Computing story trees
Alfred Correira · 1980
A theory of understanding (parsing) texts as a process of collecting simple textual propositions into thematically and causally related units is described, based on the concept of macrostructures as proposed by Kintsch and van Dijk. These macrostructures are organized into tree hierarchies, and their interrelationships are described in rule-based story grammars related to the Kowalski logic based on Horn clauses. A procedure for constructing and synthesizing such trees from semantic network forms is detailed. The implementation of this procedure is capable of understanding and summarizing any story it can generate using the same basic control structure.