Reasoning About a Semantic Memory Encoding of the Connectivity of Events

In artificial intelligence, human understanding of text is modeled by programs that construct representations. A critical question concerns determining the form of the representation (hence, the form of the understanding). Thls article explores the encoding relationship between the semantic memory and the representation/ understanding. An important feature of this relationshlp Is that semantic memory and the constructed representation share the same structure, that is, the structure of the " understanding " is a " copy " of some piece of structure taken from semantic memory. A key idea developed is the notion of conceptual roots, the basic framework of the semantic memory-encoded understanding/representation. The research reported in this article examined the twin themes of " copy based " representation/understanding ond the conceptual roots by exploring their roles in several reasoning tasks: The conceptual roots can be used to explain succinctly the connection between any two concept-coherent events In an understanding. The semantic memory encoding provides a measure of lmpor-tance that quantifies the conceptual emphasis of the understanding; given this measure of importance, It is easy to show that each of the important nodes is either a conceptual root or covered by one of the conceptual roots. A combination of techniques can be used to generate a description of the basic event content of the narrative (i.e., a basic summary): This last task reveals some other interesting properties of the conceptual roots.