Several researchers have noted the local coherence exhibited by discourse (Sidner 1979; Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein 1983; Carter 1987; etc.). A primary component of this local coherence is the way the local focus of the discourse shifts from one sentence to the next and the way this shifting is marked by linguistic choices made by the writer/speaker. By local focus, we refer to that concept a s...

Many application domains require algorithmic support for collections of large bit vectors that are frequently referenced. In a compiler that performs type inferencing, this problem occurred in representing sets of possible types at each program point. This paper presents an incremental hashing technique that performs well in this domain.

A rule-based object/task modelling approach for GIS's is proposed which is characterized by specifying database app lications in terms of localized domain knowledge representa tion and explicit control knowledge representation! and by utilizing complementaryly the techniques of database, logic and object—oriented programming to support inferencing and deductive quering.

We describe our participation in the TREC-10 Question Answering track. All our runs used the Tequesta system; we provide a detailed account of the natural language processing and inferencing techniques that are part of Tequesta. We also summarize and discuss our results, which concern both the main task and the list task.

This paper presents an application of the Dempster-Shafer evidence combination scheme in building a rule based expert system shell for diagnostic reasoning. Domain knowledge is stored as rules with associated belief functions. The reasoning component uses a combination of forward and backward inferencing mechanisms to interact with the user in a mixed initiative format.

The Microsoft Research question-answering system for TREC-9 was based on a combination of the Okapi retrieval engine, Microsoft’s natural language processing system (NLPWin), and a module for matching logical forms. There is no recent published account of NLPWin, although a description of its predecessor can be found in Jensen et al. (1993). NLPWin accepts sentences and delivers a detailed synt...