report on Very Large KB conference
Tom Gruber <gruber@HPP.Stanford.EDU>
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From: Tom Gruber <gruber@HPP.Stanford.EDU>
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Here is a report on the First International Conference on the Building and
Sharing of Very Large-Scale Knowledge Bases, held in Tokyo. The report was
written by James Hendler, and originally posted to and redistibuted by the
US Office of Naval Research Asia office. It is reposted here with
permission of the author.
From:
Dr. David K. Kahaner
US Office of Naval Research Asia
(From outside US): 23-17, 7-chome, Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106 Japan
(From within US): Unit 45002, APO AP 96337-0007
Tel: +81 3 3401-8924, Fax: +81 3 3403-9670
Email: kahaner@cs.titech.ac.jp
Re: Building/Sharing Very Large Knowledge Bases (KBKS'93), Tokyo 12/93.
04/27/94 (MM/DD/YY)
This file is named "kbks-93.94"
ABSTRACT. Summary of the first International Conference on the Building
and Sharing of Very Large-Scale Knowledge Bases (KBKS'93) which took
place from Dec 1-4, 1993 in Tokyo Japan.
This summary was prepared by
Prof. James A. Hendler
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: (301) 405-2696; Fax: (301) 405-6707
Email: HENDLER@CS.UMD.EDU
Report on the First International Conference on the Building and
Sharing of Very Large-Scale Knowledge Bases (KBKS'93)
The First International Conference on the Building and Sharing of Very
Large-Scale Knowledge Bases (KBKS'93) took place from Dec 1-4, 1993 in
Tokyo Japan. The meeting consisted of a two-day conference open to a
wide audience, followed by a smaller two-day workshop focusing on
technical issues. Dr. Kazuhiro Fuchi (University of Tokyo) chaired
the Organizing Committee for this meeting, Dr. Toshio Yokoi (EDR
Ltd.) chaired the Steering and Program Committee for the Conference,
and Prof. Riichiro Mizoguchi (Osaka University) chaired the
organization of the workshop. The conference had close to five
hundred attendees, with about eighty five non-Japanese scientists from
a large number of different countries attending. The workshop was
limited to about seventy five participants, again representing a large
number of countries. The US National Science Foundation provided
travel funds for fourteen North American scientists to attend, and a
number of other international agencies also provided support (A
complete list of sponsors is provided at the end of this report.)
This conference focused on bringing together researchers from
throughout the international community who were interested in
designing and building larger knowledge bases than those in use today.
In addition, the topic of how to share such knowledge bases (as a
technical, social, and political problem) was also addressed. The
conference also served, in part, to introduce the international
community to Japan's plans for the building of several Very Large
Knowledge Bases (VLKBs), administered through the Ministry of
International Trade And Industry (MITI). This ambitious plan will
involve both the development of the knowledge repositories, and making
these VLKBs available to other researchers. Also presented at the
meeting were US projects including MCC's CYC Project (directed by
Douglas Lenat), an ambitious multi-year project to build a VLKB
consisting of great deals of "common sense" knowledge, and the Arpa
sponsored "knowledge sharing" initiative, which is focusing on
designing and building tools for the development of interoperable
knowledge sources. Also discussed were several European Community
Projects to develop large, shared corpora for linguistic and language
processing research and development.
Another notable aspect of this meeting was the interdisciplinary
nature of the work presented. Researchers included not just
Artificial Intelligence and Information Science researchers, but also
those involved in the development of academic information services
and digital libraries for use in the sciences and the humanities.
Among the projects presented in these regards were systems under
development at the Japanese National Center for Science Information
Systems and the US Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.
Several notable themes emerged from this conference. The first is
that there are starting to exist large, machine readable, lexicons,
dictionaries and corpora for work in linguistics and natural language.
Notable among these is the Japanese Electronic Dictionary, containing
several hundred thousand words and word-pairs in English and Japanese.
This work is being made available to researchers both in Japan and
abroad, and is expected to be the basis for much work in machine
translation. Work in the development of lexicons and corpora for the
European languages was also presented (see Session II and Session IV,
below). [See also my report on the Electronic Dictionary Project,
"edr.92", 27 May 1992, DKK].
Another major theme was the need for the linking of knowledge base
technology and existing data repositories, particularly including
corporate knowledge bases. Ronald Brachman of AT&T Bell Laboratories
(see Session III) discussed techniques for integrating knowledge and
databases, and details of several other projects aiming towards this end
were presented at the workshop. The related issue of how knowledge
sources could be obtained automatically (i.e. without human knowledge
engineering efforts) was also discussed by Dr. Yorick Wilks (University
of Sheffield, UK), Susan Armstrong (University of Geneva, Switzerland),
and Hozumi Tanaka (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan).
The third main theme presented focused on the development of knowledge
sharing technologies. This included reports on the US Arpa Knowledge
Sharing Effort (presented at the conference by William Swartout of the
University of California and at the workshop by Robert Neches (USC) and
Tim Finin of the University of Maryland Baltimore County), Japanese
efforts (presented by Prof. Setsuo Ohsuga of the University of Tokyo),
and European efforts (presented by Prof. Bob Wielinga of the University
of Amsterdam, the Netherlands). In addition, a panel discussion at the
workshop discussed how international cooperation in the area of
knowledge sharing could be supported.
Those interested in the conference will probably wish to obtain a copy
of the proceedings which is being released as an edited book sometime in
the summer of 1994. The Second International Conference on the Building
and Sharing of Very Large-Scale Knowledge Bases is tentatively scheduled
for April, 1995, and will take place at the University of Twente in the
Netherlands. The Chair will be Dr. Nicolaas Mars (mars@cs.utwente.nl).
Below I present
1) Details of ordering the proceedings
2) A list of speakers and brief summaries of the sessions presented
at the Conference.
3) A brief summary of topics and list of the speakers at the Workshop.
4) A list of sponsors and cooperating organizations
======================
1) Details of ordering the proceedings
The post conference edition of the proceedings will appear in book
form. The book is entitled "Knowledge Building and Knowledge Sharing"
edited by Kazuhiro Fuchi and Toshio Yokoi. It will be published by
Ohmsha Ltd. and IOS Press. The book is scheduled for release in July,
1994. Orders can be placed to:
In Japan:
Ohmsha Ltd., 3-1 Kanda Nishiki-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101, Japan
In North American:
IOS Press, Postal Drawer 10558, Burke, VA 22009-0558, USA
In the UK:
IOS Press, 73 Lime Walk, Headington, Oxford OX3 7AD, England
In Europe and the rest of the world (except the Far East)
IOS Press, Van Diemenstraat 94, 1013 CN Amsterdam, The Netherlands
In the Far East:
IOS Press and Ohmsha Ltd have joint distributorship
=================
2) A list of speakers and brief summaries of the sessions presented
at the Conference.
CONFERENCE Dec 1 -2, 1993 [talks presented in Japanese or English,
with simultaneous translation]
Speaker list and brief summary of conference topics:
Opening Addresses:
(Opening addresses focused on the importance of building large
knowledge bases and sharing the results in the international
community.)
Eiji Kageyama - President, Japan Information Processing Development
Center, Japan
Osamu Watanabe - Director General, Machinery and Information
Industries Bureau, Ministry of Internation Trade and Industry,
Japan
Yasushiro Kato - Deputy Director-General, Science and Technology
Agency, Japan
Su-Shing Chen - Program Director, National Science Foundation, USA
Keynote Addresses:
(Keynote addresses included a review of current International and
Japanese efforts in the design and building of Very Large Knowledge
Bases presented by Dr. Fuchi and a stirring vision, presented by Dr.
Toshio Yokoi, in which he postulated a near-term future in which much
of the intellectual knowledge of mankind is available electronically
for access by humans assisted with knowledge-based tools.)
From Infancy to Adolescence
Prof. Kazuro Fuchi, University of Tokyo, Japan
Chair, KB&KS'93 Organizing Committee
Very Large-Scale Knowledge Bases Embodying Intelligence Space
Toshio Yokoi, Japan Electronic Dictionary Research Institute, Japan
Chair, KB&KB'93 Steering and Program Committee
Session I: Academic and Social Demands for KB & KS
Chair: Prof. Syun Tutiya, Chiba University, Japan
(This session focused on social demands for building and sharing large
knowledge bases. Presenters discussed the importance of mutual
cooperation between computer and information scientists, social
sciences, and the humanities, in the formation of an interdisciplinary
research area focusing on building and disseminating electronic
knowledge resources)
KB and KS as a new Economic and Social Infrastructure
Ken-Ichi Imai, Director of Research, Stanford Japan Center, Japan
On the Nature of Human Knowledge
Norio Fujisawa, Director, Kyoto National Museum
Professor Emeritus, Kyoto University, Japan
Session II: Language Technology and Science
Chair: Prof. Yuji Matsumoto, Nara Institute of Science and
Technology, Japan
(This session presented the current status and future trends in the
natural language processing area. Topics presented included knowledge
representation for natural language resources, the development of
lexicons and corpora for translation efforts, and new directions in
document processing technology and systems. Natural language
processing and computation linguistics is one of the areas where large
knowledge sources (machine readable dictionaries, translation
lexicons, and multi-lingual corpora) are currently available.)
Current Status and Future Trends of Natural Language
Processing
Prof. Makoto Nagai, Kyoto University, Japan
Analysis and Generation Techniques
Prof. Hozumi Tanaka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Towards Automated Knowledge Acquisition
Prof. Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, UK
Acquisition and Exploitation of Textual Resources for NLP
Prof. Susan Armstrong, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Knowledge-Based Processing in Machine Translation
Prof. Jun-Ichi Tsujil, The University of Manchester Institute
of Science and Technology, UK
Session III: Knowledge Technology and Science
Chair: Prof. Fumio Mizoguchi, Science University of Tokyo,
Japan
(This session aimed to explore the current status and future trends in
the area of "knowledge processing." Topics included efforts at
standardization for knowledge sharing, the automated learning of
knowledge, and the integration of knowledge- and data-base
technologies.)
How Can People Share Large Knowledge Bases
Prof. Setsuo Ohsuga, University of Tokyo, Japan
Knowledge Sharing: Prospects and Challenges
Prof. William Swartout, University of Southern California, USA
Reusable and Shareable Knowledge Bases: A European Perspective
Prof. Bob Wielinga, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Viewing Data Through a Knowledge Representation Lens
Ronald Brachman, Head, Artificial Intelligen Principles
Research Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA
Knowledge Acquisition and Ontology
Prof. Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka Universtiy, Japan
Session IV: Sharable Knowledge Sources
Chair: Prof. Shojiro Nishio, Osaka University, Japan
(This session presented a number of existing systems which include
very large multi-media databases, text-bases and knowledge bases.
Overviews and "lessons learned" talks presented work in Japan, The
European Community, and the USA on the development of various
knowledge repositories. Also presented was a talk by Douglas Lenat on
MCC's CYC project, a multi-year attempt to encode massive amounts of
human "commonsense" knowledge. The CYC project has resulted in the
building of the world's largest knowledge base to date, thus this talk
was of special interest both to those attempting to launch new
knowledge acquisition efforts and those attempting to design automated
means for acquiring knowledge.)
The Future of Academic Information Services
Prof. Hisao Yamada, Director of Research and Development
Department, National Center for Science Information
Systems, Japan
Linguistic Resources for the R&D Communities: Problems and
Perspectives,
Prof. Antonio Zampolli, University of Pisa, Italy
The Role of the Text Encoding Initiative in Creating,
Maintaining and Using Well- Documented and
Multi-purpose Electronic Resources
Prof. Susan Hockey, Director, Center for Electronic texts in
the Humanities, USA
Cyc: Priming the Knowledge Sharing Pump
Douglas Lenat, Director, Cyc Project, Microelectronics and
Computer Technology Corporation, USA
Session V: Panel Discussion - Information Infrastructure and
International Cooperation
(Although a large amount of research has gone into the development of
very large knowledge bases, and into the technology for making these
knowledge bases shareable, little effort to date has focused on
developing the foundations for international cooperation and knowledge
sharing. This panel discussed both the existing obstacles (technical,
social, and political) to developing such international efforts and to
discuss how international cooperation could be supported. The
importance of developing "information-oriented" societies, and
international mechanisms to support these, was discussed.)
Panelists:
Prof. Kazuhiro Fuchi (coordinator), University of
Tokyo, Japan
Prof. Christian Rohrer, Stuttgart University, Germany
Prof. Peter M.D. gray, University of Aberdeen, UK
Su-Shing Chen, Program Director, National Science
Foundation, USA
Brian Oakley, Director, Logica, UK
Closing Remarks: Masao Teruyama, Executive Managing Director, Japan
Information Processing Development Center
========================
3) A brief summary of topics and list of the speakers at the Workshop.
The workshop included technical presentations on a number of
international projects in the building and sharing of very large
knowledge bases. Topics included (among many others):
* the evaluation of existing systems and corpora (particularly in the
area of natural language and machine translation systems)
* the use of high performance computing and database technologies for
supporting very large knowledge bases,
* technologies for both human-intensive and automated efforts at
building large knowledge bases,
* detailed proposals for information sharing protocols, and
* knowledge representation and ontology issues focusing on how various
techniques scale up to very large size.
Those interested in more information about particular workshop topics
are encouraged to purchase the proceedings (see details above) or to
contact the presenters directly.
WORKSHOP, Dec 3-4, 1993. [All presentations in English]
Opening Remarks: Prof. Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka University, Japan
Session I: Knowledge Sharing
Toward the Knowledgeable Community, T. Hishida and H. Takeda,
Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Knowledge Sharing in Integrated User Support Environments:
Applications, Frameworks and Infrastructure,
R. Neches, Univ. of Southern California, USA
Context: A real Problem for Large and Shareable Knowledge
Bases, B. Jansen, CSIRO, Australia
Sharing of Very Large Scale Knowledge Bases; A rule selection
approach, D, Karagiannis, Univ of Vienna, Austria, and
K. Hinkelmann, DFKI, Germany
A New Framework Of Very Large Knowledge-Bases, K. Yokota and
A. Aiba, Institute for New Generation Computer
Technology, Japan
Linguistic Instruments in Knowledge Engineering: A Research
Proposal and Some Experiments, R. van de Riet, Vrije
University, the Netherlands
Session II: From Data bases to Knowledge Bases
Adapting Database Implementation Techniques to Manage Very
Large Knowledge bases, J. Mylopoulos and V. Chaudhri,
University of Toronto, Canada
Knowledge Discovery in Object-Oriented and Active Databases,
J. Han, Simon Fraser University, Canada, S. Nishio,
Osaka University, Japan, and H. Kawano, Kyoto
University, Japan
Session III: Knowledge Representation
Context Reflection for Flexible Knowledge Representation, H.
Nakashima, Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan
The Role of Ontologies in Structuring Large Knowledge Bases,
N. Mars, University of Twente, the Netherlands
KQML: An Information and Knowledge Exchange Protocol, T.
Finin, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA,
R. Frizson and D. McKay, Unisys Corporation, USA
Session IV: Natural Language Processing and Lexical Knowledge
Computational Science, Cognitive Science, and Comceptual
Science: Exploiting Constraints for Multi-Lingual
Knowledge-Based Systems, R. Berwick, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, USA
Text Compiler and Concept-Tagged Corpus
H. Yasuhara, Japan Electronic Dictionary Research
Institute, Japan
Extracting Knowledge bases from Machine Readable Dictionaries:
Have we wasted our time?, N. Ide, Vassar College, USA
and J. Veronis, CNRS and University of Provence, France
Production of Machine Translation Dictionary with Frequency
Information, T. Ashizaki, The Japan Information Center
of Science and Technology, Japan
Session V: Supports and Application of Very Large Knowledge-Bases
Massively Parallel Matching of Knowledge Structures, J.
Hendler and W. Andersen, University of Maryland, USA
Towards Knowledge Intensive Engineering, T. Tomiyana, T.
Kiriyama, and Y. Umeda, University of Tokyo, Japan
Building and Sharing Large Knowledge Bases in Molecular
Genetics, F. Rechenmann, France
Panel: Breakthroughs and Applications for Knowledge Bases and
Knowledge Sharing
H. Kitano (chair), Sony CSL, Japan
J. Hendler, University of Maryland, USA
T. Nishida, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
M. Shepherd, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, USA
Closing Remarks: Prof. James Hendler, University of Maryland, USA
=======================
4) A list of sponsors and cooperating organizations
Conference information:
Organized by:
Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC)
Supported by:
Ministere De L'Industrie du Commerce Exterieur, France
Bundesministerium fur Forschung und Technologie, Germany
Ministry of International Trade and Indistry, Japan
Ministry of Education, Japan
Science and Technology Agency, Japan
Department of Trade and Industry, UK
National Science Foundation, USA
Commision of the European Communities
In Cooperations with:
Information Processing Society of Japan
The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Japanese Cognitive Science Society
Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence
Japan Society for Software Science and Technology
The American Association for Artificial Intelligence
The Association for Computational Linguistics
The Association for Computing Machinery (Japan Chapter)
The European Coordinating Committee on Artifical Intelligence
----------------------------END OF REPORT---------------------------