Action-Centered Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) aims at retrieving documents that are most relevant to a query provided by a user. Traditional techniques rely mostly on syntactic methods. In some cases, however, links at a deeper semantic level must be considered. In this paper, we explore a type of IR task in which documents describe sequences of events, and queries are about the state of the world after such events. In this context, successfully matching documents and query requires considering the events' possibly implicit, uncertain effects and side-effects. We begin by analyzing the problem, then propose an action language based formalization, and finally automate the corresponding IR task using Answer Set Programming.

CASP Solutions for Planning in Hybrid Domains

CASP is an extension of ASP that allows for numerical constraints to be added in the rules. PDDL+ is an extension of the PDDL standard language of automated planning for modeling mixed discrete-continuous dynamics. In this paper, we present CASP solutions for dealing with PDDL+ problems, i.e., encoding from PDDL+ to CASP, and extensions to the algorithm of the EZCSP CASP solver in order to solve CASP programs arising from PDDL+ domains. An experimental analysis, performed on well-known linear and non-linear variants of PDDL+ domains, involving various configurations of the EZCSP solver, other CASP solvers, and PDDL+ planners, shows the viability of our solution.