Marilyn Ford

Two Modes of Mental Representation and Problem Solution in Syllogistic Reasoning.

In this paper, the theory of syllogistic reasoning proposed by Johnson-Laird (1983, 1986; Johnson-Laird & Bara, 1984; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991) is shown to be inadequate and an alternative theory is put forward. Protocols of people attempting to solve syllogistic problems and explaining to another person how they reached their conclusions were obtained. Two main groups of subjects were identified. One group represented the relationship between classes in a spatial manner that was supplemented by a verbal representation. The other group used a primarily verbal representation. A detailed theory of the processes for both groups is given.

Strategies in Human Nonmonotonic Reasoning

Although humans seem adept at drawing nonmonotonic conclusions, the nonmonotonic reasoning systems that researchers develop are complex and do not function with such ease. This paper explores peoples reasoning processes in nonmonotonic problems. To avoid the problem of peoples conclusions being based on knowledge rather than on some reasoning process, we developed a scenario about life on another planet. Problems were chosen to allow the systematic study of peoples understanding of strict and nonstrict rules and their interactions. We found that people had great difficulty reasoning and we identified a number of negative factors influencing their reasoning. We also identified three positive factors which, if used consistently, would yield rational and coherent reasoning—but no subject achieved total consistency. (Another possible positive factor, specificity, was considered but we found no evidence for its use.) It is concluded that nonmonotonic reasoning is hard. When people need to reason in a domain where they have no preconceived ideas, the foundation for their reasoning is neither coherent nor rational. They do not use a nonmonotonic reasoning system that would work regardless of content. Thus, nonmonotonic reasoning systems that researchers develop are expected to do more reasoning than humans actually do!

System LS: A three tiered nonmonotonic reasoning system.

In this paper, a formal system of nonmonotonic reasoning is developed, which takes as its inspiration the manner in which some people make logically justifiable conclusions about nonmonotonic reasoning problems. 
 The people, when asked about individuals, compare the logical strength of the arguments relating any sets to which the individual belongs, to other sets. A three‐tiered system of rules including rules of System P as well as Transitivity and Monotonicity is developed. The system, known as System LS for logical strength, deals with three levels of non‐strict relationships:

The Development of a Taxonomy of Desired Personal Qualities for IT Project Team Members and Its Use in an Educational Setting

Although much literature exists on desired qualities of team leaders of IT projects and even desired components of the team, there is a paucity of literature on the desired personal qualities of individuals working within team settings. This research set out to empirically investigate the personal qualities which students believe would be desirable in IT project team members.

A note on some psychological evidence and alternative grammars

Abstract Frazier, Clifton, and Randall (1983) have obtained psycholinguistic data which, they claim, show that verb control information is not used during the initial analysis of a sentence. They argue that the data go against a Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) (Gazdar, 1981; Gazdar, 1982; Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, & Sag, 1985) but fit naturally with a Government and Binding (GB) style grammar (Chomsky, 1980, 1981). It is shown in the present paper that Frazier et al.s argument against GPSG is flawed. Further, it is shown that one does not have to assume that verb control information is ignored during initial sentence analysis in order to account for the data.

Human Nonmonotonic Reasoning: the Importance of Seeing the Logical Strength of Arguments

Three studies of human nonmonotonic reasoning are described. The results show that people find such reasoning quite difficult, although being given problems with known subclass-superclass relationships is helpful. The results also show that recognizing differences in the logical strengths of arguments is important for the nonmonotonic problems studied. For some of these problems, specificity – which is traditionally considered paramount in drawing appropriate conclusions – was irrelevant and so should have lead to a “can’t tell” response; however, people could give rational conclusions based on differences in the logical consequences of arguments. The same strategy also works for problems where specificity is relevant, suggesting that in fact specificity is not paramount. Finally, results showed that subjects’ success at responding appropriately to nonmonotonic problems involving conflict relies heavily on the ability to appreciate differences in the logical strength of simple, non-conflicting, statements.

Parsing Complexity and a Theory of Parsing

There are many potential influences on the development of any theory and many directions the research program resulting from the theory can take. The present paper outlines some influences on the development of a theory of parsing proposed by Ford, Bresnan, and Kaplan (1982) and illustrates the current research program for the further testing and refinement of the theory. The results of three on-line experiments are presented and the theory is further refined given the results obtained.

Generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data: the contextualized sentence completion task

Abstract There is much interest in using large corpora to explore predictors of the probability of higher level linguistic structures, but suitable corpora are not available for all languages and their varieties. We explore a task that uses discourse contexts from an existing corpus as prompts for sentence completion to investigate the usefulness of the method for generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data. Mini databases of dative and genitive structures were obtained with the method using American and Australian participants. It is shown that the databases are indeed a good proxy for corpus data.

Using Micro Management Techniques to Overcome Problems in Group Assignments

Group assignments are becoming increasingly popular in education, including Information Technology education. This paper explores problems with the use of group assignments and offers a new strategy designed to keep the good features of group assignments while removing the negative. Many students in Information Technology believe they should have group assignments because they will be working in groups in industry. Staff sometimes justify the use of group assignments as preparing students for team work in industry. However, we suggest that many problems with group assignments can be overcome by making group assignments more closely replicate cond itions in industry. We propose a three-phase strategy using management techniques on a small scale.

What Exactly Do You Want Me To Do? Analysis of a Criterion Referenced Assessment Project

In tertiary institutions in Australia, and no doubt elsewhere, there is increasing pressure for accountability. No longer are academics assumed a priori to be responsible and capable of self management in teaching and assessing the subjects they run. Procedures are being dictated more from the ‘top down’. Although academics may not always appreciate ‘top down’ policies on teaching and learning, they should at least be open to the possibility that the policies may indeed have merit. On the other hand, academics should never be expected to blindly accept policies dictated from elsewhere. Responsible academics generally also need to evaluate for themselves the validity and legitimacy of externally introduced new policies and procedures.