About Norms and Causes

May 2004

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

Volume

Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2004)

All Papers

Knowing the norms of a domain is crucial, but there exist no repository of norms. We propose a method to extract them from texts: texts generally do not describe a norm, but rather how a state-of-affairs differs from it. Answers about the cause of the state-of-affairs described often reveal the implicit norm. We apply this idea to the domain of driving, and validate it by designing algorithms that identify, in a text, the “basic” norms to which it refers implicitly.