AGS TechBlog
A source and journal of ideas

This morning we signed up as a sponsor for the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling 2009 in Manchester, UK.

The conference is an outstanding global forum on the computational modeling of human cognition. You can find additional information at the ICCM 2009 web site.

I hope to see you there!

-Stu

Interesting article the other day at PhysOrg concerning artificial intelligence research and playing poker at the University of Alberta.

I wrote a post on it in the AI Forum. Rather than repeating the whole thing here, I’ll just point you to the post over there: http://agsforum.agstechnet.com/index.php?topic=22.0

-Stu

As I mentioned in some earlier posts, I have yet to find a good site that reviews, rates, lists pros and cons, and similar things for the many artificial intelligence tools, approaches and systems you can find on the web.

Today, we are kicking off our new forum that will hopefully scratch this itch. The new forum can be found at http://agsforum.agstechnet.com

The reviews I intend to do on the forum are not meant as a criticism to anybody’s work, but I feel that many people will be able to use the information to more quickly find the right tools to help them with whatever application they are pursuing.

Its brand new, so there is no meat there yet. I will be writing about systems I know about as much as time permits. Please chip in if you are so inclined.

Enjoy!

-Stu

Check out the beginning of the new surveys page: http://www.agstechnet.com/surveys.html

I will be using the surveys to best focus on the AI tools, systems, and techniques that you think matter most.

This is intended to follow up on my previous post: http://www.agstechnet.com/blog/2007/11/29/the-really-big-list-of-ai-tools/

If you have thoughts or questions concerning a community feedback site for artificial intelligence tools and techniques, please send me a note.

-Stu 

A client recently asked me what I meant when I refered to “heuristic search.”  Heuristic search is performed when “brute force search” (or all-possible-paths-search) is computationally intractable.  Essentially, you can think of a heuristic as a “rule of thumb” or an approach to calculate an approximate answer.  Here’s a more detailed description…

A heuristic is defined by Meriam Webster’s on line dictionary as follows:

Main Entry: heu·ris·tic
Pronunciation: hyu-’ris-tik
Function: adjective
Etymology: German heuristisch, from New Latin heuristicus, from Greek heuriskein to discover; akin to Old Irish fo-fúair he found
: involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods heuristic assumption>; also
: of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance heuristic computer program>

Heuristics are used in the context of high complexity to find good solutions to problems that might be impossible to solve for an exact or the globally optimum solution.

Examples of the use of heuristic search are found in many common optimization problems.  In many optimization efforts, computations can take billions of billions of years to find the exact solution even on the fastest computers. This is a case where using heuristics may allow you to find a good solution even if the optimal solution is unknown.

-Stu

My search has not been in vain.  The biggest (I am not suggesting that size is the most important metric) list found so far is on none other than AAAI’s site.  You can see it at:

 http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/soft.html

 It is a general list of the full spectrum of AI tools–and it is more comprehensive than anything else I’ve found.  The contents relating to natural language processing seems to be good.

Unfortunately, there still is no sense of which tools are best for certain applications, what is highly supported, etc.  I think this would be enormously useful–especially for small teams looking for components that already fill a need. 

So last night I sent Carol Hamilton, AAAI’s Executive Director, a note asking about possibly making a change to the site.  I hope that together we will be able to gin up something useful.

Two other good lists found seem worth mentioning (in no particular order) that are specific to NLP:

• http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/projects.html
• http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=State_of_the_art

More to follow.

- Stu

While at the AAAI Fall Symposium this week, it occurred to me that there may not be a really good, reasonably complete, business oriented open source site for tools that businesses, especially small businesses, can use in natural language processing applications.

To be useful to small businesses, the tools would need to be well written, well documented, and constructed in a way that enabled straightforward interface connections between the various parts.  I started making a list of possible component tools that might be included in such a list.  The list is a draft list of course, but hopefully some of you readers out there will help out and give me some additional, maybe even better ideas.

Draft List of Possible NLP Components in an Open Source Portal for Business

• Parser
• Grammar - context free or context sensitive
• Grammar editing tool
• Training text corpus
• Front end user interface
• Synonym dictionary and editor
• Ontology and editor
• Tutorials and documentation for integrating into applications

So far, I have looked around at several sites including NLUC, OpenNLP, and several wikis and university sites.  Several offer some very useful material, but none seemed to offer the “one stop shop” that I had in mind.

If you have some ideas, please leave a comment or send me a note.  If I can’t find something within a few weeks, then I will start ginning one up.

-Stu

Just got back from AAAI’s Fall Symposium 2007 in Arlington, VA.  It was great to feel back in touch with the AAAI community. It had been too long since I had attended a AAAI event–good to be back!

I was thrilled to give Saturday night’s Plenary Session remarks on Cognitive Approaches to Natural Language Processing.  From two full days of presentations, discussions, and side meetings, I was pleased to see a good amount of progress in the community over the past several years.  Naturally, there remains a great deal of research, development, and work before the real world will have the kind of rich, natural dialog with machines that we see now only in science fiction.  But at least we are making progress.

For more detail, you can find AAAI’s page on the 2007 Fall Symposium at:

http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/fss07.php

-Stu