Symposium on Questions

May 11–12, 2012

Description

We want to understand what makes questions good for various purposes. In education, computation, law, and other endeavors it is important to frame questions that will achieve various goals: provoking the right thoughts on the part of a student; eliciting just enough but not too much information from a witness; capturing the issues about a program that are likely to baffle a novice user, and should be in the FAQ list.

We believe that the study of the syntax, semantics, and especially the pragmatics of questions, from traditional linguistic, philosophical, cognitive, and computational points of view, can contribute to understanding what it is about questions makes them good or bad, useful or useless, suitable or unsuitable, in various contexts and given various goals.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) and the Stanford Humanities Center

Tentative Schedule

The symposium will be in the Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford University (see map location)

Friday, May 11

3:00pm: Welcome and introductory remarks
John Perry (Philosophy and CSLI: LILAC)
Katja Zelljadt (Humanites Center)
Dan Flickinger (CSLI)
3:30pm: The neuroscience of questions? by Pat Suppes (Philosophy and CSLI: Suppes' Brain Lab)
4:15pm: TBA by Stanley Peters (CSLI and Linguistics)
5:00pm: Dynamic logics of questions and issues by Johan van Benthem (Philosophy and CSLI: LILAC)

Saturday, May 12

9:30am: Wordless questions, wordless answers by Herb Clark (Psychology)
10:15am: What makes a question a good question: lessons from the biomedical sciences by Colleen Crangle (CSLI: Suppes' Brain Lab)
11:00am: Questions lawyers use at trial by Tim Hallahan (Stanford Law School)
11:45am: Latent semantic analysis by Pentti Kanerva (CSLI: LILAC)
12:30pm: Break for Lunch
1:30pm: TBA by Rick Sommer (Pre-Collegiate Studies))
2:15pm: Questions and roles by John Perry (Philosophy)
3:00pm: Open questions about (acceptable and unacceptable) exclamative answers by Cleo Condoravdi (CSLI)
3:30pm: Coffee break
4:00pm: Linguistic and functional taxonomy of questions by Ali Farghaly (CSLI: LILAC)
4:45pm: A not too implausible theory of questions by Paul Skowkowski (Symbolic Systems)
5:30pm: Toward automation of tutorial dialogues by Dan Flickinger (CSLI)

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