The problem we consider in this paper is that of discovering formal ruleswhich will enable us to decide when a question posed in English can beanswered on the basis of one or more declarative English sentences. Toillustrate how this may be done in very simple cases we give rules whichtranslate certain declarative sentences and questions involving the quantifiers'some', 'every', 'any', and 'no' into a modified first-order predicate calculus,and answer the questions by comparing their translated forms with those ofthe declaratives. We suggest that in order to capture the meanings of morecomplex sentences it will be necessary to go beyond the first-order predicatecalculus, to a notation in which the scope of words other than quantifiersand negations is clearly indicated.Machine Intelligence 6

In N. V. Findler and B. Meltzer (Eds.), Artificial intelligence and heuristic programming. New York: American Elsevier, 81-100.

We describe the analysis of visual scenes consisting of black on white drawings formed with curved lines, depicting familiar objects and forms: houses, trees, persons, and so on; for instance, drawings found in coloring books. The goal of such analysis is to recognize (by computer) such forms and shapes when present in the input scene; that is, to name (correctly) as many parts of the scene as possible: finger, hand, girl, dance, and so on. Complications occur because each input scene contains several such objects, partially occluding each other and in varying degrees of orientation, size, and so on. The analysis of these line drawings is an instance of'the context problem', which can be stated as'given that a set (a scene) is formed by components that locally (by their shape) are ambiguous, because each shape allows a component to have one of several possible values (a circle can be sun, ball, eye, hole) or meanings, can we make use of context information stated in the form of models, in order to single out for each component a value in such manner that the whole set (scene) is consistent or makes global sense?' Thus, shape drastically limits the values that a component could have, and further disambiguation is possible only by using global information (derived from several components and their interrelations or interconnections) under the assumption that the scene as a whole is meaningful. This paper proposes a way to solve'the context problem' in the paradigm of coloring book drawings. We have not implemented this approach; indeed, a purpose of this paper is to collect criticisms and suggestions.

In IJCAI 1971: INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

In R. J. O'Brien (Ed.), Report of the twenty-second annual round table meeting on linguistics and language studies. (Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, No. 24.) Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 35-56.

Invited paper presented at the IEEE Systems Science and Cybernetics Conference, Miami

This paper describes a data structure, MENS (MEmory Net Structure), that is useful for storing semantic information stemming from a natural language, and a system, MENTAL (MEmory Net That Answers and Learns) that interacts with a user (human or program), stores information into and retrieves information from MENS and interprets some information in MENS as rules telling it how to deduce new information from what is already stored. MENTAL can be used as a guestion-answering system with formatted input/output, as a vehicle for experimenting with various theories of semantic structures or as the memory management portion of a natural language question-answering system.See also:U. Wisconsin Technical Report 109 versionScanned, non-OCR, versionIn IJCAI-71: INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. British Computer Society, London, pp. 512-523.

A paradigm enabling heuristic problem solving programs to exploit an analogy between a current unsolved problem and a similar but previously solved problem to simplify it s search for a solu­tion is outlined. It is developed in detail for a first-order resolution logic theorem prover. Descriptions of the paradigm, implemented LISP programs, and preliminary experimental results are presented. This is believed to be the firs t system that develops analogical information and exploits it so that a problem-solving program can speed its search.IJCAI-71, British Computer Society, London, 1971. Revised version in Artificial intelligence 2(2):147- 178, fall, 1971.

Research Memorandum MIP-R-92. University of Edinburgh: Department of Machine Intelligence, School of Artificial Intelligence

Proceedings of the IJCAI, pp 359-364, London: British Computer Society, September 1971