AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium The Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana
This symposium was intended to be a meeting of researchers actively working on implemented knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) systems for general natural language processing (NLP) in order to assess the current state of that field. Specific topics of interest include the following.
Expressiveness and generality of the representation language with respect to natural language. For example, coverage of complex object descriptions and treatment of quantification. What are the trade-offs in increasing the expressiveness of the representation language to support natural language?
Inference methods that parallel reasoning in natural language. Natural deduction systems, for example, are so called because of the apparent naturalness of the proof procedure. Another example is surface reasoning, based on the syntactic structure of the natural language.
Ability of the formalism or system to capture important semantic and pragmatic aspects of natural language. For example, the computational relationship between the representation language and the parser/generator. Is it possible to define the representation language to facilitate this relationship? At what cost?
How many or kinds of representation languages are needed for general NLP? Many NLP systems actually use two representation languages: a semantic representation language that captures the semantics of a sentence, and a knowledge representation language that is used to do reasoning and represent the system's general knowledge about the domain. Typically these languages are quite different, with the former being a much more powerful language (including modalities, lambda expressions and other higher order constructs, generalized quantifiers, etc) and the latter being what the system's reasoning engine actually operates on, usually something more or less equivalent to first-order logic, (or an even more restricted vivid representation like a relational database) This raises the question of how these languages relate to each other, and if it is possible (or desirable) to have a semantic representation language that supports inference.
Panel discussion will includes stands on issues such as: what problems are solved, and how to use the solution(s); what areas need work; defense or attacks of the standard design of morphology-syntax-semantics-pragmatics
The format of this symposium was designed to encourage interaction amongst the participants.
Demonstrations of working NLP/KRR systems are also of interest, however attendees must provide their own hardware and software support. Attendees interested in this option should indicate what they are planning on demonstrating, and how they propose to do so.
Questions and indications of interest should be directed to the Symposium
Chair at:
syali@tigger.cs.uwm.edu
The symposium will be limited to between forty and sixty participants. Working notes will be prepared and distributed to participants in the symposium. Some financial support is possible for full-time student attendees.
In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other interested parties will be able to register in each symposium on a first-come, first- served basis. Registration will be available by mid-July 1994. To obtain registration information write to the AAAI at 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (fss@aaai.org).
Syed Ali (syali@tigger.cs.uwm.edu)