The International Computer Science Institute
is pleased to present a talk:

Simulation Semantics and its Applications

Srini Narayanan ICSI

snarayan		icsi.berkeley.edu

Monday, October 8, 2001 ICSI, Rm 607 2:30-3:30 pm

This talk describes a biologically motivated computational model of actions and events. A novel feature of the model is an "active" representation (based on Stochastic Petri nets) of motion and manipulation verbs (such as walk, push, slide, slip). This can be used both for planning and control of actions and also for context-sensitive inference in language understanding. The basic representation has been shown to provide sufficient inductive bias for cross-linguistic learning of hand action verbs. Monitoring and control parameters abstracted from the model appear to offer elegant ways to solve difficult linguistic problems in aspectual composition. Results of applying the model to discourse fragments from newspaper stories on economics suggest that discourse about abstract policies, goals, resources and intent routinely relies on metaphoric projections of fine-grained semantic distinctions among terms from concrete familiar domains such as motion and manipulation.

The formalism has been analyzed both as a mathematical system and as an abstraction of neural computation. Ongoing work attempts to test the biological predictions of the model through a series of planned fMRI imaging experiments within the NTL (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/NTL) project, and systematize the representation of the simulation specification within the FrameNet (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet) project. I will also touch on a recent application that uses aspects of the model to describe, enact, and compose services on the semantic Web (http://www.semanticweb.org) as part of a multi-institution Web-Services (http://daml.semanticweb.org/services/daml-s/2001/05 effort.