next up previous
Next: References Up: AN EXAMPLE FOR Previous: THE NEED FOR NONMONOTONIC

CONCLUSION

To recapitulate: The original set of predicate calculus sentences can be generated from the story as one goes along. Each sentence is generated approximately from a sentence of the story with the aid of general knowledge and what has been generated from the previous sentences. (This will usually be the case if the story is well told although there are sometimes cases in which the correct way to express a sentence will depend on what follows - but this is not good writing.) The completion, however, will depend on the whole of the story.

It might be interesting to consider what can be determined from a partial reading of the story--even stopping the reading in the middle of a sentence since what has appeared so far in a sentence often must be understood in order to even parse the re tex2html_wrap_inline87


John McCarthy
Tue May 14 09:36:52 PDT 1996