In this issue, Luc Steels takes a new Clay Carr, Homer Chin, Aaron Cohn, overly commercial tone, for example, and insightful look at knowledgebased Michael Compton, Ajit Dingankar, an article that serves mainly to extol systems and provides a synthesis Lance Eliot, David Fogel, Tom the virtues of a commercial product. of several different approaches to Gruber, Uma Gupta, Larry Hall, Jim Second, the article should be well analyzing expertise. It's a long article Hightower, Dwight Johnson, Bob written. We don't have the editorial but, in my opinion, an important Joyce, Murali Krishnamurthi, John staff to do extensive rewriting. I recommend it to anyone with Kunz, Douglas Leyh, Jim MacDonald, and perhaps, unfortunately, an interest in knowledge-level analysis Brigitte Maitre, Robert Newstadt, we rarely publish manuscripts of expert systems. On the same Matthew Realff, Jeff Schlimmer, Allen submitted by non-English-speaking general topic of expert systems but Sherzer, Bob Smith, Scott Staley, Lynn authors.

Many barriers exist today that prevent effective industrial exploitation of current and future AI research. These barriers can only be removed by people who are working at the scientific forefront in AI and know potential industrial needs. The Knowledge Processing Laboratory's research and development concentrates in the following areas: (1) natural language interfaces to knowledge-based systems and databases; (2) theoretical and experimental work on qualitative modeling and nonmonotonic reasoning for future knowledge-based systems; (3) application-specific language design, in particular, Prolog extensions; and (4) desi gn and analysis of neural networks. This article gives the reader an overview of the main topics currently being pursued in each of these areas.

A full book, available for free in PDF form.From the preface:A major problem in artificial intelligence is to endow computers with commonsense knowledge of the world and with the ability to use that knowledge sensibly. A large body of research has studied this problem through careful analysis of typical examples of reasoning in a variety of commonsense domains. The immediate aim of this research is to develop a rich language for expressing commonsense knowledge, and inference techniques for carrying out commonsense reasoning. This book provides an introduction and a survey of this body of research. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first book to attempt this.The book is designed to be used as a textbook for a one-semester graduate course on knowledge representation.Morgan Kaufmann

Databases are at the heart of most real-world knowledge base systems. The management and effective use of these databases will be the limiting factors in our ability to build ever more complex AI systems. This article reports on a workshop that explored how databases and their associated technologies can best be used in the development of large AI applications.

Text planning is one of the most rapidly growing subfields of language generation. Until the 1988 AAAI conference, no workshop has concentrated on text planning and its relationship to realiza-tion. This report is a summary of that workshop.

Largely from this Traditionally, systems that automatically and realization--was widely experience, we came to understand generate natural language have deemed more convenient than accurate: the sorts of tasks that a text planner been conceived as consisting of two The components of a generator has to perform: determining which principal components: a text planner should be able to communicate at elements to say, coherently structuring and a realization grammar. Recent any level where their information is the input elements, building advances in the art, especially in the applicable.

The A.T. Nonmonotonic Workshop multisubmission paper policy by Anderson Memorial Scholarship Program The third international workshop on IJCAI was deferred until the of the American Indian Science August meeting.

This article records the results of an experiment in which a survey of AI and expert systems (ES) literature was attempted using Science Citation Indexes. The survey identified a sample of authors and institutions that have had a significant impact on the historical development of AI and ES. However, it also identified several glaring problems with using Science Citation Indexes as a method of comprehensively studying a body of scientific research. Accordingly, the reader is cautioned against using the results presented here to conclude that author A is a better or worse AI researcher than author B.

Knowledge Acquisition, 1[#1]:3-37

ABSTRACT Classifier systems are massively parallel, message-passing, rule-based systems that learn through credit assignment (the bucket brigade algorithm) and rule discovery (the genetic algorithm). They typically operate in environments that exhibit one or more of the following characteristics: (1) perpetually novel events accompanied by large amounts of noisy or irrelevant data; (2) continual, often real-time, requirements for action; (3) implicitly or inexactly defined goals; and (4) sparse payoff or reinforcement obtainable only through long action sequences. Classifier systems are designed to absorb new information continuously from such environments, devising sets of compet- ing hypotheses (expressed as rules) without disturbing significantly capabilities already acquired. This paper reviews the definition, theory, and extant applications of classifier systems, comparing them with other machine learning techniques, and closing with a discussion of advantages, problems, and possible extensions of classifier systems. Artificial Intelligence, 40 (1-3), 235-82.