Giuseppe's Written Questions
This is an open book examination, so you may consult---and
reference---any sources from the literature. Note, however, that you
are not permitted to consult any person about this examination, with
the exception that you may ask your committee members clarification
questions.
Each answer should be no more than 5 pages of single-spaced
text in 12pt font, using 1" margins all around.
- Rich Thomason, Knowledge Representation
- (a) Eventualities (states and processes) have become
increasingly important as a temporal representational device.
Discuss the reasons for this, and illustrate how eventualities
figure in a temporal reasoning application
of your choice. (b) Many temporal formalisms are intimiately
connected with action.
Critically discuss the theories of action that emerge in the
readings you selected for the examination. What role do these
theories play in the design of planning architectures?
- Claim: The most important current application
of ontologies in KR is in organizing knowledge bases
for natural language interpretation and generation.
(Information management and retrieval is an
increasingly important application, and of course there
are others.) If you don't agree with this assessment,
choose the application that you feel is most important,
and substitute it for NL interpretation and generation.
Show how research on the structure of spatial
and spatial-like knowledge is useful and
important for building and maintaining knowledge bases for
natural language generation and interpretation. Discuss
the role of this research in designing (a)
inference mechansisms for managing the knowledge base (e.g.,
for maintaining coherence) and (b) its role in carrying out
domain reasoning.
- Johanna Moore, Natural Language
- What are main problems that arise in generating explanations
of quantitative systems (e.g., probabilistic or decision-theoretic
reasoning systems)? Critically evaluate the approaches that
have been taken to explaining decisions made by such systems.
- Generation of referring expressions is one of the central
problems in NL generation. Researchers have identified several
factors that may influence the generation of an appropriate referring
expression in a given context. What are these factors?
How do they affect the generation of initial refererences?
subsequent references? Be specific. Include examples.
- Steve Roth, Human Computer Interaction
-
Research on automatic presentation has produced characterizations
of data, of tasks, and of graphical techniques. These enable reasoning
about the selection and composition of graphical techniques appropriate
for various combinations of data types and tasks.
Work on user interfaces has demonstrated the importance of interactive
techniques for the effectiveness of visualizations. Propose a starting point
for characterizing interactive techniques so that they can be incorporated in
an automatic presentation system. Discuss how interactive techniques relate to
characteristics of data, tasks, and graphics and suggest some selection
and composition rules for designing interactive visualizations
-
Current techniques for evaluating user interfaces have not
been applied extensively to information exploration tasks and
visualization systems. Discuss what issues would have to be addressed
to effectively design good studies of the effectiveness of these
systems. You can organize your discussion by selecting two
candidate systems (e.g. painting; table lens; dynamic queries; tree maps)
and saying what you would want to find out from a study to
determine the ``value'' of each system. Discuss the strengths and
weaknesses of two evaluation techniques for addressing these issues
(e.g. GOMS, walk-throughs). You don't have to design new methods,
but at least tell what we would need to learn that current methods may
not tell us.