The automatic disambiguation of word senses has been an interest and concern since the earliest days of computer treatment of language in the 1950's. Sense disambiguation is an “intermediate task ” (Wilks and Stevenson, 1996) which is not an end in itself, but rather is necessary at one level or another to accomplish most natural language processing tasks. It is

Introduction Since the time that "God made man in His own image", humans have been fascinated by stories about artifacts coming to life. Ancient myth, fairytales, literature, and science fiction abound with stories of artificial beings. In the older stories, although it is people who make the beings, it is the power of supernatural forces that bestows life. Ovid's story of Pygmalion is perhaps one the most famous from mythology; a sculptor falls in love with his sculpture of a woman which the goddess Venus then brings to life. Then there is the ancient Guianan Indian fairytale about a witch doctor who carved himself a daughter out of a plum tree because he needed a son-in-law to look after him. Similarly, there is the story of the wooden puppet Pinocchio who desires and eventually obtains boyhood (a desire that parallels that of the android Commander Data in "Star Trek: the Next Generation"). In days of old, the breath of life into the inanimate was a mystery that extolled th

Abstract. The goal of our study is to evaluate the effect on program comprehension of three factors that have not previously been studied in a single experiment. These factors are programmer expertise (expert versus novice), programming task (documentation versus reuse), and the development of understanding over time (phase 1 versus phase 2). This study is carried out in the context of the mental model approach to comprehension based on van Dijk and Kintsch’s model [(1983) Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic]. One key aspect of this model is the distinction between two kinds of representation the reader might construct from a text: (1) the textbase, which refers to what is said in the text and how it is said, and (2) the situation model, which represents the situation referred to by the text. We have evaluated the effect of the three factors mentioned above on the development of both the textbase (or program model) and the situation model in object-oriented program comprehension. We found a four-way interaction of expertise, phase, task and type of model. For the documentation group we found that experts and novices differ in the elaboration of their situation model but not their program model. There was no interaction of expertise with phase and type of model in the documentation group. For the reuse group, there was a three-way interaction between phase, expertise and type of model. For the novice reuse group, the effect of the phase was to increase the construction of the situation model but not the program model.

Abstract. The implementation of situated agents that mimic aspects of human or animal cognition requires psychological theories with regard to motivation, perception, emotion and memory that are both detailed and formal. The ‘Psi’ theory of psychologist D. Dörner provides a framework for agents that fulfills some of these demands and focuses on emotional modulation of perception, action-selection, planning and memory access. This paper is an attempt at giving a short introduction to artificial emotion, some aspects of Dörner’s theory and briefly hints at possible lines of extension. 1

It has been suggested that the enterprise of developing mechanistic theories of the human cognitive architecture is flawed because the theories produced are not directly falsifiable. Newell attempted to sidestep this criticism by arguing for a Lakatosian model of scientific progress in which cognitive architectures should be understood as theories that develop over time. However, Newell’s own candidate cognitive architecture adhered only loosely to Lakatosian principles. This paper reconsiders the role of falsification and the potential utility of Lakatosian principles in the development of cognitive architectures. It is argued that a lack of direct falsifiability need not undermine the scientific development of a cognitive architecture if broadly Lakatosian principles are adopted. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the Lakatosian concepts of positive and negative heuristics for theory development and of general heuristic power offer methods for guiding the development of an architecture and for evaluating the contribution and potential of an architecture’s research program.

The objective of this research is to formally define a spatio-temporal conceptual model that captures the data semantics required for temporal (e.g., accounting, portfolio management and personnel management) and geospatial (e.g., facility management, transportation and logistics) applications. We show how the proposed model provides a metaphor that bridges the semantic gap between the real world and its spatio-temporal representation in the information systems. We also demonstrate how the proposed model can be employed for integration of distributed spatio-temporal data, thus, bridging the semantic gap between the information producers and its consumers. Our multimethodological research approach includes: (i) formally defining a spatio-temporal semantic model using set theory; (ii) evaluating the proposed model using a case study at the US Geological Survey (USGS), and an experiment; and (iii) demonstrating practicality of our proposed model using a proof-of-concept prototype system. 2 1. Background and Objectives Almost all real world applications, e.g., accounting, portfolio management, personnel management

Creativity is essential to an organization’s survival. In order to remain productive and adaptive, an organization’s members must devise creative solutions – solutions that work, and that fall outside the set of known solutions. The Cognitive Network Model (CNM) of creativity proposes a cognitive explanation of the mechanisms that cause creative solutions to occur in the human mind. This paper reports the results of an experimental test of CNM. Sixty-one four-person groups used either the FreeBrainstorming thinkLet or the DirectedBrainstorming thinkLet to generate solutions for one of two ill-structured tasks. In FreeBrainstorming, participants generate creative solutions without intervention from a moderator. In DirectedBrainstorming, a moderator presents a series of oral prompts at fixed intervals to stimulate new lines of thinking. To gain more insight into the mechanisms underlying creativity, we tested three levels of variety among the moderator’s prompts. In both tasks, people using DirectedBrainstorming produced solutions with higher average creativity ratings, and higher concentrations of creative solutions than did people using FreeBrainstorming. Significant differences were also found among the three levels of variety used for DirectedBrainstorming.

This paper deals with problems of learning in the working environment and introduces ideas of supporting the learning on demand process. With the system LEAR (Learners Living Repository), we propose a solution that supports users in exploiting and exchanging learning and consultation episodes: Users can describe problems or solutions when accomplishing tasks by memos or by registered screen actions, comment on them, and store them in a personal "demotheque". Users can send memos and registered screen actions that describe questions or problems as a request for off-line help to a consultant. Memos and registered screen actions that describe representative solutions can be made available to a group of users in a "purse for demos".

. In this report, I show that a reverse-Hebb synaptic modification rule leads to the enhancement of response specificity of simulated visual cortex neurons in the absence of spatial patterning of the afferent activity. Although it is clear that receptive fields in the visual cortex can be modified by experience, many studies have shown a substantial increase of response specificity in cats deprived of pattern vision by lid suture, leading some to conclude that receptive field properties are essentially hard-wired. The hard-wired vs. experience-dependent controversy can be resolved by assuming that while Hebb-type plasticity is responsible for developmental synaptic changes, the organization of presynaptic activity which exists under conditions of visual deprivation is sufficient to drive the neurons towards greater specificity (Linsker 1986a-c; Miller 1989, 1992; Miller et al. 1989). As a reverse-Hebb rule enhances response specificity by balancing the push-pull system of ONa...

This paper deals with todays shortcomings of learning in the working environment, it discusses the state of the art in the literature, and introduces our ideas of supporting the learning on demand process in a social environment. The support provides opportunities for creating, editing and using memos or registered screen actions and exchanging them within a group of domain workers. We are currently developing a conceptual framework that will be implemented and evaluated in a realistic work setting.