R. Schank, Conceptual Dependency: A Theory of Natural Language Understanding. Cognitive Psychology, 3 (4), 1972.

Author of the summary: J. William Murdock, 1997, murdock@cc.gatech.edu

Cite this paper for:

• A coherent framework for representing meaning can facilitate reasoning about the content of natural language discourse.

Keywords: Conceptual Dependency, Natural Language

Systems: A system is implied but only the theory is presented

Summary: Argues that natural language understanding needs to be
conducted in a broader context of reasoning.  Introduces the notions
of conceptualizations and concepts which are units of meaning loosely
corresponding to the grammatical units of clauses and words.  Further
introduces four classes of concepts, picture producers (PP's), actions
(ACT's), picture aiders (PA's), and action aiders (AA's) which very
loosely correspond to the syntactic categories of nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs respectively.  Presents a formalism called
C-diagrams which represent relationships (i.e. "dependencies") between
concepts and conceptualizations.  Describes the components of a
sentence processing system within this ontology.  Presents the
language of C-diagram in enormous depth.  Describes the processing
which goes into forming such representations including resolution of
issues such as meaningfulness constraints, syntactic ambiguity,
semantic ambiguity, etc.  Looks at the issues of intensionality,
causation, and expectation within this framework.  Discusses the topic
of drawing inferences about world states from the content of
utterances.  Briefly introduces the issue of early natural language
processing by young children.

Summary author's notes:

• This summary came from a file which had the following disclaimer: "The following summaries are the completely unedited and often hastily composed interpretations of a single individual without any sort of systematic or considered review. As such it is very likely that at least some of the following text is incomplete, inadequate, misleading, or simply wrong. One might view this as a very preliminary draft of a survey paper that will probably never be completed. The author disclaims all responsibility for the accuracy or use of this document; this is not an official publication of the Georgia Institute of Technology or the College of Computing thereof, and the opinions expressed here may not even fully match the fully considered opinions of the author much less the general opinions of the aformentioned organizations."