Means-ends analysis is a seemingly well understood search technique, which can be described, using planning terminology, as: keep adding actions that are feasible and achieve pieces of the goal. Unfortunately, it is often the case that no action is both feasible and relevant in this sense. The traditional answer is to make sabgoals out of the preconditions of relevant but infeasible actions. Th...

This report introduces a new speech task based on simple questions and answers. The task differs from a traditional sentence recall task in that it involves an element of comprehension and can be implemented in an ongoing fashion. It also contains two target items (the question and the answer) that may be associated with different voices and locations to create dynamic listening scenarios. A se...

We need well-founded theories linking attentional phenomena at the cognitive, psychological level to neurophysiological phenomena at the level of individual neurons, and we want the theories to be as precise as possible. Is it currently feasible to formulate such theories in mathematical terms? Here I argue, by example, for a positive answer. My example is the neural theory of visual attention ...

In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of a novel resource for Multilingual Question Answering (QA). Such a resource consists of a set of multilingual pattern libraries for answer extraction and validation. In the spirit of the ongoing attempts to develop freely available resources for QA, we argue that the distribution and use of pattern libraries will contribute to make Multilingual Q...