Action Language Research Articles

Updating action domain descriptions

Incorporating new information into a knowledge base is an important problem which has been widely investigated. In this paper, we study this problem in a formal framework for reasoning about actions and change. In this framework, action domains are described in an action language whose semantics is based on the notion of causality. Unlike the formalisms considered in the related work, this language allows straightforward representation of non-deterministic effects and indirect effects of (possibly concurrent) actions, as well as state constraints; therefore, the updates can be more general than elementary statements. The expressivity of this formalism allows us to study the update of an action domain description with a more general approach compared to related work. First of all, we consider the update of an action description with respect to further criteria, for instance, by ensuring that the updated description entails some observations, assertions, or general domain properties that constitute further constraints that are not expressible in an action description in general. Moreover, our framework allows us to discriminate amongst alternative updates of action domain descriptions and to single out a most preferable one, based on a given preference relation possibly dependent on the specified criteria. We study semantic and computational aspects of the update problem, and establish basic properties of updates as well as a decomposition theorem that gives rise to a divide and conquer approach to updating action descriptions under certain conditions. Furthermore, we study the computational complexity of decision problems around computing solutions, both for the generic setting and for two particular preference relations, viz. set-inclusion and weight-based preference. While deciding the existence of solutions and recognizing solutions are PSPACE-complete problems in general, the problems fall back into the polynomial hierarchy under restrictions on the additional constraints. We finally discuss methods to compute solutions and approximate solutions (which disregard preference). Our results provide a semantic and computational basis for developing systems that incorporate new information into action domain descriptions in an action language, in the presence of additional constraints.

Modelling autonomic dataspaces using answer sets

This paper presents an approach for managing an autonomic data space, able to automatically define views that fulfill the requirements of a set of users, and adjust them as the data space evolves. An autonomic data space deals with incomplete knowledge to manage itself because of the heterogeneity and the lack of metadata related to the resources it integrates. Our approach exploits the expressiveness of stable models and the K action language for expressing the data space management functions. It is based on a model for specifying an autonomic dataspace expressed using answer set programming (ASP). ASP is a type of declarative logic programming particularly useful in knowledge-intensive applications. It is based on the stable semantics (answer sets), which allows negation as failure and applies the ideas of auto-epistemic logic to distinguish between what is true and what is believed.

Grounding language in action

Grounding language in action

Beyond a code of ethics: phenomenological ethics for everyday practice

Physical therapy, like all health-care professions, governs itself through a code of ethics that defines its obligations of professional behaviours. The code of ethics provides professions with a consistent and common moral language and principled guidelines for ethical actions. Yet, and as argued in this paper, professional codes of ethics have limits applied to ethical decision-making in the presence of ethical dilemmas. Part of the limitations of the codes of ethics is that there is no particular hierarchy of principles that govern in all situations. Instead, the exigencies of clinical practice, the particularities of individual patient's illness experiences and the transformative nature of chronic illnesses and disabilities often obscure the ethical concerns and issues embedded in concrete situations. Consistent with models of expert practice, and with contemporary models of patient-centred care, we advocate and describe in this paper a type of interpretative and narrative approach to moral practice and ethical decision-making based on phenomenology. The tools of phenomenology that are well defined in research are applied and examined in a case that illustrates their use in uncovering the values and ethical concerns of a patient. Based on the deconstruction of this case on a phenomenologist approach, we illustrate how such approaches for ethical understanding can help assist clinicians and educators in applying principles within the context and needs of each patient.

Language in Action: Funk Music as the Critical Voice of a Post–Civil Rights Movement Counterculture

From work songs and spirituals during slavery to the gospel, soul, and funk of the civil rights movement, Black music offers a new historicist interpretation of the African American experience. Through Black popular music, the struggles, faith, and joys of a people are expressed. More than mere entertainers, Black musicians are the village griots, the revisionist historians, and the voice of a people. African American music solidifies messages of societal concerns, offering snapshots of social conditions and defining moments within a society. This research posits that funk music was the social protest discourse of poor and working-class Black youth after the euphoria of the civil rights movement faded in “the decade of the detached.” Music accompanied many prominent protest movements, including the civil rights and Black power movements. But with an apparent lull in protest activities in the 1970s and 1980s, research focused on the previous decade, leaving an absence of immediate post—civil rights scholarship. While large mainstream social protest movements were less apparent, a counter protest movement emerged through the rhetorical means of funk music. This form of creative communication used everyday experiences to challenge the dominant power structure and ideology of the time period. Consciously or unconsciously, the work of funk musicians recognized language as a form of social control, thus ending their blind consent to manipulation through language by developing a counterdiscourse that challenged accepted social norms. The functional approach to rhetorical social movements is applied to further support this claim.

Developmental robotics modeling of the functions of language in action learning: Reply to comment on “Grounding language in action and perception: From cognitive agents to humanoid robots”

Developmental robotics modeling of the functions of language in action learning: Reply to comment on “Grounding language in action and perception: From cognitive agents to humanoid robots”

From action to language and back: Comment on ‘Grounding language in action and perception: From cognitive agents to humanoid robots’ by Cangelosi

From action to language and back: Comment on ‘Grounding language in action and perception: From cognitive agents to humanoid robots’ by Cangelosi

Approximation of action theories and its application to conformant planning

This paper describes our methodology for building conformant planners, which is based on recent advances in the theory of action and change and answer set programming. The development of a planner for a given dynamic domain starts with encoding the knowledge about fluents and actions of the domain as an action theory D of some action language. Our choice in this paper is AL – an action language with dynamic and static causal laws and executability conditions. An action theory D of AL defines a transition diagram T ( D ) containing all the possible trajectories of the domain. A transition 〈 s , a , s ′ 〉 belongs to T ( D ) iff the execution of the action a in the state s may move the domain to the state s ′ . The second step in the planner development consists in finding a deterministic transition diagram T l p ( D ) such that nodes of T l p ( D ) are partial states of D , its arcs are labeled by actions, and a path in T l p ( D ) from an initial partial state δ 0 to a partial state satisfying the goal δ f corresponds to a conformant plan for δ 0 and δ f in T ( D ) . The transition diagram T l p ( D ) is called an ‘approximation’ of T ( D ) . We claim that a concise description of an approximation of T ( D ) can often be given by a logic program π ( D ) under the answer sets semantics. Moreover, complex initial situations and constraints on plans can be also expressed by logic programming rules and included in π ( D ) . If this is possible then the problem of finding a parallel or sequential conformant plan can be reduced to computing answer sets of π ( D ) . This can be done by general purpose answer set solvers. If plans are sequential and long then this method can be too time consuming. In this case, π ( D ) is used as a specification for a procedural graph searching conformant planning algorithm. The paper illustrates this methodology by building several conformant planners which work for domains with complex relationship between the fluents. The efficiency of the planners is experimentally evaluated on a number of new and old benchmarks. In addition we show that for a subclass of action theories of AL our planners are complete, i.e., if in T l p ( D ) we cannot get from δ 0 to a state satisfying the goal δ f then there is no conformant plan for δ 0 and δ f in T ( D ) .

Grip Force Is Part of the Semantic Representation of Manual Action Verbs

Motor actions and action verbs activate similar cortical brain regions. A functional interference can be taken as evidence that there is a parallel treatment of these two types of information and would argue for the biological grounding of language in action. A novel approach examining the relationship between language and grip force is presented. With eyes closed and arm extended, subjects listened to words relating (verbs) or not relating (nouns) to a manual action while holding a cylinder with an integrated force sensor. There was a change in grip force when subjects heard verbs that related to manual action. Grip force increased from about 100 ms following the verb presentation, peaked at 380 ms and fell abruptly after 400 ms, signalling a possible inhibition of the motor simulation evoked by these words. These observations reveal the intimate relationship that exists between language and grasp and show that it is possible to elucidate online new aspects of sensorimotor interaction.

The Remedy to Linguistic Skepticism. Judaism as a Language of Action

The Remedy to Linguistic Skepticism. Judaism as a Language of Action

Grounding language in action

Grounding language in action

Multivalued action languages with constraints in CLP(FD)

AbstractAction description languages, such asand ℬ (Gelfond and Lifschitz,Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 1998, vol. 2, pp. 193—210), are expressive instruments introduced for formalizing planning domains and planning problem instances. The paper starts by proposing a methodology to encode an action language (with conditional effects and static causal laws), a slight variation of ℬ, usingConstraint Logic Programming over Finite Domains. The approach is then generalized to raise the use of constraints to the level of the action language itself. A prototype implementation has been developed, and the preliminary results are presented and discussed.

An Investigation of Multi-Agent Planning in CLP

This paper explores the use of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) as a platform for experimenting with planning problems in the presence of multiple interacting agents. The paper develops a novel constraint-based action language, B MAP, that enables the declarative description of large classes of multi-agent and multi-valued domains. B MAP supports several complex features, including combined effects of concurrent and interacting actions, concurrency control, and delayed effects. The paper presents a mapping of B MAP theories to CLP and it demonstrates the effectiveness of an implementation in SICStus Prolog on several benchmark problems. The effort is an evolution of previous research on using CLP for single-agent domains, demonstrating the flexibility of CLP technology to handle the more complex issues of multi-agency and concurrency.

A UML-based static verification framework for security

Secure software engineering is a new research area that has been proposed to address security issues during the development of software systems. This new area of research advocates that security characteristics should be considered from the early stages of the software development life cycle and should not be added as another layer in the system on an ad-hoc basis after the system is built. In this paper, we describe a UML-based Static Verification Framework (USVF) to support the design and verification of secure software systems in early stages of the software development life-cycle taking into consideration security and general requirements of the software system. USVF performs static verification on UML models consisting of UML class and state machine diagrams extended by an action language. We present an operational semantics of UML models, define a property specification language designed to reason about temporal and general properties of UML state machines using the semantic domains of the former, and implement the model checking process by translating models and properties into Promela, the input language of the SPIN model checker. We show that the methodology can be applied to the verification of security properties by representing the main aspects of security, namely availability, integrity and confidentiality, in the USVF property specification language.

Repertórios sobre lesbianidade na mídia televisiva: desestabilização de modelos hegemônicos

Este artigo objetiva apresentar uma análise discursiva da telenovela Senhora do Destino (Rede Globo, 2004-2005). A postura construcionista, aliada a uma leitura feminista, permitiu compreender a noção de lesbianidade como uma construção social na qual os discursos e a linguagem empregados variam segundo o contexto social e histórico específico. O foco de análise se deu a partir das práticas discursivas, entendidas como linguagem em ação, sempre múltiplas, situadas e dialógicas. Os resultados desta pesquisa apontam para um duplo efeito na introdução da temática lesbianidade na novela. Se, de um lado, o processo de assimilação da categoria lésbica provoca uma maior "familiarização" na sociedade, bem como a circulação de códigos/modelos propiciam a legitimação de relações afetivo-sexuais entre pessoas do mesmo sexo, de outro, o modo como ocorrem os processos de legitimação/aceitação não propicia uma desestabilização de normas sociais e de modelos hegemônicos.

Action Language verifier: an infinite-state model checker for reactive software specifications

Action Language is a specification language for reactive software systems. In this paper, we present the syntax and the semantics of the Action Language and we also present an infinite-state symbolic model checker called Action Language Verifier (ALV) that verifies (or falsifies) CTL properties of Action Language specifications. ALV is built on top of the Composite Symbolic Library, which is a symbolic manipulator that combines multiple symbolic representations. ALV is a polymorphic model checker that can use different combinations of the symbolic representations implemented in the Composite Symbolic Library. We describe the heuristics implemented in ALV for computing fixpoints using the composite symbolic representation. Since Action Language specifications allow declaration of unbounded integer variables and parameterized integer constants, verification of Action Language specifications is undecidable. ALV uses several heuristics to conservatively approximate the fixpoint computations. ALV also implements an automated abstraction technique that enables parameterized verification of a concurrent system with an arbitrary number of identical processes.

The Language of Action and Cyberaction-based Music: Theory and Practice

Action can define, guide and inform all aspects of compositional process and foster musical expression. This article formalizes a language of action-based music in the physical world and cyberspace. Typologies of actions form lexica from which such music emerges. Physical modelling synthesis is an excellent vehicle for conceptualization of actions and instruments in the digital domain, yielding replica extended, hybrid, and abstract cyberinstruments and cyberactions. Compositional examples situate proposed theoretical principles in musical practice.1 1This article is based on my dissertation research (Kojs, 2008).

Grammatical aspect and mental simulation

When processing sentences about perceptible scenes and performable actions, language understanders activate perceptual and motor systems to perform mental simulations of those events. But little is known about exactly what linguistic elements activate modality-specific systems during language processing. While it is known that content words, like nouns and verbs, influence the content of a mental simulation, the role of grammar is less well understood. We investigate the role of grammatical markers in mental simulation through two experiments in which we manipulate the meanings of sentences by modifying the grammatical aspect they use. Using the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) methodology [Glenberg, A., Kaschak, M. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 558–565], we show that progressive sentences about hand motion facilitate manual action in the same direction, while perfect sentences that are identical in every way except their aspect do not. The broader implication of this finding for language processing is that while content words tell understanders what to mentally simulate and what brain regions to use in performing these simulations, grammatical constructions such as aspect modulate how those simulations are performed.

Language and communication in conflict resolution

Language in action can be seen in terms of verbal, non-verbal and written media. Therefore, language and communication are sine qua non in this world of words and continued eruptions of conflicts or disputes. What defines human’s humanity is language which is the vehicle of communication. People, therefore, engage in communication for many reasons and for the purpose of this paper, we shall examine the roles and functions of communication as one of the means of non-violent methods of conflict resolution. Language is regarded by experts as the key to the heart of a people. Language and communication, therefore, are very crucial in the management and resolution of conflicts or disputes between the two parties in conflicts. As important as language and communication are in conflicts and conflict resolutions, they are not properly focused in the works of many writers and researchers. This paper, therefore, identifies communication as a significant means of resolving conflicts. Other non-violent methods of management and resolution of conflicts where the use of language and communication are crucial and significantly inevitable include negotiation, dialogue, mediation, adjudication, arbitration as well as the use of the mass media. It is the opinion of this paper that the roles and functions of language and communication should be more focused, analysed and utilized in order to find out the root causes, management, effects and resolutions of conflicts in the society. Key words: Peace, conflict, non-adversarial procedures, use of language, communication, mediation, resolution.

Differential roles for left inferior frontal and superior temporal cortex in multimodal integration of action and language

Several studies indicate that both posterior superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus (pSTS/MTG) and left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) are involved in integrating information from different modalities. Here we investigated the respective roles of these two areas in integration of action and language information. We exploited the fact that the semantic relationship between language and different forms of action (i.e. co-speech gestures and pantomimes) is radically different. Speech and co-speech gestures are always produced together, and gestures are not unambiguously understood without speech. On the contrary, pantomimes are not necessarily produced together with speech and can be easily understood without speech. We presented speech together with these two types of communicative hand actions in matching or mismatching combinations to manipulate semantic integration load. Left and right pSTS/MTG were only involved in semantic integration of speech and pantomimes. Left IFG on the other hand was involved in integration of speech and co-speech gestures as well as of speech and pantomimes. Effective connectivity analyses showed that depending upon the semantic relationship between language and action, LIFG modulates activation levels in left pSTS.This suggests that integration in pSTS/MTG involves the matching of two input streams for which there is a relatively stable common object representation, whereas integration in LIFG is better characterized as the on-line construction of a new and unified representation of the input streams. In conclusion, pSTS/MTG and LIFG are differentially involved in multimodal integration, crucially depending upon the semantic relationship between the input streams.