Reasoning Usefully about Mental States During Discourse Understanding: A Metaphor Based Approach

这个人工智能项目研究了识别自然语言语篇中连贯关系的部分问题。兴趣关系是描述或预设心理状态(命题态度)的话语成分之间的关系。心理状态可以是说话者、听话者或话语中提到的任何人的心理状态，也可以是信仰、意图、希望、欲望等状态。这项工作的重点是对隐含地依赖于人们经常部署的常识心理模型的描述，例如，流行的心理模型及其信念分别作为物理容器和其中的一些物理对象。常识模式在心理状态描述中经常被依赖，也是语篇连贯关系中的重要因素，然而之前关于心理状态的表征和推理的详细工作基本上回避了这个问题。然而，这项研究与心理学家和语言学家对隐喻和转喻的研究有很大关系，因为常识模型是隐喻的，而且经常涉及转喻。该项目包括开发一个AL话语解释原型系统，以及主要的数据收集活动：通过对人类受试者的实验和对各种自然语言文本的半自动检查，包括机器可读词典中的定义和例子，收集关于精神状态语言的信息。这些课文中的例子的注释纲要将被制作出来。该项目还涉及英语和其他语言(特别是西班牙语)的精神状态描述之间的关系，以期为我们实验室的机器翻译工作做出贡献。

This Artificial Intelligence project investigates part of the problem of discerning the coherence relationships within natural language discourse. The relationships of interest are between discourse components that describe or presuppose mental states (propositional attitudes). The mental states can be those of the speaker, listener, or any person mentioned by the discourse, and can be states of belief, intention hope, desire, etc. The focus of this work is on descriptions that rely implicitly of explicity on commonsense models of the mind that people often deploy, such as the prevalent model of a mind and its beliefs as respectively a physical container and some physical objects within it. Commonsense models are frequently relied upon in mental-state descriptions and are important factors in discourse coherence relationships, yet previous detailed work on representing and reasoning about mental states has largely skirted the issues. This research relates strongly, however, to work by psychologists and linguists on metaphor and metonymy, because the commonsense models are metaphorical and metonymy is often involved as well. The project includes the development of a prototype AL discourse- interpretation system, as well as major data collection activities: collection of information about mental-state language through experiments with human subjects, and through semi-automated examination of diverse natural language texts, including definitions and examples in machine-readable dictionaries. Annotated compendia of examples from these texts will be produced. The project is also concered with the relationship between mental-state descriptions in English and those in other language, notably Spanish, with a view to contributing to machine-translation work at our laboratory.