This study explores how neural network models can simulate word production in second language (L2) learners. A neural network was trained to simulate L2 word production using a variety of word properties related to connectionist networks (hypernymy, polysemy, concreteness, and meaningfulness). The study demonstrates that a neural network can produce words to a similar degree as L2 learners. The findings are important for theories of L2 lexical growth and production.

Following successful special tracks on case-based reasoning at FLAIRS over the past seven years, we invited papers for the Eighth Special Track on CBR at the 22nd International FLAIRS Conference. Case-based reasoning is an AI problem solving and analysis methodology that retrieves and adapts previous experiences to fit new contexts. This forum is intended to gather AI researchers and practitioners with an interest in CBR to present and discuss developments in CBR theory and application. Submission topics included foundations of CBR; methods for CBR (such as representation, indexing, retrieval, adaptation); evaluation methods for CBR systems and integrations; practical applications of CBR; textual CBR; CBR and creativity; CBR and design; distributed CBR; case based maintenance; spatiotemporal CBR; CBR in the health sciences; CBR integrations; case based planning; and CBR and games. The invited speaker for the special track for 2009 is Ashok Goel from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.

Using robots as part of any curriculum requires careful management of the significant complexity that physical embodiment introduces. Students need to be made aware of this complexity without being overwhelmed by it, and navigating students through this complexity is the biggest challenge faced by an instructor.  Achieving this requires a framework that allows complexity to be introduced in stages, as students' abilities improve. Such a framework should also be flexible enough to provide a range of application environments that can grow with student  sophistication, and be able to quickly change between applications.  It should be portable and maintainable, and require a minimum of overhead to manage in a classroom. Finally, the framework should provide repeatability and control for evaluating the students' work, as well as for performing research. In this paper, we discuss the advantages of a mixed reality approach to applying robotics to education in order to accomplish these challenges.  We introduce a framework for managing mixed reality in the classroom, and discuss our experiences with using this framework for teaching robotics and AI.

A neural net with multiple output nodes is capable of distinguishing among a set of related input classes even in the absence of training. It can do so with an accuracy that is markedly better than random guessing. This is because each class will tend to activate a different set of output nodes. We refer to this tendency as the net's 'inherent' bias. Ascertaining a net's inherent bias  may be thought of as learning the net. One may learn the net either instead of training it, or prior to training it. Furthermore, one only needs a small number of samples from each input class in order to reliably learn the net. If a net has been previously trained on a different, related set of classes, then ascertaining the inherent bias is a form of knowledge transfer. When such a net is trained to respond in accordance with its inherent bias, one may obtain substantially higher accuracies than is provided by nets trained in the standard fashion. Furthermore, when using a deep net, we were able to obtain such improvements while only allowing the top layer of the net to train. This layer contained only about 5.7% of the net's free parameters.

Using the already validated Coh-Metrix tool, this study examines whether there are significant linguistic and discourse differences between biomedical abstracts for American and Korean English. Also, the current study accounts for variation among journals’ countries of origin, distinguishing between biomedical journals published in the United States from biomedical journals published in South Korea. The significance of these studies regards the growing number of second language (L2) biomedical researchers attempting to publish their research in national and international English-language journals, but who find themselves locked out of the discussion because of differences in linguistic and discourse conventions. The present study aims to provide a more thorough and quantitative understanding of the prototypical linguistic components in biomedical rhetoric, and to suggest how word-, sentence-, and discourse-level structures can be researched, taught, and developed into materials. This improved understanding is expected to provide a powerful apparatus for the promotion of L2 English writers in the biomedical field.

A problem of path planning for multiple robots is addressed in this paper. A specific case of the problem with so called theta-like environment is studied. This case of the problem represent structurally the simplest solvable case and an eventual solving method for this case can be used as a building block for more general solving procedures. We propose a solving method for multi-robot path planning in theta-like environments that constructs a solution by composing it of the pre-calculated shortest solutions of certain sub-problems. This approach prefers short overall solutions. Moreover, we propose a new algorithm for pre-calculating shortest solutions of sub-problems - it is in fact an improvement of the IDA* algorithm. An experimental comparison of our methods with existing techniques is presented in the paper.

The field of artificial intelligence needs to attract new researchers to the field to continue current explorations and look for novel approaches to tomorrow's problems. One approach involves providing students with learning tools that excite their imagination and help them obtain an appreciation for what artificial intelligence can do. The tools described here are used in an undergraduate course at Sam Houston State University. They include heuristic-driven search in a potential game's terrain map, reinforcement learning in a tank battle game, and game tree search techniques in tic-tac-toe.

We present an approach to patent claim simplification which segments claim sentences into clausal discourse units, transforms them into complete sentences, establishes coreference relations and builds a discourse structure between discourse units. The four stages are necessary to allow for the syntactic analysis of otherwise unparsable claim sentences and their regeneration using discourse structure and coreference relations in order to ensure the production of a cohesive and coherent paraphrase/summary.

The Multiple ANSwer EXtraction system is a framework for interpreting a conjecture with outermost existentially quantified variables as a question, and extracting multiple answers to the question by repetitive calls to a base system that can report the bindings for the variables in one proof of the conjecture. This paper describes the framework and demonstrates its use on an illustrative example.

The success of knowledge discovery in real-world domains often depends on our ability to handle data imperfections. Here we study this problem in the framework of association mining, seeking to identify frequent itemsets in transactional databases where the presence of some items in a given transaction is unknown. We want to use the frequent itemsets to predict "missing items": based on the partial contents of a shopping cart, predict what else will be added. We describe a technique that addresses this task, and report experiments illustrating its behavior.