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+Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B
+Gregory Marton will give a talk about the meanings of English words as programs.
+http://fare.livejournal.com/136992.html
+Gregory will introduce a way of thinking about the meanings of English
+words as programs (c.f. SHRDLU), cast the problem of language learning
+as a search through the space of possible programs, and show first
+steps in learning. Gregory has created a system called Sepia that
+makes it relatively easy to write small lexicons that implement some
+semantic theory for a domain. Applications that Gregory and several
+colleagues have had fun with include:
+    * understanding dates and times and other measures: "next Wednesday"
+    * finding and linking names of people, organizations, places
+    * telling a robot what to do with stuff on a table: "touch the red one"
+    * asking about spatial paths in video: "show people entering the kitchen"
+    * a toy gossip world: "John loves Mary" "Who does not hate Mary?"
+    * a little number theory: "18 is twice the sum of its digits"
+These applications are inherently brittle, and manual construction
+gets harder as the application grows. The research goal is to
+construct new meaning programs with little human input, or with input
+from non-programmers. Given a problem phrase, Sepia uses standard ways
+to find similar words that it knows. Its current approach is to take
+the meanings of those words and makes small changes, looking for a
+combination that produces the target meaning.
+Both the system as a whole and the language of semantics are
+implemented in the GNU/Guile flavor of Scheme.
+Gregory Marton is a PhD student in computer science at MIT, and this
+is his dissertation topic. His first language is Hungarian, and since
+meeting English at age eight, he has wondered about meanings and how
+to learn language. He has a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in
+Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park, 1999.
+*
+The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800
+(6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.
+As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.
+This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge.
+MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34
+Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA
+Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT
+for welcoming us.
+* *
+Buffet: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclosure: I
+work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our Monthly
+Boston Lisp Meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. We
+appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos
+you have, so that we can order the right amount of food. Tell us by
+sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We
+won't send any acknowledgment unless requested; importantly, we'll
+keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any
+such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors.
+* * *
+The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on October 27th had over 30
+participants. Tim McNerney gave copious background on the Thinking
+Machines Corporation and its line of massively parallel computer as an
+introduction to his work on automated verification of a compiler
+optimization pass through abstract interpretation. Both the
+presentation and the following discussion were very lively.
+We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all
+the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html
+For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts
+related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link:
+http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to
+our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting
+Please forward this information to people you think would be
+interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message
+multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list
+where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should.
+Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare@tunes.org.
+[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
+When all lawful citizens are disarmed, will we have an omnipresent police
+state to protect us from armed criminals?
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+https://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/seminars