From owner-cse191-sp08-list@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Wed Feb 13 10:17:12 2008 Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:16:57 -0500 From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: 191: "SCRIPTS" To: CSE191-SP08-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: 191: "SCRIPTS" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I used an example in my slide show on the 3 aspects of proving theorems (which, for those of you who want to look at it again, is online; see links at: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/191/S08/logic.html ) that involved a "story": John went to a restaurant for dinner. He ordered a steak. When he was finished, he paid the bill & left. with 2 questions: Q1: Who is the main character? Q2: Did he eat dinner? As some of you noticed, from a logical point of view, the correct answer to Q2 is "I don't know" (because the story doesn't literally say that John ate the steak for dinner, and it's logically possible that he didn't). But from an everyday, plausible-reasoning, commonsensical, reading-comprehension-test point of view, the answer is that he probably did eat dinner. This observation was the basis for one of the most famous early programs in Artificial Intelligence: SAM, the Script Applier Mechanism. A "script" is a concept from cognitive science: It is a general framework or "schema" that outlines a typical sequence of events in a stereotypical situation such as eating out in a restaurant. The cognitive claim is that we use scripts to reason about everyday life and to comprehend what we read. The computational claim is that we can write computer programs to do the same thing. For more information, look at some of the books and papers (and examples) on my CSE 463/563/663 course website about "Conceptual Dependency": http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/676/F01/cd.html