This article discusses how explanation-based learning of plan schemata from observation can improve performance of plan recognition. The GENESIS program is presented as an implemented system for narrative text understanding that learns schemata and improves its performance. Learned schemata allow GENESIS to use schema-based understanding techniques when interpreting events and thereby ovoid the...

Since the acceptance of Wegener's theory of plate tectonics in the 1960s, continental drift vicariance has been proposed as an explanation for pan-Gondwanan faunal distributions. Given the recognition of historical connections among continents, it no longer was necessary to invoke hypotheses of dispersal across nearly insurmountable barriers. The application of continental drift vicariance theo...

The ability to comprehend and produce phrasal verbs, as lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together, is an important part of language learning. This study investigates the effect of ‘conceptual metaphor awareness’, as a newly developed technique in Cognitive Linguistics, on learning phrasal verbs by Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To meet this objective, two intact ho...

The naturalness of qualitative reasoning suggests that qualitative representations might be an important component of the semantics of natural language. Prior work showed that framebased representations of qualitative process theory constructs could indeed be extracted from natural language texts. That technique relied on the parser recognizing specific syntactic constructions, which had limite...

Storytelling with data is becoming an important component of many fields such as graphic design, the advocacy of causes, and journalism. New techniques for integrating data visualization into narrative stories have now become commonplace. Authors are enabling new reader experiences, such as linking textual narrative and data visualizations through dynamic queries embedded in the text. Novel mea...

In its hermeneutically rich reconstructions of “Axial Age” breakthroughs in the world’sgreat religions, RHE provides an all-important historical explanation for the autonomy of cul-ture vis-à-vis social structure in the present day. Powerfully documenting “Eastern” as well as“Western” Axial breakthroughs, RHE goes beyond the Orientalism that distorted Weber’s ownhistorical and c...

A narrative is a course of real events about which we might have incomplete information. Formalisms for reasoning about action may be broadly divided into those which are narrative-based, such as the Event Calculus of Kowalski and Sergot, and those which reason on the level of hypothetical sequences of actions, in particular the Situation Calculus. This paper bridges the gap between these types...

This article presents a new method to create maps that chart changes across a cinematic narrative. These are unlike narrative spaces previously discussed in the literature—they are abstract, holistic, dynamic representations based on objective criteria. The analysis considers three films (All About Eve, Inception, and MASH) by counting the co-occurrences of main characters within scenes, and 12...