When Newell introduced the concept of the knowledge level as a useful level of description for computer systems, he focused on the representation of knowledge. This paper applies the knowledge level notion to the problem of knowledge acquisition. Two interesting issues arise. First, some existing machine learning programs appear to be completely static when viewed at the knowledge level. These programs improve their performance without changing their "knowledge." Second, the behavior of some other machine learning programs cannot be predicted or described at the knowledge level. These programs take unjustified inductive leaps. The first programs are called symbol level learning (SLL) programs; the second, non-deductive knowledge level learning (NKLL) programs. The paper analyzes both of these classes of learning programs and speculates on the possibility of developing coherent theories of each. A theory of symbol level learning is sketched, and some reasons are presented for believing...

This dissertation presents a model of the knowledge a person has about the spatial structure of a large-scale environment: the "cognitive map." The functions of the cognitive map are to assimilate new information about the environment, to represent the current position, and to answer route-finding and relative-position problems. This model (called the TOUR model) analyzes the cognitive map in terms of symbolic descriptions of the environment and operations on those descriptions. Knowledge about a particular environment is represented in terms of route descriptions, a topological network of paths and places, multiple frames of reference for relative positions, dividing boundaries, and a structure of containing regions. The current position is described by the "You Are Here" pointer, which acts as a working memory and a focus of attention. Operations on the cognitive map are performed by inference rules which act to transfer information among different descriptions and the "You Are Here"...

Digital libraries serving multimedia information that may be accessed in terms of geographic content and relationships are creating special challenges and opportunities for networked information systems. An especially challenging research issue concerning collections of georeferenced information relates tO the development of techniques supporting geographic information retrieval (GIR) that is both fuzzy and concept-based. Viewing the meta-information environment of a digital library as a heterogeneous set of services that support users in terms of GIR, we define a geographic knowledge representation system (GKRS) in terms of a core set of services of the meta-information environment that is required in supporting concept-based access to collections of geospatial information. In this paper, we describe an architecture for a GKRS and its implementation in terms of a prototype system. Our GKRS architecture loosely couples a variety of multimedia knowledge sources that are in part represen...

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Abstract: Consciousness is only marginally relevant to artificial intelligence (AI), because to most researchers in the field other problems seem more pressing. However, there have been proposals for how consciousness would be accounted for in a complete computational theory of the mind, from theorists such as Dennett, Hofstadter, McCarthy, McDermott, Minsky, Perlis, Sloman, and Smith. One can extract from these speculations a sketch of a theoretical synthesis, according to which consciousness is the property a system has by virtue of modeling itself as having sensations and making free decisions. Critics such as Harnad and Searle have not succeeded in demolishing a priori this or any other computational theory, but no such theory can be verified or refuted until and unless AI is successful in finding computational solutions of difficult problems such as vision, language, and locomotion. 1

Blogs are becoming an increasingly important medium— socially, academically, and politically. Much research has involved analyzing blogs, but less work has considered how such analytic techniques might be incorporated into tools for blog readers. A new tool, metaViz, analyzes political blogs for potential conceptual metaphors and presents them to blog readers. This paper presents a study exploring the types of critical and creative thinking fostered by metaViz as evidenced by user comments and discussion on the system. These results indicate the effectiveness of various system features at fostering critical thinking and creativity, specifically in terms of deep, structural reasoning about metaphors and creatively extending existing metaphors. Furthermore, the results carry broader implications beyond blogs and politics about exploring alternate configurations between computation and human thought. Author Keywords Metaphor, political blogs, blog readers, computational metaphor identification, critical thinking, creativity.

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Confronting the challenges of annotating naturally occurring text into a semantically structured form to facilitate automatic information extraction, current Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) systems have been specifically examining a semantic predicate-argument structure. Based on the Concept Description Language for Natural Language (CDL.nl) which is intended to describe the concept structure of text using a set of pre-defined semantic relations, we develop a parser to add a new layer of semantic annotation of natural language sentences as an extension of SRL. With the assumption that all relation instances are detected, we present a relation classification approach facing the challenges of CDL.nl relation extraction. Preliminary evaluation on a manual dataset, using Support Vector Machine, shows that CDL.nl relations can be classified with good performance. 1

Since 1985 the terminological representation system BACK (Berlin advanced computational knowledge representation system) has been developed at the Technical University Berlin. Its origin lies in the KL-ONE-based knowledge representation paradigm, semantic networks, and frame-based representation languages. The current system version has gone through several changes not only on the implementational level, but also on the conceptual level. For some time now the syntax has stabilized, and larger applications may be approached in the future. Until now, introductions to the BACK system as well as its representation language were distributed throughout several publications, making it difficult for users to learn to handle the system. Hence, we found it worthwhile to write a tutorial guide through the BACK system. With BACK V5 the representation language has changed. On the one hand it became much more uniformer than in previous versions, on the other hand it was extended by some useful constructs which allow an easier customization of the language. Thus, we felt also the need for a user manual documenting the revised language.

The authors wish to express their thanks to Joseph Campione for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.