An ASP Methodology for Understanding Narratives about Stereotypical Activities

TL;DR

This paper introduces an Answer Set Programming methodology that models activities as hierarchical plans with intentions, enabling understanding of narratives about stereotypical activities, including exceptional scenarios, through question answering.

Contribution

It replaces traditional scripts with activity-based models and incorporates intentions to better handle normal and exceptional narrative scenarios.

Findings

Effective question answering on restaurant stories

Handles both normal and exceptional scenarios

Improves understanding of stereotypical activities

Abstract

We describe an application of Answer Set Programming to the understanding of narratives about stereotypical activities, demonstrated via question answering. Substantial work in this direction was done by Erik Mueller, who modeled stereotypical activities as scripts. His systems were able to understand a good number of narratives, but could not process texts describing exceptional scenarios. We propose addressing this problem by using a theory of intentions developed by Blount, Gelfond, and Balduccini. We present a methodology in which we substitute scripts by activities (i.e., hierarchical plans associated with goals) and employ the concept of an intentional agent to reason about both normal and exceptional scenarios. We exemplify the application of this methodology by answering questions about a number of restaurant stories. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.