6.UAP Thesis: Story Analogies with Structure Mapping and Plot Units

Stories pervade our mental lives. We use stories to explain the state of the world, to provide context for objects and actions, to persuade others, and especially to predict the outcomes of our actions. If we wish to build programs that interact with and think about the world as intelligently as we do, we must allow them to understand and reason about stories. For proper reasoning and inference, the ability to make analogies between stories is also crucial. For instance, political leaders often base their actions on precedent, inferring from a precedent’s similarity to recent events the likely outcomes of their actions. To do this, they must be able to spot the similarity, map current entities and events onto those in the precedent, and hypothesize new events based on the precedent. The Genesis group at MIT has developed a software system called Genesis that implements some of the requisite story comprehension and reasoning. It parses stories in simple English into a rich internal representation, using a common-sense knowledge