We have developed a method and prototype program for assisting two experts in their attempts to construct a single, consensus knowledge base. We show that consensus building can be effectively facilitated by a debugging approach that identifies, explains, and resolves…

Most knowledge representation languages are based on classes and taxonomic relationships between classes. Taxonomic hierarchies without defaults or exceptions are semantically equivalent to a collection of formulas in first order predicate calculus. Although designers of knowledge representation languages often express…

This research is concerned with designing representations for analytical reasoning problems (of the sort found on the GRE and LSAT). These problems test the ability to draw logical conclusions. A computer program was developed that takes as input a straightforward…

This report shows how knowledge about the visual world can be built into a shape representation in the form of a descriptive vocabulary making explicit the important geometrical relationships comprising objects' shapes. Two computational tools are offered: (1) Shapestokens are…

This paper examines the issues and the solutions that have been studied in database (DB) integration research and tries to draw lessons from them for knowledge base (KB) integration.

by Eric Saund., Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 1989., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 293-300).

This report elucidates the linguistic representation of temporal relations among events. This involves examining sentences that contain two clauses connected by words like once, by the time, when, and before. Specifically, the effect of the tenses of the connected clauses…

The Bifurcation Interpreter is a computer program that autonomously explores the steady-state orbits of one-parameter families of periodically- driven oscillators. To report its findings, the Interpreter generates schematic diagrams and English text descriptions similar to those appearing in the science…

The goal of this paper is to determine if the results for dynamic job-shop scheduling problems are affected by the assumptions made with regard to the processing time distributions and the scheduler's knowledge of the processing times. Three dynamic jobshop…

This paper describes a natural language system START. The system analyzes English text and automatically transforms it into an appropriate representation, the knowledge base, which incorporates the information found in the text. The user gains access to information stored in…