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An artificial intelligence approach to machine translation

Classics

The paper describes a system of semantic analysis and generation, programmed in LISP 1.5 and designed to pass from paragraph length input in English to French via an interlingual representation. A wide class of English input forms will be covered, but the vocabulary will initially be restricted to one of a few hundred words. With this subset working, and during the current year (71-72), it is also hoped to map the interlingual representation onto some predicate calculus notation so as to make possible the answering of very simple questions about the translated matter. The specification of the translation system itself is complete, and its main points of interest that distinguish it from other systems are: i) It translated phrase by phrase -- with facilities for reordering phrases and establishing essential semantic connectivities between them -- by mapping complex semantic structures of "message" onto each phrase. These constitute the interlingual representation to be translated.


The Frame Problem and Related Problems in Artificial Intelligence

Classics

The frame problem arises in attempts to formalise problem--solving processes involving interactions with a complex world. It concerns the difficulty of keeping track of the consequences of the performance of an action in, or more generally of the making of some alteration to, a representation of the world. The paper contains a survey of the problem, showing how it arises in several contexts and relating it to some traditional problems in philosophical logic. In the second part of the paper several suggested partial solutions to the problem are outlined and compared. This comparison necessitates an analysis of what is meant by a representation of a robot's environment.


Progress in Natural Language Understanding - An Application to Lunar Geology

Classics

The advent of computer networks such as the ARPA net (see e.g., Ornstein et al.) has significantly increased the opportunity for access by a single researcher to a variety of different computer facilities and data bases, thus raising expectations of a day when it will be a common occurrence rather than an exception that a scientist will casually undertake to use a computer facility located 3000 miles away and whose languages, formats, and conventions are unknown to him. In this foreseeable future, learning and remembering the number of different languages and conventions that such a scientist would have to know will require significant effort---much greater than that now required to learn the conventions of his local computing center (where other users and knowledgeable assistance is readily available). The Lunar Sciences Natural Language Information System (which we will hereafter refer to as LUNAR) is a research prototype of a system to deal with this and other man-machine communication problems by adapting the machine to the conventions of ordinary natural English rather than requiring the man to adapt to the machine.


The fourteen primitive actions and their inferences

Classics

In order to represent the conceptual information underlying a natural language sentence, a conceptual structure has been established that uses the basic actor-action-object framework. It was the intent that these structures have only one representation for one meaning, regardless of the semantic form of the sentence being represented. Actions were reduced to their basic parts so as to effect this. It was found that only fourteen basic actions were needed as building blocks by which all verbs can be represented. Each of these actions has a set of actions or states which can be inferred when they are present.


Artificial intelligence and the concept of mind

Classics

Kenneth Mark Colby, 1920 - 2001 Kenneth Colby was born in Waterbury, Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1941. Two years later he graduated from Yale's School of Medicine. Colby started his career as a professor of computer science at Stanford, and also did some research for the National Institute of Mental Health. It was there that he created Parry in the university's Artificial Intelligence Library. Parry was a chatterbot, and able to have conversations with people.





Analysis of the alpha-beta pruning algorithm

Classics

Dept. of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University. "Many game-playing programs must search very large game trees. Use of the alpha-beta pruning algorithm instead of the simple minimax search reduces by a large factor the number of bottom positions which must be examined in the search. An analytical expression for the expected number of bottom positions examined in a game tree using alpha-beta pruning is derived, subject to the assumptions that the branching factor N and the depth D of the tree are arbitrary but fixed, and the bottom positions are a random permutation of ND unique values. A simple approximation to the growth rate of the expected number of bottom positions examined is suggested, based on a Monte Carlo simulation for large values of N and D. The behavior of the model is compared with the behavior of the alpha-beta algorithm in a chess playing program and the effects of correlation and non-unique bottom position values in real game trees are examined."


The structure of belief systems

Classics

Kenneth Mark Colby, 1920 - 2001 Kenneth Colby was born in Waterbury, Connecticut and graduated from Yale in 1941. Two years later he graduated from Yale's School of Medicine. Colby started his career as a professor of computer science at Stanford, and also did some research for the National Institute of Mental Health. It was there that he created Parry in the university's Artificial Intelligence Library. Parry was a chatterbot, and able to have conversations with people.