The 2014 International Planning Competition: Progress and Trends

We review the 2014 International Planning Competition (IPC-2014), the eighth in a series of competitions starting in 1998. IPC-2014 was held in three separate parts to assess state-of-the-art in three prominent areas of planning research: the deterministic (classical) part (IPCD), the learning part (IPCL), and the probabilistic part (IPPC). Each part evaluated planning systems in ways that pushed the edge of existing planner performance by introducing new challenges, novel tasks, or both. The competition surpassed again the number of competitors than its predecessor, highlighting the competition’s central role in shaping the landscape of ongoing developments in evaluating planning systems

Separating representation, reasoning, and implementation for interaction management

Numerous toolkits are available for developing speech-based dialogue systems. Many of these toolkits include not only a method for representing states and actions, but also a mechanism for reasoning and selecting the actions, often combined with a technical framework designed to simplify the task of creating end-to-end systems. This tight coupling of representation, reasoning, and implementation makes it difficult both to compare different approaches, as well as to analyse the properties of individual techniques. We contrast this situation with the state of the art in a related research area---AI planning---where a set of common representations have been defined and are widely used to enable direct comparison of different reasoning approaches. We argue that adopting a similar separation would greatly benefit the dialogue research community