | This is a necessary step; nothing will be posted on the |
 | archive until the archivist is officially notified. |
 | Simply send e-mail to: linguistics-archivistumich.edu |
 | |
 | The message should contain the following information: |
 | |
 | 1 line: <filename>, as uploaded, file format (and font |
 | information, if any) |
 | 1 line: Author's name and address (and email address, if |
 | different from the return address on message) |
 | 1 line: Paper title (and publication data, if any) |
 | 5 lines: Paper description, with keywords |
 | |
 | The archivist will forward all the data to LINGUIST for |
 | posting on the list, and will keep it on-line as well. |
 | |
 | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
 | |
 | As soon as the archivist receives the message (and gets around to |
 | updating the archives), your paper will appear in the |
 | linguistics/papers |
 | directory of the archive, and you can tell your correspondents it's |
 | "Available for anonymous FTP at linguistics.archive.umich.edu" |
 | And you won't have to send out individual copies yourself any more. |
 | |
 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+


 Below is our first preprint announcement--the message that set us thinking
 about preprints. Since it's the first, we didn't restrict length; but if
 later authors will restrict their messages to the 8 lines described in
 John's message above, their restraint will be _greatly_ appreciated.
 Let's regard this announcement as a trial run, since -- as always --
 we're certainly willing to modify the policy in light of any comments and
 suggestions we receive from you.

 --The Moderators
 Helen & Anthony

FTP-host: reports.adm.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.218.42)
FTP-filename: /1993/CMU-CS-93-146.ps

The following article will appear in the Cognitive Science journal. A preprint
of the paper is available as CMU Computer Science Technical Report No.
CMU-CS-93-146, in electronic as well as hard-copy form. Information follows
about electronic retrieval (free), as well as ordering hard copies (for a small
charge).

Comments on the paper are invited.

Note: A preliminary and substantially different version of this paper
was announced in the neuroprose electronic archive in
December-January 1991-92 as the file gupta.stress.ps.Z (which is no
longer available).

-- Prahlad

 ***************************************
 Connectionist Models and Linguistic Theory: Investigations of Stress
 Systems in Language

 Prahlad Gupta and David S. Touretzky
 Carnegie Mellon University

 (To appear in Cognitive Science)

 Abstract

We question the widespread assumption that linguistic theory should
guide the formulation of mechanistic accounts of human language
processing. We develop a pseudo-linguistic theory for the domain of
linguistic stress, based on observation of the learning behavior of a
perceptron exposed to a variety of stress patterns. There are
significant similarities between our analysis of perceptron stress
learning and metrical phonology, the linguistic theory of human
stress. Both approaches attempt to identify salient characteristics
of the stress systems under examination without reference to the
workings of the underlying processor. Our theory and computer
simulations exhibit some strikingly suggestive correspondences with
metrical theory. We show, however, that our high-level
pseudo-linguistic account bears no causal relation to processing in
the perceptron, and provides little insight into the nature of this
processing. Because of the persuasive similarities between the nature
of our theory and linguistic theorizing, we suggest that linguistic
theory may be in much the same position. Contrary to the usual
assumption, it may not provide useful guidance in attempts to identify
processing mechanisms underlying human language.

 ************************************************

 INSTRUCTIONS FOR ELECTRONIC RETRIEVAL VIA ANONYMOUS FTP

unix> ftp reports.adm.cs.cmu.edu # or ftp 128.2.218.42
Connected to reports.adm.cs.cmu.edu.
220 REPORTS.ADM.CS.CMU.EDU FTP server (Version 4.105 of 10-Jul-90 12:08) ready.
Name (reports.adm.cs.cmu.edu:prahlad): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send usernamenode as password.
Password: <your-user-idsite> # you must include the ""
230-Filenames can not begin with "/.." .
 Other than that, everything is ok.
230 User anon logged in.
ftp> cd 1993
250 Directory path set to 1993.
ftp> get CMU-CS-93-146.ps
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening data connection for CMU-CS-93-146.ps (128.2.248.83,1073) (591324 byt
es).
226 Transfer complete.
local: CMU-CS-93-146.ps remote: CMU-CS-93-146.ps
600021 bytes received in 10 seconds (57 Kbytes/s)
ftp> quit
unix> lpr -P<your-PostScript-printer-name> CMU-CS-93-146.ps
 # or however you print PostScript files

 **************************************

 ORDERING A HARD COPY

 (The TR No. is CMU-CS-93-146)

Contact: Computer Science Documentation
 School of Computer Science
 Carnegie Mellon University
 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA

Phone: (412) 268-2596
Internet: reportscs.cmu.edu