This paper presents this algorithm, gives demonstrations of an implemented system, and describes the results of some preliminary empirical studies, which lend support to the algorithm

and improving intercoder reliability in discourse tagging using statistical techniques. Biascorrected tags axe formulated and successfully used to guide a revision of the coding manual and develop an automatic classifier.

Part of understanding fictional narrative text is determhfing for each sentence whether it takes some c, haracter's point of view and, if it does, identifying the character whose point of view is taken. This paper presents part of an algorithm for performing the latter. When faced with a sentence that takes a character's point of view, the reader has to decide whether that character is a previously mentioned character or one mentioned in the sentence. We give particular consideration to sentences about private states, such as seeing and wanting, for which both possibilities exist. Our algorithm is based on regulafities in the ways that texts initiate, continue, and resume a character's point of view, found during extensive examinations of published novels and short stories.

We present a computational analysis of de re, de dicto, and de se belief and knowledge reports. Our analysis solves a problem first observed by Hector-Neri Casta~neda, namely, that the simple rule `(A knows that P ) implies P ' apparently does not hold if P contains a quasi-indexical. We present a single rule, in the context of a knowledge-representation and reasoning system, that holds for all P , including those containing quasi-indexicals. In so doing, we explore the difference between reasoning in a public communication language and in a knowledge-representation language, we demonstrate the importance of representing proper names explicitly, and we provide support for the necessity of considering sentences in the context of extended discourse (for example, written narrative) in order to fully capture certain features of their semantics. (This document is SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. 95-49B, as well as SUNY Buffalo Center for Cognitive Science Tec...

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer

The propositional content of a reference is the proposition attributing to the referent the properties that correspond to the nouns and modifiers in the reference (for example, the propositional content of `Mary' is that the referent is named `Mary'). During language comprehension, the hearer or reader must determine the set of beliefs with respect to which the propositional content of a reference is to be understood. In the prototypical case, this set consists of the propositions that she believes that the speaker or writer believes that she and the speaker or writer mutually believe. This paper identifies two contexts in which the propositional content of a specific reference is not understood with respect to this set--- subjective and objective sentences in third-person fictional narrative text---and identifies some implications of this for understanding specific references in these contexts. 1 Introduction Specific references are references to particular entities, for example, `a...

This paper discusses the theoretical background and some of the results of an interdisciplinary, cognitive-science research project on the comprehension of narrative text. The unifying theme of our work has been the notion of a deictic center: a mental model of spatial, temporal, and character information contributed by the reader of the narrative and used by the reader in understanding the narrative. We examine the deictic center in the light of our investigations from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, individual differences (language pathology), literary theory of narrative, and artificial intelligence.

Abstract Since modernism, narrative omniscience has been much attacked, yet little studied and understood. This in inverse ratio to the central role it actually plays in narrative discourse and metadiscourse alike: the telling, reading, grouping, evolving, conceptualizing of stories, invented (e.g., novelistic) or inspired (biblical, Homeric). Here I review the various old-new critical thrusts against epistemic superprivilege (outright denials, partisan judgments, attempted confinements, impairments, replacements, as well as genuine misunderstandings) arisen since my constructive theory of omniscience appeared, often in response to it. Those neomodernist challenges meet, multiply, and frequently run to extremes in Jonathan Culler’s (2004) antitheistic critique, which accordingly presents an overall mirrorimage to how and where and why omniscient narrative is (re)constructed. Nor is this key question of epistemic privilege vs. disprivilege alone at stake. The argument shows afresh its bearings on larger issues yet, especially narrative’s open-ended art of relations. Thus the relations between axes of perspective, between perspective and plot, between power and performance, between mimetic and artistic sense-making, between factual and fictional storytelling. Equally involved, at a higher level still, are the relations between part and whole, form and force or function, typology and teleology, theory and history, (meta)discourse and ideology, the realities of literature and the desires of the literati. Throughout, the choice ultimately lies between freezing, even nullifying those relations via package deals and allowing them free play in the spirit of the Proteus Principle.