LINGUIST List 7.873

Tue Jun 11 1996

FYI: Kittredge lecture, Donating by credit card redux

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Bruno Tersago, Re: LINGUIST post on Kittredge lecture
2. Michael Bernstein, donating by credit card redux

*------------------------------------------------------------------------*

CLIF (Computational Linguistics In Flanders) and the Centre for
Computational Linguistics of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
have the pleasure of inviting you to the following lecture:

 

TOWARDS A FRIENDLIER RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUBLANGUAGE AND CONTROLLED LANGUAGE

 by

 RICHARD KITTREDGE

 Dept. of Linguistics and Translation, University of Montreal
 and 
 CoGenTex, Inc.



 Tuesday 18 June 1996
 10:00 - 12:00
 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
 Faculty of Arts
 Mgr. Sencie-Institute (MSI), room 00.28
 Blijde Inkomststraat 21, 3000 Leuven
 BELGIUM


Abstract

A certain tension exists between (1) the need of domain experts to 
communicate among themselves in an efficient subsystem of their 
shared natural language, and (2) the need to communicate technical 
information from the experts to "outsiders" in some understandable 
way. (The outsiders might be non-native speakers, or have limited 
domain knowledge, or both.) A controlled language is designed to 
meet the second need under certain assumptions about the domain 
and linguistic knowledge of the CL consumers (i.e., the outsiders). 
Often, however, little attention is given to the "natural sublanguage" 
of the experts, whose knowledge is to be communicated. A closer 
mirroring of sublanguage grammatical features during CL design 
might help improve acceptance among both CL producer and user 
communities.

This talk starts from the notion of sublanguage as it has been 
developed and used in North America for information retrieval, 
machine translation and (most recently) text generation. We discuss 
problems that have arisen or could arise in trying to make a single CL 
standard fit a family of sublanguages, or even a whole text genre. We 
argue for using better sublanguage models to make the design of CLs 
more rational, eventually allowing a more flexible and tailored set of 
standards. Current work in natural language generation already faces 
issues of whether or how to normalize the output text. Research into 
multilingual generation of technical manuals seems to indicate a 
future convergence of concerns between the language generation and 
CL communities. What the CL community can bring to this 
discussion in the short term is the collection and analysis of cases 
where CL features have proved problematic to users, or have seems 
especially alien to experts.

This is a quick follow-up about making a donation to the LINGUIST
Editorial Support Fund using a credit card. Thank you to the kind
people who have already used our web page at
http://www.cascadilla.com/linglist.html to make a donation. If you
don't have web access and still want to take advantage of the credit
card option, we're attaching that page to this message. You can send
the form below by e-mail to salescascadilla.com and we'll process
your donation and forward the money to the support fund.

Again, this option is only available until the end of June. Please
help make this fund-raising drive a success!

Yours,
 Michael Bernstein
 Cascadilla Press
 michaelcascadilla.com

For many subscribers, it might be difficult to send a donation by
check. If you would like to make a donation by Visa or MasterCard, we
at Cascadilla Press can process the donation and forward it to the
support fund. There are several important things to note:

1. The charge will appear on your credit card statement as being from
Cascadilla Press.

2. We pay a processing fee on credit card orders of 3.1%. We have to
deduct that amount from each donation to cover that direct expense. In
other words, if you donate $50.00, only $48.45 shows up in our bank
account, so we will only send the Linguist List $48.45. We will cover
all incidental expenses associated with processing the credit cards
and writing and mailing the checks.

3. If this donation would normally be a charitable deduction for tax
purposes, it will be easier for accounting purposes if you simply send
a check directly to the support fund.

4. Cascadilla Press is not affiliated with the Linguist List. We are
just trying to help out, because we value the list as a resource for
the field.

We are requesting that you only take advantage of this option for
donations over $25.00. Also, we can only offer this option through the
end of June rather than on an ongoing basis.

DONATION FORM

I would like to help the Linguist List! Please charge the amount below
to my credit card. I understand that the charge will appear from
Cascadilla Press, and that the full amount less 3.1% will be forwarded
to the LINGUIST Editorial Support Fund.

Amount of donation in dollars:

Name for donation records (can be anonymous):

Name:

Address:

Phone number:

E-mail address:

Payment method (select one): MasterCard / Visa

Card number:

Expiration date:

Please send this form to salescascadilla.com before June 30. We'll
send an e-mail note back letting you know that your donation was
processed.