With a Spoon in Hand This Must Be the Eating Frame

WITH A SPOON IN HAND THIS MUST BE THE EATING FRAME Eugene Charniak Department of Computer Science Yale University ABSTRACT A language comprehension program using "frames", "scripts", etc. must be able to decide which frames are appropriate to the text. Often there will be explicit indication ("Fred was playing tennis" suggests the TENNIS frame) but it is not always so easy.("The woman waved while the man on the stage sawed her in half" suggests MAGICIAN but how?) This paper will examine how a program might go about determining the appropriate frame in such cases. At a sufficiently vague level the model presented here will resemble that of Minsky (1975) in it's assumption that one usually has available one or more context frames. Hence one only needs worry if information comes in which does not fit them. As opposed to Minsky however the suggestions for new context frames will not come from the old onesi but rather from the conflicting information. The problem them becomes how potential frames are indexed under the information which "suggests" them. 1 INTRODUCTION Understanding every day discourse requires making inferences from a very large base of common sense knowledge. To avoid death by combinatorial explosion our computer must be able to access the knowledge it needs without irrelevant knowledge getting in its way. A plausible constraint on the knowledge we might use at a given point in a story or conversation (I shall henceforth simply assume we are dealing with a story) is to restrict consideration to that portion of our knowledge which is "about" things which have been mentioned in the discourse. So if we have a story which mentions trains and train stations, we will not use our knowledge of, say. circuses. This requires, of course, that given a topic, such as trains, or eating, we must be able to access its knowledge without going through everything we know. Hence we are lead in a natural way to something approaching a notion of "frame" (Minsky 1975): a collection of knowledge about a single stereotyped situation. In the above discussion however I have made a rather important slight of hand. Given a story we only want to consider those frames "about" things in the story. How is it that we decide which frames qualify? I was able to gloss over this because in most situations the problem, at least at a surface level, does not appear all that difficult. If the story is about trains, it will surely mention trains. So we see the word "train", and we assume that trains are relevant. What could be easier. Unfortunately, this ease is deceptive for the story may mention many topics of which only a few are truely important to the story. For example: The lawyer took a cab to the restaurant near the university. Here we have "lawyer", "cab", "restaurant" and "university" all of which are calling for our attention. Somehow on the basis of later lines we must weed out those which our only incidental. …

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