Qualitative Reasoning for Intelligent Agents


Sponsor: Computer Science Division, Office of Naval Research

Principal Investigator: Kenneth D. Forbus

Project Summary: This project explores the use of qualitative physics to provide capabilities for intelligent agents. Understanding and using common sense reasoning about the physical world is a necessary prerequisite to creating many kinds of useful intelligent agents that collaborate with human partners to accomplish tasks. Examples of such tasks include damage control assessment, operations planning, sifting through on-line information for relevant data, teaching and tutoring, and developing complex scientific and engineering models. Towards these ends, we are

Our vehicle for these investigations is the creation of an experimental prototype, an Explanation Agent that accumulates explanations of how engineered systems work, and that uses this accumulated knowledge to answer questions and interactively formulate task-specific models of those systems.

Selected publications:

Paritosh, P.K. and Forbus, K.D. (2001). Common sense on the envelope. Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning.

Kuehne, S.E. and Forbus, K. D. (2002). Qualitative physics as a component in natural language semantics: A progress report. Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.

Paritosh, P.K. (2003). A sketch of a theory of quantity. Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, Brasilia, Brazil, August.

Kuehne, S. and Forbus, K. (2004). Capturing QP-relevant information from natural language text. Proceedings of the 18th International Qualitative Reasoning Workshop, Evanston, Illinois, USA, August.

Paritosh, P. and Forbus, K. (2004). Using strategies and AND/OR decomposition for back of the envelope reasoning. Proceedings of the 18th International Qualitative Reasoning Workshop, Evanston, Illinois, August.

Kuehne, S. E. (2004). On the Representation of Physical Quantities in Natural Language Text. Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago, Illinois, August.

Paritosh, P. and Forbus, K. (2005). Analysis of Strategic Knowledge in Back of the Envelope Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), Pittsburgh, PA.


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