Review of Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future

Review of Expert Systems for the Technical Professional

The jacket notes to this book by James Allen say it is the most comprehensive, in-depth book to date covering all major aspects of natural language processing. This claim is probably realistic. The jacket notes to this book by James Allen say it is the most comprehensive, in-depth book to date covering all major aspects of natural language processing. This claim is probably realistic.

The contributions to this workshop indicate substantial advances in the technical foundations of the field. They also show that it is time to evaluate the existing approaches to commonsense reasoning problems.

The specific motivations underlying this research include the following propositions: (1) Reasoning from experimental evidence contained in the clinical literature is central to the decisions physicians make in patient care. Furthermore, the model can help us better understand the general principles of reasoning from experimental evidence both in medicine and other domains. Roundsman is a developmental computer system that draws on structured representations of the clinical literature to critique plans for the management of primary breast cancer. Roundsman is able to produce patient-specific analyses of breast cancer-management options based on the 24 clinical studies currently encoded in its knowledge base.

Decision theory and nonmonotonic logics are formalisms that can be employed to represent and solve problems of planning under uncertainty. We analyze the usefulness of these two approaches by establishing a simple correspondence between the two formalisms. The analysis indicates that planning using nonmonotonic logic comprises two decision-theoretic concepts: probabilities (degrees of belief in planning hypotheses) and utilities (degrees of preference for planning outcomes). We present and discuss examples of the following lessons from this decision-theoretic view of nonmonotonic reasoning: (1) decision theory and nonmonotonic logics are intended to solve different components of the planning problem; (2) when considered in the context of planning under uncertainty, nonmonotonic logics do not retain the domain-independent characteristics of classical (monotonic) logic; and (3) because certain nonmonotonic programming paradigms (for example, frame-based inheritance, nonmonotonic logics) are inherently problem specific, they might be inappropriate for use in solving certain types of planning problems.

Thanks from Jack and Janet Mostow for causing them to meet at AAAI'87 and subsequently marry; a correction to Jordan Pollack's affiliation; a correction to the winter 1988 wording of his report on Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Conceptual Information Processing; an addendum to the Slagle and Wick article in 9, 4: A Method for Evaluating Candidate Expert System Applications, citing Bruno Franck, and comments on Intelligent Computer-Aided Engineering by Kenneth D. Forbus in vol 9, no 3.

A panel session at the 1989 International Joint Conference on artificial intelligence in Los Angeles dealt with the subject of knowledge-based systems; the session was entitled "Expert Systems: How Far Can They Go?" The panelists included Randall Davis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Stuart Dreyfus (University of California at Berkeley); Brian Smith (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center); and Terry Winograd (Stanford University), chairman. Part 1 includes presentations from Winograd and Dreyfus. Part 2, which will appear in the Summer 1989 issue, includes presentations from Smith and Davis and concludes with the panel discussion.

The emergence of the blackboard architecture as a widely used paradigm for problem solving led us and other members of the blackboard research community to organize a workshop. The workshop was held during the 1987 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in Seattle. The main purpose of the workshop was to highlight the advances in blackboard architectures since the introduction of the paradigm in Hearsay-II and identify issues relevant to future blackboard system research. This article describes the issues raised and the discussions in each of the five workshop panels.

Robert K. Levin, Diane E. Drang, and Barry Edelson's book might better be titled, an introduction to expert systems: Turbo Pascal edition. THe book does not live up to the promise implied in the title.