Theoretical Background This study takes part in a series of studies that analyze bridging inferences within expository films. According to Graesser, León and Otero (2002) bridging inferences establish coherence which is necessary to establish a coherent mental model. In other words: If a coherence break (CB) occurs the reader needs to solve the CB by generating a bridging inference in order to ...

Linguistic information can be conveyed in the form of speech and written text, but it is the content of the message that is ultimately essential for higher-level processes in language comprehension, such as making inferences and associations between text information and knowledge about the world. Linguistically, inference is the shovel that allows receivers to dig meaning out from the text with...

The authors describe a constructionist theory that accounts for the knowledge-based inferences that are constructed when readers comprehend narrative text. Readers potentially generate a rich variety of inferences when they construct a referential situation model of what the text is about. The proposed constructionist theory specifies that some, but not all, of this information is constructed u...

The analysis of a document image to derive a symbolic description of its structure and contents involves using spatial domain knowledge to classify the different printed blocks (e.g., text paragraphs), group them into logical units (e.g., newspaper stories), and determine the reading order of the text blocks within each unit. These steps describe the conversion of the physical structure of a do...

Models of story understanding in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology typically concentrate on the construction of representations of story content. Construction of a 'complete' representation (informally equivalent to an 'understanding') requires inferences which establish coherence links between text statements. This report examines how reality-based links (e.g. causal connections...

Text understanding in a spatial domain is often seen as the construction of a mental model. In this paper we present the rst prototype of a program that realizes some of the characteristics claimed for spatial reasoning processes in mental models. Our work is based on homogeneous coordinate systems and transformation matrices. This means that a relation between two objects A and B is represente...

Automatic satire detection is a subtle text classification task, for machines and at times, even for humans. In this paper we argue that satire detection should be approached using common-sense inferences, rather than traditional text classification methods. We present a highly structured latent variable model capturing the required inferences. The model abstracts over the specific entities app...

According to current psychological models of deduction, people can draw inferences on the basis of information that they receive from different sources at different times. In 3 reading-comprehension experiments, the authors demonstrated that premises that appear far apart in a text (distant) are not accessed and are therefore not used as a basis for logical inferences (Experiment 1), unless the...

Most current theories of text processing assume a constructionist view of inference processing. In this article, an alternative view is proposed, labeled the minimalist hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the only inferences that are encoded automatically during reading are those that are based on easily available information, either from explicit statements in the text or from general kn...