The Representation of Experience for Case-Based Reasoning in Subjective Interpretation
Charles E. Martin · 1993
In Martin (1993), I argue for a new focus on subjective interpretation rather than meaning identification in natural language understanding. I characterize subjective interpretation as the integration of the reader’s past experience with the current state of mental processing. The role of a text is to identify relevant past experience; linguistic terms are associated with experience, not memory structures, and thus their interpretation is always reader-dependent. This reader-dependence must be reflected in the representation of experience: the "cases " of the system. In most case-based reasoning systems, aa in the Direct Memory Access Parser (Martin, 1990), experience is represented as an instantiated episodic knowledge structure. I argue instead for a more process-oriented representation, in which the mental state of the reader at the time of a past experience is a crucial peat of its representation. This Umental state n information is usually implicit in a reasonl-g system’s algorithm--in fact, it is usually equivalent to the Uprocessing state " of a program. In this presentation I will demonstrate how such information can be made explicit and available for reasoning by CBR systems. I wiU also discuss the constraints on fundamental CBR tasks such as adaptation which make use of this information. Those