This article describes FAQ FINDER, a natural language question-answering system that uses files of frequently asked questions as its knowledge base. Unlike AI question-answering systems that focus on the generation of new answers, FAQ FINDER retrieves existing ones found in frequently asked question files. Unlike information-retrieval approaches that rely on a purely lexical metric of similarity between query and document, FAQ FINDER uses a semantic knowledge base (WORDNET) to improve its ability to match question and answer. We include results from an evaluation of the system's performance and show that a combination of semantic and statistical techniques works better than any single approach.

A description of articles about AI systems that have the world wide web as their domain.

AI has been well supported by government research and development dollars for decades now, and people are beginning to ask hard questions: What really works? What are the limits? What doesn't work as advertised? What isn't likely to work? What isn't affordable? This article holds a mirror up to the community, both to provide feedback and stimulate more self-assessment. The significant accomplishments and strengths of the field are highlighted. The research agenda, strategy, and heuristics are reviewed, and a change of course is recommend-ed to improve the field's ability to produce reusable and interoperable components.

This paper investigates learning in a lifelong context. Lifelong learning addresses situations in which a learner faces a whole stream of learning tasks.Such scenarios provide the opportunity to transfer knowledge across multiple learning tasks, in order to generalize more accurately from less training data. In this paper, several different approaches to lifelong learning are described, and applied in an object recognition domain. It is shown that across the board, lifelong learning approaches generalize consistently more accurately from less training data, by their ability to transfer knowledge across learning tasks. 1 Introduction Supervised learning is concerned with approximating an unknown function based on examples. Virtuallyall current approaches to supervised learning assume that one is given a set of input-output examples, denoted by X, which characterize an unknown function, denoted by f.

This paper investigates learning in a lifelong context. Lifelong learning addresses situations in which a learner faces a whole stream of learning tasks. Such scenarios provide the opportunity to transfer knowledge across multiple learning tasks, in order to generalize more accurately from less training data. In this paper, several different approaches to lifelong learning are described, and applied in an object recognition domain. It is shown that across the board, lifelong learning approaches generalize consistently more accurately from less training data, by their ability to transfer knowledge across learning tasks.

This article is a reflection on the goals and focus of the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) Conference. The author begins with an historical review of the conference. He then goes on to discuss the role of the IAAI conference, including an examination of the relationship between AI scientific research and the application of AI technology. He concludes with a presentation of the new vision for the IAAI conference.

Paul Cohen's book Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence aims to encourage this trend by providing AI practitioners with the knowledge and tools needed for careful empirical evaluation. The volume provides broad coverage of experimental design and statistics, ranging from a gentle introduction of basic ideas to a detailed presentation of advanced techniques, often combined with illustrative examples of their application to the empirical study of AI. The book is generally well written, clearly organized, and easy to understand; it contains some mathematics -- but not enough to overwhelm readers. Examples come from AI work on planning, machine learning, natural language, and diagnosis.

Data mining and knowledge discovery in databases have been attracting a significant amount of research, industry, and media attention of late. What is all the excitement about? This article provides an overview of this emerging field, clarifying how data mining and knowledge discovery in databases are related both to each other and to related fields, such as machine learning, statistics, and databases. The article mentions particular real-world applications, specific data-mining techniques, challenges involved in real-world applications of knowledge discovery, and current and future research directions in the field.

Anytime algorithms give intelligent systems the capability to trade deliberation time for quality of results. This capability is essential for successful operation in domains such as signal interpretation, real-time diagnosis and repair, and mobile robot control. What characterizes these domains is that it is not feasible (computationally) or desirable (economically) to compute the optimal answer. This article surveys the main control problems that arise when a system is composed of several anytime algorithms. These problems relate to optimal management of uncertainty and precision. After a brief introduction to anytime computation, I outline a wide range of existing solutions to the metalevel control problem and describe current work that is aimed at increasing the applicability of anytime computation.

Data mining and knowledge discovery in databases have been attracting a significant amount of research, industry, and media attention of late. What is all the excitement about? This article provides an overview of this emerging field, clarifying how data mining and knowledge discovery in databases are related both to each other and to related fields, such as machine learning, statistics, and databases. The article mentions particular real-world applications, specific data-mining techniques, challenges involved in real-world applications of knowledge discovery, and current and future research directions in the field.