Connotation as a Form of Inference

CONNOTATION AS A FORM OF I ~qFERENC E JB BERTHELIN, University of Essex (language and linguistics), Wivenhoe Pk, COLCHESTER C043Sq, GREAT BRITAIN, and INSTITUT DE PROGRAMMATION, Universit~ Paris 6, 75230 PARIS CEDEX 05, FRANCE. Abstract Story-processing systems have to deal, or avoid dealing, with INFERENCE CONTROL ''6' Ii, 13. when designing one such system 2, we were great- ly helped by the "(ERC)RC" expression for con- notation I. Our system is specialised in multi - faceted descriptions of characters (not, how- ever, in the most difficult problems of beliefs about beliefs 4 and 8): here we present another aspect of the story character processing, name- ly 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, con- notations may be based on a set of initial ex- pressions rather than on a single one, which is expressed by (EiRCl, E2RC 2 ..... EnRCn) R C This seems to be an essential feature of conno- tations, since it allows emphasis on 'connoted' contents by means of an accumulation of signi- fiers. Another feature, elegantly illustrated in 'l'envers des signes 'i0 by the two steps (("voile" RC("navire"))RC("po~sie"))RC("rh~to- rique"), is their recursivity. Introduction The allusiveness of human languages, in addition to being quite convenient in social life, justi- fies the use of variable amounts of i n t e 1 - 1 i g e n c e in processing a sentencer accor- ding to the number of reasoning steps leading to a position where a satisfactory reaction be- ,14 comes possible, like "to redefine 'substance when reading Spinoza". Let us represent a first step by "ERC" i.e. "an expression is related to a content ''1, which Barthes calls the denota- tion: the second reasoning step will be repre- sented in the connotation formula: " (ERC) RC". It does not determine exactly where the reaso- ning step leads to: if we write E's content as C(E), we may have quite general connotations like ("cheese"RC("cheese"))RC("english") as op- As a beginning we made an attempt to express this in AI terms by writing a program, BAQUIL, which finds the connotations with structure(E I RCi, E2RC2)RC in a recursive way. The interest of such connotations can be shown by15: .a doctor asks:"how is he feeling ?" .the nurse answers:"he is groaning." where the nurse means, by connotation,that the patient is suffering: ("groaning" RC("groaning") RC("suffering)), but our understanding is direc- ted by the previous interrogation, so that the definitive result we expect from our system will be ("feeling"RC("feeling"), "groaning"RC("groa- ning") )RC("suffering"). This result shall be reached by consulting a semantic network and ob- serving that 'groaning' is not exactly a case of 'feeling', but an expression of it. …

Content truncated to 500 words