We point out that a common feature of integrable hierarchies presenting
soliton solutions is the existence of some special ``vacuum solutions'' such
that the Lax operators evaluated on them, lie in some abelian subalgebra of the
associated Kac-Moody algebra. The soliton solutions are constructed out of
those ``vacuum solitons'' by the dressing transformation procedure.Comment: Talk given at the I Latin American Symposium on High Energy Physics,
I SILAFAE, Merida, Mexico, November/96, 5 pages, LaTeX, needs aipproc.tex,
aipproc.sty, aipproc.cls, available from
ftp://ftp.aip.org/ems/tex/macros/proceedings/6x9