CONCEPTUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING (North Holland, 1975)
A number of primitive actions can be used to form all complex actions.
Each action entails roles which are common to all languages.
Therefore a verb can be represented in terms of more primitive concepts.
Schanks' "conceptual dipendency" draws ideas from Fillmore and Katz.
SCRIPTS, PLANS, GOALS, AND UNDERSTANDING (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1977)
A script is a social variant of Minsky's frame. A script represents
stereotypical knowledge of situations as a sequence of actions and a set
of roles. Once the situation is recognized, the script prescribes the actions
that are sensible and the roles that are likely to be played. The script helps
understand the situation and predicts what will happen. A script performs
anticipatory reasoning.
DYNAMIC MEMORY (Cambridge Univ Press, 1982)
Dynamic memory is a type of memory that can grow of its own, based on
experience. A script is a generalization of a class of situations. If a
situation falls into the context of a script, then an expectation is created
by the script, based on what happened in all previous situations. If the
expectation fails to materialize, then a new memory must be created.
This memory is structured according to an "explanation" of the failure.
Generalizations are created from two identical expectation failures.
Memories are driven by expectation failures, by the attempt to explain
each failure and learning from that experience.
New experiences are stored only if they fail to conform to the expectations.
Remembering is closely related to understanding and learning.
Schank Roger: TELL ME A STORY (Scribner, 1990) Ultimately, knowledge (and intelligence itself) is stories. Cognitive skills emerge from discourse-related functions: conversation is reminding and storytelling is understanding (and in particular generalizing). The stories that are told differ from the stories that are in memory: in the process of being told, a story undergoes changes to reflect the intentions of the speaker. The mechanism is similar to script-driven reasoning: understanding a story entails finding a story in memory that matches the new story and enhancing the old story with details from the new one. Underlying the mechanism is a process of "indexing" based on identifying five factors: theme, goal, plan, result and lesson. Memory actually contains only "gists" of stories, that can be turned into stories by a number of operations (distillation, combination, elaboration, creation, captioning, adaptation). Knowledge is embodied in stories and cognition is carried out in terms of stories that are already known. THE COGNITIVE COMPUTER (Addison-Wesley, 1984) An accessible introduction to Schank's theory of natural language understanding, conceptual dependency, scripts, and some of the early programs of his school (MARGIE, SAM, POLITICS, FRUMP, IPP, BORIS, CYRUS). TM, ®, Copyright © 2015 Piero Scaruffi |