Applying Machine Learning to Discourse Processing

The topics of the eight symposia were (1) Applying Machine Learning to Discourse Processing, (2) Integrating Robotic Research: Taking the Next Leap, (3) Intelligent Environments, (4) Intelligent Text Summarization, (5) Interactive and Mixed-Initiative Decision-Theoretic Systems, (6) Multimodal Reasoning, (7) Prospects for a Common-Sense Theory of Causation, and (8) Satisficing Models. In addition, two tutorials provided an overview of various machine-learning techniques and how some have been applied to other areas of NLP. During the discussion and panel sessions, a number of open problems were raised. There was much discussion on the availability of annotated corpora in the public domain to facilitate the application of supervised machine-learning techniques and allow the comparison of results obtained using different learning approaches. The American Association for Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, held the 1998 Spring Symposium Series on 23 to 25 March at Stanford University.