Review 2

From: Jiun-Hung Chen (jhchen@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Dec 06 2004 - 02:48:51 PST

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    PROVERB: The Probabilistic Cruciverbalist
    G. A. Keim and et al.

    Review by Jiun-Hung Chen

    Summary
    Knowledge from different expert modules is combined together to solve crossword puzzles and
    the combination is done by using constraint propagation and probabilities to select best target.

    Most important ideas

    Building different expert systems and then combining them together to solve a difficult problem
    is very important and can be seen as divide and conquer, a principal and elegant algorithm design
    paradigm. It is typically much more efficient than dealing with a problem as a whole.

    Learning transformations to clue-target pairs is a very interesting idea. By doing so, more information
    can be obtained by performing some inference in original knowledge bases. In addition, handling
    targets which are not included in any database but more probable than random with implicit distribution
     modules is a good idea, too.
     
    Largest flaws
    I think the proposed architecture can not scale up because each module works independently before
    their results are merged. It is inefficient because a clue is solved by each module. An ideal way is to
    classify a clue into a domain and only experts for this domain are used. In addition, in learning theory,
    it is hoped that each module makes independent errors in a glue so that the ensemble can perform
    substantially better than each module. However, I can not find that this issue is carefully considered
    in this paper. So, I doubt that some modules may be redundant and I guess it is an another reason
    why this system is slow.

    Open research questions
    A more efficient and powerful computer solver for crossword puzzles is very challenging. I think it
    definitely needs further understanding of many key questions such as knowledge representation
    and search in AI. In addition, WWW can be seen as a very huge knowledge base today and I think
    you can get almost all information you want. So, using WWW to solve crossword puzzles is a very
    interesting direction.


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