Literature/1975/Schank R


 * http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/T/T75/T75-2023.pdf

Author

 * Roger Schank, Yale University
 * ScientificCommons.org

Excerpts

 * Minsky's frames paper has created quite a stir within AI but it is not entirely clear that any given researcher who would agree that the frames approach is correct would agree with any other researcher's conception of what exactly that meant. What is a frame anyway? (p. 117)
 * It has been apparent to researchers within the domain of natural language understanding for some time that the eventual limit to our solution of that problem would be our ability to characterize world knowledge. In order to build a real understanding system it will be necessary to organize the knowledge that facilitates understanding. We view the process of understanding as the fitting in of new information into a previously organized view of the world. Thus we would extend our previous view of language analysis ... to the problem of understanding in general. That is, a language processor is bottom up until it gets enough information to enable it to make predictions and become top down. Input sentences ... set up expectations about what is likely to follow in the text. These expectations arise from the world knowledge that pertains to a given situation, and it is these expectations that we wish to explore here.
 * We choose to call our version of frames, SCRIPTS. The concept of a script ... is a structure that is made up of slots and requirements on what can fill those slots. The structure is an interconnected whole, and what is in one slot affects what can be in another. The entire structure is a unit that describes a situation as a whole and makes sense to the user of that script, in this case the language understander. (p. 117)
 * A script is a predetermined sequence of actions that define a situation. Scripts are responsible for, and can be recognized by, the fact that they allow for references to objects within them just as if that object had been mentioned before. That is, certain objects within a script may be referenced by 'the' because the script itself has implicitly introduced them. (p. 117)