The Semantic Component of PAL: The Personal Assistant Language Understanding Program

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defence under Office of Naval Research Contract N00014-75-C-0643.This paper summarizes the design and implementation of the "semantics" module of a natural language undertanding system for the personal assistant domain. This module includes mappings to deep frames, noun phrase referencing and discourse analysis.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

AUTOMATING REVIEW OF FORMS FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE TRANSACTIONS: A NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING APPROACH

A major challenge in Office Automation is one of automating routine jobs that involve large-scale processing of ill-formed natural language data. Such data are often present in documents such as forms where it is necessary and/or practical to allow latitude in how the forms may be filled. In this paper, we describe a computational model designed to process free-form textual data in application forms for Letters of Credit (LC), which represent a common vehicle for initiating international trade transactions. The model is based on a variation of the case-frame or thematic-role frame instantiation methods. We describe the implementation of the model, report empirical results with real LC applications, and indicate directions we are currently pursuing to improve its performance.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Frame-Based Knowledge Representation

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author was sponsored by the Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowship.The paper introduces a language for representing knowledge in a declarative form. With this language it is possible to define knowledge about a certain domain by introducing a number of concepts and by specifying their interrelations. The paper is meant to be an informal introduction to the language. We present the available constructs, describe their meaning and present a number of examples. In other papers (currently in preparation) we will give a formal semantics of the language, introduce the interference theory and discuss a possible procedural embedding.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Institute of International Educatio

Hierarchy in Knowledge Representations

This research was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the Laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract number N00014-75-C-0643.This paper discusses a number of problems faced in communicating expertise and common sense to a computer, and the approaches taken by several current knowledge representation languages towards solving these problems. The main topic discussed is hierarchy. The importance of hierarchy is almost universally recognized. Hierarchy forms the backbone of many existing representation languages. We discuss several technical problems raised in constructing hierarchical and almost hierarchical systems as criteria and open problems.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Mapping Sentences to Case Frames

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defence under Office of Naval Research Contract N00014-75-C-0643.This paper describes a range of phenomena that a case frame system should be able to handle and proposes generalizations to capture this behavior which are formulated as a set of production-like rules. These rules allow the possible surface orders of cases found in English declarative sentences to be generated from a case frame. This is important for the implementation of a case frame builder described here which requires the ability to determine what cases in a case frame can appear in a grammatical role. The appendix contains an in detail survey of some English verbs which illustrate the types of mapping found in English.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

Autonomous scheduling technology for Earth orbital missions

The development of a dynamic autonomous system (DYASS) of resources for the mission support of near-Earth NASA spacecraft is discussed and the current NASA space data system is described from a functional perspective. The future (late 80's and early 90's) NASA space data system is discussed. The DYASS concept, the autonomous process control, and the NASA space data system are introduced. Scheduling and related disciplines are surveyed. DYASS as a scheduling problem is also discussed. Artificial intelligence and knowledge representation is considered as well as the NUDGE system and the I-Space system

Frames, knowledge, and inference

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43833/1/11229_2004_Article_BF00485316.pd

Optimization of facility layout

Computer-aided layout technique, which appears to be the best approach to solving complex layout problems, is not commonly used in practice. One of the important reasons may be the generation of unrealistic layouts which results from ignoring the important practical constraints and objectives involved in layout problems. As one possible solution to this problem, a human planner can develop layout using a computer routine with those constraints and objectives in mind. However, the development of a heuristic procedure which incorporates human-like layout processes into a computer program could be a better solution;This dissertation provides the means of a realistic or a close to realistic layout development using important practical objectives and constraints involved in facility layout. Instead of ignoring those factors due to the difficulties of implementing them into mathematical statements, using them in the process of layout development will be helpful to reach an optimum or a near-optimum solution;An experimental system, FLUKES, has been constructed for testing purposes. This system develops layouts which include the practical factors involved in layout problems. These factors include architectural limitations, health/safety, user preferences, utilities, department shapes, future expansion plans, and energy savings as well as material handling costs. FLUKES uses these factors not only for the evaluation of a layout, but also for the search for a solution