Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been stu died in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representat ion languages rules are being used as a declarative programming language to form alize real-world decision logic and create IS production systems upon. This paper adopts an SE methodology from extreme programming, namely t est driven development, and discusses how it can be adapted to verificat ion, validation and integrity testing (V&V&I) of policy and contract sp ecifications. Since, the test-driven approach focuses on the behavioral a spects and the drawn conclusions instead of the structure of the rule base a nd the causes of faults, it is independent of the complexity of the rule lan guage and the system under test and thus much easier to use and understand f or the rule engineer and the user.

An approach to the classification problem of machine learning, based on building local classification rules, is developed. The local rules are considered as projections of the global classification rules to the event we want to classify. A massive global optimization algorithm is used for optimization of quality criterion. The algorithm, which has polynomial complexity in typical case, is used to find all high--quality local rules. The other distinctive feature of the algorithm is the integration of attributes levels selection (for ordered attributes) with rules searching and original conflicting rules resolution strategy. The algorithm is practical; it was tested on a number of data sets from UCI repository, and a comparison with the other predicting techniques is presented.

In this report, a novel approach to intelligence and learning is introduced; this approach is based upon what we called percep tion logic. W h at we call ' perception automata ' is introduced in which learning is accom p lished at different perception resolution. Learning in this autom a ta is not heuristic, rather it guarantees the convergence of the approxim a ted function to whatever precision required. Furthe rm ore, the learning process can take place on-line and in at m o st O(log(N)) epochs, where N is the num ber of sam p les. The perception autom a ta is based on hierarchal leve ls of resolution in which each level adds som e details to the constructed function till th e final level can successfully reconstruct the whole function. This approach com b ines the favors of com putational approach in the sense that it is precise, structural and rigorous, and the features of distributed processing and adaptivity of soft com puting, as well as continuity and real-tim e response of dynam i cal system s.

Extraction of association rules is widely used as a data mining method. However, one of the limit of this approach comes from the large number of extracted rules and the difficulty for a human expert to deal with the totality of these rules. We propose to solve this problem by structuring the set of rules into hierarchy. The expert can then therefore explore the rules, access from one rule to another one more general when we raise up in the hierarchy, and in other hand, or a more specific rules. Rules are structured at two levels. The global level aims at building a hierarchy from the set of rules extracted. Thus we define a first type of rule-subsomption relying on Galois lattices. The second level consists in a local and more detailed analysis of each rule. It generate for a given rule a set of generalization rules structured into a local hierarchy. This leads to the definition of a second type of subsomption. This subsomption comes from inductive logic programming and integrates a terminological model.

This paper deals with computational approaches to storytelling, or the production of stories by computers, with a particular attention on the way human creativity is modelled or emulated, also in computational terms. Features relevant to creativity and to stories are analysed, and existing systems are reviewed under the light of that analysis.The extent to which they implement the key features proposed in recent models of computational creativity is discussed. Limitations, avenues of future research and expected trends are outlined.

In this paper we introduce two new DSm fusion conditioning rules with example, and as a generalization of them a class of DSm fusion conditioning rules, and then extend them to a class of DSm conditioning rules.

CSIEC (Computer Simulation in Educational Communication), is not only an intelligent web-based human-computer dialogue system with natural language for English instruction, but also a learning assessment system for learners and teachers. Its multiple functions—including grammar-based gap filling exercises, scenario show, free chatting and chatting on a given topic—can satisfy the various requirements for students with different backgrounds and learning abilities. After a brief explanation of the conception of our dialogue system, as well as a survey of related works, we will illustrate the system structure, and describe its pedagogical functions with the underlying AI techniques in detail such as NLP and rule-based reasoning. We will summarize the free Internet usage within a six month period and its integration into English classes in universities and middle schools. The evaluation findings about the class integration show that the chatting function has been improved and frequently utilized by the users, and the application of the CSIEC system on English instruction can motivate the learners to practice English and enhance their learning process. Finally, we will conclude with potential improvements.

The hardness of finite domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) is a very important research area in Constraint Programming (CP) community. However, this problem has not yet attracted much attention from the researchers in the association rule mining community. As a popular data mining technique, association rule mining has an extremely wide application area and it has already been successfully applied to many interdisciplines. In this paper, we study the association rule mining techniques and propose a cascaded approach to extract the interesting patterns of the hard CSPs. As far as we know, this problem is investigated with the data mining techniques for the first time. Specifically, we generate the random CSPs and collect their characteristics by solving all the CSP instances, and then apply the data mining techniques on the data set and further to discover the interesting patterns of the hardness of the randomly generated CSPs

The problem of detecting terms that can be interesting to the advertiser is considered. If a company has already bought some advertising terms which describe certain services, it is reasonable to find out the terms bought by competing companies. A part of them can be recommended as future advertising terms to the company. The goal of this work is to propose better interpretable recommendations based on FCA and association rules.

In rules considered in this paper, the conclusion may contain existentially quantified variables, which makes reasoning tasks (as deduction) non-decidable. These rules have the same logical form as TGD (tuple generating dependencies) in databases and as conceptual graph rules. We extend known decidable cases by combining backward and forward chaining schemes, in association with a graph that captures exactly the notion of dependency between rules. Finally, we draw a map of known decidable cases, including an extension obtained by combining our approach with very recent results on TGD.