Title: Formalizing and Compiling Background Knowledge and its
Applications to Knowledge Representation and Question Answering.

Domain-specific background knowledge is an essential component of
many automated reasoning systems including general
question-answering systems that reason about some aspect of the
world. The goal of this symposium is to investigate theoretical
problems related to the design of a repository for background
knowledge and to initiate the creation of such a repository.  Such
a repository is analogous to the libraries that accompany the
compilers of various procedural languages. The effort to create an
open repository will be similar to efforts such as wordnet,
verbnet, and framenet, but unlike them our proposed repository
will contain formal representations. The availability of these
open repositories has had a significant impact on research in many
areas including question answering, and our goal is to take this
to the next level. In recent years research on knowledge
representation and reasoning has come of age with projects such as
Digital Aristotle (projecthalo.com) and question answering
projects. One of the main bottlenecks in these efforts has been
the absence of a publicly and freely available repository of
background knowledge. The aim of this symposium is to address this
shortcoming.

We solicit papers on (a) formalizations (knowledge modules) of
background knowledge in specific domains as well as (b) papers
addressing general challenges such as formalizing
background knowledge for use by multiple users on multiple
reasoning tasks.

For knowledge module papers, we impose no restriction on the
domain  to be formalized or on the level of specificity. For
example, the knowledge module might provide a general
formalization of a theory of actions, or it could be a
formalization of a travel domain. We suggest the following common
format for the knowledge module papers:

(i)  A knowledge base (KB) written in English.

(ii) Examples of informal consequences of KB, preferably
     accompanied by some explanations, including defaults
     and other commonsense knowledge not directly mentioned
     in KB but needed to produce the desired consequence.

(iii) Information about which logic/language is used in formalizing it.
           (Syntax, semantics, and where the reasoning system is available.)

(iv)  The formalization

(v)   Short description on how the formalization can be tested
      using the reasoning system.

Papers that address challenges related to some or all of the above
are also welcome.

More details on this symposium can be found at
http://www.public.asu.edu/~cbaral/aaai06-ss/

Organizing Committee:

Chitta Baral (chitta@asu.edu)
Alfredo Gabaldon (alfredo.gabaldon@nicta.com.au)
Michael Gelfond (mgelfond@cs.ttu.edu)
Joohyung Lee (appsmurf@cs.utexas.edu)
Vladimir Lifschitz (vl@cs.utexas.edu)
Steve Maiorano (stevemai@mac.com)
Sheila McIlraith (sheila@cs.toronto.edu)
Leora Morgenstern (leora@steam.stanford.edu)