In developing telephone-based conversational systems, we foresee future systems capable of supporting multiple domains and flexible vocabulary. Users can pursue several topics of interest within a single telephone call, and the system is able to switch transparently among domains within…

by Abbinav Taneja., Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Technology and Policy Program; and, (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2000., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-116).

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have…

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…