Europe
How Artefacts Influence the Construction of Communications and Contexts during Collaboration in an Agile Software Development Team
Abdullah, Nik Nailah Binti (Mimos Berhad Company) | Sharp, Helen (The Open University) | Honiden, Shinichi (National Institute of Informatics)
We used a stimulus and response method in cognition to consider agents as situated in their specific (Binti Abdullah et al, 2010) to uncover correlation patterns context as it was realized that people are strongly affected of the physical artefact-communication during specific by, and possibly dependent on their environment contexts of communications. We found preliminary empirical (Susi & Ziemke, 2001). With this shift of focus, new interactive evidence that the physical artefacts influence the theories of cognition have emerged. These interactive communication process in a mutually constraining relationship theories such as situated cognition (Clancey, 1997), with the contexts. In which the context is made up and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1999), are noted for of the teams' practice that includes how they collaborate, their emphasis on the relationship between cognition, and the physical setting, situations, and participation role.
Searching for Plans with Carefully Designed Probes
Lipovetzky, Nir (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) | Geffner, Hector (ICREA and Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
We define a probe to be a single action sequence computedgreedily from a given state that either terminates in the goalor fails. We show that by designing these probes carefullyusing a number of existing and new polynomial techniquessuch as helpful actions, landmarks, commitments, and con-sistent subgoals, a single probe from the initial state solvesby itself 683 out of 980 problems from previous IPCs, a num-ber that compares well with the 627 problems solved by FFin EHC mode, with similar times and plan lengths. We alsoshow that by launching one probe from each expanded statein a standard greedy best first search informed by the addi-tive heuristic, the number of problems solved jumps to 900(92%), as opposed to FF that solves 827 problems (84%),and LAMA that solves 879 (89%). The success of probessuggests that many domains can be solved easily once a suit-able serialization of the landmarks is found, an observationthat may open new connections between recent work in plan-ning and more classical work concerning goal serializationand problem decomposition in planning and search.
Impact of Word Sense Disambiguation on Ordering Dictionary Definitions in Vocabulary Learning Tutors
Rosa, Kevin Dela (Carnegie Mellon University) | Eskenazi, Maxine (Carnegie Mellon University)
Past research has shown that dictionaries and glosses can be beneficial in computer assisted language learning, particularly in vocabulary learning. We propose that L2 vocabulary learners can benefit from the use of a dictionary whose definitions are sensitive to the provided reading context, and that advances in the natural language processing task of word sense disambiguation can be used to automatically order the definitions of such a dictionary. An in-vivo study was conducted with ESL students to investigate the effect that the order of definitions has on vocabulary learning using REAP, a computer based vocabulary tutor. Our results showed that students benefited from having the algorithmically determined best definitions listed at the top of the definition list. Furthermore, our results suggest that word sense disambiguation may currently be good enough for use in intelligent language tutoring environments.
Effective Heuristics and Belief Tracking for Planning with Incomplete Information
Albore, Alexandre (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) | Ramírez, Miquel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) | Geffner, Hector (Universitat Pompeu Fabra and ICREA)
Conformant planning can be formulated as a path-finding problem in belief space where the two main challenges are the heuristics to guide the search, and the representation and update of beliefs. In the translation-based approach recently introduced by Palacios and Geffner, the two aspects are handled together by translating conformant problems into classical ones that are solved with classical planners. While competitive with state-of-the-art methods, the translation-based approach runs however into three difficulties. First, complete translations are expensive for problems with high width; second, incomplete translations can generate infinite heuristic values for problems that are solvable; and third, aspects that are specific to the conformant setting, such as the cardinality of beliefs, are not accounted for. In this work, we build on the translation-based approach but not for solving conformant problems with a classical planner but for deriving heuristics and computing beliefs in the context of a standard belief-space planner. For this, a novel translation KSi is introduced that is always complete, but which is sound for problems with width bounded by i. A new conformant planner, called T1, builds then on this translation for i=1, extending the heuristic that results with a second heuristic obtained from invariant "oneof expressions". A number of experiments is performed to compare T1 with state-of-the-art conformant planners.
Happy Movie: A Group Recommender Application in Facebook
Quijano-Sánchez, Lara (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) | Recio-Garcia, Juan A. (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) | Díaz-Agudo, Belén (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) | Jimenez-Diaz, Guillermo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
In this paper we introduce our recommender Happy Movie, a Facebook application for movie recommendation to groups. This system exploits information about the social relationships and behaviour of the users to provide better recommendations. Our previous works have shown that social factors improve the recommendation results. However it required many questionnaires to be filled for obtaining the social information, so we have moved to a social network environment where this information is easily available.
EcoLexicon and FunGramKB: Applying COREL to Domain-Specific Knowledge
Araúz, Pilar León (University of Granada) | Reimerink, Arianne (University of Granada)
EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on the environment. It is currently being converted into a domain-specific ontology, however, ontological properties are modelled according to surface semantics. For this reason, we are integrating our TKB in the form of a “satellite ontology” into FunGramKB, a multipurpose knowledge base specifically designed for natural language understanding. We explain how the dynamism of environmental concepts can benefit from a formal description in meaning postulates and their inclusion in FunGramKB Cognicon scripts. This would lead to the automatic generation of flexible conceptual networks and definitional templates across different contexts.
Planning for Loosely Coupled Agents Using Partial Order Forward-Chaining
Kvarnström, Jonas (Linköping University)
We investigate a hybrid between temporal partial-order and forward-chaining planning where each action in a partially ordered plan is associated with a partially defined state. The focus is on centralized planning for multi-agent domains and on loose commitment to the precedence between actions belonging to distinct agents, leading to execution schedules that are flexible where it matters the most. Each agent, on the other hand, has a sequential thread of execution reminiscent of forward-chaining. This results in strong and informative agent-specific partial states that can be used for partial evaluation of preconditions as well as precondition control formulas used as guidance. Empirical evaluation shows the resulting planner to be competitive with TLplan and TALplanner, two other planners based on control formulas, while using a considerably more expressive and flexible plan structure.
Determining Possible and Necessary Winners Given Partial Orders
Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial orders instead. Then, given a voting rule, a profile of partial orders, and an alternative (candidate) c, two important questions arise: first, is it still possible for c to win, and second, is c guaranteed to win? These are the possible winner and necessary winner problems, respectively. Each of these two problems is further divided into two sub-problems: determining whether c is a unique winner (that is, c is the only winner), or determining whether c is a co-winner (that is, c is in the set of winners). We consider the setting where the number of alternatives is unbounded and the votes are unweighted. We completely characterize the complexity of possible/necessary winner problems for the following common voting rules: a class of positional scoring rules (including Borda), Copeland, maximin, Bucklin, ranked pairs, voting trees, and plurality with runoff.