Author: SRI International

  • Introducing The Tileworld: Experimentally Evaluating Agent Architectures

    We describe a system called Tileworld, which consists of a simulated robot agent and a simulated environment which is both dynamic and unpredictable. We describe our initial experiments using Tileworld, in which we have been evaluating a version of the meta-level reasoning strategy proposed in earlier work by one of the authors.

  • Task-Oriented Dialogues As A Consequence Of Joint Activity

    The purpose of this paper to show how a number of difficult-to-explain features of these dialogues follow from the joint or team nature of the underlying task. Specifically, the paper formally defines the concept of a joint intention and we argue that the conversants in a task-oriented dialogue jointly intend to accomplish the task.

  • On Acting Together

    We present a formal definition of what it could mean for a group to jointly commit to a common goal, and explore how these joint commitments relate to the individual commitments of the team members.

  • Domain-Independent Task Specification In The Tacitus Natural Language System

    We have defined and implemented a schema specification and recognition language for the TACITUS natural language system. We give examples of the use of this schema language in a diagnostic task, an application involving data base entry from messages, and a script recognition task, and we consider further possible developments.

  • Translation By Abduction

    This approach overcomes the common machine translation bottleneck by allowing mapping of information from the source to the target language at a variety of levels from the most superficial to levels requiring deep interpretation and access to knowledge about the world, the context, and the speech act situation.

  • Incremental Interpretation

    We present a system for the incremental interpretation of natural-language utterances in context. The main goal of the work is to account for the influences of context on interpretation, while preserving compositionality to the extent possible.

  • A Survey Of AI Approaches To The Integration Of Information

    In this paper, we first review briefly a variety of AI inference techniques, focusing primarily on logical inference and uncertain reasoning methods. We conclude with a survey of approaches used to control inference processes, to mediate their access to real world information, and to schedule their activities.

  • Prosody, Syntax and Parsing

    We describe the modification of a grammar to take advantage of prosodic information provided by a speech recognition system. This initial study is limited to the use of relative duration of phonetic segments in the assignment of syntactic structure, specifically in ruling out alternative parses in otherwise ambiguous sentences.

  • Backwards Phonology

    This paper makes “reversibility” explicit and demonstrates by means of examples from Tunica and Klamath that two-level phonology does have certain desirable capabilities that are not found in grammars of unilevel rules.

  • Two Principles Of Parse Preference

    Our aims in this paper is first to present a compendium of many of these heuristics and secondly to propose two principles that seem to underlie the heuristics.

  • Interpretation As Abduction

    In the TACITUS project at SRI we have developed an approach to abductive inference, called “weighted abduction,” that has resulted in a significant simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized.

  • Decision-Making In An Embedded Reasoning System

    This paper describes some of the features of a Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) that enables it to operate effectively in such environments.