Author: SRI International

  • Some Remarks on the Semantics of Representation Languages

    It has been said many times that semantic nets are mere notational variants of predicate calculus. But before we lay down our nets, we ought at least to be clear about what predicate calculus is.

  • Choosing A Basis For Perceptual Space

    If it is possible to interpret an image as a projection of rectangular forms, there is a strong tendency for people to do so. In effect, a mathematical basis for a vector space appropriate to the world, rather than to the image, is selected.

  • The DARPA / DMA Image Understanding Testbed Programmer’s Manual

    The primary purpose of the Image Understanding (IU) Testbed is to provide a means for transferring technology from the DARPA-sponsored IU research program to DMA and other organizations in the defense community.

  • The SRI Artificial Intelligence Center: A Brief History

    A group that ultimately grew into a major world center of artificial intelligence research, a center that has endured twenty-five years of boom and bust in fashion, has “graduated” over a hundred AI research professionals, and has generated ideas and programs resulting in new products and companies as well as scientific articles, books, and this…

  • Transportability and Generality In A Natural-Language Interface System

    This paper describes the design of a transportable natural language (NL) interface to databases and the constraints that transportability places on each components of such a system.

  • Direct Parsing Of Id/Lp Grammars

    We develop a parsing algorithm, based on the algorithm of Earley, for parsing ID/LP grammars directly, circumventing the initial expansion phase. We also discuss some aspects of the time complexity of the algorithm.

  • Some Remarks on the Place of Logic in Knowledge Representation

    What is the place of logic in knowledge representation? It is argued that the answer to this question depends on what one means by logic.

  • Planning English Referring Expressions

    This paper describes a theory of language generation based on planning. To illustrate the theory, the problem of planning referring expressions is examined in detail. A theory based on planning makes it possible for one to account for noun phrases that refer, that inform the hearer of additional information, and that are coordinated with the…

  • An Abstract Prolog Instruction Set

    This report describes an abstract Prolog instruction set suitable for software, firmware, or hardware implementation. The instruction set is abstract in that certain details of its encoding and implementation are left open, so that it may be realized in a number of different forms.

  • Overview Of The Image Understanding Testbed

    The Image Understanding Testbed is a system of hardware and software that is designed to facilitate the integration, testing, and evaluation of implemented research concepts in machine vision.

  • An Overlapped Prolog Processor

    The report compares the organization to both general-purpose, microcoded machines and reduced-instruction-set machines. Hand timings indicate that a peak performance rate of 450 K LIPS (logical inferences per second) is well within current technology limitations and 1 M LIPS is potentially feasible.

  • Metarules as Meta-Node-Admissibility Conditions

    Meta-rule phrase structure grammars (MPS grammars ) have been shown to be an extremely powerful formalism in need of constraints from both the computational and the linguist points of view.