Six Problems for Story Understanders

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 3

Cognitive Modeling

Story understanding programs have been classified as script-based processors, goal-based pro-cessors or multi-level processors. Each program introduces a new knowledge structure and invents a mechanism to make inferences and manage memory for that knowledge structure. This can lead to a prol-iferation of incomplete, incompatible processing mechanisms. The alternative presented here is to concentrate on the processing mechanism. It is sug-gested that a single inferencing scheme can deal with all knowledge structures in a uniform manner. Six basic problems that such a processor must address are presented and discussed.