The following problem will be considered: from scattered examples on the behavior of a dynamic system induce a description of the system. For the induced description to be concise and modular, we use a generic action formalism based on causality, that is representable in logic programming. It is relatively simple to induce a description of a dynamic system that suffers from the frame problem. T...

In this study we examined the read speech of native and nonnative speakers with respect to pausing details of audible breathing, particularly in disfluent phases. 20 German and 20 French native speakers read the same narrative text in their native (L1) and in their non-native language (L2). Some expected results were confirmed: more frequent pauses and more frequent disfluencies in L2, as well ...

Chinese is a tone language. For a tone, the characters of its F0 pitch contours will be quite different in the condition of continuant speaking from the isolated speaking. The present researches about the Chinese tone are still centralized on the isolated speaking one, and about tone in fluent speech, there are some statements about the phenomenon of the two-word, threeword, four-word co-readin...

We propose a simple relaxation of Reiter’s basic action theories, based on fluents without successor state axioms, that accommodates incompleteness beyond the initial database. We prove that fundamental results about basic action theories can be fully recovered and that the generalized framework allows for natural specifications of various forms of incomplete causal laws. We illustrate this by ...

This paper describes a polynomially-solvable class of temporal planning problems. Polynomiality follows from two assumptions. Firstly, by supposing that each sub-goal fluent can be established by at most one action, we can quickly determine which actions are necessary in any plan. Secondly, the monotonicity of sub-goal fluents allows us to express planning as an instance of STP ≠ (Simple Tempor...

Acquiring information about its environment by sensing is a crucial ability of autonomous robots. Based on the established solution to the Frame Problem of the Fluent Calculus, we present a new, unifying formalism for representing and reasoning about sensing actions, knowledge preconditions, conditional actions, non-knowledge, and about what goals a robot can possibly achieve.

Research on information extraction (IE) seeks to distill relational tuples from natural language text, such as the contents of the WWW. Most IE work has focussed on identifying static facts, encoding them as binary relations. This is unfortunate, because the vast majority of facts are fluents, only holding true during an interval of time. It is less helpful to extract PresidentOf(Bill-Clinton, ...

Fluents are logical descriptions of situations that persist, and composite fluents are statistically significant temporal relationships (nearly identical with those in Allen’s temporal calculus) between fluents. This paper presents an algorithm for learning composite fluents incrementally. The algorithm is tested with a large dataset of mobile robot episodes. The algorithm is given no knowledge...

Restricting the search space has shown to be an effective approach for improving the performance of automated planning systems. A planner-independent technique for pruning the search space is domain and problem reformulation. Recently, Outer Entanglements, which are relations between planning operators and initial or goal predicates, have been introduced as a reformulation technique for elimina...

In this paper we study the ramification problem in the setting of time-owl. Standard solutions from the literature on reasoning about action are inadequate because they rely on the assumption that fluents persist, and actions have effects on the next situation only. In this paper we provide a solution to the ramification problem based on an extension of the situation calculus and the work of Mc...