Previous approaches have used a reasoning mechanism called beliefpercolation to determine the actual speech intent of the speaker (e.g., (Wilks and Bien 1979)). In this paper, a similar mechanism, called attitude emergence, is proposed as a mechanism for inferring a speaker's attitude toward the propositions in a persua- sive discourse. It is sbowu that in order to adequately interpret the statenlents in advertisements, associations of relevant semantic information, through br*dging inferences, are to be percolated up through attitnde model contexts to enhance anti calibrate tile interpretation of statements. A system called BUYER is being implemented to recognize speech intents through attitude emergence in the domain of food advertisements taken from Reader's Digest. An example of BUYER's processing is also presented iu the paper.

We present a reworking of the ideas in the ViewGen belief management system in terms of the structures and reasoning mechanisms contained in the Conceptual Programming system, CP which is based on Sowa's conceptual structures. Each of the constructs in ViewGen is shown in its CP form, and the major operations, ascription and percolation are shown as CP operations.