September
7 Business Meeting
14 Mary Swift
21 Amnon Eden
28 Ron Smyth

October
12 canceled
19 Werner Ceusters
26 Boris Hennig

November
2 Tsan Huang
9 Cassandra Creswell
16 canceled
23 Fall Break
30 Deb Roy

December
7 Lou Ann Gerken

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: Fall 2005)

For related CogSci events please go to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Philosophy.

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Calendar of Event

 

September
	7			Business Meeting
	14			Mary Swift, Ph.D., Computer Science Department, University of Rochester "Default aspect and the development of time reference in Inuktitut child language" Host: Richard Weist,(richard.weist@fredonia.edu), Ph.D., SUNY Fredonia, Dept. of Psychology Back to Top
	21			Amnon Eden, Ph.D., Center for Inquiry, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Essex, U.K. "Software Ontology as a Cognitive Artefact" Host: Barry Smith, Ph.D.,(phismith@buffalo.edu), Dept. of Philosophy, UB
	28			Ron Smyth, Ph.D.,Division of Humanities and Division of Life Sciences, University of Toronto, Canada "Sociophonetics, Gender, and Sexual Orientation" Hosts: Gail Mauner, Ph.D., (mauner@buffalo.edu), Dept. of Psychology, UB, and Jean Pierre Koenig, Ph.D., (jpkoenig@buffalo.edu), Dept. of Linguistics, UB Back to Top
October
	12			Canceled
	19			Werner Ceusters, MD, (werner.ceusters @ecor.uni-saarland.de), European Centre for Ontological Research, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany "Computational Linguistics for Referent Tracking in Electronic Healthcare Records: a research agenda" Host: Barry Smith, Ph.D.,(phismith@buffalo.edu), Dept. of Philosophy, UB Back to Top
	26			Boris Henning, Ph.D., Institute for Formal Ontology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany "Normativity and the Mental" Host: Barry Smith, Ph.D.,(phismith@buffalo.edu), Dept. of Philosophy, UB Back to Top
November
	2		Tsan Huang, Ph.D., Department of Linguistics, UB "Effects of linguistics experience on early levels of tone perception" Back to Top
	9			Cassandre Creswell, Ph.D., (ccreswell @janyainc.com), Janya, Inc., "Automatically detecting nominal mentions of events" Host: Jean Pierre Koenig, Ph.D., (jpkoenig@buffalo.edu), Dept. of Linguistics, UB Back to Top
	16			TBA Back to Top
	23			Fall Break Back to Top
	30			Deb Roy, Ph.D., Media Arts and Sciences, Cognitive Machines Group, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Meaning Machines" Host: Stuart Shapiro, Ph.D., (shapiro@cse.buffalo.edu), Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, UB Back to Top
December
	7			Lou Ann Gerken, Ph.D., (gerken @u.arizona.edu), Department of Psychology, Cognitive Science Program, Tweety Language Development Lab, University of Arizona Some Generalizations About Linguistic Generalization By Infants Host: Deborah Insalaco, Ph.D., (insaladm@buffalostate.edu), Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Buffalo State College

Abstracts

Wednesday, September 7, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Business Meeting

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Wednesday, September 14, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Mary Swift, Ph.D.
Computer Science Department
University of Rochester

"Default aspect and the development of
time reference in Inuktitut child language"

Children acquiring the temporal system of Inuktitut, a polysynthetic language spoken by the Inuit of Arctic Quebec, exhibit developmental phenomena that appear puzzling in comparison to previous crosslinguistic findings. Inuit children very early on use a single unmarked verb form for two kinds of time reference: perfective with telic event descriptions, and imperfective with atelic event descriptions. In contrast, previous research shows that across languages children in their early speech use different tense-aspect marking with telic event descriptions than they use with atelic event descriptions. The first puzzle is how children acquiring Inuktitut come to terms with the variable time reference of the unmarked verb form, without local cues to facilitate differentiation of interpretation. Second, Inuit children's early instances of past and perfective marking occur with atelic event descriptions, in contrast to previous findings showing that initial instances of past and/or perfective marking crosslinguistically occur with telic event descriptions, a pattern predicted by e.g., Basic Child Grammar (Slobin 1985) and The Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai and Anderson 1995). Most strikingly, Inuit children develop facility with overt future marking before overt past marking, a pattern that has not been reported for any other language. These three puzzles of Inuktitut temporal language development find a uniform account under the analysis of Bohnemeyer and Swift (2004), which is based on the notion of event realization (ER). Informally, ER is the factual occurrence of an event at a certain time. ER plays a double role in the analysis of Inuktitut child language: in Inuktitut, the temporally unmarked verb form receives its aspectual interpretation under ER; I also show that aspectual reference in early Inuktitut is constrained by ER, and that this constraint applies to early child language crosslinguistically.

Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo

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Wednesday, September 21, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Amnon Eden, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
University of Essex
U.K.

"Software Ontology as a Cognitive Artefact"

This talk is concerned with the philosophy of software. I will discuss views in the metaphysics of software and why we should care about it. I will examine the merits of viewing software ontology as a cognitive artefact and draw out some of the insights concerning the elaborate dynamics between programming languages and programming paradigms. The clams advanced are illustrated using programs in a variety of programming languages. In conclusion I will present a conceptual scheme that brings together all entities relating to software, from meta-software to hardware: the mind-to-machine taxonomy.

Amnon H Eden, Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, United Kingdom, and Center For Inquiry, Amherst, NY.

Bio: http://www.eden-study.org/bio.html

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo

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Wednesday, September 28, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Ron Smyth , Ph.D.
Division of Humanities and Division of Life Sciences
University of Toronto

"Sociophonetics, Gender, and Sexual Orientation"

This talk with give an overview of the sociophonetics research I have been conducting with Henry Rogers for the past few years at the University of Toronto. In this work we extend the restrictive notion of gender as typically found in phonetics and sociolinguistics -- namely, the distinction between speakers who are biologically male vs. female -- to considerations of sexual identity. This involves comparing the voices of gay/lesbian speakers to those of straight speakers, and, perhaps more importantly, examining how acoustic and articulatory parameters correlate with how gay/lesbian a voice is judged to be, regardless of the actual sexual orientation of the speaker. These variables include mean pitch, intonational variability, sibilant duration and frequency, /l/ velarization, voice onset time, vowel duration, formant structure, and (coming soon) voice quality characteristics. In addition to these correlational findings we have also done multivariate analysis to identify which properties are intercorrelated vs. those that seem to be independently available to speakers (Arnold Zwicky's "Menu Hypothesis").
Deeper questions involve how and why sexual identity affects speech, the extent to which 'gay' speech is 'female' speech, how and when gendered speech is acquired, and both the advantages and the limitations of laboratory-based research as compared to more subtle sociolinguistic interview methodologies.

Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo

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Wednesday, October 12, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Change in speaker, please watch for the new announcement

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Wednesday, October 19, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Werner Ceusters , MD.
European Centre for Ontological Research
Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

"Computational Linguistics for Referent Tracking in Electronic Healthcare Records: a research agenda"

In the last two decades we have witnessed considerable efforts directed towards making electronic healthcare records (EHRs) comparable and interoperable through advances in record architectures and (bio)medical terminologies and coding systems. Deep semantic issues in general, and ontology in particular, have received some interest from the research communities. However, with the exception of work on so-called ‘controlled vocabularies’, ontology has thus far played little role in work on standardization. The prime focus has been rather the rapid population of terminologies at the level of fine detail with the purpose of making them available for “clinical coding”. The rationale for clinical coding is the belief that codes will make it possible to associate precise meanings to the terms used in expressing patient data in a way that can be interpreted by software for further processing for purposes such as statistic analysis, billing, reimbursement, automated decision support, and triggering alerts. However, many aberrations in the biomedical coding and classification systems and terminologies that are used today, prevent such further processing to be done in a reliable way. This is because the terms or codes contained in the latter are used simply as an alternative to what would otherwise have been registered by means of general terms in natural language. By picking a code from such a system and then registering that code in an EHR, one refers generically to some instance of the class represented by the code. It is still left at best only partially specified which particular instance (“referent”) is intended in concrete reality.

It is here that referent tracking comes into play. The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to concrete entities in reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their body parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth insofar as these are relevant to their diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to explicitly, something which cannot be achieved when only the codes from concept-based systems are used.

A particular challenge for the referent tracking paradigm in the context of EHRs is to minimize the amount of overhead that users would experience when entering data in the records. Ideally, they should be able to continue to work in the same way as before, either by writing clinical narrative or by working with biomedical terminologies, while software running in the background should replace generic codes with entity identifiers where applicable. This can be viewed as a modified version of referent resolution which is known to be a very hard problem in computational linguistics.

About Werner Ceusters:
Werner Ceusters studied medicine ('77-'84) neuropsychiatry ('84-90'), informatics ('88-'90) and knowledge engineering ('91-'93). He started a series of international research projects in medical natural language processing under the Third, Fourth and Fifth Research Frameworks of the European Commission through his R&D company Office Line Engineering nv. Since then, he has also been active in standardisation bodies related to medical terminology such as CEN/TC251/WG2 and ISO/TC215/WG3. In April 1998, he started a new company - Language & Computing nv (L&C) - to exploit the results of his research. He left L&C in 2004 and created together with Prof. Barry Smith the European Centre for Ontological Research, his main interest being now applying and testing a new theoretically-grounded approach to ontological engineering.

References:

1. Ceusters W. and Smith B. Referent Tracking in Electronic Healthcare Records. (Download draft). Accepted for MIE 2005, Geneva, 28-31 Augustus 2005.
   
2. Ceusters W, Smith B. Strategies for Referent Tracking in Electronic Health Records. (Download draft). Proceedings of IMIA WG6 Conference on “Ontology and Biomedical Informatics”. Rome, Italy, 29 April - 2 May 2005. (in press).
   
3. Smith B, Ceusters W. An Ontology-Based Methodology for the Migration of Biomedical Terminologies to Electronic Health Records. (Download draft) Accepted for AMIA 2005, October 22-26, Washington DC.
   

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo

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Wednesday, October 26, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Boris Hennig , Ph.D.
Institute for Formal Ontology
Saarland University
Germany

"Normativity and the Mental"

What we call mental event, Descartes calls thought. This is how he defines it:
By the term ‘thought’, I understand everything that happens in us of which we are conscious, insofar as we are conscious of it.

Descartes tells us that events that happen in us are thoughts insofar as they are the object of our consciousness. What is consciousness? It seems to be a certain way of perceiving something that happens in us. However, the problem with such an account is that perceiving something would itself be a kind of thought. This would mean that Descartes circularly defines thought as the object of a special kind of thought.
I will maintain that consciousness as it appears in this definition is not a further mental event but a general normative stance. Events that happen in us are thus mental events by virtue of being subject to certain norms. That they are subject to these norms means that they may be, but not necessarily that they are evaluated according to them. The normative stance need not be actually taken by anyone. Hence, consciousness need not happen in us. If this is correct, then consciousness is not a mental event.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo

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Wednesday, November 2, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Tsan Huang , Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

"Effects of linguistics experience
on early levels of tone perception"

This study investigated the phenomenon of language-specificity in Mandarin Chinese tone perception. The main question was whether linguistic experience affects the earliest levels of perceptual processing of tones. Chinese and American English listeners participated in four perception experiments, which involved short inter-stimulus intervals (300ms or 100ms) and an AX discrimination or AX degree-of-difference rating task. Three experiments used natural speech monosyllabic tone stimuli and one experiment used time-varying sinusoidal simulations of Mandarin tones. AE listeners showed psychoacoustic listening in all experiments, paying much attention to onset and offset pitch. Chinese listeners showed language-specific patterns in all experiments to various degrees, where tonal neutralization rules reduced the perceptual distance between two otherwise contrastive tones for Chinese listeners. Since these experiments employed procedures hypothesized to tap the auditory trace mode, language-specificity found in this study seems to support the proposal of an auditory cortical map (Guenther et al. 1999). But the model needs refining to account for different degrees of language-specificity, which are better handled by Johnson's (2004) lexical distance model, although the latter model is too rigid in assuming that linguistic experience does not affect low-level perceptual tasks such as AX discrimination with short ISIs.

1. Selected References Guenther, Frank H., Ratima T. Husain, Michael A. Cohen & Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham, 1999. Effects of Categorical and Discrimination Training on Auditory Perceptual Space. In Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 23(4), pp. 213-221.
2. Johnson, Keith, 2004. Cross-linguistic perceptual differences emerge from the lexicon. In Augustine Agwuele, Willis Warren, and Sang-Hoon Park (eds.) Proceedings of the 2003 Texas Linguistics Society Conference: Coarticulation in Speech Production and Perception. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 26-41.
   

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Wednesday, November 9, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Cassandre Creswell
Janya, Inc., Buffalo, NY

"Automatically detecting nominal mentions of events"

The basic task in information extraction (IE) is to automatically extract mentions of entities, relations, and events from text. Usually, events are treated as textually anchored by verb phrases or sentences, as in (1), but of course they can also be referred to with noun phrases, as in (2).

1) [Amr Moussa was appointed Secretary General of the Arab League last year.]
2) [Amr Moussa's appointment as Secretary General of the Arab League] took place last year.
Automatic detection of nominal mentions of events faces several challenges. The one we address here is the systematic polysemy unique to nominal (vs. verbal) mentions, such that they can be used to denote either an event or the result, outcome, or product of an event.
3) Things are getting back to normal in the Baywood Golf Club after [a chemical spill](=event). Clean-up crews said [the chemical spill](=result) was 99 percent water and shouldn't cause harm to area residents.
This ambiguity is problematic for IE systems because the ultimate goal in event extraction is to create abstract event objects containing information from multiple coreferring mentions, such as their time, location, and participants. Information should not be propagated from mentions of non-events to events, and event mentions should not be collapsed with non-event mentions.
Tackling this ambiguity requires more fine-grained syntactic and semantic evidence than is used in standard word sense disambiguation techniques (Schuetze, 1998) because the event-result ambiguity does not obey the One Sense Per Discourse principle (Gale, et al., 1992).
The goal of this project is to develop a classifier that can label NPs as event-denoting or non-event-denoting based on their local lexico-syntacticcontext. Because learning from hand-annotated data alone is not sufficient to overcome the sparse data problem, we use a weakly-supervised bootstrapping technique using known unambiguous terms to learn to distinguish the contexts which make an event vs. non-event interpretation more probable. In this talk I will present some initial experimental results from our ongoing project on nominal event detection.

Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics, UB

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Deb Roy, Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Media Arts and Sciences
Cognitive Machines Group, MIT Media Laboratory

"Meaning Machines"

The meaning of words in everyday situated language use depends on physical and social context. Our group is building robots and computer game players that use situated language as a way to study and model the physical and social grounding of semantics. Emerging from these implementations are conceptual representations underlying word meanings based on semiotic schemas, perceived affordances, and spatial routines. We are using these representations and associated learning algorithms to develop computational models of language acquisition that “step into the shoes” of children and learn directly from what children hear and see. I will provide an overview of our research program and highlight our recently launched Human Speechome Project which is poised to collect and model an unprecedented level of in-home audio-visual observational data of child language development from birth to age three.

Sponsored by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UB

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Wednesday, December 7, 2005
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

280 Park Hall, North Campus

Lou Ann Gerken, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Cognitive Science Program
University of Arizona

Sponsored by the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics.

Some Generalizations About Linguistic
Generalization By Infants

One dimension on which more vs. less strongly constrained models of language acquisition vary is the amount of evidence required for a particular linguistic generalization. ‘Triggering’ models require, in the limit, only a single datum to set an innate parameter, whereas less constrained models often arrive at a generalization by performing statistics over many exemplars from an input set. I will present data from three lines of research with 9- to 17-month-old infants, which explore the amount and type of input required for learners to generalize beyond the stimuli encountered in a brief laboratory exposure. All of the studies suggest that generalization requires a minimal number of data points, but more than just one, and that different subsets of the input lead to different generalizations. Some surprising new data suggest that some types of generalization (those attested by natural languages) may be easier to make than others (those unattested by natural languages). Taken together, the data provide direction for examining the ways in which innate constraints and learning via statistics may combine in human language development.

Sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology.

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