Addressing the fundamental issues or principles underlying the task of Artificial Intelligence, the editors have selected not only papers now recognized as classics but also many specially commissioned papers that together examine the methodological and theoretical foundations of the discipline from a wide variety of perspectives: computer science and software engineering, cognitive psychology, philosophy and formal logic, and linguistics. Carefully planned and structured, the volume as a whole tackles many of the contentious questions of immediate concern to AI researchers and interested...

Machine Conversationsis a collection of some of the best research available in the practical arts of machine conversation. The book describes various attempts to create practical and flexible machine conversation - ways of talking to computers in an unrestricted version of English or some other language. While this book employs and advances the theory of dialogue and its linguistic underpinnings, the emphasis is on practice, both in university research laboratories and in company research and development. Since the focus is on the task and on the performance, this book provides some...

Modeling of individual beliefs is essential to the computer understanding of natural languages. Phenomena at all levels -- syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic -- cannot be fully analyzed in the absence of models of a hearer and of the hearer's model of other believers. The heart of this text is the presentation of an artificial intelligence (AI) program intended to simulate certain aspects of a human believer. This book provides a prolog program, Viewgen, that maintains belief structures about the world and other believers, and is able to ascribe beliefs to others without direct...

Natural Language Processing as a Foundation of the Semantic Web argues that Natural Language Processing (NLP) does, and will continue to, underlie the Semantic Web (SW), including its initial construction from unstructured sources like the World Wide Web, in several different ways, and whether its advocates realise this or not. Chiefly, it argues, such NLP activity is the only way up to a defensible notion of meaning at conceptual levels based on lower level empirical computations over usage. The claim being made is definitely not logicbad, NLP-good in any simple-minded way, but that the SW...

As a pioneer in computational linguistics, working in the earliest days of language processing by computer, Margaret Masterman believed that meaning, not grammar, was the key to understanding languages, and that machines could determine the meaning of sentences. This volume brings together Masterman's groundbreaking papers for the first time, demonstrating the importance of her work in the philosophy of science and the nature of iconic languages. This book will be of key interest to students of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Machine Conversationsis a collection of some of the best research available in the practical arts of machine conversation. The book describes various attempts to create practical and flexible machine conversation - ways of talking to computers in an unrestricted version of English or some other language. While this book employs and advances the theory of dialogue and its linguistic underpinnings, the emphasis is on practice, both in university research laboratories and in company research and development. Since the focus is on the task and on the performance, this book provides some...

Machine Translation (MT) is both an engineering technology and a measure of all things to do with languages and computers whenever a new theory of language or linguistics is offered, an important criteria for its success is whether or not it will improve machine translation.

This book presents a history of machine translation (MT) from the point of view of a major writer and innovator in the subject. It describes and contrasts a range of approaches to the challenges and problems of this remarkable technology by means of a combination of historic papers along with commentaries to...

Modeling of individual beliefs is essential to the computer understanding of natural languages. Phenomena at all levels -- syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic -- cannot be fully analyzed in the absence of models of a hearer and of the hearer's model of other believers. The heart of this text is the presentation of an artificial intelligence (AI) program intended to simulate certain aspects of a human believer. This book provides a prolog program, Viewgen, that maintains belief structures about the world and other believers, and is able to ascribe beliefs to others without direct...