DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
				UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

		     CS	701:  COGNITIVE	SCIENCE	RESEARCH SEMINAR
			       Registration No.	101079

				 William J. Rapaport

				      Fall 1989


	  +o    The topic of this research seminar is Cognitive and Computer
	       Systems for Understanding Narrative Text, a research project
	       being undertaken	by faculty and graduate	students  from	the
	       Departments  of Communicative Disorders & Sciences (Duchan),
	       Computer	Science	(Rapaport and Shapiro),	 Geography  (Mark),
	       Linguistics  (Zubin), and Psychology (Bruder and	Segal);	the
	       project is funded by the	National Science Foundation.

	       The research program consists of	a group	of  projects  whose
	       goals  are to develop a psychologically real model of a cog-
	       nitive agent's comprehension of deictic information in  nar-
	       rative  text.   We  are testing the hypothesis that the con-
	       struction and modification of a ``deictic center''-the locus
	       in  conceptual  space-time  of  the characters, objects,	and
	       events depicted by the sentences	currently being	 perceived-
	       is important for	comprehension.	To test	this hypothesis, we
	       are developing a	computer system	 that  models  a  cognitive
	       agent  who  ``reads'' a narrative and answers questions con-
	       cerning the agent's beliefs about  the  objects,	 relations,
	       and  events  in	the  narrative.	  The  final system will be
	       psychologically real, because the details of the	 algorithms
	       and the efficacy	of the linguistic devices will be validated
	       by  psychological  experiments  on   normal   and   abnormal
	       comprehenders.	This  project  will lead to a better under-
	       standing	of how people comprehend narrative  text,  it  will
	       advance the state of machine understanding, and it will pro-
	       vide insight into the nature of comprehension disorders	and
	       their potential remediation.

	  +o    Students registered for the seminar will be expected to:

	       (1) attend all meetings of the research group:

	       (2) (a) participate actively in a research project under	the
	       direction of one	or more	of the principal
	       investigators	(Bruder,  Duchan,  Mark,  Rapaport,
	       Segal, Shapiro, or Zubin),

		    (b)	present	the results of their research to the group, and

		    (c)	write a	10-15 page paper reporting on  the  results
	       of the research,	and

	       (3) attend the colloquia	sponsored by the Graduate Group	 in
	       Cognitive Science and the Center for Cognitive Science

	  +o    The seminar is open only by permission of the instructor to
	       graduate	 students  in Computer Science,	Anthropology, Clas-
	       sics, Communications, Communicative Disorders and  Sciences,
	       Comparative  Literature,	 English,  Geography,  Linguistics,
	       Modern Languages, Philosophy, Psychology, etc.

	  +o    Meeting time and place:	Tuesdays, 4-6 P.M., Baldy 119.

	  For further information, contact:

	       William J. Rapaport
	       Bell 214
	       Dept. of	Computer Science
	       (716) 636-3193
	       rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu OR rapaport@sunybcs.bitnet