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. Over the past eight years, this conference has undergone modest evolution, but a significant transformation is being planned for the next meeting.

The annual conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is the largest and most important meeting of AI theoreticians and practitioners in the United States This year, the conference was held in Seattle, Wash, and paid attendance was just under 5100 Last year's Philadelphia conference drew 5400 The drop in attendance was primarily the result of competition with the International /oint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in Milan a few weeks after AAAI I took advantage of the AAAI-87 exhibits to visit with a number of industry leaders and discuss the state of the U.S. AI marketplace. Vendors everywhere tend to be optimistic about their products and industries. Certainly, the AAAI vendors displayed optimism, but there was also an underlying current of doubt-or at least question. Questions raised by the vendors include the following: Does the recent lull in the market mean that the luster of AI and expert systems in particular is wearing thin? Are there more than a handful of significant expert systems in operation today?

Stranger Things, a show so continually obsessed over that it's become a game of find that reference, is still fascinating fans. The thriller pays tribute to a ton of iconic shows and movies, sometimes in ways that make the audience feel rewarded and cool, and other times in ways that make people feel like conspiracy theorists tumbling down an endless rabbit hole filled with mystery waffles. Of all the roughly 8,362 different influences in the canon of influences that the creators confirmed inspired the series, the PlayStation game Beyond Two Souls starring Ellen Page isn't one of them. But the interactive drama adventure game and the Netflix series do share some common elements. It's not that the show is directly referencing this game.

This paper details how OntoAgents, language-endowed intelligent agents developed in the OntoAgent framework, assess their confidence in understanding language inputs. It presents scoring heuristics for the following subtasks of natural language understanding: lexical disambiguation and the establishment of semantic dependencies; reference resolution; nominal compounding; the treatment of fragments; and the interpretation of indirect speech acts. The scoring of confidence in individual linguistic subtasks is a prerequisite for computing the overall confidence in the understanding of an utterance. This, in turn, is a prerequisite for the agent’s deciding how to act upon that level of understanding.

Negation is present in all human languages and it is used to reverse the polarity of parts of a statement. It is a complex phenomenon that interacts with many other aspects of language. Besides the direct meaning, negated statements often carry a latent positive meaning. Negation can be interpreted in terms of its scope and focus. This paper explores the importance of both scope and focus to capture the meaning of negated statements. Some issues on detecting negation from text are outlined, the forms in which negation occurs are depicted and heuristics to detect its scope and focus are proposed.

Ontologies have been criticized because they are not sufficiently flexible, and thus cannot capture the dynamism and complexity of reality. However, they have increasingly come into focus because of the need for knowledge management in both general and specialized knowledge domains. EcoLexicon is a frame-based visual thesaurus on the environment that is gradually evolving towards the status of a formal ontology. For this purpose, the information in its relational database is in the process of being linked to the ontological system of FunGramKB, a multipurpose knowledge base that has been specifically designed for natural language understanding with modules for lexical, grammatical, and conceptual knowledge. This enables the explicitation of specialized knowledge as an extension of general knowledge through its representation in the domain-specific satellite ontology of a main general ontology.

EcoLexicon is a multilingual terminological knowledge base (TKB) on the environment. It is currently being converted into a domain-specific ontology, however, ontological properties are modelled according to surface semantics. For this reason, we are integrating our TKB in the form of a “satellite ontology” into FunGramKB, a multipurpose knowledge base specifically designed for natural language understanding. We explain how the dynamism of environmental concepts can benefit from a formal description in meaning postulates and their inclusion in FunGramKB Cognicon scripts. This would lead to the automatic generation of flexible conceptual networks and definitional templates across different contexts.

The annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is the largest and most important meeting of AI theoreticians and practitioners in the United States. This year, the conference was held in Seattle, Wash., and paid attendance was just under 5100. Last year's Philadelphia conference drew 5400. The drop in attendance was primarily the result of competition with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which took place in Milan a few weeks after AAAI.