Connectionist Modeling of Human Event Memorization Processes with Application to Automatic Text Summarization

Intelligent Text Summarization

Volume

Papers from the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Probably the most influential work in the area of text understanding has been Bartlett’s theory of schemata (Bartlett 1932). Bartlett’s experiments suggested that, in understanding and remembering stories, humans relate the (new) material they hear or read to familiar schemata of related past experiences they have already developed. Thus, there is no need for the memorization of detail, neither of the exact form and structure of the story. An important aspect of the original formulation of his schema theory is the fact that schemas are not static and deterministic, but rather "active" and "developing" structures (Bartlett 1932).