This paper describes a system for the computer understanding of English. The system answers questions, executes commands, and accepts information in normal English dialog. It uses semantic information and context to understand discourse and to disambiguate sentences. It combines a…

In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical systems will behave. This thesis discusses an implemented program…

Build is a tool for keeping modular systems in a consistent state by managing the construction tasks (e.g. compilation, linking, etc.) associated with such systems. It employs a user supplied system model and a procedural description of a task to…

In this paper, a restricted domain question answering (QA) system is described. The design architecture of this QA system and the features that allow the adaptation of the QA system to the medical domain are also presented. The advantages of…

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the…

This paper reports work in progress on an experimental text editor called CREF, the Cross Referenced Editing Facility. CREF deals with chunks of text, called segments, which may have associated features such as keywords or various kinds of links to…

Well-known methods for solving the shape-from-shading problem require knowledge of the reflectance map. Here we show how the shape-from-shading problem can be solved when the reflectance map is not available, but is known to have a given form with some…

Morphological analysis requires knowledge of the stems, affixes, combnatory patterns, and spelling-change processes of a language. The computational difficulty of the task can be clarified by investigating the computational characteristics of specific models of morphologial processing. The use of finite-state…

Intelligent agents in the physical world must work from incomplete information due to partial knowledge and limited resources. An agent copes with these limitations by applying rules of conjecture to make reasonable assumptions about what is known. Circumscription, proposed by…

The Knowledge-Based Editor in Emacs (KBEmacs) is the current demonstration system implemented as part of the Programmer's Apprentice project. KBEmacs is capable of acting as a semi-expert assistant to a person who is writing a program ??king over some parts…