EECS 584 --- Artificial Intelligence 2

Instructor: Barbara Di Eugenio

Time: MW 6:30-7:45 pm
Location: LH 301

(The full syllabus (in postscript) can be found here. Note that the syllabus is periodically updated)

Machine Learning     Natural Language Processing     Planning         Assignments    


We will adopt the most current approach to Artificial Intelligence, that sees it as the study of intelligent agents. We will explore the application of AI techniques to information technology and the Web. E.g., intelligent agents are used to search the web for useful information, as a foundation for computer supported collaborative work or for electronic commerce.

After briefly reviewing some foundations of AI such as search algorithms, we will spend the rest of the semester on some of the most exciting research areas these days, such as:

We will explore each topic by starting with the relevant chapters in one of the required books ([Mitchell 97] and [Jurafski and Martin 00]), that provides the foundations for building intelligent agents. We will supplement the books with other readings. We will experiment with the techniques we will study and apply them to problems of interest to the students.

References

Required

Tom Mitchell. Machine Learning, McGraw Hill, 1997.
Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin. Speech and Language Processing. Prentice Hall, 2000.

Other readings

Prerequisites

EECS484 or consent of instructor. Knowledge of LISP and/or PROLOG and/or Java.


Machine Learning pointers and papers

General resource pages for Machine Learning:

After covering the basics of ML from Mitchell, we will discuss the following applications of ML to WWW and Internet:


Natural Language Processing pointers and papers

* The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

* Papers on CL/NLP are archived within the Computing Research Repository, with subject Computation and Language.

* A registry of some NLP software can be found at the DFKI. Some other resources can be found in the NLP section of the CMU AI repository.


Planning pointers and papers

* A few pointers to implemented planners can be found here. (This page appears to be slightly out of date).


Assignments

Homework 1 (due ...)

Installation instructions

The program for ID3 (courtesy of Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University) is written in Common Lisp. We are using the GNU implementation of Common Lisp, GCL, available on the EECS servers at /usr/local/bin/gcl. You can use another Common Lisp, e.g. on your PC, if you so wish.

You need the following three files:

There's also a sample load file, load.lsp, that you'll have to modify accordingly (paths etc).

Homework 2 (due ...)