Northeast Artificial Intelligence Consortium annual report, 1987. Volume 2, Part B. Discussing, using, and recognizing plans. Interim report, December 1986-December 1987

The Northeast Artificial Intelligence Consortium (NAIC) was created to conduct pertinent research in artificial intelligence and to perform activities ancillary to this research. This report describes progress made in the third year of the existence of the NAIC on the technical research tasks undertaken at the member universities. The topics covered in general are: versatile expert system for equipment maintenance, distributed AI for communications system control, automatic photo interpretation, time-oriented problem solving, speech understanding systems, knowledge base maintenance, hardware architectures for very large systems, knowledge-based reasoning and planning, and a knowledge acquisition, assistance, and explanation system. The specific topic for this volume is the development of a natural language interacting system with the ability to discuss, use, and recognize plans. This project requires the investigation of a knowledge representation design compatible with the intensional knowledge representation theory previously developed by Dr. Stuart Shapiro and his co-workers at SUNY Buffalo (UB).