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).

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"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

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

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp.428-433

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp. 151-157.

In E. W. Elcock and D. Michie (Eds.), Machine intelligence 8. New York: Wiley.

"We define the concept of meta-level Knowledge, and illustrate it by briefly reviewing four examples that have been described in detail elsewhere. The examples include applications of the idea to tasks such as transfer of expertise from a domain expert to a program, and the maintenance and use of large Knowledge bases. We explore common themes that arise from these examples, and examine broader implications of the idea, in particular its impact on the design and construction of large programs."IJCAI 5, 920-927

In Frey, 1-33.

Proc. IJCAI 77 VOL 1 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA AUGUST 22 - 25 , 1977, pp. 67-76 (reprinted in RNLP: 353-362)