Reasoning from the Relational Level of the Representation

Abstract

A strong motivating force for having a relational level is that, by explicitly representing the relational structure implicit in our cognitive world, this structure can be used as a basis for reasoning about the “understanding” of a text. Chapter 5 demonstrated that such a representation makes it possible to construct a weighted semantic graph that contains a set of explicit semantic relationships which represents a “coarse-grain” view of the constructed “understanding” (i.e., interpretation) of a text. This chapter develops several techniques embodied in a program called SSS that demonstrates how an interpretation graph can be used to reason about this constructed understanding. More specifically, an interpretation graph can be used for finding the basic conceptual roots (i.e., basic events) of the interpretation, for determining the connection between events of an interpretation, for determining the importance of those events, and for generating a description of the basic event content of an interpretation (i.e., a baseline summary of the text).