This manual is intended to be a guide to the philosophy and use of the programming language CONNIVER, which is "complete," and running at the AI Lab now. It assumes good knowledge of LISP, but no knowledge of Micro-Planner, in…

How does a person answer questions about children's stories? For example, consider 'Janet wanted Jack's paints. She looked at the picture he was painting and said 'Those paints make your picture look funny.' The question to ask is 'Why did…

The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposes to continue its work on a group of closely interconnected projects, all bearing on questions about how to make computers able to use more sophisticated kinds of knowledge to solve difficult problems. This proposal explains…

How can we construct a program that will understand stories that children would understand? By understand we mean the ability to answer questions about the story. We are interested here with understanding natural language in a very broad area. In…

The goal of the work reported here is to capture the commonsense knowledge of non-expert human contributors. Achieving this goal will enable more intelligent human-computer interfaces and pave the way for computers to reason about our world. In the domain…

The idea of building a programmer is very seductive in that it holds the promise of massive bootstrapping and thus ties in with many ideas about learning and teaching. I will avoid going into those issues here. It is necessary,…

Data quality issues have taken on increasing importance in recent years. In our research, we have discovered that many “data quality” problems are actually “data misinterpretation” problems – that is, problems with data semantics. In this paper, we first illustrate…

This paper presents an intelligent, hybrid system for stamping process planning in progressive die design. The system combines the flexibility of blackboard architecture with case-based reasoning. The hybrid system has the advantage that it can use past knowledge and experience…

In a Communication Bootstrapping system, peer components with different perceptual worlds invent symbols and syntax based on correlations between their percepts. I propose that Communication Bootstrapping can also be used to acquire functional definitions of words and causal reasoning knowledge.…

A speech controlled animation system is both a useful application program as well as a laboratory in which to investigate context aware applications as well as controlling errors. The user need not have prior knowledge or experience in animation and…