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 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,…