Good books, well conceived, well written, and well presented, can do much to promote the science of AI and the AAAI organization. The AAAI Press edited collections, from which the articles of this issue are excerpted, are designed to reach out to an audience that wants to learn more about AAAI and AI.

A performance evaluation of 15 text-analysis systems was recently conducted to realistically assess the state of the art for detailed information extraction from unconstrained continuous text. Reports associated with terrorism were chosen as the target domain, and all systems were tested on a collection of previously unseen texts released by a government agency. Based on multiple strategies for computing each metric, the competing systems were evaluated for recall, precision, and overgeneration. The results support the claim that systems incorporating natural language-processing techniques are more effective than systems based on stochastic techniques alone. A wide range of language-processing strategies was employed by the top-scoring systems, indicating that many natural language-processing techniques provide a viable foundation for sophisticated text analysis. Further evaluation is needed to produce a more detailed assessment of the relative merits of specific technologies and establish true performance limits for automated information extraction.

Thirty users of AI systems, 8. Make sure everyone knows at the Intelligence has announced that, key role in systems that enhance the 1. Integrating AI with traditional starting next year, its National Conference human values of the world we live in." He 2. AI may be only part of the system/ The 1991 AAAI Conferences will noted that, "Some of the most important solution, but it is increasingly the take place in Anaheim, California results of technology transfer part that makes the whole work. The National Conference will be the unexpected." "This is a recognition of changing significant benefits." "As AI moves more broadly champion" outside the AI/IS area, presentations focused on the approaches AI solutions that were only theory 12 to 18 months ago."