Electronic Newsletter Actions and Change

Electronic Newsletter on
Reasoning about Actions and Change


Issue 97027 Editor: Erik Sandewall 25.11.1997

The ETAI is organized and published under the auspices of the
European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI).

Today

IMPORTANT MESSAGE if you are submitting an article to KR-98 or to ECAI-98: the program chairs of these two conferences confirm that it is perfectly compatible with their paper submission procedures to have articles under review (= discussion) in the ETAI while they are being considered for the conference. In other words, as soon as you send the paper to the conference, feel free to enter it for discussion in our Newsletter.

Formally, the rules work as follows. In the ETAI, you first have the article discussed for three months, then you have a chance to revise it based on the feedback, and then you decide whether to submit it for refereeing in the ETAI or in some other journal. Therefore, as long as you don't proceed into the refereeing step before you get the decision from the KR or ECAI, they do not mind. It's considered analogous to participation in a workshop.

Doing this gives you the advantage of maximum visibility for the paper at the earliest possible stage. Admittedly, there is a risk that if you get heavily criticized in the Newsletter, it might damage your chances in the conference refereeing. But on the other hand, in the Newsletter you have a chance to respond immediately to the critique if it is not well founded; if you only rely on the conference reviewing then you do not have any chance of dialogue. Therefore, if you feel your paper is a quite good one, you can only gain by sending it to the ETAI. Email me if you want to find out how to go about this.


Debates

NRAC Panel Discussion on Ontologies for Actions and Change

Pat Hayes:

Vladimir Lifschitz writes:

  It seems to me that the semantics of an action language cannot be described by specifying truth conditions for its propositions. The problem is the same as with nonmonotonic languages in general. Take, for instance, the closed-world database {P(1),P(2)}. The negation of P(3) is a consequence of this database, but this fact cannot be justified on the basis of truth conditions for P(1) and P(2).

But it can be justified on the basis of the truth conditions for P(3), which is just as much a proposition of the language as the first two. Nonmonotonic logics are not classically truthfunctional, but they do have truth conditions. The simple language sketched here has the truth condition: P(n) is true iff P(n) occurs in the database.

Pat Hayes