  We study connections between the ring of symmetric functions and the
characters of irreducible finite-dimensional representations of quantum affine
algebras. We study two families of representations of the symplectic and
orthogonal Lie algebras. One is defined via combinatorial properties and is
easy to calculate; the other is closely related to the $q=1$ limit of the
``minimal affinization'' representations of quantum affine algebras. We
conjecture that the two families are identical, and present supporting evidence
and examples. In the special case of a highest weight that is a multiple of a
fundamental weight, this reduces to a conjecture of Kirillov and Reshetikhin,
recently proved by the first author.
