The tutorial introduces the audience to the concept of referring expressions, formulæ that can be used to communicate identities of otherwise abstract objects. The formalism provides foundations for a successful and unambiguous exchange of information about individuals between agents sharing common knowledge about such individuals, a task that is indispensable in most modern applications of knowledge representation and semantic technologies.
Referring Expressions in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation Systems
Dr. David Toman and Dr. Grant Weddell are professors of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. They have published and presented results in the area of knowledge representation over the last 20 years at premier AI conferences (including another Ray Reiter Prize in 2010 and Best Paper Prize and ISWC 2013; Dr. Toman has also given tutorials in the area of temporal representation and reasoning and temporal databases and information systems that has led to an invited chapter in the Handbook of Temporal Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence.