Conceptual Dependency Theory Research Articles

Conceptual modeling from natural language functional specifications

In this paper we describe a structured method for developing a conceptual data model by starting from a functional model expressed in a natural language. We have used the Conceptual Dependency theory for mapping natural language descriptions to conceptual dependency diagrams. We have developed algorithms to convert these conceptual dependency diagrams into unit conceptual dependency tables, which are then merged to represent the whole context of the application. We also show how transactional requirements can be incorporated into the unit conceptual dependency table, and subsequently convert the unit conceptual dependency table into a corresponding conceptual model. We have developed an augmented transition network (ATN) parser to develop conceptual dependency diagrams from natural language descriptions. A prototype system has been implemented using Oracle8i and developer platforms.

Modelling knowledge in Electronic Study Books

Abstract Knowledge graphs are a new form of knowledge representation. They are closely related to semantic networks and can be looked upon as in line with Schank's conceptual dependency theory and Sowa's conceptual graphs. The special feature of knowledge graphs is the use of a very restricted set of types of relations, that is considered to be the basic set of primitive relations. The theory of knowledge graphs is outlined in the first part of the paper. In the second part the possibilities of knowledge graphs for solving problems posed by Electronic (Study) Books will be discussed.

Conceptual dependency and its descendants

This paper surveys representation and processing theories arising out of conceptual dependency theory. One of the primary characteristics of conceptual dependency was the notion of a canonical form, built out of a small number of primitive representations. Although the notion of primitives has largely been lost in subsequent work, many other of the basic notions of CD have remained. In particular, the idea of building representations around inferential capabilities has prevailed in this family of research. The result is a set of representational structures, all of which are highly knowledge-intensive. The use of these structures in various processing theories has led to knowledge-based theories of language understanding, planning, reasoning and other tasks, which have contrasted sharply with the traditional search-oriented approaches used in other systems.

The music machine: Selected readings from ?computer music journal?

Computer applications to music cover a very large field. This book is a collection of articles, previously published in Computer Music Journal, one of the most respected journals in the field, which deal with some of the possible applications of automated tools in music. The book, edited by the one-time editor of the journal, consists of 54 contributions divided into eight chapters: “Interviews,” “Composition,” “The Midi Interface,” “Music Software,” “Synthesis and Signal Processing,” “ Signal Processing Hardware” and “Music and Artificial Intelligence.” In the first chapter, computer musicians are interviewed on their experience of using computers to produce sound or musical compositions and in the second, several composers describe their compositional experiments. The next four chapters focus on both hardware and software developments, mainly to process signals or to manipulate musical data. A few treat music printing or applications of stochastic processes to music or describe commercial packages. The last chapter, on AI and music, is surely the most interesting for people working in computational linguistics because it concerns problems, like formalizing knowledge, theory testing and so on, which linguistics and music share. The short but very interesting article by John Rothgeb, “Simulating Musical Skills by Digital Computer,” focuses on the use of the computer to analyze what the theories of unfigured bass lack. He implemented rules extracted from theoretical attempts to harmonize the bass part, but the resulting failures demonstrated the lack of explanatory power of the theory. Therefore, the computer can be used to investigate musical theories by implementing them and then redefining or improving them by studying the results obtained from observation of how the implementations work out. Another essay of interest in this chapter is John Rahn’s “On Some Computational Models of Music Theory” in which some theoretical and practical issues raised by other authors are discussed and criticized. Of interest from the computational linguist’s point of view would be the discussion and criticism of the possible relationship, proposed by Meehan (1980), between Schank’s Conceptual Dependency Theory and the theory of implication/realization worked

Book reivew: A NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERFACE FOR COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN by Tariq Samad (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1986)

Tariq Samad's A Natural Language Interface for Computer Aided Design describes a parser developed as part of the author's doctoral thesis at CMU's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The motivation for this work, i.e. to develop a natural language front end for a circuit-simulation program (SPICE), was pragmatic not theoretical. Samad's parser, CLEOPATRA, is not easily positioned in the large body of theory which has developed over the last two decades in natural language research; however, it does share some similarities with work in Conceptual Dependency Theory. Basically, he feels this application, because of its "complexity," requires a novel approach.

Is memory schematic?

ion Information that has been selected because it is important and/or relevant to the schema is further reduced during the encoding process by abstraction. This process codes the meaning but not the format of a message (e.g., Bobrow, 1970; Bransford, Barclay, & Franks, 1972). Thus, details such as the lexical form of an individual word (e.g., Schank, 1972, 1976) and the syntactic form of a sentence (e.g., Sachs, 1967) will not be preserved in memory. Because memory for syntax appears to be particularly sparce as well as brief (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 1974; Begg & Wickelgren, 1974; Jarvella, 1971; Sachs, 1967, 1974), the abstraction process is thought to operate during encoding. Additional support for the notion that what is stored is an abstracted representation of the original stimulus comes from studies that demonstrate that after a passage is read, it takes subjects the same amount of time to verify information originally presented in a complex linguistic format as it does to verify that same information presented in a simpler format (e.g., King & Greeno, 1974; Kintsch M Bransford, et al., 1972; Brewer, 1975; Frederiksen, 1975a; Kintsch, 1974; Norman & Rumelhart, 1975; Schank, 1972, 1976). One formalized presentation of this idea is Schank's conceptual dependency theory (1972). The theory asserts that all propositions can be expressed by a small set of primitive concepts. All lexical expressions that share an identical meaning will be represented in one way (and so stored economically) regardless of their presentation format. As a result people should often incorrectly recall or misrecognize synonyms of originally presented words, and they do (e.g., Anderson & Bower, 1973; R. C. Anderson, 1974; Anisfeld & Knapp, 1968; Brewer, 1975; Graesser, 1978b; Sachs, 1974). Abstraction and memory theories. Since considerable is lost via the abstraction process, this process can easily account for the incompleteness that is characteristic of people's recall of complex events. In light of the abstraction process, the problem for schema theories becomes one of accounting for accurate recall. Schema theories do this by borrowing a finding from psycholinguistic research, to wit, that speakers of a language share preferred ways of expressing information. If both the creator and perceiver of a message are operating with the same preferences or under the same biases, the perceiver's reproduction of the input may appear to be accurate. The accuracy, however, is the product of recalling the semantic content of the message and imposing the preferred structure onto it. Thus, biases operate in a manner that is similar to the probable detail reconstruction process. Biases have been documented for both syntactic information (J. R. Anderson, 1974; Bock, 1977; Bock & Brewer, 1974; Clark & Clark, 1968; James, Thompson, & Baldwin, 1973) and lexical information (Brewer, 1975; Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1974). Distortions may result from the abstraction process if biases are not shared by the person who creates the message and the one who receives it. More importantly, the ab-

Incorporating inferences in narrative representations: A study of how and why

Four experiments examined the conceptual organization of narrative passages and the extent to which these representations were explanatory in a variety of experimental tasks. The conceptual representation of a passage consisted of a graph of labeled nodes and labeled, directed arcs which were adopted from the Conceptual Dependency Theory. These representations included both explicitly stated information and inferences which had been empirically extracted by a question-answering procedure. Symbolic procedures for answering how- and why-questions were also delineated. The conceptual representations and the symbolic procedures that operate on these representations together accounted for 91% of the answers generated from question-answering protocols in Experiment 1, and also the rated quality of specific answers to specific questions in Experiment 2. Experiments 3 and 4 supported the hypothesis that structural properties of the representations can predict recall of explicitly stated nodes and verification ratings of inference nodes. The results provide encouraging support for the proposed graphic representations and also for the use of question-answering protocols in uncovering prose inferences.

The pragmatics of discourse planning

It is argued that the basic notions of natural language pragmatics cannot be the same as those of syntax and semantics as developed so far. Instead, pragmatics must be an empirically oriented theory of action and interaction. The role of sentences and predications is secondary. The most promising approaches for such a pragmatics are: (1) conceptual dependency theory, in which language is a form of actions specified by goal-directed plans ( e.g. Schank); (2) plan theory, in which the analysis of tasks and resources leads to the specification of a planned sequence of steps ( e.g. Sacerdoti); (3) problem-solving theory, in which points or states in a problem space have to be connected by a successful pathway ( e.g. Newell and Simon); and (4) procedural theory of discourse, in which language elements and systems are investigated with respect to how people utilize them in communication and processing. The paper offers the framework of a natural language pragmatics along these lines and applies the resulting theory to a study of a scene from a stage play by Sidney Howard. It is shown that the actions and discourse actions of the scene are indeed generated by the characters' plans and goals.

Conceptual complexity and imagery in comprehension and memory

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that verbs are represented in memory as combinations of primitive actions and relations which encode their underlying conceptual structure. This hypothesis forms the basis of a theory of language understanding called Conceptual Dependency Theory ( Schank, 1972 ). In Experiment I, comprehension latencies and cued recall probabilities were obtained for sentences of varying conceptual complexity. Increasing the complexity of conceptual structures resulted in longer comprehension latencies and lower recall levels when the verb was part of the target for recall. These results supported the conceptual complexity hypothesis, but were confounded with imagery value of the verbs. In Experiment II, imagery value and conceptual complexity were manipulated orthogonally. The results rejected complexity in favor of imagery as the predictor of performance. Recall data from both experiments suggested that imagery had a discrete effect on memory for verbs only, and did not serve to integrate individual sentences into holistic units.