This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, AI 96, held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in May 1996. The 35 revised full papers presented in the book were carefully selected by the program committee. Although organized by a national society, AI 96 attracted contributions and participants with a significant geographic diversity. The issues addressed in this volume cover an electic range of current AI topics with a certain emphasis on various aspects of knowledge representation, natural language processing, and learning.