ed versions of previous problem solutions have been studied both in the fields of AI planning (e.g. sequence—cf. Figure 5. 966 PLANNING AND SCHEDULING [Minion, 1985]) and programming by demonstration (e.g. [Cypher, 19933). In the former case they are reused for efficient planning from second principles, in the latter they enable a system to autonomously perform certain tasks on behalf of their ...

Case-based reasoning systems may suffer from the utility problem, which occurs when knowledge learned in an attempt to improve a system’s performaw.e degrades performance instead. There are two main classes of utility problems: performance utility problems and search-space utility problems. Search-space utility pmblealm, such as the branching problem in some macm-(~mtor systems [ETZIONI 1992] a...

Many algorithms extract terms from text together with some kind of taxonomic classification (is-a) link. However, the general approaches used today, and specifically the methods of evaluating results, exhibit serious shortcomings. Harvesting without focusing on a specific conceptual area may deliver large numbers of terms, but they are scattered over an immense concept space, making Recall judg...

Self-determination is the process by which people, who are governed by a foreign power, gain self-government. Often the people first form a sense of community—a sense of a shared identity, destiny, and core values—and then seek to invest those in a state, forming a nation (defined as a community invested in a state). The term self-determination is also used to refer to the normative principle t...

Towards Comprehensive Web Search by Erik Warren Selberg Chair of Supervisory Committee Associate Professor Oren Etzioni Department of Computer Science & Engineering The World Wide Web has rapidly become a key medium for information dissemination to all members of society. However, its disorganized nature and sheer size can make it difficult for people to find information. Web search services ha...

Agents which interact with humans on behalf of humans need a model of human social interaction in order to act appropriately. This paper is a brief description of such a model used by an agent to generate e-mail messages. 1. The problem There is a great deal of research in AI on multi-agent systems [Tambe et al. 1995; Etzioni, Lesh, & Segal 1993]. But there seems to be a growing need for agents...

Efficient reasoning in large knowledge bases is an important problem for AI systems. Hand-optimization of reasoning becomes impractical as KBs grow, and impossible as knowledge is automatically added via knowledge capture or machine learning. This paper describes a method for automatic extraction of axioms for efficient inference over large knowledge bases, given a set of query types and inform...

The application of machine-learning algorithms to the financial markets has been increasing in popularity in recent years. The majority of systems that have been created for the purpose of selecting stocks have utilized neural-network techniques. Our research has dealt with the feasibility of inductive logic approaches and the creation of a decision-list-based data-mining system, DL-$elect. Neu...

Heterogeneity and interoperability of Web data sources represent the current key issue in Web information extraction and integration. Warehouse approach and virtual approach are the common approaches adopted to integrate heterogeneous Web data sources. However, few analytic model and cost model were developed to measure and assess the efficiency and effectiveness of either approach or a combina...

We have explored how redundancy based techniques can be used in improving factoid question answering, definitional questions (“other”), and robust retrieval. For the factoids, we explored the meta approach: we submit the questions to the several open domain question answering systems available on the Web and applied our redundancy-based triangulation algorithm to analyze their outputs in order ...