Critique is an application he best way to improve one's writing instructor, revise based on the feedback, that is comprised of a suite of programs and then repeat the whole process as often as that evaluate and provide feedback for errors in possible. Unfortunately, this puts an enormous grammar, usage, and mechanics, that identify load on the classroom teacher, who is faced the essay's discourse structure, and that recognize with reading and providing feedback for perhaps potentially undesirable stylistic features. The companion scoring application, e-rater version As a result, teachers are not able to give 2.0, extracts linguistically-based features writing assignments as often as they would from an essay and uses a statistical model of wish. For example, the singular indefinite determiner a is labeled with the part-of-speech symbol AT, the adjective good is tagged JJ, the singular common noun job gets the label NN. After the corpus is tagged, frequencies are collected for each tag and for each function word (determiners, prepositions, etc.), and also for each adjacent pair of tags and function words. The individual tags and words are called unigrams, and the adjacent pairs are the bigrams. To illustrate, the word sequence, "a good job" contributes to the counts of three bigrams: a-JJ, AT-JJ, JJ-NN, which represent, respectively, the fact that the function word a was followed by an adjective, an indefinite singular determiner was followed by a noun, and an adjective was followed by a noun.

Sketch maps are an important spatial representation used in many geospatial-reasoning tasks. This article describes techniques we have developed that enable software to perform humanlike reasoning about sketch maps. We illustrate the utility of these techniques in the context of nuSketch Battlespace, a research system that has been successfully used in a variety of experiments. After an overview of the nuSketch approach and nuSketch Battlespace, we outline the representations of glyphs and sketches and the nuSketch spatial reasoning architecture. We describe the use of qualitative topology and Voronoi diagrams to construct spatial representations, and explain how these facilities are combined with analogical reasoning to provide a simple form of enemy intent hypothesis generation.

AI agents combining natural language interaction, task planning, and business ontologies can help companies provide better-quality and more costeffective customer service. Our customer-service agents use natural language to interact with customers, enabling customers to state their intentions directly instead of searching for the places on the Web site that may address their concern. We use planning methods to search systematically for the solution to the customer's problem, ensuring that a resolution satisfactory for both the customer and the company is found, if one exists. Our agents converse with customers, guaranteeing that needed information is acquired from customers and that relevant information is provided to them in order for both parties to make the right decision. The net effect is a more frictionless interaction process that improves the customer experience and makes businesses more competitive on the service front.

We have developed a sales-support system for door-to-door sales of cosmetics based on a system called Skin-Expert, a skin-image grading service that includes analysis and diagnosis. Skin-Expert analyzes a customer's current skin quality from a picture of the skin. Several parameters are extracted by image processing, and the skin grading is done by rules generated by data mining from a baseline of grades given by human skin-care experts. Communication with the Skin-Expert is through a cellular telephone with a camera, using e-mail software and a Web browser. Salespeople photograph the customer's skin using the camera in a standard cellular telephone and then send an e-mail message that includes the picture as an attachment to our analysis system. Other parameters associated with the customer (for example, age and gender) are included in the body of the message. The picture is analyzed by our skin-grading system, and the results are made available as a page in HTML format on a customer-accessible Web site. An e-mail is sent when the results are available, usually within minutes. Salespeople check the results by using a Web browser on their cellular telephones. The output not only provides a grading result but also gives recommendations for the care and cosmetics that are most suitable for the customer. Our system integrates cellular communication, Web technology, computer analysis, data mining, and an expert system. Though salespeople use only a cellular telephone with very little computing power as the front end, they can take advantage of intelligent services such as computer grading and data mining. The salespeople do not need to think about what is running in the background, and there is no requirement that end users have any special hardware.

We are pleased to publish this special selection of papers from the 2003 Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference (IAAI-03). IAAI seeks out applications of artificial intelligence that either demonstrate new technology or use previously known technology in innovative ways. IAAI particularly seeks out examples of deployments of AI technology that tackle the problems of demonstrating value and planning for long-term deployment. The five articles we have selected for this special issue are extended versions of papers that appeared in the conference. Two of the articles are deployed applications that have already demonstrated practical value. The remaining three articles are particularly innovative emerging applications. We will briefly outline each of them.

We propose a model for errors in sung queries, a variant of the hidden Markov model (HMM). This is a solution to the problem of identifying the degree of similarity between a (typically error-laden) sung query and a potential target in a database of musical works, an important problem in the field of music information retrieval. Similarity metrics are a critical component of `query-by-humming' (QBH) applications which search audio and multimedia databases for strong matches to oral queries. Our model comprehensively expresses the types of {m error} or variation between target and query: cumulative and non-cumulative local errors, transposition, tempo and tempo changes, insertions, deletions and modulation. The model is not only expressive, but automatically trainable, or able to learn and generalize from query examples. We present results of simulations, designed to assess the discriminatory potential of the model, and tests with real sung queries, to demonstrate relevance to real-world applications.

An accepted belief is a proposition considered likely enough by an agent, to be inferred from as if it were true. This paper bridges the gap between probabilistic and logical representations of accepted beliefs. To this end, natural properties of relations on propositions, describing relative strength of belief are augmented with some conditions ensuring that accepted beliefs form a deductively closed set. This requirement turns out to be very restrictive. In particular, it is shown that the sets of accepted belief of an agent can always be derived from a family of possibility rankings of states. An agent accepts a proposition in a given context if this proposition is considered more possible than its negation in this context, for all possibility rankings in the family. These results are closely connected to the non-monotonic 'preferential' inference system of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor and the so-called plausibility functions of Friedman and Halpern. The extent to which probability theory is compatible with acceptance relations is laid bare. A solution to the lottery paradox, which is considered as a major impediment to the use of non-monotonic inference is proposed using a special kind of probabilities (called lexicographic, or big-stepped). The setting of acceptance relations also proposes another way of approaching the theory of belief change after the works of Gärdenfors and colleagues. Our view considers the acceptance relation as a primitive object from which belief sets are derived in various contexts.

The Twelfth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in Acapulco, Mexico, in conjunction with the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The events included the Robot Host and Urban Search and Rescue competitions, the AAAI Robot Challenge, and the Robot Exhibition. In the Urban Search and Rescue competition, teams attempted to find victims in a simulated disaster area using teleoperated, semiautonomous, and autonomous robots. The AAAI Robot Challenge is a noncompetitive event where the robots attempt to attend the conference by locating the registration booth, registering for the conference, and then giving a talk to an audience.

RoboCup is no longer just the Soccer World Cup for autonomous robots but has evolved to become a coordinated initiative encompassing four different robotics events: (1) Soccer, (2) Rescue, (3) Junior (focused on education), and (4) a Scientific Symposium. RoboCup-2003 took place from 2 to 11 July 2003 in Padua (Italy); it was colocated with other scientific events in the field of AI and robotics. In this article, in addition to reporting on the results of the games, we highlight the robotics and AI technologies exploited by the teams in the different leagues and describe the most meaningful scientific contributions.