Good readers ask questions during reading, and this is presumed to improve their text comprehension. But what about not-so-good readers? Does question asking promote comprehension for struggling readers and, if so, how can we best support these students? This paper examines question generation among low-performing sixth-graders who read moderately-challenging science texts. It characterizes the nature of students’ questions and describes the effects of a video-based peer modeling intervention on their question asking and reading comprehension. In contrast to previous research, this study found that students asked a large number of deep reasoning questions, particularly those related to identifying goals, processes, causes, and consequences. However, such questions were not generally associated with greater understanding. Only two types of deep reasoning questions were related to text comprehension—those that were not answered in the text (directly or indirectly) and those that students labeled as “I’m Confused” questions. The study also found that readers who were exposed to video-based peer modeling of question generation asked more of these types of questions and scored significantly higher on multiple measures of text comprehension. These findings have implications for the design of systems to support struggling readers and for theory-building about question generation.

Millions of people globally have been forcibly displaced from their homes due to reasons beyond their control such as conflict, political upheaval, and environmental catastrophes. In many cases, these forced migrants seek temporary refuge in camps managed by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although responsibility for refugees’ well-being within camps belongs mainly to the NGOs and host government, the density of the camp population and lack of resources of service providers leads to a high degree of insecurity. Building off successful models of mHealth, or utilizing mobile technologies to address healthcare needs, this paper explores the possibility of using communication technologies to address personal security issues. Using agent based modeling techniques, this paper examines the ways in which information about incidents of violence are communicated through a closed population. In this way, the authors advocate for the use of mobile phones in an mSecurity context that empowers forced migrants to become active members in reducing incidents of violence within refugee and internally displaced persons camps.

International networks, although highly efficient, may produce surprising threshold effects that shift costs to geographically distant locations. International utility, transportation, and information networks facilitate the efficient flow of information, energy, goods and people. These networks exhibit a scale-free network structure with a few large “hubs”. Yet their efficiency belies their lack of robustness. Because such networks transcend national boundaries, furthermore, disruptions to the network in one geographic region may have profound economic and national security costs for countries in another region. To illustrate how complex networks may transmit costs among countries, this paper builds an agent-based model (ABM) of the international air transportation system. The ABM employs a genetic algorithm to identify “small” disruptions that produce cascading network failures. The study makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates how some complex networks evolve into network structures that trade off robustness for efficiency. Second, it illustrates how researchers can combine agent-based modeling, evolutionary computation, and network analysis to simulate differing failure modes for global networks. This convergence of simulation methodologies characterizes the emerging field of computational social science.

Research on agent communication languages has typically taken the speech acts paradigm as its starting point. Despite their manifest attractions, speech-act models of communication have several serious disadvantages as a foundation for communication in artificial agent systems. In particular, it has proved to be extremely difficult to give a satisfactory semantics to speech-act based agent communication languages. In part, the problem is that speech-act semantics typically make reference to the "mental states" of agents (their beliefs, desires, and intentions), and there is in general no way to attribute such attitudes to arbitrary computational agents. In addition, agent programming languages have only had their semantics formalised for abstract, stand-alone versions, neglecting aspects such as communication primitives. With respect to communication, implemented agent programming languages have tended to be rather ad hoc. This paper addresses both of these problems, by giving semantics to speech-act based messages received by an AgentSpeak agent. AgentSpeak is a logic-based agent programming language which incorporates the main features of the PRS model of reactive planning systems. The paper builds upon a structural operational semantics to AgentSpeak that we developed in previous work. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: an extension of our earlier work on the theoretical foundations of AgentSpeak interpreters; a computationally grounded semantics for (the core) performatives used in speech-act based agent communication languages; and a well-defined extension of AgentSpeak that supports agent communication.

Lin and Zhao's theorem on loop formulas states that in the propositional case the stable model semantics of a logic program can be completely characterized by propositional loop formulas, but this result does not fully carry over to the first-order case. We investigate the precise relationship between the first-order stable model semantics and first-order loop formulas, and study conditions under which the former can be represented by the latter. In order to facilitate the comparison, we extend the definition of a first-order loop formula which was limited to a nondisjunctive program, to a disjunctive program and to an arbitrary first-order theory. Based on the studied relationship we extend the syntax of a logic program with explicit quantifiers, which allows us to do reasoning involving non-Herbrand stable models using first-order reasoners. Such programs can be viewed as a special class of first-order theories under the stable model semantics, which yields more succinct loop formulas than the general language due to their restricted syntax.

We consider the Gödel bimodal logic determined by fuzzy Kripke models where both the propositions and the accessibility relation are infinitely valued over the standard Gödel algebra[0,1] and prove strong completeness of Fischer Servi intuitionistic modal logic IK plus the prelinearity axiom with respect to this semantics. We axiomatize also the bimodal analogues of T, S4, and S5 obtained by restricting to models over frames satisfying the [0,1]-valued versions of the structural properties which characterize these logics. As application of the completeness theorems we obtain a representation theorem for bimodal Gödel algebras. In a previous paper [6], we have considered a semantics for Gödel modal logic based on fuzzy Kripke models where both the propositions and the accessibility relation take values in the standard Gödel algebra [0,1], we call these Gödel-Kripke models, and we have provided strongly complete axiomatizations for the unimodal fragments of this logic with respect to validity and semantic entailment from countable theories. Similar results were obtained for the unimodal Gödel analogues of the classical modal logics T and S4 determined by Gödel-Kripke models over frames satisfying, respectively, the [0,1]-valued version of reflexivity, or reflexivity and transitivity. The axiomatization of the unimodal Gödel analogues of S5 remains open.

Analogy-based Story Generation (ASG) is a relatively under-explored approach for story generation and computational narrative. In this paper, we present the SAM (Story Analogies through Mapping) algorithm as our attempt to expand the scope and complexity of stories generated by ASG. Comparing with existing work and our prior work, there are two main contributions of SAM: it employs 1) analogical reasoning both at the specific story content and general domain knowledge levels, and 2) temporal reasoning about the story (phase) structure in order to generate more complex stories. We illustrate SAM through a few example stories.

RTAA* is probably the best-performing real-time heuristic search algorithm at path-finding tasks in which the environ- ment is not known in advance or in which the environment is known and there is no time for pre-processing. As most real- time search algorithms do, RTAA∗ performs poorly in presence of heuristic depressions, which are bounded areas of the search space in which the heuristic is too low with respect to their border. Recently, it has been shown that LSS-LRTA∗, a well-known real-time search algorithm, can be improved when search is actively guided away of depressions. In this paper we investigate whether or not RTAA∗ can be improved in the same manner. We propose aRTAA∗ and daRTAA∗, two algorithms based on RTAA∗ that avoid heuristic depressions. Both algorithms outperform RTAA∗ on standard path-finding tasks, obtaining better-quality solutions when the same time deadline is imposed on the duration of the planning episode. We prove, in addition, that both algorithms have good theoretical properties

Standard belief change assumes an underlying logic containing full classical propositional logic. However, there are good reasons for considering belief change in less expressive logics as well. In this paper we build on recent investigations by Delgrande on contraction for Horn logic. We show that the standard basic form of contraction, partial meet, is too strong in the Horn case. This result stands in contrast to Delgrandes conjecture that orderly maxichoice is the appropriate form of contraction for Horn logic. We then define a more appropriate notion of basic contraction for the Horn case, influenced by the convexity property holding for full propositional logic and which we refer to as infra contraction. The main contribution of this work is a result which shows that the construction method for Horn contraction for belief sets based on our infra remainder sets corresponds exactly to Hanssons classical kernel contraction for belief sets, when restricted to Horn logic. This result is obtained via a detour through contraction for belief bases. We prove that kernel contraction for belief bases produces precisely the same results as the belief base version of infra contraction. The use of belief bases to obtain this result provides evidence for the conjecture that Horn belief change is best viewed as a 'hybrid' version of belief set change and belief base change. One of the consequences of the link with base contraction is the provision of a representation result for Horn contraction for belief sets in which a version of the Core-retainment postulate features.

In a field of research about general reasoning mechanisms, it is essential to have appropriate benchmarks. Ideally, the benchmarks should reflect possible applications of the developed technology. In AI Planning, researchers more and more tend to draw their testing examples from the benchmark collections used in the International Planning Competition (IPC). In the organization of (the deterministic part of) the fourth IPC, IPC-4, the authors therefore invested significant effort to create a useful set of benchmarks. They come from five different (potential) real-world applications of planning: airport ground traffic control, oil derivative transportation in pipeline networks, model-checking safety properties, power supply restoration, and UMTS call setup. Adapting and preparing such an application for use as a benchmark in the IPC involves, at the time, inevitable (often drastic) simplifications, as well as careful choice between, and engineering of, domain encodings. For the first time in the IPC, we used compilations to formulate complex domain features in simple languages such as STRIPS, rather than just dropping the more interesting problem constraints in the simpler language subsets. The article explains and discusses the five application domains and their adaptation to form the PDDL test suites used in IPC-4. We summarize known theoretical results on structural properties of the domains, regarding their computational complexity and provable properties of their topology under the h+ function (an idealized version of the relaxed plan heuristic). We present new (empirical) results illuminating properties such as the quality of the most wide-spread heuristic functions (planning graph, serial planning graph, and relaxed plan), the growth of propositional representations over instance size, and the number of actions available to achieve each fact; we discuss these data in conjunction with the best results achieved by the different kinds of planners participating in IPC-4.