This paper describes krl, a Knowledge Representation Language designed for use in understander systems. It outlines both the general concepts which underlie our research and the details of KRL-0, an experimental implementation of some of these concepts. These forms provide a variety of ways to express the logical structure of the knowledge, in order to give flexibility in associating procedures (for memory and reasoning) with specific pieces of knowledge, and to control the relative accessibility of different facts and descriptions. The formalism for declarative knowledge is based on structured conceptual objects with associated descriptions. These objects form a network of memory units with several different sorts of linkages, each having well-specified implications for the retrieval process.

Cutting-edge and "big-picture" in perspective, this popular introduction to cognitive development focuses on both the fascinating nature of children's thinking and the excitement and change in work in this area. Using an integrated topical approach, it explores the developmental aspects of social cognition, perception, memory, and language. Theoretically balanced, it considers the full spectrum of approaches--from Piaget's developmental stages, to information-processing (including connectionism), dynamic systems, contextual, theory-change, neo-Piagetian, evolutionary, neuroscience, and constraint approaches.

Diagrams are of substantial benefit to WHISPER, a computer problem-solving system, In testing the stability of a "blocks world" structure and predicting the event sequences which occur as that structure collapses. WHISPER'S components include a high level reasoner which knows some qualitative aspects of Physics, a simulated parallel processing "retina" to "look at" Its diagrams, and a set of re-drawing procedures for modifying these diagrams. Diagrams enable WHISPER to work with objects of arbitrary shape, detect collisions and other motion discontinuities, discover coincidental alignments, and easily update its world model after a state change.

This note describes LIFER, a practical facility for creating natural language interfaces to other computer software. Emphasizing human engineering, LIFER has bundled natural language specification and parsing technology into one convenient package.

The ROBOT project is to develop an English interface to data base management systems (DBMS). Our approach calls for mapping English language questions into a language of data base semantics that is independent of the content of the data base. In this way we work in a "movable miniworld" since the semantic primitives are fixed, but the area of discourse varies with the content of the data base. Thus, by making only dictionary changes we have interfaced a student grade file and employee file and a data dictionary.

Torres D. D and Rocco S. C A comparative study for assessing the reliability of complex networks using rules extracted from different machine learning approaches Proceedings of the 18th Australian Joint conference on Advances in Artificial Intelligence, (954-958)

Programs in the artificial intelligence domain impose unusual requirements on control structures. Production systems are a control structure with promising attributes for building, generally intelligent systems with large knowledge bases. This paper presents examples to illustrate the unusual position taken by production systems on a number of control and pattern-matching issues. Examples are chosen to illustrate certain powerful features and to provide critical tests which might be used to evaluate the effectiveness of new designs.

Prolog is a simple but powerful programming language founded on symbolic logic. The basic computational mechanism is a pattern matching process ("unification") operating on general record structures ("terms" of logic). We briefly review the language and compare it especially with pure Lisp. The remainder of the paper discusses techniques for implementing Prolog efficiently; in particular we describe how to compile the patterns involved in the matching process. These techniques are as incorporated in our DECsystem-10 Prolog compiler (written in Prolog).

Planning is the process of formulating an intended course of action. In this paper we present a model of planning and describe the current version of an INTERLISP simulation of the model. We also review psychological results which confirm the model's basic assumptions for human planning behavior.

This paper describes an investigation of the feasibility of resolving anaphors in natural language texts by means of a'shallow processing' approach which exploits knowledge of syntax, semantics and local focussing as heavily as possible; it does not rely on the presence of large amounts of world or domain knowledge, which are notoriously hard to process accurately. The ideas reported are implemented in a program called SPAR (Shallow Processing Anaphor Resolver), which resolves anaphoric ambiguities in simple English stories and generates sentence-by-sentence paraphrases that show what interpretations have been selected. To resolve anaphors, SPAR combines and develops several existing techniques, most notably Sidner's theory of local focussing and Wilks' 'preference semantics' theory of semantics and common sense inference Consideration of the need to resolve several anaphors in the same sentence results in Sidner's framework being modified and extended to allow focus-based processing to interact more flexibly with processing based on other types of knowledge. Wilks' treatment of common sense inference is extended to incorporate a wider range of types of inference without jeopardizing its uniformity and simplicity. In the absence of large quantities of world knowledge, successful anaphor resolution is seen to depend on the coordination of predictions made by system components exploiting various knowledge sources.