Owen Rambow talk today IN AVW 3165!!!! 11am.

In the 80s and 90s of the last century, in subdisciplines such as
planning, text generation, and dialog systems, there was considerable
interest in modeling the cognitive states of interacting autonomous
agents. Theories such as Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962), the
belief-desire-intentions model of Bratman (1987), and Rhetorical
Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson 1988) together provide a framework
in which to link cognitive state with language use. However, in
general natural language processing (NLP), little use was made of such
theories, presumably because of the difficulty at the time of some
underlying tasks (such as syntactic parsing). In this talk, I propose
that it is time to again think about the explicit modeling of
cognitive state for participants in discourse. In fact, that is the
natural way to formulate what NLP is all about. The perspective of
cognitive state can provide a context in which many disparate NLP
tasks can be classified and related. I will present two NLP projects
at Columbia which relate to the modeling of cognitive state:

Discourse participants need to model each other's cognitive states,
and language makes this possible by providing special morphological,
syntactic, and lexical markers. I present results in automatically
determining the degree of belief of a speaker in the propositions in
his or her utterance.

Bio: PhD from University of Pennsylvania, 1994, working on German
syntax. My office mate was Philip Resnik. I worked at CoGentex, Inc (a
small company) and AT&T Labs -- Research until 2002, and since then at
Columbia as a Research Scientist. My research interests cover both the
nuts-and-bolts of languages, specifically syntax, and how language is
used in context.