In the recent years rule-based programming in terms of decla rative logic programming has formed the basis for many Artificial In telligence (AI) applications and is well integrated in the mainstream infor mation technology capturing higher-level decision logics. Typically, the st andard rule systems and rule-based logic programming languages such as Prolog deri vatives are based on the untyped theory of predicate calculus with untyped logic al objects (untyped terms), i.e. the logical reasoning algorithms apply pure sy ntactical reasoning. From a rule engineering perspective this is a serious restri ction which lacks major Software Engineering principles such as data abstracti on or modularization, which become more and more important when rule applications grow larger and more complex. To support such principles in logic programmi ng and capture the rule engineer's intended meaning of a logic program, types a nd typed objects play an important role. Moreover, from a computational poin t of view, the use of types drastically reduces the search space, i.e. proofs c an be kept at a more abstract level and it offers the option to restrict the applic ation of rules and to control the level of generality in queries.

The models of statistical physics used to study collective phenomena in some interdisciplinary contexts, such as social dynamics and opinion spreading, do not consider the effects of the memory on individual decision processes. On the contrary, in the Naming Game, a recently proposed model of Language formation, each agent chooses a particular state, or opinion, by means of a memory-based negotiation process, during which a variable number of states is collected and kept in memory. In this perspective, the statistical features of the number of states collected by the agents becomes a relevant quantity to understand the dynamics of the model, and the influence of topological properties on memory-based models. By means of a master equation approach, we analyze the internal agent dynamics of Naming Game in populations embedded on networks, finding that it strongly depends on very general topological properties of the system (e.g. average and fluctuations of the degree). However, the influence of topological properties on the microscopic individual dynamics is a general phenomenon that should characterize all those social interactions that can be modeled by memory-based negotiation processes.

Standard game theory assumes that the structure of the game is common knowledge among players. We relax this assumption by considering extensive games where agents may be unaware of the complete structure of the game. In particular, they may not be aware of moves that they and other agents can make. We show how such games can be represented; the key idea is to describe the game from the point of view of every agent at every node of the game tree. We provide a generalization of Nash equilibrium and show that every game with awareness has a generalized Nash equilibrium. Finally, we extend these results to games with awareness of unawareness, where a player i may be aware that a player j can make moves that i is not aware of, and to subjective games, where payers may have no common knowledge regarding the actual game and their beliefs are incompatible with a common prior.

The failure diagnosis for {\it discrete event systems} (DESs) has been given considerable attention in recent years. Both on-line and off-line diagnostics in the framework of DESs was first considered by Lin Feng in 1994, and particularly an algorithm for diagnosability of DESs was presented. Motivated by some existing problems to be overcome in previous work, in this paper, we investigate the minimal cost algorithm for diagnosability of DESs. More specifically: (i) we give a generic method for judging a system's off-line diagnosability, and the complexity of this algorithm is polynomial-time; (ii) and in particular, we present an algorithm of how to search for the minimal set in all observable event sets, whereas the previous algorithm may find {\it non-minimal} one.

The task is to find a functional dependence between x and y, f: x null y, subject to certain optimality conditions. Representative tasks include binary classification, multi-class classification, regression and ranking. We often want to reduce the dimension of the data (the number of features) before the actual learning (Guyon & Elisseeff, 2003); a larger number of features can be associated with higher data collection cost, more difficulty in model interpretation, higher computational cost for the classifier, and decreased generalisationAppearing in Proceedings of the 24 th International Conference on Machine Learning, Corvallis, OR, 2007.

Some alternatives to probability in the literature include sets of probability measure [Huber 1981; Walley 1991], Dempster-Shafer belief functions [Shafer 1976] and the closely related nonadditive measures [Schmeidler 1989], and possibility measures [Dubois and Prade 1990]. In this paper, we consider the notion of expectation for all these representations of uncertainty. We do not take a stand here on what the "right" way is to represent uncertainty; we simply investigate characterizations of expectation and reasoning about expectation, both for probability and for other representations of uncertainty. It is well known that a probability measure determines a unique expectation function that is linear (i.e., E (aX + bY) = aE (X) + bE (Y)), monotone (i.e., X Y implies E ( X) E (Y)), and maps constant functions to their value. Conversely, given an expectation function E (that is, a function from random variables to the reals) that is linear, monotone, and maps constant functions to their value, there is a unique probability measure µ such that E = E µ. That is, there is a 1-1 mapping from probability measures to (probabilistic) expectation functions. One of the goals of this paper is to provide similar characterizations of expectation for other representations of uncertainty. Some work along these lines has already been done, particulary with regard to sets of probability measures [Huber 1981; Walley 1991; 1981]. 1 However, there seems to be surprisingly little work on characterizing expectation in the context of other measures of uncertainty, such as belief functions [Shafer 1976] and possibility measures [Dubois and Prade 1990].

This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical level, the main claim of this paper is that syntactic networks should be interpreted as the outcome of the use of the syntactic machinery. Thus, the intrinsic features of such machinery are not accessible directly from (known) network properties. Rather, what one can see are the global patterns of its use and, thus, a global view of the power and organization of the underlying grammar. Taking a look into more practical issues, the paper examines how to build a net from the projection of syntactic relations. Recall that, as opposed to adult grammars, early-child language has not a well-defined concept of structure. To overcome such difficulty, we develop a set of systematic criteria assuming constituency hierarchy and a grammar based on lexico-thematic relations. At the end, what we obtain is a well defined corpora annotation that enables us i) to perform statistics on the size of structures and ii) to build a network from syntactic relations over which we can perform the standard measures of complexity. We also provide a detailed example.

Intelligent Input Methods (IM) are essential for making text entries in many East Asian scripts, but their application to other languages has not been fully explored. This paper discusses how such tools can contribute to the deve lopment of computer processing of other oriental languages. We propose a design philosophy that regards IM as a text service platform, and treats the study of IM as a cross disciplinary subject from the perspectives of software engineering, human - computer interaction (HCI), and natural language processing (NLP). We discuss these three perspectives and indicate a number of possible future research directions.

Probability-like parameters appearing in some statistical models, and their prior distributions, are reinterpreted through the notion of `circumstance', a term which stands for any piece of knowledge that is useful in assigning a probability and that satisfies some additional logical properties. The idea, which can be traced to Laplace and Jaynes, is that the usual inferential reasonings about the probability-like parameters of a statistical model can be conceived as reasonings about equivalence classes of `circumstances' - viz., real or hypothetical pieces of knowledge, like e.g. physical hypotheses, that are useful in assigning a probability and satisfy some additional logical properties - that are uniquely indexed by the probability distributions they lead to.

An approach to induction is presented, based on the idea of analysing the context of a given problem into `circumstances'. This approach, fully Bayesian in form and meaning, provides a complement or in some cases an alternative to that based on de Finetti's representation theorem and on the notion of infinite exchangeability. In particular, it gives an alternative interpretation of those formulae that apparently involve `unknown probabilities' or `propensities'. Various advantages and applications of the presented approach are discussed, especially in comparison to that based on exchangeability. Generalisations are also discussed.