Overview of Awarded Papers: The 19th Annual Conference of JSAI.

In this chapter, we introduce five awarded papers, selected from the 19th annual conference of JSAI (Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence) 2005. These five papers are truly excellent, for they were selected out of over 290 papers, the rate of which was less than 2%, voted by the total number of approximately seventy reviewers. As has been often mentioned, the research of artificial intelligence branches to many fields; among them, we could observe such tendency that empirical methods were rather prevalent compared with theoretical issues. However, we contend that the following five papers were both sound in theory and practical in feasibility. We show the synopses of the five papers, adding short comments for the award for each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]