Infants in Children Stories - Toward a Model of Natural Language Comprehension

Abstract

How can we construct a program that will understand stories that children would understand? By understand we mean the ability to answer questions about the story. We are interested here with understanding natural language in a very broad area. In particular how does one understand stories about infants? We propose a system which answers such questions by relating the story to background real world knowledge. We make use of the general model proposed by Eugene Charniak in his Ph.D. thesis (Charniak 72). The model sets up expectations which can be used to help answer questions about the story. There is a set of routines called BASE-routines that correspond to our "real world knowledge" and routines that are "put-in" which are called DEMONs that correspond to contextual information. Context can help to assign a particular meaning to an ambiguous word, or pronoun.