📄 Center for the Study of Language and Information

Summary

This item from the FINITE STRING newsletter section of the American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 9(1), 1983, is a research-program report rather than an experimental paper. It announces CSLI, a center established at Stanford in early 1983 to study language and information. The center gives an institutional home to long-running collaboration between Palo Alto industrial labs and Stanford departments working on natural and computer languages.

Its first agenda, Program SL (situated language), rests on three ideas:

• Human language use is computational, because it is carried out by finite agents with limited resources.
• Computing is linguistic, because people treat machine symbols as being about the world.
• Real-world linguistic activity needs semantically grounded theories that connect computation, language and information.

The program aims to bring the study of natural language and computer languages into one framework built on philosophical and mathematical foundations. The report sketches the planned projects, covering grammar formalisms, parsing, semantics, discourse, planning and commonsense reasoning. Its value today is historical: it documents the setting in which unification-based grammars and situation semantics developed.

Key points

• CSLI started with 17 principals and about as many associate members, drawn from SRI International, Xerox PARC, Fairchild, and Stanford's Computer Science, Linguistics and Philosophy departments. Jon Barwise was director and Stanley Peters associate director.
• Program SL has 16 projects in four areas:
  • (A) traditional linguistics: syntax, morphology and phonology.
  • (B) theories of situated human language.
  • (C) computing languages and architectures.
  • (D) philosophical and mathematical foundations.
• The report names GPSG, LFG, phrase-linking grammar and PATR-2 as the formalisms under study. It argues that all of them rely on context-free analysis combined with unification.
• The semantics work targets several constructions: tense and aspect, comparatives, plurals and mass terms, conditionals, and attitude reports such as belief and intention. It also tests compositionality, including for free word-order languages like German, Hebrew and Warlpiri.
• The same newsletter issue carries Ralph Weischedel's first note as editor and the program for the 21st ACL Annual Meeting, held 15–17 June 1983 at MIT.