Thomas Gruber

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent digital assistant are disclosed. A user request is received, the user request including at least a speech input received from a user. In response to the user request, (1) an echo of the speech input based on a textual interpretation of the speech input, and (...

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent digital assistant are disclosed. A text string is obtained from a speech input received from a user. The received text string is interpreted to derive a representation of user intent based at least in part on a plurality of words associated with a user and st...

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent digital assistant are disclosed. A user request is received, the user request including at least a speech input received from the user. The user request is processed to obtain a representation of user intent, where the representation of user intent associates...

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent digital assistant are disclosed. A first task is performed using a first parameter. A text string is obtained from a speech input received from a user. Based at least partially on the text string, a second task different from the first task or a second parame...

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent digital assistant are disclosed. A text string is obtained from a speech input received from a user. Information is derived from a communication event that occurred at the electronic device prior to receipt of the speech input. The text string is interpreted...

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent automated assistant are disclosed. A user request is received through a conversation interface of the intelligent automated assistant, the user request including at least a speech input received from a user. One or more candidate domains relevant to the user...

Methods, systems, and computer readable storage medium related to operating an intelligent digital assistant are disclosed. A user request is received, the user request including at least a speech input received from a user. The user request including the speech input is processed to obtain a representation of user intent for identifying items of a...

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social Web. They arise from data about how people associate terms with content that they generate, share, or consume. Recen...

Ontologies are enabling technology for the Semantic Web. They are a means for people to state what they mean by the terms used in data that they might generate, share, or consume. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the social Web. They arise from data about how people associate terms with content that they generate, share, or consume. Recen...

We show how to deliver a sophisticated, yet intuitive, interactive application over the web using off-the-shelf web browsers as the interaction medium. This attracts a large user community, improves the rate of user acceptance, and avoids many of the pitfalls of software distribution.

stem. Their new system would inter-operate with existing systems, using them to perform some of its reasoning. In this way, declarative knowledge, problem solving techniques and reasoning services could all be shared among systems. The reusable modules in the library them-selves will bene#t from re#nements that are only possible through extensive u...

This document describes a compositional modeling language, CML, which is a general declarative modeling language for logically specifying the symbolic and mathematical properties of the structure and behavior of physical systems. CML is intended to facilitate model sharing between research groups, many of which have long been using similar language...

Virtual documents are hypermedia documents that are generated on demand in response to reader input. This paper describes a virtual document application that generates natural language explanations about the structure and behavior of electromechanical systems. The application, called DME, structures the interaction with the reader as a question-ans...

In the VT/Sisyphus experiment, a set of problem solving systems were being built against a common specification of a problem. An important hypothesis was that the specification could be given, in large part, as a common ontology. This article is that ontology. This ontology is different than normal software specification documents in two fundamenta...

We show how to deliver a sophisticated, yet intuitive, interactive application over the web using off-the-shelf web browsers as the interaction medium. This attracts a large user community, improves the rate of user acceptance, and avoids many of the pitfalls of software distribution. Web delivery imposes a novel set of constraints on user interfac...

The Generic Frame Protocol (GFP) is an application program interface for accessing knowledge bases stored in frame knowledge representation systems (FRSs). GFP provides a uniform model of FRSs based on a common conceptualization of frames, slots, facets, and inheritance. GFP consists of a set of Common Lisp functions that provide a generic interfac...

We describe an ontology for mathematical modeling in engineering. The ontology includes conceptual foundations for scalar, vector, and tensor quantities, physical dimensions, units of measure, functions of quantities, and dimensionless quantities. The conceptualization builds on abstract algebra and measurement theory, but is designed explicitly fo...

An ontology is a set of definitions of content-specific knowledge representation primitives: classes, relations, functions, and object constants. Ontolingua is mechanism for writing ontologies in a canonical format, such that they can be easily translated into a variety of representation and reasoning systems. This allows one to maintain the ontolo...

The design of products by multi-disciplinary groups is a knowledge intensive activity. Collaborators must be able to exchange information and share some common understanding of the information’s content. The hope, however, that a centralized standards effort will lead to integrated tools spanning the needs of engineering collaborators is misplaced....

Recent work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific...

Generating explanations of device behavior is a long-standing goal of AI research in reasoning about physical systems. Much of the relevant work has concentrated on new methods for modeling and simulation, such as qualitative physics, or on sophisticated natural language generation, in which the device models are specially crafted for explanatory p...

Effective information sharing and decision coordination are vital to collaborative product development and integrated manufacturing. However, typical special-purpose CAE systems tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, and typical integrated CAE systems tend to limit flexibility and process innovation. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineerin...

A design rationale is an explanation of why something is designed as it is. In this paper we analyze the sources of knowledge and inference underlying design rationale. We examine protocols of people talking about designs in several domains to identify kinds of design information that are requested and used. We classify the information types along...

. Research in design rationale support must confront the fundamental questions of what kinds of design rationale information should be captured, and how rationales can be used to support engineering practice. This paper examines the kinds of information used in design rationale explanations, relating them to the kinds of computational services that...

Information sharing and decision coordination are central problems for large-scale product development. This paper proposes a framework for supporting a knowledge medium [32]: a computational environment in which explicitly represented knowledge serves as a communication medium among people and their programs. The framework is designed to support i...

Although AI research and commercial system development depend on bodies of formally represented knowledge that are expensive and difficult to construct, current knowledge base design does not support the accumulation or reuse of such knowledge. This paper presents a strategy for building libraries of sharable, reusable knowledge in which common ont...

This paper introduces a panel to be held at the Knowledge Acquisition Track of the Machine Learning Workshop (ML91). This panel will focus on the problem of acquiring design rationale knowledge from humans for later reuse. The design of tools for design rationale capture reveals several fundamental issues for knowledge acquisition, such as the rela...

This paper takes an alternate view of design: that the designed artifact is an integrated human-machine system (IHMS). In this view, the human operator is a functional component of an intelligent system, contributing to the overall performance of the system. Performance often includes intelligent activity, where the human and machine share responsi...

Knowledge about the rationale for a design---how and why a device is designed as it is---can be valuable, but is difficult to capture in reusable form. This paper presents a view of design knowledge capture and the use of design knowledge for design rationale. We define design rationales as explanations in response to questions about the design. Th...

this paper is that the technology for generating the documentation---natural language explanations of simulations---is also used to acquire some of the knowledge needed to document a design.

We describe a method for generating causal explanations, in natural language, of the simulated behavior of physical devices. The method is implemented in DME, a system that helps formulate mathematical simulation models from a library of model fragments using a Compositional Modeling approach. Because explanations are generated from models that are...

To support the sharing and reuse of formally represented knowledge among AI systems, it is useful to define the common vocabulary in which shared knowledge is represented. A specification of a representational vocabulary for a shared domain of discourse—definitions of classes, relations, functions, and other objects—is called an ontology. This pape...

The Palo Alto Collaborative Testbed (PACT), a concurrent engineering infrastructure that encompasses multiple sites, subsystems, and disciplines, is discussed. The PACT systems include NVisage, a distributed knowledge-based integration environment for design tools; DME (Device Modeling Environment), a model formulation and simulation environment; N...

Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the user of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific pur...

A central purpose of knowledge acquisition technology is to assist with the formulation of domain models that underlie knowledge systems. In this article we examine the model formulation process itself as a problem-solving task. Drawing from AI research in qualitative reasoning about physical systems, we characterize the model formulation task in t...

The goal of enterprise integration is the development of computer-based tools that facilitate coordination of work and information flow across organizational boundaries. These proceedings, the first on EI modeling technologies, provide a synthesis of the technical issues involved; describe the various approaches and where they overlap, complement,...

Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) is a computer-oriented language for the interchange of knowledge among disparate programs. It has declarative semantics (i.e. the meaning of expressions in the representation can be understood without appeal to an interpreter for manipulating those expressions); it is logically comprehensive (i.e. it provides for...

hatwill enable researchers to develop new systems by selectingcomponents from library of reusable modulesand assembling them together. Their effort will be focusedon creating specialized knowledge and reasonersspecific to the task of their system. Their new systemwould inter-operate with existing systems, usingthem to perform some of its reasoning....

Building new knowledge-based systems today usually entails constructing new knowledge bases from scratch. It could instead be done by assembling reusable components. System developers would then only need to worry about creating the specialized knowledge and reasoners new to the specific task of their system. This new system would interoperate with...

An approach to acquiring justification that transforms why-questions into what-questions, borrowing the power of existing techniques, is discussed. The constrained dialogue has been implemented in an interactive tool, called ASK, that interviews experts and builds programs. The approach is applied to two different knowledge-acquisition problems; th...

In this paper I describe an approach to automated knowledge acquisition in which users specify desired system behavior by constructing justifications of examples. Justifications are explanations of why example behaviors are appropriate in given situations. I analyze the problem of acquiring justifications, showing how current knowledge acquisition...

The general knowledge acquisition problem and the problem of acquiring strategic knowledge from experts was addressed. An automated knowledge acquisition tool called ASK was described and demonstrated with a human machine dialog, and the results from experiments analyzed. The importance of the design of knowledge representations and reasoning metho...

Strategic knowledge is used by an agent to decide what action to perform next, where actions have consequences external to the agent. This article presents a computer-mediated method for acquiring strategic knowledge. The general knowledge acquisition problem and the special difficulties of acquiring strategic knowledge are analyzed in terms of rep...

In this article we present an automated method for acquiring strategic knowledge from experts. Strategic knowledge is used by an agent to decide what action to perform next, where actions effect both the agent's beliefs and the state of the external world. Strategic knowledge underlies expertise in many tasks, yet it is difficult to acquire from ex...

Knowledge acquisition is the transfer and transformation of expertise from knowledge sources in the world (mainly people) into a form that can be executed by a knowledge-based system to perform an expert task. It is widely acknowledged that the knowledge acquisition problem is a significant barrier to the development of knowledge-based systems. The...

This research focuses on the problem of acquiring strategic knowledge-knowledge used by an agent to decide what action to perform next. Strategic knowledge is especially difficult to acquire from experts by conventional methods, and it is typically implemented with low-level primitives by a knowledge engineer. This dissertation presents a method fo...

This paper presents an approach to the problem of acquiring strategic knowledge from experts. Strategic knowledge is used to decide what course of action to take, when there are confiicting criteria to satisfy and the effects of actions are not known in advance. We show how strategic knowledge challenges the current approaches to knowledge acquisit...

The problem of knowledge acquisition is viewed in terms of the incongruity between the representational formalisms provided by an implementation (e.g. production rules) and the formulation of problem-solving knowledge by experts. The thesis of this paper is that knowledge systems can be designed to facilitate knowledge acquisition by reducing repre...

A knowledge system architecture is a level of description of knowledge systems that specialises general AI implementation techniques to suit a class of problem solving tasks. This paper presents three complementary views of the architecture level, and analyzes their implications for the design of knowledge en­ gineering tools. The analysis is illus...

The design of products by multi-disciplinary groups is a knowledge intensive activity. Collaborators must be able to exchange information and share some common understanding of the information's content. The hope, however, that a centralized standards effort will lead to integrated tools spanning the needs of engineering collaborators is misplaced....

We show how to deliver a sophisticated, yet intuitive, interactive application over the web using off-the-shelf web browsers as the interaction medium. This attracts a large user community, improves the rate of user acceptance, and avoids many of the pitfalls of software distribution. Web delivery imposes a novel set of constraints on user interfac...