IIS: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Mechanisms for Explicitly Self-Aware Communicative Agents

这个项目正在为公开展示自我意识的交流代理开发理论和实践基础。这些智能体知道他们知道什么和不知道什么，他们可以做什么和不能做什么，以及他们的推理和行动背后的意图和假设，他们在对话交互中表现出“沉着”，回忆过去的经验，对正在进行的交互进行推理。为此，正在开发的理论思想围绕着自我认知知识和推理理论(知道一个人知道和不知道什么，以及一个人是如何获得知识的)，一种将不确定推理与逻辑相结合的新方法(准概率理论)，以及促进关于系统自身知识和特殊能力的推理的一种形式的“句法意识”元参照。该项目使用EPILOG推理引擎作为实验的基础，同时扩大了该引擎的能力。Epiog使用的知识呈现(情节逻辑)几乎与普通语言的表达能力相匹配，因此非常适合本项目的推理和对话目标。结果将包括人工智能体中自我意识的可证明理论，一般自我认知、不确定和句法意识推理的新方法，以及改进的EPILOG引擎。结果将在主要的人工智能、代理和对话研究的会议和期刊上传播，改进的Epilog引擎将普遍使用。从长远来看，这项工作将有助于在软件支持、建议、辅导和游戏等领域为新一代更像人类的交互式人工智能代理铺平道路。

This project is developing theoretical and practicalfoundations for communicative agents that overtly exhibitself-awareness. Such agents are aware of what they knowand do not know, what they can and cannot do, and whatintentions and assumptions underlie their inferencesand actions, and they show "presence of mind" in dialogueinteractions, recalling past experiences and reasoningabout the ongoing interactions. The theoretical ideasunder development for this purpose center around theoriesof autocognitive knowledge and inference (knowing whatone knows and does not know, and how one acquiresknowledge), a new approach to integrating uncertaininference with logic (quasi-probability theory), anda form of "syntactically aware" metainference thatfacilitates reasoning about a system's own knowledgeand special capabilities. The project uses the EPILOGinference engine as a basis for experimentation, whilebroadening that engine's capabilities. The knowledgerepresentation (episodic logic) used by EPILOG nearlymatches the expressive capabilities of ordinary languageand is thus well-suited to the inferential and dialoguegoals of this project. The results will includedemonstrable theories of self-awareness in artificialagents, new methods of general autocognitive, uncertain,and syntactically aware inference, and an improvedEPILOG engine. The results will be disseminated in majorconferences and journals for AI, agent and dialogueresearch, and the improved EPILOG engine will begenerally available. In the longer run, the work willhelp pave the way for a new generation of more human-likeinteractive AI agents, in such areas as software support,advice, tutoring, games, etc.