Peter Clark - Working Notes

These working notes are unpublished documents, giving informal summaries and discussions of various research issues. They are pre-publication material and of varying quality, and some of the ideas have since been superceded. A brief description of their contents is given below.

If you unable to download or print a paper, and would like a hard-copy, email me (peter.e.clark@boeing.com) with your postal address and I'll be happy to send a copy to you.

43. Project Halo: Making Sense of Questions in a Knowledge-Rich Environment (2011). Invited presentation at the DARPA Machine Reading Year Three Kickoff Meeting (PPTx, PDF).
42. Creating BLUE Formulations of the Refinement Phase Test Suite (RTS) Questions: Experience and Reflections (2010). We spent three months adding biology and lexical knowledge so that AURA could answer a test suite of fluently worded English questions. This document summarizes this experience, and its implications for future QA work with AURA. (PDF).
41. Query Relaxation in AURA. (2010). An intermediate reflection on the possible roles of query relaxation in AURA's QA module. (PDF).
40. A Brief Overview of Some Datapoints in the Query Relaxation Literature (2009). A short literature survey of the main themes in this area in the database literature. (plain text file).
39. RTE5: An Informal Analysis of Some Interesting Textual Entailment Examples (2010). A fairly informal discussion of what it would take to infer a hypothesis H from a text T for some selected RTE5 examples, using lexical and world knowledge (as opposed to shallow, statistical matching techniques). (PDF).
38. The KM to SILK Translator - Preliminary Design and Implementation (2010). A technical discussion of how to convert KM's prototypes, as build by knowledge engineers using the AURA system, into the F-Logic-like language SILK. (PDF). Also supporting material: silk-translator-examples.txt (The examples discussed in the Working Note), silk-translator.ppt (PowerPoint overview), silk-translator.lisp (Lisp implementation).
37. Evaluation of the New Paraphrase and Question Formulation Capability in AURA (2010). A description of recent developments in AURA's question-answering capabilities. (PDF).
36. The Semantics of Questions (2010). A discussion of the formal semantics of some of the questions posed to AURA, with particular focus on the relationship between universals and hypotheticals (PDF).
35. BLUE (Boeing Language Understanding Engine): A Quick Tutorial on How it Works. (2009). A short and sweet PowerPoint summary (PowerPoint). (Also see the technical paper Boeing's NLP System and the Challenges of Semantic Representation in Proc SIGSEM Symposium on Text Processing (STEP'08), Venice, Italy, 2008, for longer discussion and illustrations).
34.On the Relation between "Semantically Tractable" Queries and AURA's Question Formulation Facility. (2009). A discussion of Popescu et al's notion of "semantically tractable" questions in natural language interfaces to databases, and the extent to which it can be applied to asking questions in the AURA system. (PDF).
33. A Study of Some "Hard to Formulate" Biology Questions (2009) An analysis of 22 biology questions that the users had trouble expressing in our controlled language CPL in the AURA system. (PDF).
32. Why is it Hard to Understand Original English Questions? (2009) The AURA knowledge-based system currently requires users to reformulate questions in a simplified version of English called CPL. This document discusses some of the obstacles to having AURA understand the original English questions directly. (PDF).
31. On the Relationship of AURA Question-Answering and Textual Entailment (2009) How question-answering in a textbook-derived knowledge-based system and the Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) challenge are closely related. (PDF).
30. Using Scripts to help in Biomedical Text Interpretation (2009) A worked example of how general knowledge of transportation can be used to guide interpretation of biomedical text (PDF).
29. The Problem of Unrealized Complements and its Relation to Frames and Scripts (2008). A short discussion of the issues in, and solutions to, the problem of "missing" (unstated) elements in text. (Plain text file).
28. Do Scripts Solve NLP? (2008) A discussion on the use of scripts to understand the MUC-3 kidnapping articles. (PDF).
27. Representing "improvement": A Short Study on an RTE Example (2007). (Plain text file). A discussion on how to represent the notion of "improve" and "better", set in the context of language processing (textual entailment).
26. Making Sense of Sentences (2001). (Powerpoint). Some examples of trying to align variations of an input sentence with background knowledge (PowerPoint format)
25. Reference Resolution and Views (2001). (Postscript, PDF). How background knowledge might be used to resolve indirect references in text.
24. From Natural Language to KM Representations (2001). (Postscript, PDF). Some extremely preliminary thoughts. The toy demo code is also available here.
23. Concept Variation and Example Generation: Some Preliminary Thoughts (2001). (Postscript, PDF).
22. More Thoughts on Views (2001). (Postscript, PDF). Some further, assorted thoughts on the notion of `views' in a KB. Co-authored with John Thompson and the UT KB group.
21. A Proposal for a Process Specification Language (2001). (Powerpoint). Co-authored with John Thompson. Presents some key concepts and examples for representing processes and their executions in KM. This working note is in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
20. Understanding Role Concepts (2000). (Postscript, PDF). This note gives a new discussion of role concepts, superceding the earlier (and in places erroneous) Working Note number 11. This working note is currently being revised and will appear shortly.
19. Using Views in a Knowledge Base (2000). (Postscript, PDF). Discusses the notion of "views", namely explicit representations of how general concepts can be applied to more domain-specific concepts. Co-authored with John Thompson, Ken Barker, James Fan, Bruce Porter, Dan Tecuci, Peter Yeh.
18. Constructing Scripts Compositionally: A Molecular Biology Example (2000). (Postscript, PDF). This note follows on from Working Note 17, to provide another example (with less discussion), this one from the molecular biology domain about how a virus works. (The KM KBs repeated in this note are bioex-classes.km and bioex-prototypes.km, and the graphlet databases is bioex.graphlets).
17. $RESTAURANT re-visited: A KM Implementation of a Compositional Approach (2000). (Postscript, PDF). A worked KM example of a familiar AI problem. This paper also compares class-based and prototype-based styles in KM. (The KM KBs repeated in this note are restaurant-classes.km and restaurant-prototypes.km, and the graphlets database is restaurant.graphlets).
16. Translating from CCALC into KM: An Example (1999). (Postscript, PDF). Comparison of two representation languages, CCALC and KM, for a simple problem. Co-authored with Joohyung Lee, Vladimir Lifschitz, and Bruce Porter.
15. From Text to Paragraph Representations. (1999). (Postscript, PDF). A discussion of the gap between NLP-generated semantic graphs, and a fuller representation of meaning, for a short paragraph of text.
14. Story Generation and Aviation Incident Representation (1999). (Postscript, PDF). Discusses the representation and generation of aviation incident `stories' (also: Prolog code talespin.pl).
13. Knowledge Patterns (1998). (Postscript, PDF). A discussion of components as theory `patterns' or `templates', which get instantiated (`morphed') in various ways for reasoning.
12. More on Components (1998). (Postscript, PDF). A more detailed discussion of component data-structures and composition.
11. Should Role Concepts be Included in a Taxonomy? (1998). (Postscript, PDF). A brief discussion of how to place `role concepts' (eg. Teacher, Producer) in a taxonomy.
10. Requirements for a Knowledge Representation System (1996). (Postscript, PDF). An attempt to enumerate general requirements for a KR system, with some example representational challenges.
9. Representing Conceptual Graphs in Algernon (1996). (Postscript, PDF). A discussion of conceptual graphs, and how they might be represented in the KR language Algernon.
8. The Help-Desk Assistant Project (1996). (Postscript, PDF). A pictorial overview of the DCE Help-Desk Project. (0.8MB compressed, uncompresses to 26MB due to color images). Also see the Web pages here.
7. Object Descriptions Revisited (1995). (Postscript, PDF). A view of components as a self-contained system of relationships, with a clearer delineation. Also see the AAAI'97 paper for the evolution of this theme.
6. Constructing Scripts from Components (1995). (Postscript, PDF). Describes representing stereotypical action sequences (`scripts') compositionally, employing ideas from Batory's GenVoca approach to software composition.
5. KI Revisited (1995). (Postscript, PDF). An overview and discussion of Ken Murray's KI system for Knowledge Integration.
4. Building Action Descriptions from Components (1995). (Postscript, PDF). Describes representing STRIPS-style actions compositionally.
3. Concept Construction as Constraint Relaxation (1995). (Postscript, PDF). Thoughts on dealing with contradictions between components during composition. (also see builder.tar.Z - LIFE code)
2. Components and Contexts (1995). (Postscript, PDF). An exporation of connections between the idea of components, contexts, composition, and problem-solving.
1. Building Concepts from Components (1994). (Postscript, PDF). Initial thoughts on representations as compositions, visualized as graph superposition.

peter.e.clark@boeing.com