This report contains a historical perspective on previous Distributed Artificial Intelligence Workshops, highlights of the roundtable discussions, and a collection of research abstracts submitted by the participants.

The First International Workshop on User Modeling in Natural Language Dialogue Systems was held 30-31 August 1986 in Maria Laach, West Germany. Issues addressed by the participants included the appropriate contents of a user model, techniques for constructing user models in both understanding and generating natural language dialogue, and the development of general user-modeling systems. This article includes an overview of the presentations made at the workshop. It is a compilation of the author's impressions and observations and is, therefore, undoubtedly incomplete; and at times might fail to accurately represent the views of the researcher presenting the work.

This conference is analogous to the ancient texts but little procedural consultation of philosophers and cognitive information), we had to rely on the This report is a review of the First psychologists by computer scientists pandits to whom the oral tradition had National Conference on Knowledge in the beginnings of AI. been passed. Representation and Inference in Western psychology and philosophy is The conference was inspired by Sri Sanskrit, Bangalore, India, 20 through quite different from the Indo-Aryan Paramananda Bharathi Swamiji and 22 December, 1986 The conference tradition: the former has its basis in was organized by Dr. H. N. Mahabala was inspired by an article that Aristotelian logic and the scientific (president, Computer Society of India; appeared in the Spring 1985 issue of method, whereas the latter is also chairman, Indian Institute of AI Magazine--"Knowledge based on introspection and internal Technology) and others. The conference Representation in Sanskrit and experience Nevertheless, both these was attended by the vice-chairman Artificial Intelligence." Virtually text.The purpose of AI in this context every institute of science, mathematics is to derive a "method" for natural language and engineering was represented. A working group has been created to was implicit; it was not the focus.

An important issue in achieving acceptance of computer systems used by the nonprogramming community is the ability to communicate with these systems in natural language. Often, a great deal of time in the design of any such system is devoted to the natural language front end. An obvious way to simplify this task is to provide a portable natural language front-end tool or facility that is sophisticated enough to allow for a reasonable variety of input; allows modification; and, yet, is easy to use. It allows for user input to be in sentence or nonsentence form or both, provides a detailed parse tree that the user can access, and also provides the facility to generate responses and save information.

To fully appreciate Professor Pearl's book, begin with a and the numerous techniques for representing knowledge careful reading of the title. It is a book about "..Intelligent-and uncertainty in common use in mainstream AI. ..Strategies.." for the discovery and use of "Heuristics.. " Chapter 5 begins a quantitative performance analysis of to allow computers to solve ".. Search.. ' ' problems. This includes a nice exposition on is a critical component in AI programs (Nilsson 1980, Barr branching processes, although the mathematically unsophisticated and Feigenbaum 1982), and in this sense Pearl's book is a reader may find it difficult. Here Pearl introduces strong contribution to the field of AI. It serves as an excellent probabilistic models to complement probabilistic heuristics. As a book about search, it is thorough, at analysis of search heuristics, and to a probabilistic analysis the state of the art, and contains expositions that will delight of nonadmissible heuristics in ...

An important issue in achieving acceptance of computer systems used by the nonprogramming community is the ability to communicate with these systems in natural language. Often, a great deal of time in the design of any such system is devoted to the natural language front end. An obvious way to simplify this task is to provide a portable natural language front-end tool or facility that is sophisticated enough to allow for a reasonable variety of input; allows modification; and, yet, is easy to use. This paper describes such a tool that is based on augmented transition networks (ATNs). It allows for user input to be in sentence or nonsentence form or both, provides a detailed parse tree that the user can access, and also provides the facility to generate responses and save information. The system provides a set of ATNs or allows the user to construct ATNs using system utilities. The system is written in Franz Lisp and was developed on a DEC VAX 11/780 running the ULTRIX-32 operating system.

Annual Review of Computer Science

Computational Linguistics, vol. 13, nos. 1-2, January-June 1987, pp. 47-63.

IEEE Computer, pages 100-109, January

The AI lab at the Courant Institute at New York University (NYU) is pursuing many different areas of artificial intelligence (AI), including natural language processing, vision, common sense reasoning, information structuring, learning, and expert systems. Other groups in the Computer Science Department are studying such AI-related areas as text analysis, parallel Lisp and Prolog, robotics, low-level vision, and evidence theory.