Date: Thu, 18 Apr 91 22:34:33 EDT
From:: tar@medg.lcs.mit.edu (Thomas A. Russ)
To: gsl@ai.mit.edu
Subject: Butta Seminar Friday.

			       SEMINAR

FRIDAY, APRIL 19
12:15 PM
NE43-8TH FLOOR PLAYROOM

			    P. Knott Butta

	 German Research Center for Alimentary Intake (DFGF)
		    Sauerkrautundkoleslawanderside

     Inferences in Culinary Languages: Techniques and Complexity

Abstract: 

Culinary  languages provide  a means  for  expressing knowledge  about
hierarchies of menus, i.e. classes  of objects with common properties.
They have been investigated originally  in  the  field of gourmet food
design, following the  ideas initially embedded  in romance-based  and
gastronomy  old-boy-net-based    languages,   especially the   FR-ENCH
language.

However, several formalisms  of  this kind  are now   being considered
within  the realm of stand-up buffets   and cocktail parties, with the
aim of  enriching the expressivity  of existing feeding models and and
cocktail party languages with subject-oriented features.

The   basic reasoning tasks   on  meal   sources are  satiability  and
consumption checking.  Although  culinary languages  have  been widely
used in AI-systems, only in rare cases  have  complete techniques been
discovered.  In this talk, we present a general technique for devising
inference  procedures for culinary  languages, which is  based  on the
tableau  calculus for nouvelle  cuisine.  Moreover, we  use our herbal
combinatoric   technique to  derive   complexity  results  for several
variants of culinary languages. With these complexity results, precise
lower and upper  bounds  can  be derived  for almost   every  culinary
language proposed   in the  literature.  As  an  application,  we give
maximal  satiation languages and  minimal cholesterol languages,  thus
solving a research problem that has been open for years.

Hosts: David Beymer
       Jim Hutchinson
       John Keen