Connotation As A Form Of Inference

Story-processing systems have to deal, or avoid dealing, with INFERENCE CONTROL ''6' Ii, 13. when designing one such system 2, we were greatly helped by the "(ERC)RC" expression for connotation I. Our system is specialised in multi-faceted descriptions of characters (not, however , in the most difficult problems of beliefs about beliefs 4 and 8): here we present another aspect of the story character processing, namely the recursive EXPLANATION of inconsistencies appearing in the description of a character. We give a very schematic system overview, then some details about the CONNOTATION rules and an example of their application to a story. posed to ("fromage" RC("cheese")) RC("french"), but also situation-specific ones, as ("cheese" RC("cheese as geological stuff") RC("bizarre"), in the processing of a robot who asked what the moon is made of. As Barthes then remarks, connotations may be based on a set of initial expressions rather than on a single one, which is expressed by (EiRCl, E2RC 2 ..... EnRCn) R C This seems to be an essential feature of connotations , since it allows emphasis on 'connoted' contents by means of an accumulation of signi