Natural language generation (NLG) is a major subfield of computational linguistics with a long tradition as an application area of automated planning systems. While things were relatively quiet with the planning approach to NLG for a while, several recent publications have sparked a renewed interest in this area. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which these new NLG approaches profit ...

Theoretical results on HTN planning are mostly related to the plan existence problem. In this paper, we study the structure of the generated plans in terms of the language they produce. We show that such languages are always context-sensitive. Furthermore we identify certain subclasses of HTN planning problems which generate either regular or context-free languages. Most importantly we have dis...

Humans and robots think in different ways: humans evaluate qualitatively while robots process quantitative data. For example, a human may say “I am at the east of the building” in expressing a location, while a robot may use a precise coordinate. Similarly a human may specify “run carefully” in requiring a behavior pattern, but a robot may read linear and angular velocities. There is a need to ...

We present an automatic procedure for pre-processing planning problems containing language axioms, a specific type of domain axioms. The axioms considered are assumed to be in the form p1 ∧ p2 ∧ ...∧ pn → c. The pre-processing approach described consists of encoding the language axioms directly inside the given operators, contrary to other (not always correct) existing approaches in which axiom...

The goal of this project is to develop the underlying technologies for spoken dialogue systems to serve as highly interactive interfaces to AI-based reasoning systems. Most current speech and natural language projects are focusing on applications that involve only limited dialog, and little intelligent reasoning, such as data-base query and form-filling applications. But the great promise for s...

The action language Golog allows specifying the behavior of autonomous systems with very flexible programs that leave certain aspects open to be resolved by the system. Such open aspects are often planning tasks, where the system needs to find a suitable course of actions to reach a given goal. The first part of this thesis aims to make highly efficient planning systems available to the Golog s...

AI Planning is inherently hard and hence it is desirable to derive as much information as we can from the structure of the planning problem and let this information be exploited by a planner. Many recent planners use the finite-domain state-variable representation of the problem instead of the traditional propositional representation. However, most planning problems are still specified in the p...

The action language Golog has been applied successfully to the control of robots, among other things. Perhaps its greatest advantage is that a user can write programs which constrain the search for an executable plan in a flexible manner. However, when general planning is needed, Golog supports this only in principle, but does not measure up with state-of-the-art planners. In this paper we prop...

In recent years, features have been introduced in modeling and planning for manufacturing of parts. Such features combine geometric and functional information. Here it is shown that the feature concept is also useful in assembly modeling and planning. For modeling and planning of both single parts and assemblies, an integrated object-oriented product model is introduced. For speci"c assembly-re...