Author: SRI International

  • A Practical Nonmonotonic Theory For Reasoning About Speech Acts

    A prerequisite to a theory of the way agents understand speech acts is a theory of how their beliefs and intentions are revised as a consequence of events. This process of attitude revision is an interesting domain for the application of nonmonotonic reasoning because speech acts have a conventional aspect that is readily represented by…

  • Rational Interaction As The Basis For Communication

    This paper derives the basis of a theory of communication from a formal theory of rational interaction. The major result is a demonstration that illocutionary acts need neither be primitive, nor explicitly recognized. As a test case, we derive Searle’s conditions on requesting from principles of rationality coupled with a theory of imperatives. The theory…

  • On Cheeseman: A response to Peter Cheeseman’s `An Inquiry into Computer Understanding’

    Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Center, AIC

  • A Commentary on Bogdan’s `Information and Semantic Cognition’

    Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Center, AIC

  • Localized Event-Based Reasoning For Multiagent Domains

    This paper presents the GEM concurrency model and GEMPLAN, a multiagent planner based on this model. Unlike standard state-based AI representations, GEM is unique in its explicit emphasis on events and domain structure. In particular, a world domain is modeled as a set of regions composed of interrelated events. Event-based temporal logic constraints are then…

  • Local Pragmatics

    The outline of a unified theory of local pragmatics phenomena is presented, including an approach to the problems of reference resolution, metonymy, and interpreting nominal compounds. The TACITUS computer system embodying this theory is also described. The theory and system are based on the use of a theorem prover to draw the appropriate inferences from…

  • Review of `Structured Meanings: The Semantics of Propositional Attitudes’

    Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Center, AIC

  • Localizing Expression Of Ambiguity

    In this paper we describe an implemented program for localizing the expression of many types of syntactic ambiguity, in the logical forms of sentences, in a manner convenient for subsequent inferential processing. Among the types of ambiguities handled are prepositional phrases, very compound nominals, adverbials, relative clauses, and preposed prepositional phrases. The algorithm we use…

  • The Core Knowledge System

    This document contains an in-depth description of the Core Knowledge System (CKS)–an integrative environment for the many functions that must be performed by sensor-based autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. The CKS itself has been designed to support a wide variety of potential applications. However, special attention has been given to assuring its relevance to a particular…

  • Review of `Structured Meanings: The Semantics of Propositional Attitudes’

    Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Center, AIC

  • Recognition By Parts

    To have a general-purpose machine vision capability, we must be able to recognize things; we argue that most natural objects have a part structure that we can recover from image data and thus use as the basis for “general-purpose” recognition. We describe a “parts” representation that is fairly general purpose, despite having only a small…

  • On McDermott’s First Critique

    The first question to be answered is, What is logicism?’ McDermott outlines the logicist position as follows…