Narrative Presentation and Meaning

Contents

We present a preliminary sketch of our exploration of understanding event descriptions by casting them in terms of narrative presentation. We maintain that human use of narrative in communication reflects a consistent approach to the organization of information. We further hypothesize that this method of organization is an effective heuristic for focusing inference to understand the world around us. Thus, we believe that casting events and descriptions of events in terms of narrative presentation will both increase the salience of mechanical understanding results and decrease the computational complexity.