"The terms adaptation, learning, concept-formation, induction, self-organization, and self-repair have all been used in the context of learning system (LS) research. The research has been conducted within many different scientific communities, however, and these terms have come to have a variety of meanings. It is therefore often difficult to recognize that problems which are described differently may in fact be identical. Learning system models as well are often tuned to the require- ments of a particular discipline and are not suitable for application in related disciplines."In Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Vol. 11. Dekker

GUS is the first of a series of experimental computer systems that we intend to construct as part of a program of research on language understanding. In large measure, these systems will fill the role of periodic progress reports, summarizing what we have learned, assessing the mutual coherence of the various lines of investigation we have been following, and suggesting where more emphasis is needed in future work. GUS (Genial Understander System) is intended to engage a sympathetic and highly cooperative human in an English dialog, directed towards a specific goal within a very restricted domain of discourse. As a starting point, GUS was restricted to the role of a travel agent in a conversation with a client who wants to make a simple return trip to a single city in California. There is good reason for restricting the domain of discourse for a computer system which is to engage in an English dialog.

This paper discusses an effort in the application of artificial intelligence to the access of data from a large, distributed data base over a computer network. A running system is described that provides real-time access over the ARPANET to a data base distributed over several machines. The system accepts a rather wide range of natural language questions about the data, plans a sequence of appropriate queries to the data base management system to answer the question, determines on which machine(s) to carry out the queries, establishes links to those machines over the ARPANET, monitors the prosecution of the queries and recovers from certain errors in execution, and prepares a relevant answer. In addition to the components that make up the demonstration system, more sophisticated functionally equivalent components are discussed and proposed. The work described in this paper represents the joint efforts of an integrated, energetic group at SRI. Members of this group include Rich Fikes (now at Xerox PARC), Koichi Furukawa (now at ETL).

IJCAI 1977, 389-397

"An important research problem in artificial intelligence is the study of methods for learning general concepts or rules from a set of training instances. An approach to this problem is presented which is guaranteed to find, without backtracing, all rule versions consistent with a set of positive and negative training instances. The algorithm put forth uses a representation of the space of those rules consistent with the observed training data. This "rule version space" is modified in response to new training instances by eliminating candidate rule versions found to conflict with each new instance. The use of version spaces is discussed in the context of Meta-DENDRAL, a program which learns rules in the domain of chemical spectroscopy."Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp.305-310

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp.235-246.

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp.286-291.

See also: Stanford Heuristic Programming Project Memo HPP-77-25Proc. IJCAI-77: Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp 1014-1029

Also found at aminer.orgProc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp.434-441.

Proc. Fifth Intl. Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77) pp. 888-893, Boston, Mass. USA, August 1977. Reprinted in "Readings in Planning", Morgan-Kaufmann, 1990.