[Robotgroup] Fwd: [fai] Forum for AI, Monday, August 25, Alexander Koller, Saarland University (at UT)

[Bryan Bishop]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [fai] Forum for AI, Monday, August 25, Alexander Koller, 
Saarland University
Date: Sunday 17 August 2008
From: "Lily Mihalkova" <lilyanam at cs.utexas.edu>
To: fai at utlists.utexas.edu

An AI talk from the Linguistics department:

Speaker:  Alexander Koller,  Saarland University

Title:      Generation as planning

Date:      Monday, August 25th, 2008

Time:      3:00pm

Place:    PAR 301

ABSTRACT:

Joint work with Matthew Stone and Ron Petrick.

The problem of natural language generation is intimately related to AI
planning on many levels. In both problems, the computer has to search
for a sequence of actions that combine in appropriate ways to achieve
a given goal; in the case of generation, these actions may correspond
to uttering speech acts, sentences, or individual words. This has been
recognized in the literature for several decades, but there is
currently a revival of interest in exploring this connection, which
has been sparked especially by the recent efficiency improvements in
planning. In my talk, I will first show how sentence generation can be
translated into a planning problem. This has the advantage that the
(somewhat artificial) separation of sentence generation into
microplanning and surface realization can be overcome. Furthermore,
each plan action captures the complete grammatical, semantic, and
pragmatic preconditions and effects of uttering a single word. I will
then present a new shared task for the generation community, in which
the system must generate instructions in a virtual environment. I will
discuss some problems that arise in this application -- particularly
regarding the use of extralinguistic context in generation -- and
propose some ideas on how they can be tackled using a planning
approach.

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The Forum for Artificial Intelligence meets regularly to discuss
scientific, philosophical, and cultural issues in artificial
intelligence.  Both technical research topics and broader
inter-disciplinary aspects of AI are covered, and all are welcome to
attend.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab/fai/

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