Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a widely used Information Retrieval method based on "bag-of-words" assumption. However, according to general conception, syntax plays a role in representing meaning of sentences. Thus, enhancing LSA with part-of-speech (POS) information to capture the context of word occurrences appears to be theoretically feasible extension. The approach is tested empirically on a automatic essay grading system using LSA for document similarity comparisons. A comparison on several POS-enhanced LSA models is reported. Our findings show that the addition of contextual information in the form of POS tags can raise the accuracy of the LSA-based scoring models up to 10.77 per cent.

DepAnn is an interactive annotation tool for dependency treebanks, providing both graphical and text-based annotation interfaces. The tool is aimed for semi-automatic creation of treebanks. It aids the manual inspection and correction of automatically created parses, making the annotation process faster and less error-prone. A novel feature of the tool is that it enables the user to view outputs from several parsers as the basis for creating the final tree to be saved to the treebank. DepAnn uses TIGER-XML, an XML-based general encoding format for both, representing the parser outputs and saving the annotated treebank. The tool includes an automatic consistency checker for sentence structures. In addition, the tool enables users to build structures manually, add comments on the annotations, modify the tagsets, and mark sentences for further revision.

Distributed representation is a way of representing information in a pattern of activation over a set of neurons, in which each concept is represented by activation over multiple neuro ns, and each neuron participates in the representation of multiple concepts [1]. Examples of distributed representat ions include Recursive Auto-Associative Memory (RAAM) [2], Tensor Product Representations [3], Holographic Reduc ed Representations (HRRs) [4, 5], and Binary Spatter Codes (BSC) [6, 7, 8]. BSC is a powerful and simple method of representing hierarchical st ructures in connectionist systems and may be regarded as a binary version of HRRs. Yet, BSC has some drawback s associated with the representation of chunking. This is why different versions of BSC can be found in the literature.

The opening book is an important component of a chess engine, and thus computer chess programmers have been developing automated methods to improve the quality of their books. For chess, which has a very rich opening theory, large databases of high-quality games can be used as the basis of an opening book, from which statistics relating to move choices from given positions can be collected. In order to find out whether the opening books used by modern chess engines in machine versus machine competitions are ``comparable'' to those used by chess players in human versus human competitions, we carried out analysis on 26 test positions using statistics from two opening books one compiled from humans' games and the other from machines' games. Our analysis using several nonparametric measures, shows that, overall, there is a strong association between humans' and machines' choices of opening moves when using a book to guide their choices.

There has been a lot of recent interest in mining patterns from graphs. Often, the exact structure of the patterns of interest is not known. This happens, for example, when molecular structures are mined to discover fragments useful as features in chemical compound classification task, or when web sites are mined to discover sets of web pages representing logical documents. Such patterns are often generated from a few small subgraphs (cores), according to certain generalization rules (GRs). We call such patterns "generalized patterns"(GPs). While being structurally different, GPs often perform the same function in the network. Previously proposed approaches to mining GPs either assumed that the cores and the GRs are given, or that all interesting GPs are frequent. These are strong assumptions, which often do not hold in practical applications. In this paper, we propose an approach to mining GPs that is free from the above assumptions. Given a small number of GPs selected by the user, our algorithm discovers all GPs similar to the user examples. First, a machine learning-style approach is used to find the cores. Second, generalizations of the cores in the graph are computed to identify GPs. Evaluation on synthetic data, generated using real cores and GRs from biological and web domains, demonstrates effectiveness of our approach.

Event-driven reactive functionalities are an urgent need in nowadays distributed service-oriented applications and (Semantic) Web-based environments. An important problem to be addressed is how to correctly and efficiently capture and process the event-based behavioral, reactive logic represented as ECA rules in combination with other conditional decision logic which is represented as derivation rules. In this paper we elaborate on a homogeneous integration approach which combines derivation rules, reaction rules (ECA rules) and other rule types such as integrity constraint into the general framework of logic programming. The developed ECA-LP language provides expressive features such as ID-based updates with support for external and self-updates of the intensional and extensional knowledge, transactions including integrity testing and an event algebra to define and process complex events and actions based on a novel interval-based Event Calculus variant.

Doctoral Symposium of MATES'06 Abstract: Automated management and monitoring of service contracts like Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or higher-level policies is vital for efficient and reliable distributed se rvice-oriented architectures (SOA) with high quality of service (QoS) levels. IT service provider need to manage, exec ute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. I propose a novel rule-based knowledge representation (KR) for SLA rules and a respective rule-based service level management (RBSLM) framework. My rule-based approach based on logic programming pr ovides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation and high levels of automation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. Therewith, I address an urgent need service-oriented businesses do have nowadays which is to dynamically change their business and contractual logic in order to adapt to rapidly changing business environments and to overcome the restricting nature of slow change cycles.

Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been stu died in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representat ion languages rules are being used as a declarative programming language to form alize real-world decision logic and create IS production systems upon. This paper adopts an SE methodology from extreme programming, namely t est driven development, and discusses how it can be adapted to verificat ion, validation and integrity testing (V&V&I) of policy and contract sp ecifications. Since, the test-driven approach focuses on the behavioral a spects and the drawn conclusions instead of the structure of the rule base a nd the causes of faults, it is independent of the complexity of the rule lan guage and the system under test and thus much easier to use and understand f or the rule engineer and the user.

In this paper we propose some novel path planning strategies for a double integrator with bounded velocity and bounded control inputs. First, we study the following version of the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP): given a set of points in $\real^d$, find the fastest tour over the point set for a double integrator. We first give asymptotic bounds on the time taken to complete such a tour in the worst-case. Then, we study a stochastic version of the TSP for double integrator where the points are randomly sampled from a uniform distribution in a compact environment in $\real^2$ and $\real^3$. We propose novel algorithms that perform within a constant factor of the optimal strategy with high probability. Lastly, we study a dynamic TSP: given a stochastic process that generates targets, is there a policy which guarantees that the number of unvisited targets does not diverge over time? If such stable policies exist, what is the minimum wait for a target? We propose novel stabilizing receding-horizon algorithms whose performances are within a constant factor from the optimum with high probability, in $\real^2$ as well as $\real^3$. We also argue that these algorithms give identical performances for a particular nonholonomic vehicle, Dubins vehicle.

We are presenting a set of multilingual text analysis tools that can help analysts in any field to explore large document collections quickly in order to determine whether the documents contain information of interest, and to find the relevant text passages. The automatic tool, which currently exists as a fully functional prototype, is expected to be particularly useful when users repeatedly have to sieve through large collections of documents such as those downloaded automatically from the internet. The proposed system takes a whole document collection as input. It first carries out some automatic analysis tasks (named entity recognition, geo-coding, clustering, term extraction), annotates the texts with the generated meta-information and stores the meta-information in a database. The system then generates a zoomable and hyperlinked geographic map enhanced with information on entities and terms found. When the system is used on a regular basis, it builds up a historical database that contains information on which names have been mentioned together with which other names or places, and users can query this database to retrieve information extracted in the past.