From the Publisher:
An agent is an entity with domain knowledge, goals and actions. Multi-agent systems are a set of agents which
interact in a common environment. Multi-agent systems deal with the construction of complex systems involving multiple agents and their coordination. A multi-agent system (MAS) is a distributed computing system with
autonomous interacting intelligent agents that coordinate their actions so as to achieve its goal(s) jointly or competitively.

Introduction to Multiagent Systems

An assumption-based TMS

In 1978, Patrick Hayes promulgated the Naive Physics Manifesto. (It finally appeared as an “official” publication in Hobbs and Moore 1985.) In this paper, he proposed that an allout effort be mounted to formalize commonsense knowledge, using first-order logic as a notation. This effort had its roots in earlier research, especially the work of John McCarthy, but the scope of Hayes’s proposal was new and ambitious. He suggested that the use of Tarskian seniantics could allow us to study a large volume of knowledge-representation problems free from the confines of computer programs. The suggestion inspired a small community of people to actually try to write down all (or most) of commonsense knowledge in predictate calculus. He launched the effort with his own paper on “Liquids” (also in Hobbs and Moore 1985), a fascinating attempt to fix ontology and notation for a realistic domain. Since then several papers in this vein have appeared (Allen 1984; Hobbs 1986; Shoham 1985). I myself have been an enthusiastic advocate of the movement, having written general boosting papers (1978) as well as attempts to actually get on with the work. (1982, 1985). I even coauthored a textbook oriented around Hayes’s idea (Charniak and McDermott 1985). It is therefore with special pain that I produce this report, which draws mostly negative conclusions about progress on Hayes’s project so far, and the progress we can expect. In a nutshell, I will argue that the skimpy progress observed so far is no accident, that in fact it is going to be very difficult to do much better in the future. The reason is that the unspoken premise in Hayes’s arguments, that a lot of reasoning can be analyzed as deductive or approximately deductive, is erroneous. I don’t want what I say in this paper to be taken as a criticism of Pat Hayes, for the simple reason that he is not solely to blame for the position I am criticizing. I will therefore refer to it as the “logicist” position in what follows. It is really the joint work of several people, including John McCarthy, Robert Moore, James Allen, Jerry Hobbs, Patrick Hayes, and me, of whom Hayes is simply the most eloquent.

A critique of pure reason

We propose a novel formalism, called Frame Logic (abbr., F-logic), that accounts in a clean and declarative fashion for most of the structural aspects of object-oriented and frame-based languages. These features include object identity, complex objects, inheritance, polymorphic types, query methods, encapsulation, and others. In a sense, F-logic stands in the same relationship to the object-oriented paradigm as classical predicate calculus stands to relational programming. F-logic has a model-theoretic semantics and a sound and complete resolution-based proof theory. A small number of fundamental concepts that come from object-oriented programming have direct representation in F-logic; other, secondary aspects of this paradigm are easily modeled as well. The paper also discusses semantic issues pertaining to programming with a deductive object-oriented language based on a subset of F-logic.

/pdf/logical-foundations-of-object-oriented-and-frame-based-2acr2uie5u.pdf

Logical foundations of object-oriented and frame-based languages

From the Publisher:
In addition, this title offers coverage of two entirely new subject areas. First, the text features a new chapter on statistically-based methods using large corpora. Second, it includes an appendix on speech recognition and spoken language understanding. Also, the information on semantics that was covered in the first edition has been largely expanded in this edition to include an emphasis on compositional interpretation.

Natural Language Understanding

Since the first publication of ''Programming in Prolog'' in 1981, Prolog has continued to attract an unexpectedly great deal of interest in the computer science community and is now seen as a potential basis for an important new generation of programming languages and systems. In this second edition, the authors have improved the presentation and corrected various minor errors to provide a textbook as well as a reference work for everyone who wants to study and use Prolog as a practical programming language. Various examples show how useful programs can be written with the Prolog system that exists today. The authors concentrate on teaching the ''core'' Prolog; all examples conform to this standard and will run on most existing Prolog implementations. Some of the existing Prolog implementations are listed in the appendices with indications as to how diverge from the standard.

William F. Clocksin

Papers

Programming in Prolog