Rozprawy Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term “Information Society Age” seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

By presenting state-of-the-art results in logical reasoning and formal methods in the context of artificial intelligence and AI applications, this book commemorates the 60th birthday of Jörg H. Siekmann. The 30 revised reviewed papers are written by former and current students and colleagues of Jörg Siekmann; also included is an appraisal of the scientific career of Jörg Siekmann entitled "A Portrait of a Scientist: Logics, AI, and Politics." The papers are organized in four parts on logic and deduction, applications of logic, formal methods and security, and agents and planning.

Annotation This volume constitutes seleted papers from the 12th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2009, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, in September 2009. This volume contains a collection of submitted papers presented at the conference which were thoroughly reviewed by three members of the conference reviewing team consisting of more than 40 top specialists in the conference topic areas. A total of 53 accepted papers out of 112 submitted, altogether contributed 127 authors and co-authors, were selected for presentation at the conference by the program committee and then included in this book. Theoretical and more general contributions were presented in common (plenary) sessions. Problem oriented sessions as well as panel discussions then brought together the specialists in limited problem areas with the aim of exchanging knowledge and skills resulting from research projects of all kinds.

For many years Leonard Bolc has played an important role in the Polish computer science community. He is especially known for his clear vision in the development of artificial intelligence, inspiring research, organizational and editorial achievements in areas such as e.g.: logic, automatic reasoning, natural language processing, and computer applications of natural language or human-like reasoning. This Festschrift volume, published to honor Leonard Bolc on his 75th birthday includes 17 refereed papers by leading researchers, his friends, former students and colleagues to celebrate his scientific career. The essays present research in the areas which Leonard Bolc and his colleagues investigated during his long scientific career. The volume is organized in three parts; the first is devoted to logic - the domain which was one of the most explored by Leonard Bolc himself. The second part contains papers focusing on different aspects of computational linguistics; the third part comprises papers describing different applications in which natural language processing or automatic reasoning plays an important role.