Title: Formalizing and compiling background knowledge and its applications to KR and QA. Symposium Description: This symposium is about formalizing and compiling background knowledge, also referred to as domain axiomatization, and its applications to knowledge representation (KR) and question answering (QA). To motivate this, let us consider answering questions with respect to a paragraph of text. Often it is not possible to appropriately answer the questions with respect to the text without using additional background knowledge. For example, consider the text: ``John, who always carries his laptop with him, took a flight from Boston to Paris on the morning of Dec 11th.'' Now suppose one were to ask the following questions: Q1: Where is John on the evening of Dec 12th. Q2: In which city is John's laptop on the evening of Dec 10th. Q3: In which city is John's laptop on the evening of Dec 12th. To answer the above question, one needs to use the common-sense or domain knowledge (which is unspecified in the text) that normally when one takes a flight from A to B then (s)he will be at B at the end of the flight; and if X has the physical object Y with him and X is in B then Y is also in B. Thus if one were to represent the above story in a knowledge representation formalism, to do appropriate common-sense reasoning we will also need to encode the necessary background knowledge that is not quite explicitly stated in the story. Similarly, queries may include terms such as `find a plan', `find an explanation', and `find a cause' that are not quite defined in the text. These concepts also need to be appropriately formalized, so that correct common-sense answers could be given with respect to such queries. The goal of this symposium is to investigate theoretical problems related to the design of a repository for background knowledge and 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. The availability of these open repositories has had a great impact on research in many areas including areas such as question answering, and our goal is to take this to the next level. In particular, in recent years Knowledge representation (KR) and reasoning has come of age with projects such as Digital Aristotle (projecthalo.com), and question answering projects (sponsored by ARDA) that need large scale KR. One of the main bottlenecks in these efforts has been the absence of a repository of background knowledge similar to wordnet. The aim of this symposium is to address that. **In the symposium we will encourage the formalizations to be done in a language with a precise semantics and at least a prototype implementation that is openly available.** The research goal of this symposium is not a brand new one. There have been similar efforts in the past -- such as the Ontology related efforts at Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford and CYC -- some of which are still continuing. Prominent among them is CYC. The key difference between CYC and our aim is analogous to the difference between Celera's genome effort and the open Human genome project. While CYC is developed by a company and only small parts of its knowledge base is openly accessible, a larger subset accessible with restrictions and legalities and its reasoning engine is not publicly available, our aim is to kick-start the development and compilation of a knowledge base that will be openly available, that will have reasoning engines that are openly available, and that is written in a KR language with precise, published and vetted (by the community) syntax and semantics. {Note: To the best of our knowledge CYC's syntax and semantics is neither completely published, nor vetted by the research community.) The other main difference between earlier efforts and the current effort is that in some sense the earlier efforts were a bit premature, as it is only recently that the KR community has come up with a few good KR languages with a large body of support structure consisting of theoretical results, implementations and applications. To elaborate further on the background knowledge, besides the domain specific knowledge like the one we mentioned earlier about the travel domain, we also need to develop and compile meta-level formalizations. An example of a the later is a compilation of `commonsense facts about actions'. There have been formalizations of many small action domains ("toy worlds") in the literature. The next step would be to isolate the concepts and principles that these and similar individual domains have in common and to build a database of such principles stated in a general form. Once such a database is created, it will be possible to obtain from it formalizations of many individual action domains, including those studied in the past, by adding domain-specific facts. The symposium will consist of few invited and plenary talks, several paper presentations, some discussion sessions, and possibly a poster session. In the CFP of the symposium we will solicit papers on formalizations of background knowledge in specific domains as well as papers addressing some of the general challenges such as formalizing background knowledge for use by multiple users on multiple reasoning tasks. Prior to the symposium, a web site for the repository will be announced, and participants will be encouraged to submit their formalizations to the repository. The structure of the repository, the web site, and the protocol to add new formalizations to the web site will be discussed during the symposium. Organizing Committee: Chitta Baral chitta@asu.edu Department of Computer Science and Engineering Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85281 http://www.public.asu.edu/~cbaral/ Alfredo Gabaldon alfredo.gabaldon@nicta.com.au Knowledge Representation and Reasoning National ICT Australia Sydney, Australia Michael Gelfond mgelfond@cs.ttu.edu Department of Computer Science Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX http://www.cs.ttu.edu/~mgelfond/ Vladimir Lifschitz vl@cs.utexas.edu Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/ Joohyung Lee appsmurf@cs.utexas.edu Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/appsmurf/ will change from Fall 05 to Department of Computer Science and Engineering Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85281 Sheila McIlraith Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 6 King's College Road Toronto, Ontario, Canada. M5S 3H5 http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sheila/ Steve Maiorano stevemai@mac.com ARDA (Advance Research and Development Agency) Potential Participants: The idea of a symposium on this topic was conceived during a discussion in the research mailing list tag@cs.utexas.edu. Several people volunteered to play an active role (beyond just participation) in the symposium, and several others suggested ideas about the symposium and this proposal. Besides the organizing committee, the above includes John McCarthy (Stanford), Alessandro Provetti (Bresina, Italy), and Ramon Otero (La Corona, Spain). The complete list at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/tag/members.html has more than 60 members and we attach it below. In addition we expect some of the participants of Commonsense'05; Participants of NRAC workshops; and participants of ASP (Answer set programming) meetings; etc. to be interested in this symposium. We also expect some of the members of the various groups involved in the AQUAINT question answering program to be attend this symposium. Members of tag@cs.utexas.edu listed at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/tag/members.html Varol Akman (akman@cs.bilkent.edu.tr) Ozgur Alan (alan@ceng.metu.edu.tr) Ferda Nur Alpaslan (ferda@rorqual.cc.metu.edu.tr) Saadat Anwar (saadat@east.mars.asu.edu) Chitta Baral (chitta@asu.edu) Marcello Balduccini (marcello.balduccini@ttu.edu) Leopoldo Bertossi (bertossi@scs.carleton.ca) Martin Brain (mjb@cs.bath.ac.uk) Pedro Cabalar (cabalar@dc.fi.udc.es) Monica Caniupan (mcaniupa@scs.carleton.ca) Isabella Cattinelli (isabella_cattinelli@hotmail.com) Sandeep Chintabathina (chintaba@redwood.cs.ttu.edu) Nihan Kesim Cicekli (nihan@ceng.metu.edu.tr) Peter Clark (clarkp@puffin.rt.cs.boeing.com) Owen Cliffe (occ@cs.bath.ac.uk) Stefania Costantini (stefcost@univaq.it) Tom Crick (tc@cs.bath.ac.uk) Marina De Vos (mdv@cs.bath.ac.uk) Semra Dogandag (semra@ceng.metu.edu.tr) Esra Erdem (esra@kr.tuwien.ac.at) Selim Erdogan (selim@cs.utexas.edu) Wolfgang Faber (faber@kr.tuwien.ac.at) Paolo Ferraris (otto@cs.utexas.edu) Alfredo Gabaldon (alfredo@cs.utoronto.ca) Joel Galloway (galloway@mdlogix.com) Yeting Ge (yg321@nyu.edu) Gregory Gelfond (gregory.gelfond@ttu.edu) Michael Gelfond (mgelfond@cs.ttu.edu) Nick Gianoutsos (nick_gianoutsos@yahoo.com) Enrico Giunchiglia (enrico@dist.unige.it) Juan Carlos Acosta Guadarrama (jcaguadarrama@yahoo.co.uk) Stijn Heymans (sheymans@vub.ac.be) Eric Hsu (eihsu@cs.toronto.edu) Giorgi Japaridze (giorgi.japaridze@villanova.edu) Yulia G. Kahl (ykahl@juno.com) Umut Kahramankaptan (umutk@bilkent.edu.tr) Evren Kapusuz (evren@ceng.metu.edu.tr) G. Neelakantan Kartha (gnkartha@yahoo.com) Larry King (lking@cs.nmsu.edu) Ozcan Koc (okoc@dpt.gov.tr) Vladik Kreinovich (vladik@cs.utep.edu) Ugur Kuter (ukuter@metu.edu.tr) Tuan Chi Le (lctuan@asu.edu) Hung Viet Le (hle@cs.nmsu.edu) Gene Moo Lee (gene@cs.utexas.edu) Joohyung Lee (appsmurf@cs.utexas.edu) Nicola Leone (leone@mat.unical.it) Yuliya Lierler (yuliya@immd8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de) Vladimir Lifschitz (vl@cs.utexas.edu) Dan Lu (ludan_ban@yahoo.com) Marco Maratea (marco@dist.unige.it) Ritesh Mariadas (ritesh@cs.utep.edu) Sheila McIlraith (sam@ksl.stanford.edu) Norm McCain (nmccain@sunflower.com) John McCarthy (jmc@steam.stanford.edu) Veena S. Mellarkod (mellarko@cs.ttu.edu) Alessandra Mileo (mileo@dsi.unimi.it) Luis Angel Montiel Moreno (luis.angel.montiel@gmail.com) Juan Antonio Navarro Perez (navarroj@cs.man.ac.uk) Viet Hung Nguyen (hung@asu.edu) Davy Van Nieuwenborgh (dvnieuwe@vub.ac.be) Monica Nogueira (monica@cs.utep.edu) Magdalena Ortiz de la Fuente (is103378@mail.udlap.mx) Mauricio Osorio (josorio@mail.udlap.mx) Ramon P. Otero (otero@dc.fi.udc.es) Aarati Parmar (aarati@steam.stanford.edu) Gerald Pfeifer (gerald@pfeifer.com) Inna Pivkina (ipivkina@cs.nmsu.edu) Axel Polleres (axel@kr.tuwien.ac.at) Enrico Pontelli (epontell@cs.nmsu.edu) Bruce Porter (porter@cs.utexas.edu) Alessandro Provetti (provetti@dsi.unimi.it) Wanwan Ren (rww6@cs.utexas.edu) Orkunt Sabuncu (e106181@ceng.metu.edu.tr) Richard Scherl (rscherl@monmouth.edu) Ian Scott-Fleming (ian.scott-fleming@cs.ttu.edu) Armando Tacchella (tac@dist.unige.it) Yana Maximova Todorova (is113154@mail.udlap.mx) Nam Tran (http://www.public.asu.edu/~nhtran) Son Cao Tran (tson@cs.utep.edu@cs.utep.edu) Hudson Turner (hudson@d.umn.edu) Dirk Vermeir (dvermeir@vub.ac.be) Richard Watson (richard.watson@coe.ttu.edu) Claudia Zepeda Cortes (sc098382@mail.udlap.mx) Zhao Jicheng (jicheng@asu.edu) Zhao Yuting (yzhao@itc.it)