The Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98) was held in Madison, Wisconsin, on 26-30 July. The following four workshops were held in conjunction with the conference: (1) Case-Based Reasoning Integrations, (2) Learning for Text Categorization, (3) Predicting the Future: AI Approaches to Time-Series Problems, and (4) Software Tools for Developing Agents.

In conjunction with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Hall of Champions exhibit, the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence held a panel discussion entitled "AI Game-Playing Techniques: Are They Useful for Anything Other Than Games?" This article summarizes the panelists' comments about whether ideas and techniques from AI game playing are useful elsewhere and what kinds of game might be suitable as "challenge problems" for future research.

It is a northern European city of 100,000, almost on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The local press (The Derry Journal north Derry coast, with beautiful meetings enjoyed themselves and & Belfast Telegraph) and radio (BBC beaches at Benone and Castlenock expressed their congratulations on Northern Ireland) ran a number of and then through Coleraine to the the program and organization. Also, articles leading up to and during the seaside resorts of Portstewart and for the first time, AICS attracted a conference. All plenary invited speaker Portrush. A few kilometers further large number of delegates and papers talks and the panel session went out along the north Antrim coast, we from abroad, including many from on streaming video and audio, stored arrive at the Giants' Causeway and the United Kingdom, Europe, and Sauce!); Gweedore, home of the Clannad and live with the possibility of phonein for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the They did lie in the areas of evidential reasoning, AICS-97, the Annual Conference of a supreme job.

Cognitive modeling has traditionally leads to, on the one hand, the apparent he workshop entitled "Computational of Power," which we cochaired been underrepresented in American lack of regularities and, on the and organized, was held at the Thirteenth Association for Artificial Intelligence other hand, superfluous regularities National Conference on Artificial conferences and journals. However, its that can be misleading, which is even Intelligence (AAAI-96) on 5 importance should not be underestimated.

A false negative means that fraud, bad credit, or intrusion passes unnoticed, with potential loss of revenue or security. This workshop focused primarily papers, 10 of which were selected for with the Fourteenth National on what might loosely be termed presentation at the workshop. These Conference on Artificial Intelligence "improper behavior," which includes 10 papers were grouped into 3 categories. However, Glasgow applying classification techniques to were over 50 attendees, with a balanced does discuss the estimation of "inherent fraud and risk problems, including the mix of university and industry risk," which is the bread and butter use of clustering techniques to generate researchers. We sought participants data, highly skewed distributions ("improper Columbia University, and Phillip Chan to discuss and explore common behavior" occurs far less frequently of Florida Institute of Technology).

This confusion is intensified by the "overhyping" of the term agent.

Introduction to this Special Issue on Innovative Applications of AI

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in research on empirical methods in natural language processing. These methods employ learning techniques to automatically extract linguistic knowledge from natural language corpora rather than require the system developer to manually encode the requisite knowledge. This article presents an introduction to the series of specialized articles on these topics and attempts to describe and explain the growing interest in using learning methods to aid the development of natural language processing systems.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in research on empirical methods in natural language processing. These methods employ learning techniques to automatically extract linguistic knowledge from natural language corpora rather than require the system developer to manually encode the requisite knowledge. The current special issue reviews recent research in empirical methods in speech recognition, syntactic parsing, semantic processing, information extraction, and machine translation. This article presents an introduction to the series of specialized articles on these topics and attempts to describe and explain the growing interest in using learning methods to aid the development of natural language processing systems.

An Introduction to this Special Issue of AI Magazine