R. Schank and R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977.

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

Cite this paper for:

• Tracing the causal relations between events in a story often requires highly structured generalizations of common episodic behaviors.

Keywords: Scripts, Causality, Natural Language, Conceptual Dependency

Systems: SAM (Script Applier Mechanism)

Summary: Chapter 1: Introduces some broad issues in AI / Cognitive
Science such as the role of computational modeling in the evaluation
of psychological theories, the importance of structured knowledge
representation, the importance of natural language understanding, the
dichotomy between declarative and episodic knowledge, etc. Provides a
very brief introduction to Conceptual Dependency (see #25).

Chapter 2: Discusses causality as a key factor in story understanding.
It presents a formalism for representing causal interactions between
events represented in CD.  Shows how a rule based method can
infer causal relationships between directly connected events using a
small set of general purpose rules. Points out that many
causal relations in natural language texts are not direct and instead
depend on inferred intermediate events.  

Chapter 3: Discusses scripts as a form of generalized episodic
knowledge which provides a chain of events for common activities.
Presents the restaurant script as an example and then provides a great
many very brief discussions of key topics regarding scripts
(e.g. selection of scripts, recovering from errors and exceptional
conditions in scripts, terminating scripts, overlapping scripts,
interactions among scripts, etc.).

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."