Knowledge Representation in the TRAINS System

The long term goal of the TRAINS project is to deve- lop an intelligentplanning assistant that is conversa- tionally proficient in natural language. The TRAINS system helps a user construct and monitor plans about a railroad freight system; their interaction ta- kes place in natural language. The representational needs of a system like TRAINS include represen- ting lexical meaning, dealing with the problem of ambiguity, make use of information about context, and finding a connection between the content of the current utterance and the plan being jointly develo- ped by system and user. The goal of the paper is to describe how TRAINS-93, the latest prototype of TRAINS, deals with these issues.